iamkeithmccoy

There's a reason mathematics is generally within liberal arts programs rather than science programs. Mathematics is the art of logic. Yes, sometimes mathematics becomes incredibly useful but most mathematics is never applied.

Compare that with computer science. Most of the work we do in software engineering is in service of an applicable output - software products that facilitate processes or bring in revenue. Turning up the dial on AI gets companies to these outputs faster.

Turning up AI on mathematics helps solve conjectures and can provide new insights. But it has a major misalignment with the purpose of mathematics which is largely intellectualism.

Unfortunately it's the norm in large companies to never polish anything. Google has gotten worse and worse at this. But Microsoft is king. They bring a team together to build a new thing and then as soon as they can check that feature box on their sales deck they move that team off onto something else. Loop is a good example of this. Microsoft started building a Notion competitor and then just stopped. The Loop component model got pulled into Copilot and integrated everywhere. But you still cannot move a document between workspaces - one of the most basic pieces of user functionality ever.

I also look at Application Insights / Azure Monitor w/ their OTel SDK, Teams, SharePoint, Visio, <insert MS product here>. Basic functionality is missing and requests are left open for years or decades. Nothing is ever polished. Nothing is ever finished. Everything is good-enough.

Good examples are great. But it doesn't solve the problem. The only way to fix this busted economy where inequality is increasing and few, wealthy individuals are gaining insane amounts of political power through spending is systemic change in the structure of our tax base.

Say what you want but I can write a production backend without any non-Microsoft dependencies. Everything from db and ORM to HTTP pipeline/middleware to json serialization to auth to advanced logging (OTel). Yes, sometimes we opt for 3rd party packages for advanced scenarios but those are few and far between, as opposed to npm/js where the standard library is small and there is little OOTB tooling and your choices are to reinvent a complex wheel or depend on a package that can be exploited. I argue the .NET model is winning the new development ecosystem.

That Teams requires you to put every channel in a team is a huge pain. We often have orthogonal needs (teams vs projects) and need cross-team adhoc channels. When I was with an organization that used Slack, this was easy. With Teams, you have to figure out where to put a channel and who is on that team. You also cannot tell who is in a channel because you join teams, not channels. I miss Slack's ability to spin up a cross-team project channel and just invite whoever needs to be involved.

Also, whenever you create a team in Teams, it creates a SharePoint site for that team. So we are the engineering team and want all our docs in engineering. But to spin up a cross-team project team means it gets its own SharePoint site and now files are scattered. Want to add a Loop workspace? That's per channel, not per team. And teams are exchange groups - so it makes handling exclusive email groups more difficult because if your team is public then anybody can join your email group.

That's my biggest gripe about Teams. But also notifications have never worked well for me. The integrations, even with Microsoft products, are poor. Want to send a well-formatted Azure Monitor alert to a Teams channel? You have to set up a complicated and fragile logic app (power automate) and figure out how to transform the message from the "common alert schema".

And message management is harder. In Slack I could always use the built-in remind-me-later. It'd put the message in Later and notify me again. The best we have in Teams is the power automate workflow to resend the message. But it's just too much friction typing in the exact date and time I want it resent vs Slack where I could just click "remind me tomorrow".

End rant

Queue VPNs set up specifically in low-income areas to provide lower pricing on the internet.

> AIs are much better at responding to my intent, and they rarely attempt to sell me anything

Yet. It's only a matter of time before AI becomes ad-riddled and enshittified.