It would probably have been clearer if I'd written "people who use emoji".
Edit: I assume it’s a joke related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card
Since your comment was not a joke, I'll point out that documents aren't the only target for emoji's. This is a system-wide issue, right?
Thankfully they did stop global gun violence though.
I thought this happened outside of Unicode... Apple switched, then everyone else did too. (Microsoft was using a ray gun at the time Apple switched; but Microsoft switched to a depiction of a revolver the day after Apple switched to a water pistol)
Just no.
Appears a lot of people write something up then throw it into chatgpt or something to spice it up with the things as well.
More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_indicator_symbol
I'm one of them! I didn't know it existed until this moment.
Edit: The latest attack came in the form of a full-screen system level (covered the taskbar) advert for Windows 11 when I logged in a few weeks ago, complete with all the dark patters we expect from our tech overlords in 2025. Now the windows update status icon also has a constant blue dot on it. Clicking it lets me know I should upgrade to Windows 11 ASAP. Realistically, I'll probably reluctantly switch once Steam stops supporting Windows 10.
Also can't avoid mentioning Windows 11 gaming without the middle finger that is discontinuing Windows Mixed Reality and bricking the headsets. Thankfully someone looks to be making a SteamVR driver for it (https://old.reddit.com/r/WindowsMR/comments/1l65ji8/things_a...), but what a pathetic shame he's doing it on his own time rather than MS paying the pocket change it would have taken to do it
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinJS
When Windows 8 was initially previewed at Microsoft's developers conference, .NET wasn't still part of the overall picture.
How many people are proficient enough in C nowadays to maintain the old shell?
I drank the WinRT Kool Aid between Windows 8, Windows Phone and the clear failure of Project Reunion.
Still I keep myself around, expecially to warn newbies that whatever Microsoft is selling for WinUI, regardless of the shiny cover, the book inside is roten.
Whatever I have learnt from community calls and endless Github discussions, is that most new interns never did Windows development before landing on Windows team.
The calls are available on YouTube, mostly young, puzzled looks when questioned about feature XYZ coming to Windows, not even understanding issues that come from Windows 8 and 8.1 UAP model, that predated UWP, among other possible examples.
I would dare to say they did all their studies in UNIX world, Apple, Google devices, before landing a job at Microsoft.
So Web technologies it is.
Note I am not blaming them, each one gets to learn what they can, how they can.
The blame lies on upper management of a 4 trillion valued company, that isn't able to put in place the resources and learnings, so that the team can actually deliver, as it used to be during the 3x "Developers!" dance.
I think you can pretty much say that about everything in Windows 11. Seeing the XP emulation on the front page yesterday reminded me how grotesquely slow 10 and 11 are. Honestly I wonder if you ran one of the old Windows versions on period hardware how it would compare to now. And then keeping the period hardware but if you swapped to an SSD I bet it would fly. But maybe it's rose-tinted glasses.
Personally I preferred Vista to 7 (7 took away a bunch of nice things). Even as bad as Windows Me was from a stability point of view, it at least added new features. I'd be hard-pressed to think of anything that Windows 11 does better than before.
Windows 2000 was snappy. Incredibly so.
I'd try to dig it up but search is so fundamentally broken these days I can't find it.
I definitely thought that was less than two years ago...sigh
That video touches on something else that drives me crazy: the decay of keyboard shortcuts
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All that being said, I will play devil's advocate for at least one modern luxury that I wouldn't want to live without that I can understand makes performance more difficult: per-monitor DPI that can change on the fly. But still: 8.1 (with ClassicShell) was fairly snappy
Yes, there are always "reasons", but things have got dramatically worse, with especially 8 -> 10 -> 11.
It particularly annoys me when apps/widget/utilities partially load in and sit there with nothing but a blank chrome, slowly partially rendering.
It's a plague that has affected everything, even Task Manager.
Now, holy smokes - what a dumpster fire. Most of the time it doesn't get me out of trouble anymore. Here are some of my favorite Windows 11 UI changes:
- complete waste of space on the side now. it doesn't even save any vertical space because of how bloated it is
- nonsense iconography on the side (services, startup apps in particular)
- Processes: "..." overflow has one item, View. I get that they want it more touch friendly but even then how clunky is that to navigate?!
- Performance: Resource Monitor was right there, now it is again buried in a stupid "..." menu, again to save space for...nothing?
- Details: The column picker is preposterous. It was already annoying before, mostly because you couldn't resize it, but they didn't fix that, no. Now you can see only 5 columns at a time. I seem to remember the column selection used to be a bit better before Windows 8 or 10 (like there was some other way to get that menu besides right-clicking the column headers) but I can't easily check
- In general I find that "Processes", "Performance", and "Details" all disagree about CPU usage
Tip: `taskmgr -d` runs the previous UI
"If all your titlebars disappear and you just have a graph, double-click dead client space to switch back to normal mode"
and
"If Task Manager ever hangs or crashes, start another by pressing ctrl-shift-esc."
and
"If Task Manager ever becomes internally corrupted, kill/close it. Restart it while holding down CTRL, ALT, and SHIFT, and Task Manager will reset ALL internal settings to factory fresh"
How to discover any of this except by reading a reddit post by the developer?
"There should be nothing that TaskMgr can't kill - it will even escalate privilege and (if you have it) enable debug privilege to attach to and kill apps that way if needed."
Why is this even necessary? It's a part of the OS, it should not need One Weird Trick to kill processes.
Also happened on Gnome.
There's a general anti-keyboard conspiracy.
I have a feeling if you high-end hardware of that period, it will feel faster than win11 on high-end hardware now.
However, the other software also evolved. You almost cannot use modern internet with old browser.
It seems to copy the emoji to the clipboard rather than inserting it directl.
> I find that when I’m annoyed by things like this and actually dig down into it, the feeling evaporates as I come to appreciate all the complexities and challenges. It’s humbling, and next time I get unreasonably annoyed at something I can remember that feeling, and accept that a lot of things are harder than they seem on the surface.
This was a nice little coda to the article. I agree with the sentiment that it's not worth running your mood over, but in contrast to the author's experience I often find after digging down that imho malice/indifference/negligence is responsible for bad time I end up having.
> My feeling is that Microsoft, and other companies too, have relied far too heavily on their beta testers to identify bugs. They expected problems to be surfaced by telemetry and user reports, which are less effort than actual testing.
Microsoft used to be better at this (although bugs still escaped regularly), but in 2014, they eliminated the software developer in test role, and software developers roles were supposed to make up the difference. IMHO, there has been an obvious slump in quality since then.
Also, the problem with relying on user bug reports, is when it's clear you're not listening to users, users stop providing bug reports. I've been to microsoft user forums and seen long discussion threads where many people have an issue and there's no follow up from Microsoft. When you direct issues to that kind of forum and don't respond there, that's a sign that says you don't care, don't bother to report things.
Like, can I please go back to paying for Windows again so you can afford to not make it such a piece of crap? I know the tech elite always sneered at MS/Windows but trust me, it wasn't this bad.
But why do I have to run the scan? Why doesn't it run automatically in the background. What happened that lead to whatever it's fixing... is the telemetry working???
I also find it amazing when the windows store manages to end up broken and need to be reinstalled... Why doesn't it fix itself? And what with all the signature verification stuff, why doesn't whatever is corrupting the files not fail the signature check.
Thanks for reading my newsletter.
The top cause of broken Windows Update or Windows Stores is in my experience people either running malware as part of pirating stuff (it's not zero-daying their browser), which then nukes the background services needed for Windows Store/Update to work. Or they deliberately run scripts that stop Windows updating because they find it annoying not realizing that they corrupted their system by doing so. Or they do other things that break Windows like changing the permissions on c:\Program Files\WindowsApps which is meant to be private and managed only by the OS, but power users hate that idea so they mess with it and then things break.
Windows shouldn't allow itself to be reconfigured in ways that let users deliberately break it, but ultimately it's just software and can't stop users fucking with its internals if they try hard enough.
On macOS things are much better. Apple transitioned to immutable system images and de-powered the root user a long time ago. They also managed to create a culture where even power users recognize that SIP is good for security and don't turn it off so there's way less of a culture of random hacks. Their security is way better as a whole so there's less malware and it's less invasive. And their OS engineers are just better so they don't tend to ship updates that botch stuff like Microsoft do.
Easy example: disable the Windows license check background service, and the Security app no longer opens. There's no error message, just nothing happens at all when you click it. Why does Microsoft allow users to do this? Well the whole OS is just in maintenance mode due to tech debt bankruptcy so fixing anything has become nearly impossible, let alone the kinds of huge moves Apple has made.
Unfortunately, this was a widespread industry trend
Some people are just natural problem solvers
I have worked in huge code bases (think Windows-like huge) with policies like that and thus know the pain very well, but cannot think of solutions around it. Most of the time the complexity grows as the code and related modules have to support both codepaths: you cannot really simplify the architecture even if the "bugfix" branch is really conceptually simpler (as it tends to happen).
There's also no cleanup policy (not to mention that the developers who do the cleanup ,if ever, will just remove the if and not simplify the surrounding code).
Also, these things need to be temporary, and you should enforce that somehow. Otherwise, chances are very few permutations are being tested, which makes it hard to use the flexibility you tried to build. Some teams automate this in some fashion... require an expiration date comment, fail the build if it's in past the date, or if you like things spicy, have a bot remove it on expiration.
Sometimes you end up with a feature that's done in your code but waiting for something else and you end up with the behavior disabled for a long time. That's not fun, but it's life.
Otherwise, I like feature flags to live for about one release... Put it in, push the feature, once it works, remove the ability to turn it off. That should be part of the post-release acceptance process.
There's numerous feature flags that seem to just be 'MSRC_[id]' (for the Microsoft Security Response Center), and anecdotally looking through Windows 11 a lot of actual bugfixes (various ReFS driver crashes, for example, have feature flag checks around their fixes) are feature-flagged as per usual with both global (for the whole batch of fixes) and per-feature flags, so this is a bit of an incorrect assumption.
Things breaking downlevel is pretty common anyway, and the emoji picker has been in a pretty bad state since the original picker IME (introduced I believe in RS3, ~2017) was replaced with 'Expressive Input' which also allowed adding GIFs and a few other things but relied on a new UI framework that I suspect was tied to an unrelated internal effort culminating in the '10X' product which only got canceled.. right before Windows 11 development started, and therefore pretty much bitrotted.
Windows 10 was left on a fairly 'bad' release, the 'Iron' semester which was used as a baseline for Server 2022 was still like 10 from a UX perspective (10X was only canceled between that and 'Cobalt', where the Sun Valley work which led to the Windows 11 product happened) but had a fair few bugfixes that didn't get backported to 10 'version 2004' ('Vibranium', I believe, as otherwise the codename would've been 'Chromium' which is bad).
You will get stuck in a loop on https://mysignins.microsoft.com/register and never be able to sign in.
It's been months.
I had to tell clients, "Sorry, I can't help you with this Microsoft service because Microsoft's software literally doesn't work."
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Azure Speech services powering Windows 11 dictation are broken, and have been broken for months.
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I'm pretty sure the people responsible for Windows leadership are asleep at the wheel, or management specifically for the Windows product doesn't explicitly exist anymore, and some service-oriented management is leading Windows development.
The people behind Microsoft authentication are clearly incompetent, too.
mouse_•6mo ago
hasnd•6mo ago
anonymars•6mo ago
Toorkit•6mo ago
So, yeah, I've never needed a dedicated emoji picker myself, even though I've had Rofimoji installed for a while.