Microsoft Blog

Because no one knows what the true cost is, especially with how all the money is circular. For example, Microsoft 365 Copilot. A company might get a significant discount on the price per user for that SKU. What does that translate to? OpenAI is the actual brain behind it. So who ends up getting the money at the end? https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/04/27/the-next-phase-of-the-micr… OpenAI needs Microsoft's infra for training and market penetration. MS needs something AI to slap onto their products until they develop their own in-house. Now, whether it's actually necessary or not for an enterprise is a question. There's a lot of FOMO spending. Maybe 5-10% of your workforce are programmers that need great AI. The rest of the admin, finance, other people? TBD.

That's a fantastic piece of short fiction, but it is fiction. In practice though, I've seen so many copy&pasted unsourced open source snippets in proprietary code that I've lost all ability to be surprised by it, and I can't think of any one time where the company was sued about that, let alone anyone facing any personal repercussions, not even those junior devs. And if anything, by being "lossy encyclopedias" rather than copy-pasters, LLMs significantly reduce this ostensible legal liability. Oh, and then you have the actual tech giants offering legal commitment to protect you against any copyright claims: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2023/09/07/copilot-copyright… https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/protecting-…

IC. AI is best at high-social status bullshitting where it doesn't matter to you if you get the right answer or not. No wonder the likes of Eric Schmidt and Satya Nadella think it is such a big deal, because it can do their jobs. Did Copilot write this? https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/07/24/recommitting-to-our-why-wh… It's hard to see how human intelligence could be behind GAME PASS and the Activision acquisition (Did you know King Games is part of Microsoft?)

Nope, it's a war, it's just not evenly distributed across the globe. Probably the best example, is the current conflict with Russia and Ukraine. It's a global cyberwar, with real (life and death) consequences. https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2022/04/27/hybrid-war-ukrain… https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2022/06/22/defending-ukraine… It's not unrestricted cyberwar, but I also don't think we have a complete picture of the scale of the cyber conflict, nor do we have a complete picture of the attacks and defences being mounted.

Microsoft has talked about being carbon negative by 2030, and removing all emissions they've done over the lifetime of the company by 2050. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-be-carbon-n… Sounds good. Reciprocally though, my skepticism in various green credit programs has only grown over time. It seems unclear how many efforts out there are green washing credits, to not yet mine or make some display that doesn't help greatly. But I do think if there's any hope for green economy, a $3T company probably has swagger & personel to eventually refine & drive towards effective spending. Hopefully. If they can be true to these declarations. Let us hope.

You can use GPT-4 for free via Bing - though I find it a little hard to explain to people how they can do that because I'm never sure what the rules are with regards to creating Microsoft accounts, whether you can use any browser or have to use Edge, what countries it's available in etc. Actually maybe the recommendation should be to use GPT-4 for free via https://copilot.microsoft.com/ instead now. (Except I can't tell which version of GPT that's using yet - there was a story on 5th December that said GPT-4 Turbo was "coming soon", not sure when "soon" is though: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/12/05/celebrating-the-first-year… )

> Meta and Microsoft have been longtime partners on AI, starting with a collaboration to integrate ONNX Runtime with PyTorch to create a great developer experience for PyTorch on Azure, and Meta’s choice of Azure as a strategic cloud provider. (sic) https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/07/18/microsoft-and-meta-expand-…

Microsoft is now double dipping (they charge for the product and also monetize telemetry). They own linked in, github, office, teams and windows, and are combining those surveillance streams. They continue to support the CLOUD act as a "first step": https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2018/04/03/the-cloud-act-is-…

They made their call earlier than Duck [0]. Both probably had to follow Microsoft policy who wrote this including mention of Bing, interestingly a day before EU sanctions [1]. [0] https://twitter.com/QwantCom/status/1498755728877801472 [1] https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2022/02/28/ukraine-russia-di…

First Microsoft and not Airbnb. As if our traffic didn't qualify us as the LA of the East. Seriously though, metropolitan Atlanta is a great area to live with three major interstates going through the city and a very well developer surrounding area. With many businesses adopting more lenient WFH policies the drive is not always a concern. Schools are generally a good mix of public and private as with any area. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2021/02/11/investing-to-grow-in-and-w…

Microsoft has publicly endorsed this law, and has suggested that other countries should copy it. Personally I disagree, but it's worth reading their statement. https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2021/02/11/endorsement-austr…

Not public AFAIK. But multiple news agencies cite US officials who make the claim it was Cozy Bear / APT29 [1]. Microsoft claims [2], "We believe this is nation-state activity at significant scale ... Because of the sophistication of the techniques and operational security capabilities of the actor, we want to encourage greater scrutiny by the broader community..." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cozy_Bear [2] https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2020/12/13/customers-protect…

I don't think you should limit your volunteering to Covid-19 related projects. There are already tons of people putting up semi-amateur analyses of epidemiological data, and I think that's (A) the best thing software can do right now, and (B) dangerous when done by people outside of epidemiology. Contributing to other open-source projects has civic value in and of itself, but there are also projects like ElectionGuard[1] that have additional value in the public interest and need contributors. 1. https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2019/09/24/electionguard-ava…

Important to note: this post follows the announcement yesterday that Bonsai will be acquired by Microsoft: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/06/20/microsoft-to-acquire-bonsa…

This feels more the fault of local government that just lets large tech companies have their way. If you read this: https://blogs.microsoft.com/?p=52550473 you'll see that their post does not mention the housing situation at all. I wonder where they will find all the non-engineers and execs - the janitors, the guards, the cooks, the receptionists - who are being pushed out by every acre that gets taken over by Apple/Google/MSFT.

How it works, from the creators, back in August[1]: Standard video stabilization crops out the pixels on the periphery to create consistent frame-to-frame smoothness. But when applied to greatly sped up video, it fails to compensate for the wildly shaking motion. Hyperlapse reconstructs how a camera moves throughout a video, as well as its distance and angle in relation to what’s happening in each frame. Then it plots out a smoother camera path and stitches pixels from multiple video frames to rebuild the scene and expand the field of view. [1]http://blogs.microsoft.com/next/2014/08/11/hyperlapse-siggra...

Why not aim your anger towards No-IP, given the following? "Our research revealed that out of all Dynamic DNS providers, No-IP domains are used 93 percent of the time for Bladabindi-Jenxcus infections, which are the most prevalent among the 245 different types of malware currently exploiting No-IP domains. Microsoft has seen more than 7.4 million Bladabindi-Jenxcus detections over the past 12 months, which doesn’t account for detections by other anti-virus providers. Despite numerous reports by the security community on No-IP domain abuse, the company has not taken sufficient steps to correct, remedy, prevent or control the abuse or help keep its domains safe from malicious activity." http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2014/06/30/microsoft-takes-on-global-c…

SRE who deals with some .Net stuff that uses MSSQL but is converting to MySQL. so I feel somewhat qualified to talk about MSSQL. TL;DR: Nothing interesting going on. There is nothing to talk about here. It's boring database engine that powers boring business applications. It's pretty efficient and can scale vertically pretty well. With state of modern hardware, that vertical limit is high enough most people won't encounter it. It's also going the way of Windows Server which is to say, it's being sold but not a ton of work is being done on it. Companies that are still invested in it are likely because they don't care about cost ultimately or cost of switching is too high to greenlight the switch. Anyone who does care about cost like my current company has switched to OSS solutions like PostGres/MySQL/$RandomNoSQLOSSOption. My company switched away when turned into SaaS business and those MSSQL server costs ate into bottom line. This has been happening throughout the ecosystem. Proget which is THE solution for .Net Artifacts is switching to PostGres: https://blog.inedo.com/inedo/so-long-sql-server-thanks-for-all-the-fet… Also, I saw this article from Brent Ozar, who I see as MSSQL smart person, which basically said if you have the option, just go with PostGres: https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2023/11/the-real-problem-with-sql-se… It's also worth noting that Microsoft even bought PostGres scaling solution called Citus so they read the writing on…

For those who have not been keeping up with recent events. The United States government, is currently reevaluating its relationship with Microsoft due to recent security issues related to Russian and Chinese state-funded attacks. [Microsoft Storm-0558 Incident, cited as a recent example] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2023/07/14/analysis-of-s… Microsoft recently pledged to improve its security practices through incentives to executive pay and other initiatives. [Microsoft Blog on recent Commitment] https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2024/06/13/microsofts-work-t… Despite these pledges, several members of Congress are making it known that they dont see Microsoft as being serious about their recent commitments around security. It is worth noting that several of these members of congress influence how much Microsoft gets paid. The Recall feature is often used as a lightning rod to bring to light the rushed rollout of Microsoft's features without concern for security. [Video with timestamp of Microsoft's President being questioned by Florida Congresswoman, Recall mentioned] https://youtu.be/kB2GCmasH4c?t=8217 While I suspect there may not be any sole reason for the release delay, it would seem to me that having Microsoft's biggest customer using Recall this way, may greatly influence the company's decision to hold off on the release.

Although there’s a constant supply, there’s still an exponential demand. Programming has already created two classes of developers for many years. Those blue collar type programmers who translate requirements into code. And those white collar type engineers who design & gather requirements into concepts. I think the big divide here has always been for the latter, but companies still need the former to train & skill up to the latter. I don’t see this trend slowing down for the next 20-30 years. Hell, even by 2025 there will be a deficient of over 150 million. I don’t think we can train nor repopulate fast enough for that demand which will only increase each year in addition. Times will be great for knowledge work jobs in the tech industry. Not just programming. Programming experience will only become more required for non-coding jobs. Especially any people management or leadership type role. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/06/30/microsoft-launches-initiat…

> Steven Gonzales Monserrate is an anthropologist and a PhD candidate Maybe this person should stick to studying skull sizes or whatever it is an anthropologist studies these days. I'm sorry to say, but what a load of horse shit. Yes, data centers use energy. Essentially all of the big cloud providers have committed to carbon neutrality, most of them are pretty far done with getting there, and essentially all of them already source the vast majority of their power from renewables at this point. That's not just because it is greener, but also because it is cheaper. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. each maintain nice web pages on how far they are with these plans. - Amazon is shooting for 2025 for 100% carbon neutral energy. https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/the-cloud?energyTyp… - Microsoft plans for carbon negative by 2030: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-be-carbon-n… - Google claims to have been carbon neutral since 2007 and plans to be carbon free by 2030 as well: https://sustainability.google/commitments-europe/ That's a trend with many other manufacturers as well. E.g. lots of automotive manufacturers. If there's a deep conspiracy where these companies are lying about what they are doing, that would be news worthy of course. But, I suspect that most of these companies are simply getting very good at managing absurdly high degrees of energy and water efficiency and cost. Kind of counters the message of…

Statement from Microsoft President here on security https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2020/12/17/cyberattacks-cybe… "One of the more chilling developments this year has been what appears to be new steps to use AI to weaponize large stolen datasets about individuals and spread targeted disinformation using text messages and encrypted messaging apps." "a second evolving threat, namely the growing privatization of cybersecurity attacks through a new generation of private companies, akin to 21st-century mercenaries." "As humanity raced to develop vaccines, Microsoft security teams detected three nation-state actors targeting seven prominent companies directly involved in researching vaccines and treatments for Covid-19." "One indicator of the current situation is reflected in the federal government’s insistence on restricting through its contracts our ability to let even one part of the federal government know what other part has been attacked. Instead of encouraging a “need to share,” this turns information sharing into a breach of contract. It literally has turned the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations upside down."

Disclaimer: Self-plug but I do feel it may be relevant to people here who wish to take responsibility for their greenhouse gas footprint. If you're looking at CO₂ emissions and want to do something about your own footprint please consider removing your own emissions. Reductions are great and all (definitely part of the necessary solution) however they do not address the existing excess of CO₂ in the atmosphere I started "Carbon Removed"[0] for the exact purpose to bring carbon removal to everyone and make it easy for us all to compensate the damage we have done to the environment. We support carbon removal methods so you can turn your emissions into trees and stone. If you're more interested in removal methods I suggest researching: * tree planting - cheap and easy but slow to see results * direct air capture and storage - new, innovative technology that can permanently remove CO₂ through mineralisation but is expensive at this stage. Search "climeworks" * enhanced weathering - "olivine stones" and "project vesta" are good steps here that can slowly and naturally capture CO₂ * blue carbon - naturally removing carbon dioxide through ocean ecosystems * biochar - "carbonise" organic material and use it as a soil supplement (as well as a carbon sink) Personally I have been exceptionally happy to see the transition from "carbon credits" (which, IMHO provide dubious value and are hard to quantify) to net-zero emissions - the thought leading concept of…

Background: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2020/06/17/social-contact-co… > “Social contact” used to be something we didn’t have to think about. It was a byproduct of going to the store or the gym, often viewed as a positive byproduct. Since the start of COVID-19, it comes at a high price. Today, it can perhaps be compared to carbon emissions: an unwelcome byproduct of economic activity. One can lead to pollution; the other to infection. In economic terms, social contact has become a scarce resource. It has become the linchpin between managing infections and protecting the economy – it is what is driving up infection rates but is also needed for economic activity. By treating it as an economically scarce resource, it raises three critical questions that we began to address in the paper in a data-driven way: > How much room do we have to open the economy (“social contact budget”)? > How do we best spend the budget (“return on social contact”)? > How do we grow our social contact budget over time (“reducing cost of social contact”)?

I don't know, I personally find the "I'm selling the CDs because people don't know it's available for free online" a bit unconvincing. He did it in hopes of profiting [0] by misleading people into thinking they pay for an original. What he sold is freely available online, one search away. Definitely a lot more accessible than buying his discs. This article is heavily biased and fails to present any of the evidence that puts the guy in a bad light. Also [1]: > However, in essence, what Lundgren eventually pleaded guilty to was making these Dell refurbishers’ customers believe that they were obtaining a genuine Dell-branded "Reinstallation Disc" with Dell’s blessing, when in actuality, they weren’t. P.S. I love how the downvotes pour in with no actual dissenting opinion :). Nowhere even in the guy's own emails can anyone find anything but mentions of profit, a ripe market, and basically doing his best to deceive customers by making the product look like a genuine Dell one (arranging for fake Microsoft and Dell labels to be applied to the discs). Nobody goes to such lengths to deceive their customers out of honesty and good intentions. What he did is like recycling paper into freshly printed counterfeit banknotes. Real Robin Hood. > “You would have to be an expert with a magnifying glass to know and/or see such differences.” [2] > “If the software will be 98% accurate I believe I can get away with that.” [2] [0]…

You said he's "not some scammer looking to fleece a few people and make a quick buck." Look at this e-mail: https://blogs.microsoft.com/uploads/prod/sites/5/2018/04/Email_image3.… I have no idea how anyone, after reading this e-mail, can conclude that he was not trying to scam buyers into believing they were buying something other than counterfeit material, unawares, and then sell it to customers who were equally unaware they were buying counterfeits. "Work hard and get these moved to any other buyer. No nomral company or buyer will notice such isuses and every month you spend sitting on this product is another month XP get's older and my assets become worth less." "I have not seen the return that I was expecting to use for my India project buddy." Those are Lundgren's _own words._ And nobody who read the article you wrote and linked to would have that context. They would, in fact, have your words to the opposite.

Microsoft also just released a book on AI and its role in society. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/01/17/future-computed-artificial… "...Beyond our personal lives, AI will enable breakthrough advances in areas like healthcare, agriculture, education and transportation. It’s already happening in impressive ways. ... But as we’ve witnessed over the past 20 years, new technology also inevitably raises complex questions and broad societal concerns. ... To answer these tough questions, technologists will need to work closely with government, academia, business, civil society and other stakeholders. At Microsoft, we’ve identified six ethical principles – fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusivity, transparency, and accountability – to guide the cross-disciplinary development and use of artificial intelligence. The better we understand these or similar issues — and the more technology developers and users can share best practices to address them — the better served the world will be as we contemplate societal rules to govern AI. We must also pay attention to AI’s impact on workers. What jobs will AI eliminate? What jobs will it create? If there has been one constant over 250 years of technological change, it has been the ongoing impact of technology on jobs — the creation of new jobs, the elimination of existing jobs and the evolution of job tasks and content. This too is certain to continue. ... As computers behave…

"I haven't read them but I'm familiar with the area of discussion." "What we are doing now is a thundering herd attack on the global mind-space of algorithms+data." Nice way to put it. Ok, you really need to read those references since most programming is supposed to suck if it's done by humans. It used to bother me when I was younger but I accept it as inevitable. Much like evolution itself producing tons of waste on its way to overall dominance of most of the search space. Once you get basic principles driving it, you must then work within that to squeeze as much of that good engineering as possible into those constraints. It's only way to have high impact or shift segments of the herd in better directions. Hell, it's a little like CLP for people & development processes. ;) I'm including original essay, a great commentary tie-in in historical proof, and one by ex-high assurance guy Steve Lipner at Microsoft: http://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html http://yosefk.com/blog/what-worse-is-better-vs-the-right-thing-is-real… https://blogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2007/08/23/the-ethics-of-p… " The Prolog version is less than a page of code and half of that is direct translations of the puzzle hints to CLP constraints (the other half just sets up the variables and such.)" It was beautifully concise compared to the others. Of course, they were trying to re-invent the parts like execution strategy that are hidden in Prolog. Your point seems…

Yes, definitely to your first and last two questions! It's not as viable as it resulting in a large scale FPGA movement anytime soon since the the industry and academia is heavy experienced with using GPUs. The software and libraries on GPUs, like CUDA, TensorFlow and other open source libraries are very mature and are optimized for GPUs. There will have to be libraries in Verilog (I for one I'm hoping to be a part of this movement for some time now, so I'd love it if anyone can guide me to anything going on) There are some major to minor hurdles. Although some of them might not seem like much[0], here they are: 1. Till now deep learning/machine learning researchers have been okay with learning the software stack related to GPUs and there are widespread tutorials on how to get started, etc. Verilog/VHDL is a whole different ball game and a very different thought process. (I will address using OpenCL later) 2. The toolchain being used is not open source and it's not really hackable. Although that is not that important in this case, since you're starting off writing gates from scratch, there will be problems with licensing, bugs that will be fixed at snail's pace (if ever) till there will be a performant open source toolchain (if ever, but I have hope in the community). You'll have to learn to give up at a customer service rep if you try to get help, unlike open source libraries where to head to github's issue page and get help quickly with the main devs. 3. Although…

My understanding is that a lot of the molecular interactions involved become exponentially complex to model using classical computers --- so this would be one of the major new areas of exploration with quantum computers. People I've spoken with in the industry are excited about simulating fertilizer synthesis processes (which are super energy inefficient the way we do it at scale, but are theoretically much cheaper to perform, since anaerobic bacteria do it in the soil at normal temperature and pressure) And also excited about simulating battery design -- being able to test millions of molecules without actually having to make a battery. Of course, these are the early-stage speculative things, I'm sure more fancy nanotech could be explored with quantum computers as well. http://blogs.microsoft.com/next/2015/11/13/with-quantum-computing-simu…