What community is there to house around Microsoft Copilot?
Seriously, why does Microsoft Copilot need a Discord Server?
What do I talk about when I join the Microsoft Copilot server?
What are we doing here?
The Discord server for Midjourney is said to be one its biggest use point, the source of its largest audience, and one of its biggest sales funnels. Even as other image models have grown more powerful/capable, Discord has been suggested (or blamed, depending on perspective) for keeping Midjourney one of the most popular ones.
I would not be surprised if some PM at Microsoft heard about that and made it a box to check without understanding why the Midjourney Discord became so popular/remains so popular (I've heard it is basically a "Gen Z meme farm" and full of nonsense even "worse" than the term "Microslop"; so far I've managed to avoid that Discord and have only heard second-hand tales).
I'd imagine that there's some discussion about how to make the most out of the tool as well as discussion of experiments and capabilities. I'm not even sure what exactly "Microsoft Copilot" entails anymore because of the multiple rebrands, but having a place where you can discuss exploring plugins and other adjacent features seems useful.
Not quite the same, but recently I was recently looking around for communities centered around Claude Code for discussion about people's workflows as well as discussion about what plugins people are using and if they notice it making a significant difference.
Since the technology is still evolving, having an active community can help you discover new patterns and explore the space more effectively.
> [...] I'm not even sure what exactly "Microsoft Copilot" entails anymore [...]
Watching from the sidelines (not a Microsoft user), I've completely lost track. Between this, the Azure 365 cloud whatever stuff, I have no idea what many of the products even exactly are any more.
Simply put Microsoft is the worst company at naming stuff. Even when they come up with a good name for something, they'll name 3 other totally different products the same thing to maximize confusion.
I gotta say though, I'm actually not sure which VMware (well Broadcom I suppose) products I use anymore. I'm pretty sure they took the Aria name off something else they called Aria for a little while. So Aria is no longer Aria but they still have Aria but it's what used to be called XYZ
Xbox Series with X > S (so if you want the high end of the current generation you want the Xbox Series X; if you want mid-range things are more complicated because you can now get an Xbox One X, but not the Xbox One, used for much less than you'd get an Xbox Series S for and which one is "better" is a dice roll depending on the games you want to play and if 4K matters to you…)
Series is a real weird word to use there. But it also doesn't help that the versions are extra complicated because with "PC-like compatibility" in everything after the Xbox One playing just about the entire same library you need a bit of a matrix to figure out which is best for you if you don't care about the "latest and greatest".
Oh wow yes, completely forgot about that one. To me, it's a complete blur made from single words and letters, one series x s one box 360? Maybe they should create a 365, with MS office pre-installed. Or something.
Seriously? Does anybody know what Copilot is? I don't think I have ever seem a "Copilot user", so I don't know what it looks like. Is it the little macro key on new laptop keyboards? The chatbot you get in Bing? A technical philosophy? Or is it in essence just copilot.com, the mediocre chat interface which you used to get free GPT-4 three years ago?
I wish. I got a Dell laptop for work and they've replaced the right Ctrl key with a Copilot key, and (because it's a locked-down work sysyem) the only thing I can remap that to is the Windows menu. And I keep hitting it out of muscle memory, interrupting everything. But at least now it doesn't launch Copilot.
Which I could add is "the only AI approved for use by IT" because they hate us.
> Which I could add is "the only AI approved for use by IT" because they hate us.
It's the same at our place. It's basically the lowest effort way as we already have data agreements with Microsoft 365 it eliminates a lot of the paperwork. And they do promise that they won't train on data even in the free (well, included with basic M365) version for corporate users. A lot of others don't unless you pay.
It's too bad because it seems to be the worst AI around. Even compared to ChatGPT itself which uses the same model as copilot in MS Office. I don't really understand why there's such a difference. If you do pay the $30 it's a bit better especially the researcher.
Double check if the (hopefully not locked) BIOS gives an option to customize the CTRL key. I had a previous work laptop which also got cute with the CTRL button, but thankfully did let you remap it.
They saw other successful AI products with discords (like midjourney) and then they probably just copied the idea thinking they would get similar success from it.
That's a lot of what big corp america strategy boils down to -- copy your competitors.
Don't get me wrong, creating a passionate community around a product is a great strategy for many reasons, but microsoft never had passionate users in the first place.
And it is telling that they are banning humor and criticism form their community, it shows they do not want have any criticism for their product, which is one of the benefits of community (fast and honest feedback loops). Its sort of like north korea where saying anything bad about the "great leader" or else. That's not a fun community, that is a community people want to leave but can't bc they will get shot at the border.
There are communities who gobble up anything Microsoft produces. People in the Microsoft MVP program are usually in this camp - if you want to find examples. Me and my coder friends were part of the fandom, but with just me and my biased N=10 sample set; this fanbase is evaporating quickly (but I still know some hardcore "azure thumpers").
Not just people like that. I'm always searching for better ways to do things and dive into things deeper. Including Windows and Copilot. So having spaces for that can be helpful. Most public forums are unfortunately just complaint departments. Nobody wants to solve anything, they just want to complain with some projection of David and Goliath. It's really annoying. I want to find more positive spaces but for a lot of tech it's just negative all the way down. Maybe I'm just crazy for enjoying tech still and not being committed to an OS religion.
The same as every other Discord server: Giving a few people the feeling of power over dozens of channels with memes and unsearchable low-quality "discussions".
An awful lot of corporate workers are stuck with Copilot as their only approved chat option, so some of them are probably trying to learn how to get the best results they can from it.
Being Microsoft, you'd think they would just offer a public Teams server instead? Not that you'd get more traction with it, but at least it's in-house and theoretically they would be motivated to build integrations on top.
Pretty ironic, isn't it? You'd think they'd have enough faith in Teams to compete with Discord on this front.
The friction comes from having to sign up for different forums or services. I'd wager fewer people use (or even like) Teams than Discord among the tech enthusiast types who are willing to give them feedback on their product.
Eh, good on them for not trying to act like Teams targets the same use cases as Discord just because Teams is an internal product. One is focused on the internal chats and groups within the business with occasional well defined outsiders and the other is more targeting something like live social media for consumers.
I'm not even sure if there is a way to have a team/channel for external users that they don't need to be invited to (I know you can jump through hoops to make it so they don't need to be guests in your tenant at least) or that there should necessarily be something like that in the first place.
For the same reason any company or open-source project uses Discord: it's a quick way to gather feedback and study how people use your products, without forcing users to sign up for something new if they already use Discord with a wide range of other servers.
I believe Windows 7 also had a great user interface.
This talk from PDC2008 resonated with me, specifically the concept of "Delights" from 23:45 onward.
The truth is that even with KeePassXC, I just really do not notice stale passwords across devices.
It's just really not a huge deal for me personally. Maybe it is for normal people.
I sync my databases maybe once a year if I'm lucky.
Right, that's what I was trying to emphasize. Rare syncs are totally fine here, too. I try to keep a routine but tend to slip. If not 'with my usual device' there's a tiny number of accounts I even need. They rarely change so the 'cache' is usually suitable. If not, the restriction is always short-lived.
> The BEAM's "let it crash" philosophy takes the opposite approach. Instead of anticipating every failure mode, you write the happy path and let processes crash. The supervisor detects the crash and restarts the process in a clean state. The rest of the system continues unaffected.
Do I want this? If my request fails because the tool doesn't have a DB connection, I want the model to receive information about that error. If the LLM API returns an error because the conversation is too long, I want to run compacting or other context engineering strategies, I don't want to restart the process just to run into the same thing again. Am I misunderstanding Elixir's advantage here?
You can (and should) always handle whatever errors you actually want to and are able handle, so if that means catching a lot of them and forwarding them to a model, that's not a problem.
The benefit comes mainly from what happens when you encounter unknown errors or errors that you can't handle or errors that would get you into an invalid state. It's normal in BEAM languages to handle the errors you want to/can handle and let the runtime deal with the other transient/unknown errors to restart the process into a known good state.
The big point really is preventing state corruption, so the types of patterns the BEAM encourages will go a long way toward preventing you from accidentally ending up in some kind of unknown zombie state with your model, like for example if your model or control plane think they are connected to each other but actually aren't. That kind of thing.
It doesn't sound strange, it actually sounds sane and what everyone should be doing.
At the same time, I can't imagine the last time I had a random exception I didn't think about in prod, but I guess that's the whole point of the BEAM, just don't think about it at all.
I might take a stab at Elixir, the concepts seem interesting and the syntax looks to be up my alley.
“Let it crash” doesn’t mean keep bashing your head against the wall. Elixir makes it easy to write state machines which reason about different types of failures, but it’s more declarative (this process requires X and Y preconditions, otherwise do Z) rather than imperative (I have to try/catch failures due to X and Y, now do Z). With Elixir you can actually specify that the process doesn’t start until the DB connection is ready, if that was the cause of the failure, it won’t start again (something else can take care of the DB). When the LLM API returns an error you can put the agent in a paused “errored” state and then you can have a different process decide what to do with the error, and pass it back to the main agent when it’s done. This is all really elegant functional code in Elixir compared to try/catches and if statements.
The thing with Linux cheats is that they were significantly easier to make(you didn't have to think about bypassing the anticheat at all, you could just read the game's memory or LD_PRELOAD your cheat in), and a lot more were publicly available(in true FOSS fashion, a lot of Linux cheats were open-source). A cheat that could cost $30-$60 a month on Windows could be free as in freedom(and free beer) on Linux.
I am not a kernel developer, so I don't really have any idea what this means, but CIX appears to have patches in the Linux kernel[0], so I assume mainlining more stuff is in the works?
I believe Valve's concerns went(or maybe go?) beyond just the Windows Store, and into "We believe Microsoft may become unable to ship a good Operating System in the future".
In a 2013 interview with Gabe Newell: "Windows 8 was like this giant sadness. It just hurts everybody in the PC business. Rather than everybody being all excited to go buy a new PC, buying new software to run on it, we’ve had a 20+ percent decline in PC sales — it’s like 'holy cow that’s not what the new generation of the operating system is supposed to do.' There’s supposed to be a 40 percent uptake, not a 20 percent decline, so that’s what really scares me. When I started using it I was like 'oh my god...' I find [Windows 8] unusable." [0]
The Windows Store probably was a part of it, sure, but looking at that quote from 2025, after having your SSD broken, your recovery unusable and your explorer laggy? It's quite bitter-sweet.
99* and 00* are what I do during hackathons, not work. I write some of the worst, god-awful code I've ever seen during hackathons, because I need to get the idea working. I(and the company) can't afford to merely "get the idea working" in production.
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