It mostly looks like a mild slow down of user-facing release and rebrand of unpopular features.

It is not a retreat. The marketing team is just trying to figure out how to reframe things that caused public backlash.

Because if middle managers even in other companies are tracking people’s locations then people are more likely to think that my software that asks for their location will be used to track them even though it doesn’t.

That is certainly a direction. I hope you have robust redunacies on the concentrator.

This will break a lot of applications.

This shit makes my job harder. I am required by law to provide a PSAP with the location data of any 911 caller (within a pretty tight radius). I have to use software in concert with softphones which requires the user enter their location when logging in the phone on their computer, just in case it is used to dial 911. This isn’t optional, we could face serious legal penalties if a user dials 911 and the response is delayed because the responders go to the wrong place.

My stuff is only used for 911. We don’t keep track. Really. There’s not even a mechanism to do that.

But when MS pulls this invasive bullshit it makes people afraid that my 911 software is doing the same thing. It makes them lie on the form or refuse to put anything in it. It makes them less safe and it makes my life difficult trying to convince them that the software we are using really is just for safety and that nobody, not even me, has access to it.

yeah, cocksuckers are awesome.

$25B 90% off - 3 days only $2.5B

It’s been decades since I’ve read it, so I wasn’t sure if I remembered that part correctly or I would have mentioned it. I recall another part where one of the princes gets raped that was really messed up as well. And just a lot of rape in general in that book that I thought was gross. I recall really being disturbed by it more than I was by The Clan of the Cave Bear because the latter presented the rape of Ayla (as a child) in an intentionally gross, traumatic and disturbing way, while Anne Rice wrote the rape of Beauty in an erotic way.

Anyway, both books frequent banned books lists. I read many banned books during my time at the bookstore.

You really don’t. Whatever you are imagining, it’s more than that.

Now imagine reading it as a 19-year old who grew up without the internet.

As a young man I worked in a bookstore and when I discovered the amount of smut in romance novels it was pretty shocking.

Then I read the Claiming of Sleeping Beauty.

I was not prepared for that.

Literally being used as an intensifier bothers me less than inflammable meaning both flammable and not flammable.

Back in the late 80s they were pretty legit.

Mostly because the model is incapable of experiencing remorse or any other emotion or thought.

Maybe they will ask their fans if they have phones.

I haven’t noticed anything like this online. I only one time saw a woman post in a MSM community and it was to ask a question, which was fine.

“AI applications introduce novel security risks, such as cross-prompt injection (XPIA), where malicious content embedded in UI elements or documents can override agent instructions, leading to unintended actions like data exfiltration or malware installation.”

Exfiltrating data and installing malware are the tasks it was designed to do, the warning is that it might be done by someone other than Microsoft I guess.

AOW4 being the one exception for me.

I didn’t actually finish the 7.0 MSQ (I quit shortly after the awful “western” storyline), but the actual writing was painfully bad at every point leading up to that. For example, the way we know Wuk Lamat has grown as a person is because they say “Wuk Lamat has really grown through this adventure”. Most characters appear to have the motivation of dong things because the plot needs it to happen.

Finally, the prior expansions had strong themes, from Heavensword’s take on cyclical violence, SB talking about oppression and so on. Dawntrail doesn’t seem to have anything to say (or maybe it’s all at the end, idk). It was just really disappointing and I just couldn’t deal with it. It’s like it was written for children except it deals with dark themes. Like the worst of the YA section.

By contrast, I was a blubbering mess at points in ShB and EW. Especially the 5.3 stuff, holy shit.

And then turns to garbage at the 400 hour mark. Dawntrail actually made me quit due to some of the worst writing I have ever had the misfortune of experiencing in a game. Serious whiplash coming off the fourth expansion.

They have 93% of the market, they don’t care about people who use Windows.