This company has been pulling these tricks since the early 90s.
If you fell for this once again, there's nobody else to blame but yourself.
And honestly I think this case is just a perpetually clueless manager getting over-joyous with vibecoding (to the point of being marveled at changing two lines of code without blowing everything up).
It's probably going to be reverted in the coming days. Which doesn't change the fact that it's a very Microsoft way of operating.
- Refusing for over seven years to offer a simple UI to clear "issues" pane, instead blaming plugin authors for not 'owning' the content. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/66982
Microsoft hasn't cared about the actual users of VSCode for a very long time.
People act like a corporation has character traits, as a person does. But it doesn't. You can't strongly predict future behavior based on the present the way you can with a person, so it makes no sense to have seething eternal hatred for a company.
If one hasn't been personally betrayed yet, it is easy to minimize or ignore the warnings of others who have been through the predatory/anticompetitive, EEE, stack ranking, etc. eras of MS.
No question VSCode has some real structural advantages: free (as opposed to pricey VS Enterprise licenses - this matters in non-tech enterprises), somehow easily installable even in enterprise locked-down environments, first-class webdev support, first-class python integration, extensive extension/plugin ecosystem, extensive multi-language support, excellent wsl integration, and that MIT source license to PR their way out of their EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) infamy.
There's no other free IDE quite with this set of features. Eclipse is a heavy heavy lumbering thing.
It's not even a mystery why it has a lot more traction than vscodium - that sweet sweet MIT license means it's a good thing right? Salves that mental nag in the conscientious.
It takes a principled, die-hard attitude to use vscodium over vscode, or something else altogether, especially if you're a multi-talented dev.
That's the thing about giant corporations, they tend to outlive human careers. MS has outlived the careers of Gates, Balmer, and likely Nadella. Google has outlived Page/Brin, Schmidt. IBM so many. Volkswagen likewise. Even Comcast survived the worst-company-in-america days. Ma Bell continues to survive as Verizon, AT&T. Sony too. Railroads continue to this day. Hence the modern day race to get as large as possible, as quickly as possible.
Opposition due to incidents fades over time as people simply walk away into the sunset. That big boss that you have to defeat at the end of the game? Simply goes on to fight other players once you leave.
We don’t need snarky comments like this, especially when the technology in question is so pervasive and takes a lot of cognitive effort to avoid. The blame lies solely with Microsoft.
To be direct about this: this is actually our fault they fell for this. It’s your fault too. We’re the ones building the future for the next generation/s, so whatever “tricks” they fall for are created by our generation (to extract or generate wealth, amongst other things.)
That’s on us to do better through education and fighting back.
They also know the conditions they have to endure - economic, climate, whatever - are not normal or okay. They're well aware of who to blame for those.
Not until they've personally been hurt by something.
Unfortunately I can't recall who said this, it was the beginning of a tech talk and it made something instantly click for me.
We have almost no way to influence both politicians and corporations because an individual informed vote gets lost in the avalanche of votes by people who don't care. The biggest lie a few hundred years ago was that "all men are created equal" told to the general population by people who owned slaves. The biggest lie in our generation is that we have democracy.
1) It's impossible to vote for what you really want because the choice is restricted to predefined options - political parties are only a few points in a highly dimensional space representing what people actually want.
2) Everyone votes on everything and every vote has the same weight. It's impossible to target your vote to one issue you researched deeply - it'll be lost in the noise of people who are voting about something completely unrelated but their vote picks a party which in turn affects your issue.
3) Corporations, especially in tech, have just as much influence as the government and they're little dictatorships. Not even their workers can influence their decisions directly.
