Corey Moss-Pech

🦔 Microsoft is pulling engineers off new features to stabilize Windows 11 after months of patch failures. January brought emergency fixes for systems that couldn't shut down, OneDrive and Dropbox freezing, and machines stuck on black screens at boot. Windows chief Pavan Davuluri says reliability will be the focus for much of the year. Microsoft's stock dropped 12% this week on AI spending concerns. My Take I wrote about this recently. Nadella says 20-30% of Microsoft's code is now AI-written. A GitClear study found code churn doubled after AI tools became widespread. Microsoft's own researchers found developers miss 40% more bugs reviewing AI-generated code because it "looks clean." I can't prove the connection, but when the company bragging about AI-written code has to stop building new features just to fix what's broken, the question keeps asking itself. They're still pushing Recall, which screenshots everything on your desktop. Still shoving Copilot and OneDrive prompts at users. Still overriding browser choices to route traffic through Edge. Users are dealing with broken updates and aggressive upsells at the same time. Trust erodes fast when your operating system feels like it's working against you while also failing to work at all. Hedgie🤗

‘Although ed-tech companies tout huge learning gains, independent research has made clear that technology rarely boosts learning in schools—and often impairs it. A 2024 meta-analysis of 119 studies of early-literacy tech interventions, led by Rebecca Silverman of Stanford University, found the studies described programmes that delivered at best only marginal gains on standardised tests. The majority had little effect, no effect or harmful ones. Jared Horvath, a neuroscientist and author of a book called “The Digital Delusion”, has reviewed meta-analyses covering tens of thousands of studies. His verdict: “In nearly every context, ed tech doesn’t come close to the minimum threshold for meaningful learning impact.”’

The inevitable endpoint: college essays written by the student's AI and evaluated by school's AI.

Fun fact: The 1998 paper that introduced Google and PageRank to the world ends with this acknowledgment: "Supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement IRI-9411306. Funding also provided by DARPA and NASA." Sergey Brin was on an NSF Graduate Fellowship. Larry Page was a PhD student on the grant. Google—now worth $2 trillion—exists because American taxpayers funded "the Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project." Not a startup garage myth. A government grant. Every time someone says public research funding "picks winners and losers" or "crowds out private innovation," remember: the most dominant technology company of the 21st century was incubated entirely with public money, inside a public university, by researchers on federal fellowships and grants. The private sector didn't see it coming. VCs passed. The government funded it anyway—not because it would become Google, but because fundamental research into information retrieval seemed worth understanding. That's the point. You can't predict which grants will change the world. You fund the science and let researchers explore. The internet (DARPA). GPS (DoD). Touchscreens (CIA/NSF). mRNA vaccines (NIH). Google (NSF/DARPA/NASA). Public investment in basic research isn't wasteful spending. It's the seed corn of the entire modern economy.

Apps to “share photos and updates with friends” always behave like unstable elements. They exist for a few years before the product inevitably decays into something else (like we’ve seen with both IG and Facebook). Interesting reflection here from the Head of IG.

holy fucking shit