You have to trust the contract.

If you use Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace etc then they already have all your data anyway. Most businesses have to trust other companies and the contract at some point.

The only other option is to use Open Source self hosted everything which is beyond most people’s ability.

If you’re a business with a contract with them it should state that they won’t use your data to train their models.

If you’re using the free service then you’re right that it’s safe to assume that your data was already being used.

Deterministic means for the same input you always get the same output.

For AI it would be if you ask it a question multiple times using exactly the same words you would get the same answer.

We had that in our DOS C code base. We didn’t have a debugger so we had a function that output debug messages to console if the debug flag was set.

There were more than a few instances where a crash would stop happening if we added debug messages.

We put it down to the linker rearranging modules to fit in memory as our exe was more than a megabyte in size.

I sometimes suspect that I am actually an AI. I’ve always struggled with captchas and I comment my code exactly as you’ve just described.

You don’t for the one time codes because there is a standard that is supported by many authenticator apps.

App based 2FA is better. Either the app generates a time based code that you enter into the site or the site sends a push notification to the app asking you to verify the login attempt.

Passkeys are good too as they replace the password completely and leave the 2FA part to the device.

It’s better than nothing and some people would really struggle to do other types of 2FA.

I find this very odd because Azure DevOps is hardly ever down in our experience.

Microsofts documentation is also increasingly just outright _wrong_:

There used to be a spot on joke about Microsoft documentation taking the piss out of the fact that it was always 100% accurate but at the same time pretty useless. That joke hasn’t been relevant for a while.

It’s so frustrating trying to find out how to do something in one of the admin centres for M365 and you find a Microsoft document with exactly what you need in it only to find out that the UI has changed and the steps don’t work now. Did they move it? Did they remove it? Who knows?

The AI Fix podcast had a piece about how someone let an AI agent do the coding for them but had a disaster because he gave it access to the production database.

Very funny.

https://theaifix.show/61-replit-panics-deletes-1m-project-ai-gets-gold-at-math-olympiad/

I’m pretty sure that 5 is a feature because the button that moved is usually replaced with a clickable ad.

Sounds like SAP.

I think that there is always an implied design requirement of the program shouldn’t crash.

There’s a setting on the phone app to block notifications when you’re active on the desktop. It works well for me.

I don’t think that I get meeting notifications on my teams on desktop either so they just come up in outlook.

There are people in my org that always start with a “Hi” and then send each sentence as a new message. Very irritating.

The idea is that you can have more data online than you can fit on your computer.

It makes sense for SharePoint when there can easily be enough data to cause space problems on employee computers.

It doesn’t really make sense for it to be the default for personal OneDrives though.

There are new versions of C# every year.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/csharp-version-history

I think that the main difference is that developers tend to test for success (i.e. does it work as defined) and that testers should also test that it doesn’t fail when a user gets hold of it.

I have worked with some excellent testers but I have also worked with a team that literally required us to write down the tests for them.

To be fair, that wasn’t their fault because they weren’t testers. They were finance people that had been seconded to testing because we didn’t have a real test team.

The current team is somewhere in between.