> Windows has hundreds of milions direct users worldwide.
A BIG chunk of these are captured users working at Big Corp™.
I work at a company of 100k+ employees. The enterprise-managed Window machines we're issued are unbelievably bad. But I'm 100% sure if Microsoft pulled a Darth Vader "I'm altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further" and 10x'd the price, nothing would change. Maybe at 100x (or the point of actual unaffordability).
Very cool for large existing projects! I'll definitely be taking it out for a test drive on a codebase which is luckily using quite a recent py version (so should be easy to upgrade).
> Peeps can check their usage which has a good breakdown
Must be nice. At Sony we use Copilot (as an MS enterprise customer) and restrictions to token usage circa June have resulted in a hunger games of who-can-use-them-all-first, with the pool usually drying up by the 10th day of each month.
As for usage breakdown: we got a manually-published table most days just showing per-user token usage, until eventually we were told even that was somehow too difficult to provide.
Between that and learning how much the whole of Sony Corporate Group spends on Copilot (spoiler: it's hilariously little), I've sort of run out of disbelief.
I'm so glad I work at a company that isn't looking at our token usage. I mean, we're encouraged to use it but hearing about leaderboards and things is wild - but we also aren't big enough to need API costs, so power users get a flat rate 200/Month subscription or whatever.
I could see finance looking at it from a cost perspective if it was API costs, but sharing it with the rest of the users feels like a different measurement...
To clarify: we don't have leaderboards (thankfully), our issue is more in the opposite direction, with people who do want to make use of the tools (optimally or not) majorly constricted from doing so.
> I could see finance looking at it from a cost perspective if it was API costs, but sharing it with the rest of the users feels like a different measurement...
It is indeed surreal. I am not bullish about this company's technological capabilities going forward tbh.
The fear-and-loathing generated by those colleagues who no longer can or want to synthesize anything themselves after the token-fueled high does indeed make for good popcorn viewing.
At some point I think these sorts of analogies break down, as the setup becomes too foreign to what we're more concretely used to.
In this case: there is no pen or paper which can store what you write on a replicated set of servers across the world, with an accompanying ToS telling you how that will be treated/used.
Although I have little sympathy for this women (both her intent and stupidity), I do agree this is a dangerous thing.
But that's because you are a technologist who understands how servers work and has to think about where data lives. Meanwhile, mainstream software design increasingly blurs the line between local and remote and makes it hard to tell what is what. How can she be expected to know?
The wording here seems problematic. Why is law enforcement entitled to this degree of access to public surveillance as their "property"? That word strongly implies it is theirs to do with as they wish - I don't see how that would be a desirable state of affairs.
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