I don’t disagree, but corps are going to push the settings in their software and products that makes them the most money. It sucks but should be expected.

It’d be better if there were competitve open source options with the same ease of use, of implementation at scale, and ease of management at scale, but unless you’re willing to do custom forking and dev work, most of the time it’s easier to go with whatever is the overwhelming standard is and work around the rough spots, as at least then you’ll almost never be in completely uncharted waters.

I spent a few years building a custom solution for integrating a semi-popular but still relatively new HRIS system with a hybrid AD/Entra environment with a somewhat unique hybrid Exchange (email) setup. Doing it live, no real documentation to speak of because the few other places that had done it turn out to be consulting groups that sell their solutions for ridiculous amounts of money. My workplace has now hired an entire team and spent at least half a mil on a new software suite that will replace my solution eventually, after more dev work by this new team.

That was after I burned a year trying to figure out how in the hell I could programatically try to clean up a horribly misconfigured and mismanaged old SolarWinds Orion setup that had accumlated tech debt for years, only to be stymied because they don’t allow public discussion of their fucking database structure, and what I found out myself was batshit. Don’t trust software that use their own custom bastardization of SQL.

After those experiences I’m pretty damn content to stay in the land of “well documented and popular” and just work around the rough edges. Keeping up with patch and update news and delaying updates a little usually gives plenty of time to effectively opt-out by changing the settings before it hits our environment at large.

Fuck Microsoft’s bullshit, but at some point it’s the enemy you know, especially in a corporate environment. I’m no stranger to masochism through tech work, but I’ve gotten used to MS’s brand of fuckery, as a lot of us have.

No… then they don’t do what I’m talking about. I’m sorry you deal with the suck, but your IT team still gets hammers.

My workplace backs up to OneDrive itself. No requirement of work VPN, just sign in on a work machine with internet connection and confirm the MFA prompt.

Technically OneDrive is some unholy patchwork on top of Sharepoint Online, as evidenced by a ton of back end settings going through the SharePoint admin UI, but that’s not relevant to the discussion.

I didn’t even know it was possible to hijack Onedrive to point to SharePoint Server. For that matter who in the absolute fuck is still using Sharepoint Server? It went out of support two years ago, and extended support (at significantly extra cost) ends July 14th.

There is technically another On-Prem version past 2019, but it’s obvious bare minimum life support.

Plus, Microsoft locks so many of their security and other features baked into Azure behind Office 365 E5 licenses that most places are just using those for Office etc, and those come with a shit ton of storage per-user in OneDrive and SharePoint online.

We also don’t have auto-deletion turned on (yet). I’ve already done what I can to talk my boss out of it, but we will have options to prevent it on specific files and folders, as we already do with email (auto delete past certain age, unless it’s in the archove folder. you can set up auto archive rules if you need, but there’s rules on max space).

TL;DR- Your workplace does not in fact do “essentially what I described”, which is a large contributor to the issues you’ve seen. Go get hammers and beat your IT staff with them.

Especially the Sharepoint Server shit. That’s horrifying. No one should have to even think about touching that. Ewwww.

I’m sorry, that sucks. It really only takes about ten minutes to search up the settings to turn off the saving redirection in Office programs and toss it in the default Group Policy settings, but I’m sure that at a huge org that would end up stuck in absurd change review hell that IT folk seem to try and avoid.

Go beat your IT department with hammers. I have roughly a decade in IT with primarily Windows in our environment. There’s no reason for it to suck so bad in a corporate environment. They can disable it entirely very easily, or make it work amazingly well with some effort.

My workplace:

• We redirect/sync My Documents and My Pictures to OneDrive seamlessly. If it’s saved in either of those, autosave is on and it’s the same file locally and on onedrive. Files saved follow to any machine. Viewable in explorer always, actually downloaded locally on the fly as needed. Obvious overlaid icon on every file to indicate if it’s synced, syncing, or not available locally (when you’re offline and can’t connect to one drive). You can right click files and folders to easily adjust if they’re always downloaded up to date locally or just on demand.

• If there are any conflicts it can’t auto-merge (usually only non-office docs) it saves them with the source computer name appended to the end of the file name so you have each version available, and it pops up a notification that stays until it is manually dismissed, so you know it happened.

• If for some reason you’re working on a document outside of the synced folders, office programs do not default to saving in one drive, they default to where the document was opened from or to “My Documents” for new docs, so shit doesn’t get silently moved on you. I can and have had the same doc opened on multiple machines at once, made edits on each, and it worked just like live collaboration with other users.

It doesn’t have to suck, and it’s also easily disableable entirely in enterprise environments if your IT doesn’t want to configure it well. We kept it entirely disabled from our environment until we had our config planned and thoroughly tested with a pilot group for a few months before we let it hit the company as a whole.

Where meme?

Edit: Here’s a quick image for posts like this, enjoy.

I’m sure understanding those things helps, but it’s not an easy thing to hear for people stuck in an imbalance in the relationship.

Sure doesn’t feel “healthy” when you feel your needs aren’t being met, especially when you get told the problem is you because you want more than they are willing to give.

“A big part of my love language is physical intimacy. When my partner doesn’t reciprocate any interest in it, despite every attempt on my end to communicate my needs, it makes me feel unloved. I’m hurting and you’re going to tell me it’s my fault?”

Look, it’s very easy to casually give advice like this when you aren’t stuck in what feels like a fundamentally broken relationship.

This would make an amazing shitpost of a counter to people whining about Windows 11 start menu being react based.

I assume js is just the file type and GNOME isn’t running a full browser under the hood, but this could make a lot of people upset, lol.

Will say from experience that beyond the general yuck, and logistics of having to clean puke off your junk and the surroundings, getting puke on the head of your penis is not pleasant. The acidity of it stings/burns. Do not reccomend.

C’mon, where’s Funky Mode and the Over 20 lbs of pussy and ass sticker?

Pardon the pedanticness: Phones do NOT completely power down. The jury is out on if they are still traceable in “standby”/psuedo-powered off mode. The generally accepted advice is to treat them like they are still tracable.

There’s plenty of blame to go around on this, no need to only go after one party in the whole chain that allows this to occur.

I have a hard time believing this isn’t a shitpost project.

What the fuck? I was like dead certain that you were stuck with a bunch of high schoolers at a grocery store or something. That should never be happening anywhere remotely close to a cube farm.

Best strategy is to play dumb. “Hello, [fuckface’s manager], I have some concerns about the tiktok content [fuckface] is making for the company and some questions about my job responsibilities in relation to it. [Fuckface] pretty regularly interrupts my work to request me to act in these videos and it is getting in the way of my usual duties. If my participation is required, could you please let me know in writing? I’ll also need to discuss with my manager about how this should be prioritized and scheduled alongside my other job duties.”

Force their awareness in a way that doesn’t immediately look like an assassination. The more you can get in writing the more rope this guy makes to hang himself with. If somehow they claim it’s actually work related, keep pushing the edges of “I just want to be sure” until his channel is company property or he shoots himself in the foot.

Alternatively, get paid to intentionally do bad acting. “Oh, I’ve never been good on camera, sorry!”

Why would that take the fun out of it? Just tell them no.

Just like this coworker. Just tell him no. “I’m not helping you with your side hustle man, find someone else.”

It is currently a hidden setting in Firefox’s about:config. They are removing it from there and no longer controlling it within Firefox itself so it will follow the setting set in you window manager (probably have the wrong term here, haven’t had my coffee yet), which is (generally) not hidden and available through a settings GUI. So you won’t have a web browser having different functionality than elsewhere on your machine.

If it’s hidden at that point, blame the window manager/desktop environment/whatever it’s called.

Are there any other CoPilots I should know about?

Meow.

They are setting this as an optional feature. They are not just disabling it.

Man, it must take some effort to be an atheist with legenedary Pokemon running around and Arceus being a thing.

Lol, this is why we don’t tend to give software engineers local admin, and why most places hire separate UX designers.

Don’t even need to go that far. Pro and using Group Policy covers most of it. A registry entry here, a powershell command for uninstalling some bloat there… LTSC just saves uninstalling some of the bloat still on Pro.