My biggest hope for LLM's was to finally be able to make sense of all the Microsoft documentation; the constant churn in product naming, different versions with varying levels of support and compatibility, the multitude of different API's to accomplish the same operation.. turns out the LLM's are just a confused as me :(

Every single auth related MS library/api I've tried to use has had three different doc pages saying a slightly different version of a slightly different part of what I actually need to know, and then the actual needed information being buried in a stack overflow post somewhere (and that information being slightly different again from the official MS docs).

Stack overflow was wrong then somehow ChatGPT knew what I was talking about when trying to set a dotnet environment variable in azure for an array in an app service. It has to be foo__0 not foo:0 so I broke production in a very nonobvious day for a day. At some point the foo__0 gets transliterated into foo:0 apparently?

The absolute worst location for this was, of course, the Azure or dotnet documentation sites. Cmon Microsoft you make both of these products surely this is a huge use case for your customers?

Asking Bing AI anything to do with MS Purview, (which is an M365 product for a range of data security applications), will result in several answers, all wrong and outdated, pointing to documentation that is also wrong and outdated, pointing to other documentation that doesn't exist.

To be fair, that's an improvement over the status quo. Generally they are far more confused than me.

... and reinstall Windows is offered as the next step after sfc /scannow.

This is grossly unfair.

You've entirely omitted the `dism /cleanup-image /(scan|check|restore)-health` rain dance

Blast. Soz.

I've been using Windows since v1 or perhaps 2 - we had a "CAD" workstation at school back in the day. It was a RM Nimbus with a 80186 (yes!) in it. I own a Commodore 64 from 1984ish (still have it - it now has USB).

I also recall using telnet to access the internet (gopher, WAIS etc) and being asked by my boss in 1994ish to investigate this www thing that was making waves.

I found it after a lot of navigation through menu systems. This is a discussion about the real differences by Sir TBL: https://www.w3.org/History/1992/WWW/FAQ/WAISandGopher.html

My report was: it looked pretty much the same as the rest, which shows exactly how prescient I was! To be honest, back then it was hard to tell what on earth was going on in a telnet session. At the time I could get at a sort of hyperlinked system on my telly (CEEFAX) and there were other similar systems around the world.

In hindsight, I think graphics cemented the www's dominance. I remember discovering the Mosaic browser and leaving telnet at around the time when a MS President (yes the speccied one) decided the web was not going anywhere), and thinking "fuck: that's the future".