#microsoft application development services

but one thing i don't think people outside of the industry understand is exactly how companies like microsoft plan on scaling the ability of their ai agents. as this post explains, they are not as advanced as some people make them out to be and it is hard to feed them the amount of context they need to perform some tasks well.

but what the second article in the above post explains is microsoft's investment in making a huge variety of the needed contexts more accessible to ai agents. the idea is like, only about 6 months old but what every huge tech firm right now is looking at is mcps (or model context protocols) which is a framework for standardizing how needed context is given to ai agents. to oversimplify an example, maybe an ai coding agent is trained on a zillion pieces of javacode but doesn't have insider knowledge of microsoft's internal application authoring processes, meta architecture, repositories, etc. an mcp standardizes how you would then offer those documents to the agent in a way that it can easily read and then use them, so it doesn't have to come pre-loaded with that knowledge. so it could tackle this developer's specific use case, if offered the right knowledge.

and that's the plan. essentially, we're going to see a huge boom in companies offering their libraries, services, knowledge bases (e.g. their bug fix logs) etc as mcps, and ai agents basically are going to go shopping amongst those contexts, plug into whatever the context is that they need for the task at hand, and then power up by like a bajillion percent on specific task they need to do.

so ai is powerful but not infallible right now, but it is going to scale pretty quickly i think.

in my opinion the only thing that is ever going to limit ai is not knowledge accessibility, but rather corporate greed. ai models are crazy expensive to train and maintain. every company on earth is also looking at how to optimize them to reduce some of that cost, and i think we will eventually see only a few megalith ais like chatgpt, with a bunch of smaller, more targeted models offered by other companies for them to leverage for specialized tasks.

i genuinely hope that the owners of the megalith models get so greedy that even the cost optimizations they are doing now don't bring down the price enough for their liking and they find shortcuts that ultimately make the models and the entire ecosystem shitty. but i confess i don't know enough about model optimization to know what is likely.

i don't do a lot of long form posts but. I realized that so many people aren't aware that a lot of the enshittification of using computers in the past decade or so has a lot to do with embedded webapps becoming so frequently used instead of creating native programs. and boy do i have some thoughts about this.

for those who are not blessed/cursed with computers knowledge Basically most (graphical) programs used to be native programs (ever since we started widely using a graphical interface instead of just a text-based terminal). these are apps that feel like when you open up the settings on your computer, and one of the factors that make windows and mac programs look different (bc they use a different design language!) this was the standard for a long long time - your emails were served to you in a special email application like thunderbird or outlook, your documents were processed in something like microsoft word (again. On your own computer!). same goes for calendars, calculators, spreadsheets, and a whole bunch more - crucially, your computer didn't depend on the internet to do basic things, but being connected to the web was very much an appreciated luxury!

that leads us to the eventual rise of webapps that we are all so painfully familiar with today - gmail dot com/outlook, google docs, google/microsoft calendar, and so on. as html/css/js technology grew beyond just displaying text images and such, it became clear that it could be a lot more convenient to just run programs on some server somewhere, and serve the front end on a web interface for anyone to use. this is really very convenient!!!! it Also means a huge concentration of power (notice how suddenly google is one company providing you the SERVICE) - you're renting instead of owning. which means google is your landlord - the services you use every day are first and foremost means of hitting the year over year profit quota. its a pretty sweet deal to have a free email account in exchange for ads! email accounts used to be paid (simply because the provider had to store your emails somewhere. which takes up storage space which is physical hard drives), but now the standard as of hotmail/yahoo/gmail is to just provide a free service and shove ads in as much as you need to.

webapps can do a lot of things, but they didn't immediately replace software like skype or code editors or music players - software that requires more heavy system interaction or snappy audio/visual responses. in 2013, the electron framework came out - a way of packaging up a bundle of html/css/js into a neat little crossplatform application that could be downloaded and run like any other native application. there were significant upsides to this - web developers could suddenly use their webapp skills to build desktop applications that ran on any computer as long as it could support chrome*! the first applications to be built on electron were the late code editor atom (rest in peace), but soon a whole lot of companies took note! some notable contemporary applications that use electron, or a similar webapp-embedded-in-a-little-chrome as a base are:

microsoft teams

notion

vscode

discord

spotify

anyone! who has paid even a little bit of attention to their computer - especially when using older/budget computers - know just how much having chrome open can slow down your computer (firefox as well to a lesser extent. because its just built better <3)

whenever you have one of these programs open on your computer, it's running in a one-tab chrome browser. there is a whole extra chrome open just to run your discord. if you have discord, spotify, and notion open all at once, along with chrome itself, that's four chromes. needless to say, this uses a LOT of resources to deliver applications that are often much less polished and less integrated with the rest of the operating system. it also means that if you have no internet connection, sometimes the apps straight up do not work, since much of them rely heavily on being connected to their servers, where the heavy lifting is done.

taking this idea to the very furthest is the concept of chromebooks - dinky little laptops that were created to only run a web browser and webapps - simply a vessel to access the google dot com mothership. they have gotten better at running offline android/linux applications, but often the $200 chromebooks that are bought in bulk have almost no processing power of their own - why would you even need it? you have everything you could possibly need in the warm embrace of google!

all in all the average person in the modern age, using computers in the mainstream way, owns very little of their means of computing.

i started this post as a rant about the electron/webapp framework because i think that it sucks and it displaces proper programs. and now ive swiveled into getting pissed off at software services which is in honestly the core issue. and i think things can be better!!!!!!!!!!! but to think about better computing culture one has to imagine living outside of capitalism.

i'm not the one to try to explain permacomputing specifically because there's already wonderful literature ^ but if anything here interested you, read this!!!!!!!!!! there is a beautiful world where computers live for decades and do less but do it well. and you just own it. come frolic with me Okay ? :]

Major US technology companies have been named as potential targets as the war between Iran, Israel, and the United States begins to spill into the digital infrastructure that powers modern economies.

Iranian state-linked media this week published a list of offices and infrastructure run by US companies with Israeli links whose technology has been used for military applications. According to Al Jazeera, the companies include Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle.

Many of these companies operate regional offices, cloud infrastructure, or data-center operations across the Gulf, including in the United Arab Emirates. None have released public statements on this development.

The list was published by the semi-official, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps–linked Tasnim News Agency alongside a warning that the scope of the conflict could expand beyond traditional military targets.

“As the scope of the regional war expands to infrastructure war, the scope of Iran’s legitimate targets expands,” Tasnim News Agency reported.

Once the AI bubble bursts, that doesn’t mean chatbots and image generators will be relegated to the trash bin of history. Rather, there will be a reassessment of where it makes sense to implement them, and if attention moves on too fast, they may be able to do that with minimal pushback. The challenge visual artists and video game workers are already finding with employers making use of generative AI to worsen the labor conditions in their industries may become entrenched, especially if artists fail in their lawsuits against AI companies for training on their work without permission. But it could be far worse than that. Microsoft is already partnering with Palantir to feed generative AI into militaries and intelligence agencies, while governments around the world are looking at how they can implement generative AI to reduce the cost of service delivery, often without effective consideration of the potential harms that can come of relying on tools that are well known to output false information. This is a problem Resisting AI author Dan McQuillan has pointed to as a key reason why we must push back against these technologies. There are already countless examples of algorithmic systems have been used to harm welfare recipients, childcare benefit applicants, immigrants, and other vulnerable groups. We risk a repetition, if not an intensification, of those harmful outcomes. When the AI bubble bursts, investors will lose money, companies will close, and workers will lose jobs. Those developments will be splashed across the front pages of major media organizations and will receive countless hours of public discussion. But it’s those lasting harms that will be harder to immediately recognize, and that could fade as the focus moves on to whatever Silicon Valley places starts pushing as the foundation of its next investment cycle. All the benefits Altman and his fellow AI boosters promised will fade, just as did the promises of the gig economy, the metaverse, the crypto industry, and countless others. But the harmful uses of the technology will stick around, unless concerted action is taken to stop those use cases from lingering long after the bubble bursts.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has been on a multiyear mission to transform the company’s corporate culture into one that operates like what he calls “the world’s largest startup.” He’s looked to make Amazon leaner and less bureaucratic by urging staffers to do more with less and cutting organizational bloat.

When covid hit, the shift in Big Tech to remote work made interviewing cheaper and easier but also made it more difficult for VPs and directors to gain visibility and get promoted without first building an empire of as many minions as possible, and this kicked off a really unprecedented hiring boom where thousands of applicants were streaming through an eleven-step interview process to a bunch of new roles that didn't really make sense. Now Big Tech employees are back in office, which means that middle managers have better strategies for raising visibility, and also economic times leaner, which means there's pressure to not just hire indiscriminately. This has led to massive layoffs at e.g. Microsoft and Meta and above all else Amazon which has been absolutely hemorrhaging employees.

What's different about these Amazon layoffs, though, is that they're surprisingly skewed towards removing the engineers who make the products rather than removing the layers of management and bureaucracy. During Meta's big layoffs, for example, they gave a bunch of newly-promoted managers the choice of returning to doing actual production work or getting laid off. Laying off a bunch of engineers doesn't really make a ton of sense when Amazon makes more profit from Amazon Web Services than all its other business lines combined - like, that seems like the part of the company that's successful, and where you'd want to be investing money.

hello friends, I am going to be sharing portions of a paper i wrote way back in 2018 for a college class. in it, i was researching exactly how the ND games were made, and why they would not be made that way anymore.

if you have any interest in the behind the scenes of how her interactive made their games and my theories as to why our evil overlord penny milliken made such drastic changes to the process, read on!

Aleksei Volkov, a Russian national, pleaded guilty to operating as an initial access broker for the Yanluowang ransomware group, which targeted multiple United States companies between 2021 and 2022. Court filings indicate he gained unauthorised access to victim networks and sold those credentials for ransom proceeds.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) directed all federal agencies to patch a Samsung zero-day actively exploited in LandFall spyware attacks against WhatsApp users. The flaw enabled remote monitoring on affected Android devices.

Researchers from Volexity linked new spear phishing operations to China-aligned threat group UTA0388, using artificial intelligence tools to craft more convincing phishing messages. Simultaneously, a new phishing-as-a-service platform named Quantum Route Redirect was discovered targeting Microsoft 365 users worldwide via over 1,000 malicious domains.

A report by Wiz revealed that 65% of leading artificial intelligence firms leaked sensitive credentials and model data through GitHub repositories. Exposed secrets potentially compromise proprietary assets valued at hundreds of billions of dollars.

Cybersecurity researchers identified the GlassWorm malware spreading through compromised Visual Studio Code extensions, infecting thousands of developer systems. Meanwhile, ClickFix-style phishing attacks resurfaced, targeting hotels with PureRAT malware delivered through malicious emails.

The Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) updated its Top 10 web application risks, adding two new categories reflecting emerging threats in application security. Additionally, Mozilla enhanced its Firefox 145 release with stronger anti-fingerprinting protections to bolster online privacy.

Today's advisories highlight multiple high-severity vulnerabilities across the Linux kernel, Red Hat, and Ubuntu, including the VMSCAPE flaw affecting virtualised environments. Critical issues were also patched in Samba, Samsung Android (actively exploited), and Intel microcode, while coordinated updates spanned Python, OpenSSL, and libTIFF, indicating a broad focus on foundational open-source components.

Highlights of the day:

GlassWorm resurfaces via infected OpenVSX extensions: new wave compromises three developer plugins and GitHub repos, using hidden Unicode and Solana blockchain C2; victims include a Middle Eastern government entity.

Booking.com phishing hijacks hotel accounts worldwide: attackers abused legitimate business logins to send PureRAT-laced messages to guests, enabling large-scale credential theft and financial fraud.

OWASP updates Top 10 for 2025: revised list introduces “Software Supply Chain Failures” and “Insecure Design” while reaffirming “Broken Access Control” as the top web application risk.

AI firms leak secrets on GitHub: Wiz found 65% of Forbes AI 50 companies exposed API keys and credentials across deleted forks and personal repos, revealing weak secrets management.

Russian hacker admits role in Yanluowang ransomware: Aleksei Volkov pleaded guilty in the US to selling stolen access and laundering ransom payments, facing prison and $9.1 million restitution.