Microsoft is Closing Its Employee Library and Cutting Back on Subscriptions (theverge.com)
- Reference: 0180587824
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/15/1754223/microsoft-is-closing-its-employee-library-and-cutting-back-on-subscriptions
- Source link: https://www.theverge.com/tech/862531/microsoft-library-closure-transition-changes-notepad
> Microsoft's library of books is so heavy that it once caused a campus building to sink, according to an unproven legend among employees. Now those physical books, journals, and reports, and many of Microsoft's digital subscriptions to leading US newspapers, are [1]disappearing in a shift described inside Microsoft as an "AI-powered learning experience."
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> Microsoft started cutting back on its employee subscriptions to news and reports services in November, with some publishers receiving an automated email cancellation of a contract. [...] Strategic News Service (SNS), which has provided global reports to Microsoft's roughly 220,000 employees and executives for more than 20 years, is no longer part of Microsoft's subscription list.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/tech/862531/microsoft-library-closure-transition-changes-notepad
I read about this in a Vinge novel (Score:4, Informative)
They chopped the books up into confetti and read them with AI scanners.
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Yes, thank you! That was Rainbow's End by Vinge. I was thinking about this yesterday, couldn't remember which book it was... thought it was Rudy Rucker. If LLMs have already consumed the sum total of digitized human knowledge, the next step is to digitize all the remaining books... probably destructively.
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Why store books when we can build palaces for the rich?
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> Why store books when we can build palaces for the rich?
Why keep knowledge accessible to the unwashed masses when the rich can have a monopoly on it?
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This 2005 article from The Onion seems relevant, and maybe no longer funny.
[1]https://theonion.com/google-an... [theonion.com]
[1] https://theonion.com/google-announces-plan-to-destroy-all-information-it-can-1819567986/
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Satire is just pretentious prognostication.
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Sigh. That was from 2005. The Onion article includes:
> Brandt also expressed reservations about the company’s new motto. Until yesterday’s news conference, the company’s unofficial slogan had been “Don’t be evil.” The slogan has now been expanded to “Don’t be evil, unless it’s necessary for the greater good.”
I mean, just ten years later they did indeed drop the "don't be evil". They just couldn't be bothered to even do the "greater good" part.
Well Gosh Darnit! (Score:4, Insightful)
"Listen folks, we've spent hundreds of billions of dollars on this pattern matching lying machine by dad-gumit, y'all are gonna use it!"
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> It was like visiting Boeing's 747 factory, climbing to the observation platform in the middle and just seeing the scale and scope of everything around you.
Except that in the Boeing factory, it's the [1]weight of the FAA documentation [generalaviationnews.com] that makes the buildings sink
[1] https://generalaviationnews.com/2023/01/31/when-the-paperwork-equals-the-weight-of-the-aircraft/
The "sinking library" myth (Score:2)
Microsoft's library of books is so heavy that it once caused a campus building to sink, according to an unproven legend among employees.
This is a really common kind of myth. I've heard the same story about libraries at a dozen universities. Snopes even has [1]an article about it [snopes.com].
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sinking-library/
Re: The "sinking library" myth (Score:1)
I actually saw a cracked early 20th century library building that needed reinforcements because the foundation moved over 50 odd years due to the weight of the books and shelving. So there is some truth to the myth.
Related: IBM Almaden's library in the 90's (Score:2)
Was absolutely breathtaking. It was fantastic. The building it was in was so long, there was an airport-style golf cart to shuttle people between different areas.
It contained every journal and technical book and reference you can imagine.
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Anyhow, the retreat from archivism and knowledge is the path into darkness and ignorance.
Not buying it (Score:2)
"Microsoft's library of books is so heavy that it once caused a campus building to sink, according to an unproven legend among employees"
Yeah, right. Half the colleges in the US have similar legends about *their* campus library.
Reminds me of Good Omens (Score:2)
> Now those physical books, journals, and reports, and many of Microsoft's digital subscriptions to leading US newspapers, are disappearing in a shift described inside Microsoft as an "AI-powered learning experience".
In Good Omens, Famine - one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - is seen starting a restaurant chain in which portions are minuscule: one appetizer is literally lavender scent delivered from, IIRC, a plastic bag, while one of the mains is chicken-flavoured foam. Substituting a wimpy, ethereal, and potentially revisionist "AI-powered learning experience" for real, physical books strikes me as analogous to the scene I just described.
It used to be the case that "history is whatever we said it was when we w
Hallucinatory History (Score:2)
A hallucinatory AI Journey:
Search: "twelve monkeys hugo award"
AI: "The 1995 film 12 Monkeys was nominated for the 1996 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, recognizing its significant contribution to science fiction cinema, though it didn't win, losing to Apollo 13."
Search: "Apollo 13 hugo award"
AI: "Apollo 13 (1995) was nominated for the 1996 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, a prestigious award in science fiction, though it did not win, losing to Babylon 5 for "The Coming of Shadows"."
The s
Very Sad (Score:2)
I used to enjoy going to the Redmond Campus library and would just spend my lunch hour finding books that I could check out and read (Or just buy flat out from other sources) on topics that were normally not available to me because of the technical nature of the books and the fact that those technical books are so hard to get otherwise; There just isn't a nice way to do discovery on random technical topics I might like as a polymath without being able to be surrounded by amazing amounts of books on them.
Sur
Guess I'm not that surprised... (Score:1)
During the 9 years I worked at Microsoft I went into the library a handful of times. Not sure I ever saw anybody else in there. It was nice, very clean, very quiet, but...I'm not sure how many employees still remembered it existed.
I did use the digital subscriptions (Wall Street Journal, etc.) sometimes, but even there I'm sure they were paying for some subscriptions that never got used.
So, while the nostalgic part of me is a bit sad to see the library go, the practical side of me isn't that surprised and h
*cringing in researcher* (Score:2)
I'm sure none of those sources needed to be consistent and complete. An AI can be handy, especially for retrieval when your parameters are a bit fuzzy for proper search, but the ability to realllllly point where you got the claim from is pretty damned important if you want to build anything reliable on it.
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It's funny to think that with my collection of Mindshare and MS Press vintages tomes and e-books, I might soon actually have more resources than Redmond to make real things. Going vintage, I don't know how anyone makes an ISA board without having an ISA Systems Architecture book.
Physical vs. Digital (Score:3)
Digital versions can be quietly 'updated' and 'corrected' to whatever the powers that be (whether political or corporate) want them to be.
This is much harder with physical printed books.
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Also, without the old physical documents in the library it will be much harder to check whether LLM output is accurate or just AI slop.
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But it will make Winston Smith's job a lot easier.
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I see the actions performed as cost saving measures.
This leads me to believe that Microsoft is into economic troubles that they are trying to hide. Cutting down on employee freebies is often one of the signs.
I do suspect that they aren't getting the revenue they expected from Copilot and Azure Cloud services, but can't just increase the prices overnight to cover the costs. So I suspect that the management of Microsoft are being quite stressed and that in turn also explains why they are so desperately trying
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Probably the exec whose passion project was the library, retired. Execs had wanted to kill the library for years but it was less of a hassle to just wait for him to retire, then dial it way back. So now that's happening. Microsoft has a lot of "untouchable" execs from the 90s era with weird pet projects.
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If you're relying on Amazon for anything, you've had it coming, IMO. There are other sources for ebooks and readers. I've got around 1.500 paper books but I'm not going to buy any more of them if there's an ebook edition. Physical books are way too heavy to justify their exclusive use. And let's not even start with travelling with sufficient reading material for two or three weeks...
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They can have my original copies of [1]Agatha Christie's story [theparisreview.org] when they pry them out of my cold, dead hands.
[1] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/02/05/mystery/
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Also, you don't learn with AI. You consume with AI and forget just as quickly.
This is why AI is a "crutch" to some people. (I.e. the idiot masses.) They use AI to get a quick answer. Because they got that answer so quickly and made no real effort to do so, our lizard brains just discard the answer after it has served it's purpose in the moment. Weighing that the cost of remembering the answer is too resource intensive (to the brain) compared to the cost to get the answer again if / when it's needed. That