I liked you better when you weren't cool

[sovay]

Does anyone know how to remove the floating Copilot button from a version of Microsoft Word on which I disabled all so-called connected experiences the day I bought the new license more than two years ago and which has nonetheless just sneakily updated itself so that I have an AI-inducing rainbow-colored heartworm constantly keeping pace in the down right corner of the document, blocking out text which I am trying to write? I have looked for suggestions online and most of them seem to require preference options not available in my Mac. But what I need in a Word document is words and nothing else and I cannot deal with a planet-killing visual fault in the middle of them, on top of which the fact that this obscenity can be intruded into my software makes me want to headline the news for the disappearance of the Roko's basilisk boys who put it there. If a program is on my computer, the only person who should be able to tinker with it is me. I am not even eloquent, I am so furious. Any actionable suggestions would be appreciated.

[ETA 2025-11-12 22:23] JESUS CHRIST AFTER AN EVENING ON THE PHONE WITH APPLE SUPPORT WHICH WAS FLABBERGASTED BY THE PROBLEM AND NO SUPPORT WHATSOEVER FROM MICROSOFT I FIXED THE PROBLEM MYSELF WITH A CLEAN INSTALL OF PRE-COPILOT MICROSOFT WORD BECAUSE I NEVER THREW AWAY THE ORIGINAL INSTALL PACKAGE FROM 2023 IT WAS STILL IN MY TRASH I SHOULD NOT HAVE HAD TO REINSTALL FROM MY LITERAL TRASH WELCOME TO 2025

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an extremely long-winded response that may safely be skipped

[foxmoth]

Linux is terrific if you're a power user and mildly hell if you're only marginally functional as a coder. I am only marginally functional as a coder, so it's as well that I'm in Linux as hobby mode because if I had to SERIOUSLY rely on it for PRODUCTION I'd be boned. The coding power user aspect is extremely cool in a tinkerer's way, but at the point where JOE is ????? about unfucking some horrible chain reaction of cmake dependencies/prerequisites, I'm DEFFO boned. Really the only thing that makes Linux semi-possible for me is that at this point in time, the Raspberry Pi and its OS are pretty well documented on the internet in a way that coding ANYTHING [edit for clarity] absolutely were not in, like, the late 1990s or early oughts to the general public. Hell, even (say) coding in C or Forth are much more doable NOW because it's so much easier to Google (lolsob) some helpful note on Stack Exchange or some random specialty subreddit!

Also Linux is absolutely not doable if you're doing any kind of actual Hollywood-or-adjacent professional music production that involves interfacing with other people in orchestral mockups; there are probably some music genres where you could roll your own with production tools semi/available for Linux but orchestral mockups are sadly not one of them because of the weird combo of specialty VSTs and unhinged RAM/processor requirements. I mean, and this is also kind of niche so I can't resent this too much for music.

But for example, I was attempting to build a freaking glorified text editor that had Node.js as a prerequisite, and it took ONE AND A HALF HOURS on 5G to attempt to download/make the necessary file only for it to tell me, after an hour and a half, that it had FAILED. At that point I was too annoyed to chase down whatever the hell dependencies were borked, but the real issue for me was "Why the hell does a GLORIFIED TEXT EDITOR have a prerequisite that takes LITERALLY OVER AN HOUR to download let alone to compile into whatever?!" I could see this for some kind of unhinged 3D graphics game engine accelerated whatever the fuck, but for a TEXT EDITOR this to me is a sign of a completely fucked coding toolchain, and makes me understand why the Dusk OS guy is such a (delightful) crank. The difference being the Dusk OS guy is actually a 1337 coder (WRITING TWO OSes, my fucking God) and I'm a barely functional at coding rando hobbyist! I kind of love his manifesto even though my reaction to Dusk OS as postapocalyptic survivalist project is "Sir, have you considered that if civilization is THAT boned, maybe one had better consider whether there is still a WORKING POWER GRID first?" (as someone who used to work briefly in energy market intelligence) although maybe he has completely independent house solar power or some damn thing. Anyway, from said manifest:

While the primary purpose of this operating system is related to civilizational collapse, it's also in big part a reaction to the modern software stack. That stack is disgustingly complicated. It's a product of the compounded effect of a software culture that breeds complexity and had the opportunity to build upon itself over decades, unchecked and unchallenged, oozing its inscrutable pus at every corner.

The further we let that culture creep out, the harder it is to get out of it. Hardware follows it dutifully -- and in the same spirit of spurious complexity -- making clean slate approaches more and more out of reach... but not impossible yet!

Dusk OS has an amazing "power density", that is, it packs a lot of power in a very small package. This density allows it to do many things that the modern stack can do at a fraction of the complexity cost.

It is partly intended as a wake up call to software developers: the regular way to develop software today is stupid and wasteful and has been for the last 30 years. This stupidity and wastefulness feeds itself and makes us design bigger and stupider hardware to cater to bigger and stupider software.

Like I said, he is on the crank end in terms of, uh, practicality but I think he's correct about the fucked software stack EVEN BEFORE we get into the increasingly fucked software ecosystem available to regular non-coder users. :] I started tiptoeing away from both macOS and Windows at the point where Windows started pushing nagware "updates" that you could say "install now OR remind me in three days" but you could never actually say FUCK YOU NO JUST GO AWAY FOREVER and macOS started pushing AI/phone-home analytics OS updates that were TURNED ON by default instead of being opt-in. I especially do not want to have to go to the point of learning to write some cursed ESP32 microprocessor OS of my own because I am quite literally NOT COMPETENT for this and anything I generate will be full of vulnerabilities but hey, at least Linux exists. :p