psydii

"Have Claude, and the credit card. Let's see if I can code up an MIS before the school goes bust."

The prompts that produced these apps apps are not being written by your average bloke picked at random of your local high street. There is a very real chance that, certainly for a generation or so, there will be a transformation and democratisation of the software. But after that the number of people who understand enough to work with a genAI to codevelop actually good products will diminish, and scarcity of skills will be dramatically worse than it was in the pre-genAI days. Adobe might get unseated, but its replacement(s) will end up costing just as much in 20-30 years when there aren't enough developers left to properly steer the AIs. I do wonder whether genAI will be able to overcome the problem of the systems eventually poisoning themselves after a decade or two of eating their own dogfood, which cold lead to the worst outcomes of all. Initial models that are good enough to replace a huge swathe of knowledge based skills, but then too limited by ingesting their own output to continue to drive things forward. Meanwhile people who could have steered the ship have aged out of the workforce with none/insufficient to replace them.... If I am wrong, then perhaps it will be good enough to write and maintain excellent code over decades without human supervision.

The optimistic cynic in me wonders if this is not entirely accidental in order to make the new 365/Google-by-default authentication system appear like an immediate win for everybody (when it eventually goes live). FWIW some of our Conditional Access Policies force this on certain users on certain services where we absolutely want to minimise the risk that an auth token might remain valid any longer than absolutely necessary. I wonder if this (parentpay's plan) might be leveraging the methodology some of us are familiar with when changing IP ranges via DHCP: ahead of the change, reduce the life time to as close to zero as tolerable so when you switch over live , the users have a minimal amount of downtime.

AI tends to write like newspaper/magazine journalists, or those practiced at communicated with inattentive senior executives. Which is why those groups hyped it so much in the early years - it wrote just like/speaks to them. The key is that their prose followed a set pattern to deliver information and keeping the reader hooked. Basically its "writing frame", a tool heavily used in support of ND students. So "writes like ND students" is actually "optimised information delivery for those who aren't giving it their full attention"!

They can do many amazing things better than AI, but I've never seen one quite that good.

I've seen "Options" work well. It's from the same team that brought us the inspirationally named (and highly regarded) "Timetabler" TimeTabler | School Timetabling Software | Our Products Caveat: it was a long long time ago, from the earliest days of the Bromcom MIS.

26H2 adds Windows settings backup and restore. Not a replacement for roaming profiles of yore, but potentially handy when swapping out a user's device in a 1:1 environment. We try to mimic 1:1 by enforcing seating plans in IT Suites (well the class teachers do it as per T+L and behaviour management policies). This ensures any device a student is likely to use, should be ready for them next time they use it. Now I wonder how hot desking vs 1:1 and settings backup interact when the user might be on their 1:1 device then a shared device etc. Windows settings backup becoming a new resilience baseline - Windows IT Pro Blog

Copilot itself is covered by the same contracts as 365. So doesn’t strictly need one if you’ve got your 365 paperwork up to date. You should however add it to your AI register, and mention it alongside 365 in your RoPA. But if you light up any of the integrations that alter that, such as Anthropic models, you might need to more formally consider whether an additional DPIA is needed based on the specific terms of those additional integrations. in Microsoft-land if you have to click through a licence agreement to enable it, then you need to do at least a light-pass on a DPIA and add it to your RoPA and stat sharing registers.

Those Grandstream handsets look a lot like rebadged chinese oem built on top of the alibaba cloud. If the rebadger has done the job properly, you are not supposed to be able to realise, but sometimes there's a config mistake and the phone registers with a chinese server on boot. We've got ours (not grandstream, but clearly the same manufacturer) locked down with geo-based firewall rules. We used to have cisco handsets which lasted 10+ years. These ones look and feel like longevity might be a concern, but they've actually been *more* reliable than the cisco's in their first few years. (compared to the ciscos in their first few years). For us, support comes from the UK based VOIP provider that sold them to us, and it hasn't been a problem. However I think the way the contract works, they will all get swapped out at the five year mark - which potentially speaks to the longevity (or lack there of) of the device/support. Beyond that, I couldn't say.

If only there was a B2B web api they could use instead of an exe first compiled in 2002. Oh. Wait. There is. ParentPay should be eating their own dog food. Or just use WONDE like everybody else. Frankly it’s embarrassing.

The way I have solved this in the past is via the cashless catering vendor. (They are one of the smaller outfits.) Their system prints the cards/tokens and integrate with Paxton so they already have a commercial licence (for your site). And because cashless catering, and basic provisioning/deprovisioning is a solved problem, you can sometimes persuade the cashless catering developer to put in some bespoke automations for you. The method of persuasion varies depending on how much you've spent with them recently. One year something was quoted at £6000 (which we did seriously consider, but declined) and then a few years later (and to be fair after they had done some similar dev work for someone else), it was thrown in "for free" if we bought those three tills we were planning to this month rather than next.... (done this twice with two different vendors solving similar but different problems)

Autopilot is apparently having a bad day too. https://x.com/nilsvanwoensel/status/2105264065643729252

Microsoft tells nonprofits their deleted M365 data isn't coming back So the non-profits did not move to a supported plan, so the tenants were hard deleted. Utlimately not unreasonable, except..... ...there's supposed to be a window where the tenant is recoverable, but it seems Microsoft's processes are such that that is more of a "good intention" than actual operating practice. I hope this is followed up with a significant strong statement about the steps they are putting in place to prevent hard deletion of backups before the recovery window expires. I mean you can backup SharePoint document libraries pretty easily, and even your inbox... but if you've enitrely lost Intune and Entra? This is a significant breach of trust.

Microsoft have done a really surprisingly good job of bring this particular feature to 365. It's far from a perfect implementation, but it is now very easy to loose track of where a file really is.

Wasn't that specific course, but it cost us nothing that wasn't already spent. Because its a faff to get set up and no one else had put themselves forward, the full allocation was just sitting there. You do have to align things with the actual job you are doing/being trained to do, and there is real work required of your manager to support you as part of the apprenticeship programme.