Discussion
I just got an email from Microsoft telling me about the exciting new things in Copliot for Office. Unfortunately, all of the placeholder text in their examples was in actual placeholder XML tags and not rendered as that tag is in their normal documentation.
So what’s the explanation?
@david_chisnall the agent running your mail client read somewhere that XML is obsolete, and refuses to render since then
@david_chisnall
Used to assume MS uses Copilot on their products to advertise its capabilities to users.
Starting to assume the intent is instead to advertise to CEOs how much they could get away with.
@david_chisnall Option 4: it looked good in draft, but the outlook codebase is degrading due to vibecoding and something broke between hitting send and the emails leaving the server (this would be my guess, given the number of new bugs I've seen in the system over the last year or so)
Oh, that's another option. Exchange uses RTF for rich text and converts to HTML for external access. It's possible that this was some exciting RTF attribute that didn't have a mapping to HTML.
@david_chisnall could have been a bit of all of the above, TBH
@david_chisnall the classics
@david_chisnall clearly, they expect computers to understand human language, and humans to understand computer language
@david_chisnall ... or they expect your Mail Client LLM to fill in the details :-)
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@david_chisnall Where is the "All of the above and more" option?