Byron Wright

Technology consultant, author, and instructor for Microsoft technologies. Microsoft MVP (2012-2015) for Exchange Server/Office 365

[Justin Elze @HackingLZ]

Anthropic trying to stop open source models is overthinking it.

Just tell Metallica they trained on their songs.

[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

When people are stressed, “You can handle this” is a better message than “It’s not a big deal.”

Data: Minimizing risks dismissing their experience. Encouragement builds their confidence.

The best way to support people is not to deny their pain—it's to help them navigate it.

[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

There’s more to the youth mental health crisis than social media. A key culprit is perfectionism.

307 studies, 35 years, 83k students: Young adults feel growing pressure to be flawless.

It's a risk factor for depression and anxiety—and it began a generation before smartphones.

[Byron Wright @ByronWrightGeek]

This should be framed somewhere.

[Абе, Ангеле! @Abe_Angele]

@SwiftOnSecurity We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, and it's all bridges now all of a sudden.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔Picnic, a Seattle pizza robotics startup that raised $53 million and partnered with Domino's, just shut down. The company sold its IP to an unnamed buyer and left at least one restaurant owner stuck with $250,000 of useless robots. Zume Pizza did the same thing in 2023 after burning nearly $500 million trying to keep cheese from sliding off pies inside their delivery trucks. Both companies promised one worker could output 100 pizzas an hour with their hardware.

My Take
Picnic and Zume burned through $550 million combined trying to automate something humans do for $15 an hour. The Seattle restaurant owner stuck with the leftover hardware compared his kitchen to an aquarium of useless machines. That image is funny until you remember the same script is running across Starbucks pulling its AI inventory tool, Waymo pausing eight cities, Microsoft killing Claude Code internally, and Uber blowing through its 2026 AI budget in four months.

The mechanism is always the same in every story I've been covering. The demo works in a controlled environment with clean inputs. The deployment fails because real kitchens, real intersections, and real warehouses produce messy inputs the demo never tested. The vendor gets paid through the failure cycle. The buyer eats the cost and quietly retires the product. If a pizza chef can lose $250,000 on a topping robot, the people writing $80 billion capex checks for general purpose AI agents should expect to learn the same lessons at much larger scale.

Hedgie🤗

[cow @cowincrisis]

farmer found my twitter it’s so over

[ALI TAJRAN @alitajran]

Important: Get ready to migrate to Microsoft Entra Cloud Sync!

As organizations look to strengthen identity security and advance their Zero Trust strategies, many are looking for simpler, more reliable ways to manage hybrid identity.

To support these needs, Microsoft is beginning the transition from Microsoft Entra Connect Sync to the cloud‑native Microsoft Entra Cloud Sync - helping reduce on‑premises complexity while improving security, reliability, and day‑to‑day manageability.

This shift is a key step toward a cloud-managed identity future that will provide a more secure, resilient, and easier-to-operate synchronization experience. As part of ongoing modernization efforts, Microsoft's strategy remains to deliver stronger security, improved reliability, and simpler identity operations.

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭'𝐬 𝐧𝐞𝐱𝐭:

Beginning in July 2026, Microsoft will begin notifying customers about their individual transition timelines. The transition will be rolled out in phases, and Microsoft will reach out directly to each organization when their assigned transition window begins. This phased approach ensures that Microsoft can provide tailored guidance and support to all its customers.

- Initial phases: In the first waves, Microsoft will focus on tenants for whom Entra Cloud Sync already meets all their identity synchronization needs. If your organization relies on advanced features or has a large directory, you will not be among the initial targeted groups. Microsoft will prioritize early transitions for customers with straightforward configurations that are fully supported by Entra Cloud Sync's current capabilities.

- Subsequent phases: As Entra Cloud Sync's capabilities expand, Microsoft will progressively notify the later groups and ensure they can transition successfully once equivalent support is available in Entra Cloud Sync

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭'𝐬 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐠:

Once your organization is notified of its assigned transition window, you will receive detailed guidance and resources to help you begin the move to Entra Cloud Sync. During this period:

- You will have to review your current configuration, assess readiness, and familiarize yourself with Cloud Sync's capabilities.
- You will gain access to the transition tool and step-by-step documentation to support a smooth transition.
- You will move and test your synchronization environment in Entra Cloud Sync before any permanent changes are made.

Once your transition to Entra Cloud Sync is successfully completed:

- Entra Cloud Sync will be the primary mechanism for identity synchronization capabilities between Active Directory and Entra ID, replacing the identity sync functionality in Entra Connect tool.

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭'𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐠:

Once you migrate to Cloud Sync, your hybrid authentication features that enable on‑premises credentials to be used for accessing cloud resources will continue to be available after migration on the Connect Sync config wizard.

#Microsoft365 #EntraID

[Byron Wright @ByronWrightGeek]

If you've ever had an editor this rings true.

[Peter Lucier @PeterLucier]

Maya Angelou on the joys of being edited

[Byron Wright @ByronWrightGeek]

Correct.

[PintsO’Guinness @PintsO_Guinness]

In 1994. The widget in the Guinness can won Invention of the year based on a public vote in the UK. The Internet came second.

[Neil Shenvi @NeilShenvi]

As an 11th grade teacher, I've had to give my students guidelines about the ethical use of AI.

Here's an easy rule of thumb:

If it would be cheating to have a human do it for you, it's cheating to use AI to do it for you.

Proof-reading: ok
Brainstorming: ok
1/

[Przemysław Kłys @PrzemyslawKlys]

I've created a service for monitoring uptime of Active Directory along couple of nice features. It monitors dns, ldap, kerberos, ntp/time, adws, replication, fsmo roles, shares, sysvol replication, provides alerts via email with incidents, recoveries, and autogenerating html report every X minutes with findings.

It not only checks if ports are open but actively checks if the data is being processed and returned correctly.

TestimoX.Monitoring service will replace my other PowerShell scripts working on schedule to deliver end-to-end availability.

[Ben Goertzel @bengoertzel]

As an AI expert who totally doesn't think LLMs are the path to AGI, but uses LLMs very avidly to get things done, here is my take on the utility of top LLMs currently:

1) If you don't know what you're doing in a certain domain, you can get interesting and valuable results, but they will be mixed up with garbage and you'll have trouble identifying the garbage.... In some cases automated methods can be used to test/filter results but this remains mostly dodgy in real-world cases.

2) If you DO know what you're doing in some domain, but are NOT willing to creatively adapt your work-style to the LLMs, or are oriented toward proving the LLMs are dumb and flawed rather than making the most of them ... then you won't get much out of them except time-saving on some rote-ish tasks

3) If you DO know what you're doing in some domain and ARE willing to open-mindedly and creatively work with the LLMs to route around their shortcomings and leverage up their strengths, you can amplify your abilities and output DRAMATICALLY.. though still with some tradeoffs: in many respects LLM-assisted products are still not as good as expert-human-crafted products, though they are also often better in various respects (and can often be produced SO much faster)

[shaurya @shauseth]

ive realized that you can replace “ai” with “excel sheets” in any sentence and the impact becomes 100 fold

[Byron Wright @ByronWrightGeek]

Hey @winnipegtransit, there is a service advisory stating route changes for the Santa Clause parade but no end time expected. Will that be in effect for all of today. I'm coming home from Grey Cup stuff tonight and need to know.

[Chay Bowes @BowesChay]

A Warning from History.

A year after WW1 ended, A French Pilot, Jacques Trolley de Prévaux, flew an Airship from the Belgian coast to the devastated battlefields of France where millions died.

Lost for decades this is part of what he saw remastered in color and HD.

[Daniel Bradley @DanielatOCN]

You can now see if a registered authentication method on a user is active or not in Microsoft Entra > https://t.co/oiBaGmbj4P 🔥

Microsoft recently added the lastUsedDateTime property on authentication methods returned by the authentication/methods endpoint in Microsoft Graph. This means admins can now get a clear view of which weak authentication methods are not being used by end users and can be safely deleted!

Check out the article above to create a report like the image below!

#Entra #Microsoft #Security

[SadServers @sadservers_com]

SadServers is (mostly) hosted in AWS but we were not affected by the outage in us-east-1 because we use the brilliant strategy of being in us-east-2 for this exact reason (second time we post something like this)

[memes.xlsx @ExcelHumor]

notice how Excel is never down

[Byron Wright @ByronWrightGeek]

This is true in a variety of industries.

[solst/ICE of Astarte @IceSolst]

“Lifetime warranty” means the lifetime of the vendor’s company, not their product

[Byron Wright @ByronWrightGeek]

For the last year, my laptop wouldn't update to Win 11 24H2. Finally cared enough to troubleshoot today. It was the Sennheiser Audio driver for my headset. Removed that and all good. What's the odds I remember that a year from now for 26H2?