Ask Paul: October 27 (Premium)

Happy Friday! It’s been another long week, so let’s kick off the weekend with another great set of reader questions.
Contingency
simionda asks:

With you running the site on your own now, do you have any kind of system in place should something happen to you?  I've seen a lot of writers who go dark for an extended period of time, giving no updates for months (Scott Hanselman and Eric Lippert are two examples).  Since your site is your livelihood, I doubt you'd just go dark - but what if something happened while you're traveling?

If I go dark, then, yes, something bad happened to me. I live to write (and write to live) in many ways, and not just to write, but to publish. Low output days are frustrating to me, and those days when I can’t publish at all are the worst. I experience many days when I write a lot but it’s for the book, perhaps, or an article that isn’t quite there yet, or whatever, and no one has any idea that this work occurred except for me. No bueno.

So I’m not going to discover the true meaning of life and disappear. This is my true meaning of life. But yes, something could happen at any time, and that’s true whether I’m home or traveling. And I don’t view my travel as any riskier than me walking across the street in Pennsylvania. In that it’s probably safer: Pennsylvania drivers are the worst.

But as far as having a plan, no, not really. Now that my wife is partnering with me on the business side of the site, she would know how to reach out to Laurent and would do so. And she knows my key friends in the industry like Mary Jo, Richard, and Rafael, and would reach out to them as well. So the world would find out.

If the worry is about the site, I’m not sure what to say. :) That would be a secondary concern for me, at least, and I’m sure for my wife. But I will discuss this with her now.
One Copilot to rule them all
helix2301 asks:

I see Windows Copilot showed up on my Windows 11 machine. What is the difference between Copilot for windows, GitHub vs office? Do they all do something I am kind of confused about branding. I would think it would be one AI to rule them all. I don't understand the difference. Cortana on skype did very similar to windows cortana. Is this just branding thing?

Yes and no.

I agree that the sudden explosion in copilots at Microsoft, its inconsistent way of naming them, and its sudden September about-face on some of the copilot branding is confusing. But I will also argue that this is good branding and that Microsoft’s about-face was for the best and a sign of good decision-making: Past regimes might have just run with the original branding, creating longer-term confusion for customers.

So. While these things are not all the same, technically or otherwise, some actually are (which contributes to the confusion). But the more important point is that Microsoft has chosen to refer to its side-by-side AI experiences as copilots, and while some of these a...