> The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
It's not that people are unimpressed with AI - they're just tired of constantly being bombarded with it, and it sneaking its way into where it's not wanted.
"Generate any image you want!" "Analyse this thing with AI!" gets pretty tiring.
If I want AI I'll actively seek it out and use it - otherwise, jog on.
It’s partly that, but it’s also partly that the quality SUCKS. I’m frustrated with AI blogspam because it doesn’t in any way help me figure out whatever I’m researching. It’s such low quality. What I want and need is higher quality primary sources — in depth research, investigation, presented in an engaging way. Or with movies and shows, I want something genuine. With a genuine story that feels real, characters that feel real and motivated.
AI is fake, it feels fake, and it’s obvious. It’s mind blowing to me that executives think people want fake crap. Sure, people are susceptible to it, and get engaged by it, but it’s not exactly what people want or aspire to.
I want something real, something that makes me feel. AI generated content is by definition fake and not genuine. A human is by definition not putting as much thought and effort into their work when they use AI.
Now someone could put a lot of thought and effort into a project and also use gen AI, but that’s not what’s getting spammed across the internet. AI is low-effort, so of course the pure volume of low effort garbage is going to surpass the volume of high effort quality content.
So it’s basically not possible to like what AI is putting out, generally speaking.
As a productivity enhancer in a small role, sure it’s useful, but that’s not what we’re complaining about.
> Soon ChatGPT will start to weave ads into their output because they'll need to make $.
AI enthusiasts need to anticipate that. We're in the VC subsidy phase, but the hammer will drop sooner or later. If you think ads are bad on Google and Facebook now, just imagine a Google that has to spend 100x more on compute to service your requests.
Plus the incentives are totally fucked. It's bad enough with search, it's far worse with AI.
Nobody (referring to companies) wants the best model. Or the one that gives the right answer the first time 100% of the time. They want the model that's just good enough to keep you prompting, but just bad enough that you use a fuck load of tokens and see a million ads.
Unless they start making these things say more expensive, pretty soon developers are going to start seeing ads in the comments of their damn source code. Or worse, suggestions to use paid services to solve all your problems, because companies paid to have the LLM shill it's products.
Yes exactly. In a decade or two people will wistfully look back on 2025 era GenAI similar to how people currently remember when Google Search was great 10+ years ago. The AI enshittification will probably be even more dramatic though, in part because of the immense cost. Despite getting more abusive every year, Google ads are at least still identifiable if you know to look for them. Once AI training weights start getting heavily manipulated for corporate and political reasons things could get pretty ugly.
AI posts/comments are meant to disenfranchise. AI posts/comments are made to flood the market of opinion and drown out the voice of the individual, to speed up dead internet theory and to remove the adversarial nature the old, open internet had with entrenched power/control (especially on narratives).
Sincerely, thanks for making this point. It may explain some subtle oddities I feel (cannot accurately reproduce them) I've observed using copilot in my daily workflow.
I mean, it gives product recommendations when you ask it to, so it's already doing that, I'm sure. It might not be making money by giving specific recommendations; but I bet it's at least getting money off Amazon referral links.
I experimented with some ai generated political spam on YouTube. The reality is a lot of people can’t tell the difference or don’t care. Given the demographic this site selects for, it’s easy to forget how many dumb people there are in the world.
> Given the demographic this site selects for, it’s easy to forget how many dumb people there are in the world.
Let's not go there.
I could see an argument that Hacker News users are a bit more book smart than the average internet user. But this site's user base is just as susceptible to motivated reasoning, myopia, and lack of empathy for those who view the world differently than them.
Those are all their own kind of intelligence. If anything, the book smarts can make those other areas disproportionately worse.
Once someone decides their intelligence guarantees their correctness, they stop questioning themselves. There was conversation here about Israel starving Gaza, and they Israel needed to provide for Gaza like the USA did for Germany, that that was acceptable/gold standard treatment of an occupied populace. When I looked up the numbers, and Israel was actually during starvation providing more calories per person than the USA did Germany, I was instantly downvoted and told people need more calories. Just for providing actual context to comments that were routinely being made.
Edit: I'm post rate limited from replying below. HN routinely chose to whitelist flagged Gaza discussions, but didn't whitelist comments of people who stated the minority opinion and whose comments were completely flagged into invisibility. If you arrived late and didn't get to read the original non-offensive but viewpoint challenging comments, you would assume everything from the 'wrong' viewpoint was so unhinged it had to be flagged, but many were just 'wrongthink' and not 'flag to invisibility' worthy. Or that there was group consensus on the discussion (obviously people just learned to stop posting on those threads if you had wrongthink).
Not sure how moderation can intervene, remove the topic flag and say it's 'a worthwhile discussion for HN' when the same moderation allows views/challenge of the narrative to be flagged to invisibility. It becomes more pontification than discussion at that point.
To someone who used to run a community, it is absolutely insane to me that on HN, users are given the tools to collectively censor people they disagree with, or even those who bring up inconvenient questions or truths.
HN moderators have the ability to take away people's voting privileges. It's either not an effective deterrent, not done at a large enough scale to be effective, or they are knowingly complicit in the manipulation.
Unfortunately, there's whole industries built around fooling people. It seems to me that we select for people who are good at fooling people and they become wealthy and successful. What would be nice is if we could start selecting for knowledgeable, helpful and useful people instead where insane amounts of money might actually bring some benefit to humanity rather than being spent on plunging us into dystopia.
I know people who get confused and consume AI content but when you point out that it's AI they're embarrassed they were fooled and upset. I've never heard the response "I don't care that it's AI." The tech bros will say that it's a "revealed preference" for AI, but it's really just tricking people into engaging.
I caught my mom watching a bunch of AI impersonations of musicians on Youtube singing slop that rarely rhymed or had any kind of message in the lyrics and with super formulaic arrangements. I asked her what she liked about them and it was like "they seem well made" and I showed her how easy Suno is to use and then showed her some of the bad missed rhymes and transcribed the lyrics to where she could see there wasn't any there there to any part of it (and how easy it is to get LLMs to generate better). It seemed to have been an antidote.
This is stuff that used to take effort and was worth consuming just for that, and lots of people don't have their filter adjusted (much as the early advent of consumer-facing email spam) to account for how low effort and plentiful these forms of content are.
I can only hope that people raise their filters to a point where scrutinizing everything becomes common place and a message existing doesn't lend it any assumed legitimacy. Maybe AI will be the poison for propaganda (but I'm not holding my breath).
The issue is that one could reasonably argue that about 95% of pop music is was already formulaic slop. Not just pejoratively, but much of it was even made by the same people. Everybody from Britney Spears to Taylor Swift and more modern acts are all being driven by one guy - 'Max Martin'. [1]
Once you see the songs he's credited with, you instantly start to realize it's painfully formulaic, but most people are happy to just bop their head to his formula of highly repetitive beats paired with simplistic and easy to sing 5-beat choruses.
Adam Conover discussed ad bumpers from the 1990s and 2000s. These were legal requirements for children's programming from the FCC. They're a compliance item, yet they were incredibly well made and creative in in many cases:
Because people at the top of their game will do great creative work even when doing commercial art and in many cases, will do way more than is perhaps commercially necessary.
So much of this AI push reminds me of the scene in 1984 where they had pornography generating machines creating completely uninspired formulaic brainrot stories by machine to occupy the proles.
You can take a thousand people and give them baseline technical skills for any medium. If you're lucky a few people out of your thousand will have a special kind of fluency that makes them stand out. from the rest.
Even more rarely you'll get someone who eats the technical skills alive and adds something original and unique which pushes them outside of the usual recycled tropes and cliches.
Martin is somewhere between those two. He's not a genius, but he's a rock solid pop writer, with a unique ear for hooks and drama, and stand-out arrangement skills.
Some of us are just here to make fun of VC folks that deserve to be endlessly mocked. The crossover with those that are also AI hype types just makes it funnier.
> AI is fake, it feels fake, and it’s obvious. It’s mind blowing to me that executives think people want fake crap.
I'm not sure if they actually think that. I think it's more likely it's some combination of 1) saying what they need to say based on their goals (I need to sell this, therefore I will say it's good and it's something you should want) and 2) a contempt for their audience (I'm a clever guy and I can make those suckers do what I want).
My problem with 2) is: it works. If you look at most movies; both the way they are made and the stories they tell is really subpar these days and this has grown worse in the last decade or so. It's not the fact that CGI is used, it's the really lazy and sloppy way that it's used. Same goes for the stories: there are so few films that have a real story to tell that I have mostly stopped watching movies at all.
I'm totally convinced the industry can sell AI generated media just fine, even with the attitude you described.
EDIT: in similar vein the settings of movies/series are equally minimised, particularly in fantasy. Take for example Game of Thrones, Winterfell. This setting could never have worked in reality and yet people loved it. Brett Deveraux pointed out how silly it was and still.https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-pa...
CGI and Photoshop filters were 'fake' too. Until they weren't.
Every single time {something more convenient} got invented, the supports of the {older, less convenient thing} would criticize it to death.
Oil painting was considered serious art now. Probably the most serious medium in traditional art schools. But at Michelangelo's time he insisted to use fresco because he believed oil was "an art for women and for leisurely and idle people like Fra Sebastiano."[0]
Forward 100 years, oil replaced tempera and fresco.
Another example: Frank Frazetta insisted he didn't use references, except he did all the time[1]. Why? We'll never know the exact reason, but it might be that using photos as references was considered 'lesser.' And now it's completely normal, even the norm.
Looking back through art history, gen-AI art seems awfully inevitable.
>CGI and Photoshop filters were 'fake' too. Until they weren't.
IMHO they still are, watch any old movie with practical effects (Aliens, Star Wars, just to name 2) and compare them to any 2025 production, green screen movies might look spectacular but they look fake, flat and boring.
True pretty much across the board for all generative AI, IMO.
I do understand why people get somewhat enamored with it when they first encounter it because there is a superficial magic to it when you first start using it.
But use it for a while (or view the output of other people's uses) and all the limitations and repetitiveness starts to become pretty obvious, and then after a while that's all you see.
AI has a quality problem because of GIGO, and thats accelerating.
It simple vacuums up everything and in the past decade, everything was more and more shit.
Information entropy crossed with physical entropy. These MBAs will never invest in weeding out the garbage, and the rest of us will never get paid enough to do it ourselves.
I don’t really buy this argument. It assumes companies like OpenAI are incentivized to be unselective about training material. Instead what we see is things like making deals with Reddit for known valuable data. I don’t think any AI operator is training on brand-new unvetted so spam websites by default now.
Oh god. Reddit has a select amount of good data compared to other markets. But if you actually read through a thread, you will find absolutly random things upvoted that stray into the zeitgeist.
If you givw a valid opinion in the wrong subreddit you get muted. The inverse is also truth. You arw using a filter these AIs dont.
Ironically, AI blogspam, because it’s disingenuous and because Google’s PageRank has been fully defeated by spam (and Search ruined further by Google’s ads) in general, has ruined the web for research. It means that you are usually better off now asking a flagship model your research questions. Let it search and provide sources. You can always tell it the sorts of sources you consider reliable.
This. After a generation of social media sneaking its surveillance, manipulation, and noisy ads into our home, work and mobile lives, it is very obvious that having something "smart" shoved into tools where it wasn't asked for isn't some noble attempt at improving lives.
Users are tired of being continually and transparently abused.
All Microsoft would have to do to shock the world and get months of good press is announce they were never going to opt anybody into anything by default any more. At this point that would be considered astonishing.
And suddenly, internal incentives would be to create useful, conflict-free capabilities users actually choose for themselves.
> All Microsoft would have to do to shock the world and get months of good press is announce they were never going to opt anybody into anything by default any more. At this point that would be considered astonishing.
One can dream. I manage M365 where I work, and MS never opting tenants into anything by default again would save me many hours of work on a seemingly weekly basis now.
The fact that they can abuse even their enterprise customers and still retain them is what blows my mind.
I manage M365 too (well part of it because we're a big company). And yes Microsoft really screwed us over when they suddenly offered "free promotional access" of SharePoint Copilot to our users.
We hadn't certified this and weren't planning to offer it any time soon but they just switched it on and included a setting to turn off off again. But by the time we did users had already used it and were complaining.
Working with Microsoft is tedious. They're always trying to sell stuff and undermine you. I consider them more of an adversary than a trusted vendor/partner.
> The fact that they can abuse even their enterprise customers and still retain them is what blows my mind.
The large org dependency on 365 and microsoft is a serious info-security and national security risk. 0 interest in improving because they know they won't ever see competition
Not that Google is any better, but I really want Google to put more effort into Workspace/GSuite and bring it up on par with M365 and all it includes, at least make Microsoft sweat a little bit that one day there might be a possibility for a competing product that can lure enterprises away. Workspace needs better DLP controls, and more of the enterprise-y things that MS wins at, and a bundled MDM that can manage all OSes, and better identity.
Even if the behemoths won't switch due to re-training & switching costs, MS desperately needs a competitor in this space. Barring that, they need to be broken up and forced to sell each bundled product separately and priced appropriately. Otherwise, who can compete with getting MDM, Identity, 2TB personal storage, 2TB sharepoint storage, Teams, DLP, EDR all for $22/user/month.
It doesn't matter if Googles office suite was better, everybody still would go Microsoft. There really isn't anything all that special about Microsoft Office to begin with.
It's less the office suite that matters (outside of Excel & PowerQuery/DAX stuff). It's everything else in M365 that Google has no answer for, or a subpar answer for.
This is where a lot of people are. In my case, every time I open a PDF in Google Drive, it forces an AI summary of the doc with no way for me to switch it off. I try to close it mid-generation, but I suspect not fast enough to keep it from getting counted in the usage stats, which is probably what some product manager is trying to maximize and demonstrate ("X number of PDF summarizations this quarter").
> It's not that people are unimpressed with AI - they're just tired of constantly being bombarded with it, and it sneaking its way into where it's not wanted.
Does anyone here know what this arguing tactic is called? It's used by tech leadership all over the world, all the time. Weaponized obtuseness, maybe?
The core of it is that you always have to pretend that everyone is basically on board with what you're doing, just don't blink and pretend that real criticism of your product is simply nonexistent, like a ghost. It's about rolling out a change to existing workflows that no one asked for, getting drowned in a sea of "No, we don't want this, do not change this because of these reasons", and then hosting a Q&A session where you pretend that everyone actually is already in love with the idea, everyone wants it, it's just that a few pesky detractors have minor, easily-addressable concerns like "we don't think it's impressive enough yet (but we're totally on board)" or "what about <pick one of the easiest-to-address technical issues here>?". They must do this consciously, right?
Maybe a subtle form of gaslighting with features of victim blaming and argument from authority? Microsoft treats its users and customers with utter contempt.
I hope Valve takes this opportunity to turn its toehold with Steam OS into a full-blown invasion of the desktop/laptop market and destroy Microsoft's monopoly while the latter is so focused on creating everything an actual user doesn't want:
It is very encouraging that Xbox is dying right at the moment that windows is trying to kill itself and Valve is moving in for the kill. For the first time in my entire life i know normies talking about running Linux on their desktops
Install Linux, (I prefer Kubuntu but you do you) and then install LM Studio and an abliterated AI from mradermacher.
The specific issue I had was that my Linux system installed the wrong driver for my motherboard's Ethernet and downloads were slow. Steam wouldn't even download.
I gave the local AI the specific issues and hardware that I had, it identified the specific cause, (Linux installing r8169 instead of the r8126 driver), and gave me the specific console commands needed to modprobe in the new driver.
I could have figured that much out myself, sure, but modprobe failed. It then told me to go to Realteks site, manually download the correct driver, and then how to install it and test that it was working.
10 minutes later I'm good to go, whereas if I had been doing it myself it would have taken me over an hour, and I'm not a total Linux noob.
When you encounter a problem, ask your local AI how to fix it. Give your PC the responses the terminal gives you in response, and minutes later you're ready to go.
Want AI? Check.
Want Games? Check.
Want to browse the internet? Check.
Want to learn Linux by doing? Check.
Want to do it all and have the least amount of headache transitioning to Linux? Check.
It's a win all the way around, and the best part is that your data isn't going to some greedy corpo to build ads targeted to you.
You get all the pluses and none of the minuses other than a few extra minutes of learning when you encounter an error.
Over the years I have grown increasingly distrustful of Microsoft. The fact that so much software runs undetected in kernel mode. I have resigned myself to feel running a Windows machine is akin to putting a sign on myself with the words “hack me”.
Now I know better. I finally realized the truth. Windows and copilot is the greatest software in history. It is if your goal is to enable spyware and mass surveillance of its users.
> It is if your goal is to enable spyware and mass surveillance of its users.
Which it is if you are a CIO of a big F500 enterprise. Microsoft provides so many ways to spy on and collect useless metrics from employees using their company issued Windows machines, it's a little insane.
With M365 Copilot (on business tenants), admins can see the prompts & responses of users. Just an FYI for anyone here that might use it at their work. Your employer can see everything you prompt.
Exactly. Even if we grant what he says (I don't fully agree)—that doesn't warrant putting that kind of "conversational engine" in Windows as a first-class citizen.
I don't want to have a conversation with my computer about my Word docs. I just want to write my Word docs.
I don't want to have a conversation with my computer about the quarterly report. I certainly don't want it making up values for the quarterly report. I just want to write the quarterly report.
Having a conversation with a computer is cool. It's a fun party trick. If there were a way to reliably get it to know about all of my things, without the concern that it would then take all that data and feed it to its mothership, I might want to be able to converse with it about those things, under certain circumstances.
But, yes: if I want AI I'll actively seek it out and use it. Stop acting like me being upset that it's getting shoved in everywhere is the same as me saying "this is a meaningless achievement."
It's also not very good at any of those things, if you ask it to generate something far enough outside of the mainstream, or something particular, or something consistent, or-
But, yeah, the insistence that we deprecate every other even remotely-connected resource (including other people) in order to supplicate ourselves to corporate desires is aggravating. You got a lot of the same pushback with VR. VR is really, really cool. Having your reality mediated by large corporations with a history of user-hostile behavior is not. Them not taking no for an answer feels violating.
This is the fundamental misunderstanding that the AI techies have. Normal people don’t want a “conversation“ with a computer. Conversations happen between people. Computers, at best, receive orders and carry them out. They are tools, not companions, and they should do nothing unless explicitly told to do it.
And that is a big problem. Other than making me excessingly mad, it is genuinely a problem that people who should work on overcoming social issues instead get their fix from fictional interaction
I wouldnt mind if the conversations actually were smart, not sycophantic, or were otherwise useful. I find more often than not it creates more work for me than it saves me, and even if i were to break even on time invested i lose massively on comprehension/understanding.
I'd rather see this technology being used as a method of input and control of the machine, just like keyboard, mouse and monitor is. Without humanized bits of conversation or suggestions, exaggerated remarks like "Got it!" - you would ask OS to preform a task and it would do what was told. And if I'd want to have a specific question or task I'd use some dedicated application that would stay dormant up until used.
Basically sums up why i don't use any kind of voice assistant still. Until the computer can DO exactly and precisely what i asked -- not what it's faulty recognition model thinks i asked -- there's zero point to trying to talk to it
I have one device in my house on Alexa called "under cabinet lights", I asked Alexa to "turn on the cabinet lights" she said "several things share the name cabinet lights, which one do you mean?" (As if there's enough information there to answer the question) I told her "all of them" thinking maybe the lights got duplicated or something.
She turned on every smart home light in the house.
Sex is great, but if you constabtly try to force it on me, sneak it into deals we make, or while i sleep etc. it will leave me quite hostile towards the topic, and that's where we are at. Consent is important in all things, no less here.
That and, a circus dog playing the piano may certainly qualify as mind-blowing in the context of circus, but if you make it your project to generally replace pianists with dogs concert-goers will rightly tell you to go lick nettles.
On top of that: it seems like Microsoft (and Google too) is doing its best at alienating customers with those measures.
Everything is now either accessing your data directly and you have to opt-out or you can't even opt out at all.
This AI rush/push is also permeating every line and product: from the office suite, to github, to vscode, and even open source tools are getting AI shoved in, like Playwright, and it feels everything else is an afterthought.
It seems Nadya is making a Ballmer-level play. Ballmer had the right intuition: that Microsoft had to move its focus from the desktop to the cloud. But the execution was poor. Now history's repeating.
It’s a perception problem AMPLIFIED by a trust problem. People don’t trust Microsoft. Or at least they trust Google more than they trust Microsoft.
For a small period of time, I was actually using Edge + Copilot everyday (and it was decent) but their competition has improved so much and appears WAY more privacy focused. I know that Sam Altman is trying hard to stay within the bounds of people’s trust, which once broken is hard to replace (he even said so in an interview).
For now he doesn't seem like a bad actor in the AI industry.
However, the moment it becomes more sustainably profitable to grow a mustache and start wearing monocles he likely will, and if he doesn't he'll be ousted and replaced by someone far worse.
The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluid gameplay experience of the latest entry in the Diablo franchise in the palm of our hands was mindblowing to someone as well. "Don't you people have phones?"
Well, Blizzard is Microsoft now so I guess they belong together.
Ironically though, Diablo Immortal was a huge commercial success despite the tone deaf announcement. I don't think MS will experience the same though. They're quickly going to be left with the only people using windows are those who are forced by their employer, no one will willingly choose it over other options.
I think what people misunderstand is that this is probably an active goal of theirs.
Similar to how Microsoft has decided there's no money to be made in console hardware and is trying to spin their Xbox brand into a software service brand they can slap on other things, I think they've decided that making a consumer OS has no money in it, and all the minmaxing of squeezing at the moment is them trying to extract the last drips of money while trying to drive people elsewhere.
I could be wrong, I'm not a journalist with sources at the company or something, but looking at it from the outside, this seems like the moves you'd make to drive people off your platform over time so you can kill it while having plausible deniability that you're not trying to do that, you definitely genuinely believe everyone wants you to opt them into everything every time you push an update.
In particular, I don't think having the kinds of enormous tire fires on update releases over this long without radical reinvestment in avoiding that happening in the future is what you do if you're trying to build something you're still dealing with another 10-20 years from now.
It seems like they had the right idea with Windows 10 (our consumer OS is now just a loss-leader we put out for free as a way to market Office/OneDrive/Visual Studio etc) but they've completely about-faced with 11. Which yeah, could be a sign they're wanting to kill the consumer segment i guess.
11, I think, is what happened when they wanted to push breaking changes that customers who pay for LTSC wanted to avoid for the entire lifetime of 10.
My assumption is that 10 was as you describe, and then 11 was motivated by wanting to make disruptive changes to squeeze the last juice from the consumer segment, and the "agentic OS" pivot is just the most recent gorilla in the room to squeeze the ever-drier sponge.
In particular, I would assume Microsoft sees writing on the wall with how so many people in younger demographics are using phones as primary devices and see full sized laptops and desktops as effectively legacy platforms they use at jobs, and is frantically trying to get out of that market before the bottom falls out.
> and is frantically trying to get out of that market before the bottom falls out.
I think you're right. They've been really pushing Windows 365 for businesses lately, and now have direct boot into W365. The new agentic stuff spins up temporary W365 instances to do it's thing.
They even recently made data model and report creation available in PowerBI web, something I never thought I'd see happen has PowerBI desktop was one of a few things still locking people in that ecosystem to Windows. They've publicly said they're committed to the web version now and web will get all the new features.
Microsoft is really pushing hard on "Windows as a service." The future of Windows isn't a locally installed OS. Windows is going to become just another app on every other platform. It's no coincidence that they renamed the remote desktop app to the "Windows app." Macs, chromebooks, phones, tablets, doesn't matter. No matter what you have, you will still be able to access Windows.
They do need to drive as many consumers off of it first though before pulling the rug and going subscription unless they want even more bad press.
What a gaslighting king this CEO is, the concern isn't how functional the AI is, the concern is AI just downloading any and all PERSONAL AND PRIVATE files on a whim, with no guard rails. What if I have photographs of my kids I've never uploaded anywhere EVER because I don't want them anywhere outside of MY DEVICE, does Microsoft just magically get to suck in those files and own them? Wild.
Its this shenanigans that forced me to nuke my Windows install and go Arch. I noticed that Windows Defender will upload "suspicious" files and there's no audit trail of what's being uploaded. So I have no way of knowing what personal documents or even proprietary software has gone up to their cloud.
Such hubris, seeing everything from HIS perspective, without taking into account the users. It is no wonder Microsoft keeps shipping crap - you can convince and push down B2B products to enterprise's throats, when their user's salaries are dependent on bosses who just care about image, with open budgets to fund whatever is sold to them to increase the bottom line. This is less effective on consumers.
I have never in my entire life wanted to "generate an image or video". I like taking photographs and recording videos because they represent the reality of my life. Who would ever want to "generate" fake images as a matter of normal daily activities?
That is indeed a really weird statement from them.
I mostly engage with text based social media or highly technical content so I know that I'm not exactly in the center of the bell curve.
I can see a use case for "AI let's go finding me holiday destination and help me plan my travel and stay". I can also see people wanting to "improve" images and videos etc to remove "blemishes".
But straight up generating random images and videos as content center pieces? That seems like a niche at best unless it's unwittingly done through the "algorithm".
It’s really becoming desperate and counterproductive.
I’ve had an Alfred command since 2013 where I type `wiki something` which then opens Confluence and searches for `something`. I use this to quickly search our company wiki for terms without breaking my concentration and flow.
Atlassian decided to add an AI summary at the top and intentionally disable the rest of the results until the AI summary has finished rendering fully. It’s insane. How is this making me more productive? It’s just shearing off one other layer of familiarity and value I’ve enjoyed for 12 years and pushing me away from their product.
Forced adoption rarely works out unless people really want the feature and don’t know that they want it. At the very least, let us disable it.
Oh no, I am definitely unimpressed. That AI you can have a sorta-kinda fluent conversation with is often a complete moron and a habitual liar, and the images it generates are awful - did he not see how horrible that Coke ad looked?
It'll probably end up useful in a bunch of applications soon-ish and I'll probably want to use it eventually, but in the meantime their AI is flooding the internet with absolute garbage, and they are literally shoving AI in my face at every opportunity they get.
It is painfully clear that people just aren't that interested, and they are getting increasingly desperate about finding ways to recoup their massive investments. But people aren't going to magically become enthusiastic about eating rotten garbage if you just keep stuffing it in their mouth!
If anything, their current approach is only going to make people hate AI even more. But they are in too deep, and admitting defeat and scaling it down until they have an actually good product that people genuinely want means seeing their stock price crater because they will have "lost" the "AI race". Their only option to avoid an immediate collapse is to keep lying through their teeth and keep trying to pretend that it is absolutely amazing and that you just must use it.
Or maybe the CEOs are completely delusional and genuinely believe what they are selling - I'm not sure which one is worse.
> If anything, their current approach is only going to make people hate AI even more
Personally I'm long past hating AI
I am pretty much at the point of viewing AI research and development as a crime against humanity
I hope I will turn out to be wrong, but as things are going right now all I can see is this path leads to misery for the vast majority of living humans.
Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if in a year or two we start seeing bans on AI because of the tactics of these corporations. And I mean full-on blunt instrument legal bans on any use or creation of the things. Nobody will care about the nuances of AI, and that the AIs nobody talk about is actually doing some neat things. The very things these corporations are doing with AI is, I suspect, ultimately going to doom it. Obviously that wouldn't be good, but if you abuse people enough, they eventually snap and go for the nuclear option.
Way too many people out there like my boss completely hooked on letting LLMs write all their emails (and letting all us scratch our heads trying to figure out what they mean)
That's so gross. Like that tells me everything about your boss. Lol. But that's what I mean. Hell, it wouldn't surprise me if we start seeing calls for the LLMs of today to be banned. AI (and I mean the other types of AI) has done some great things in the sciences/medicine and whatnot. But people will still want them banned because these companies have made LLM == AI. And it won't matter that there are other kinds of AI.
Instead of "pushing back" I wish he'd actually listen to and address his critics' points.
He is deliberately and disingenuously missing the point. It's not that the features aren't good (maybe they are, maybe they aren't). It's about how coercive Microsoft and Windows are with its users, and this exec is failing to address that one.
Just once, I'd like to hear a question get through to these assholes asking them why they are forcing so many unwanted things onto their users. From Microsoft accounts to forced windows updates to Recall... Gone are the days when users had any control over what their computers are running.
But these kinds of questions never seem to get through to them.
They only understand one thing: shareholder value. This dude's panicking because he knows how bad the next quarterly report looks when this strategy resulted in a hemorrhaging userbase. This is an expression of a stage of grief.
They can essentially force users to receive and pay for any of their AI features. It worked so far and there is no reason to believe it will stop working anytime soon.
People are just taking it and this guy knows it. The fact that I and a few others don't, doesn't even register in Microsofts bottom line.
The lesson learned is that you don't really have to care about your users right now. I'm certain there is a breaking point for that as well but until there are any indications that it is reached we probably must be glad that they are not outright insulting their users and/or charging them an additional 5 dollars a month for "disrespecting Microsoft".
We are finding out more and more, over the last decade, that there seems to be no limit to the amount of abuse and coercion that users will accept, and continue to use the products. I see posts here like "Uber ripped me off for $50, but I don't want to do a chargeback because they'll ban me!" We are at the point where companies can literally steal actual money from customers, and customers will still insist on continuing to use the software.
A handful of complainers on HN is not going to even dent this.
My bigger fear is that companies will fully embrace this--there is so much more hostility they can inflict on their users, that they haven't been doing. What is staying their hand? Car companies now know they can charge a subscription fee for every little feature of the car, and customers will still put up with it, so why haven't they already?? Apple knows they can lock down the Mac just like iOS and customers will still give them money, so why haven't they? Streaming sites know they can absolutely saturate everyone with ads, and people will not leave, so why haven't they?
That one always felt like the bubble jumping the shark to me. Like, what does “phd level intelligence” mean? I nearly did a phd. If I had, would I have levelled up by 10 intelligence points? Such obvious nonsense.
Exactly. It's not that everyone is saying "AI is completely worthless, get rid of it." It has it's use cases, I certainly benefit from LLMs in my job every day.
That doesn't mean I want it plastered everywhere, in every app or website. That doesn't mean I want to interact with or use my computer via AI, and I especially don't want to talk to my computer to do things. Mouse & keyboard is faster.
But for now at least you can just choose not to use it. The problem is, Microsoft is putting 100% of their efforts into this while long-standing Windows bugs and regressions still exist. They're aware they exist too, and are deliberately choosing not to improve their product.
Agree - argue with customers at your own peril ... moreover sophisticated devs and companies want freedom from corporate control and the underlying attitude of entitlement ... a kind of campish behavior where customers buy-in to the corporate hustle which corps think customers are obligated to play along with.
Nah ah ...
I'll say the same thing another way: customers tell suppliers whether or not they're satisfied. They don't tell me. I tell them if I think the price is worth it. They don't tell me. Argue with me and they'll lose
"we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AIwe can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI"
But we can't. I can have something styled as a conversation with a token predictor that emits text that, if interpreted as a conversation, will gaslight you constantly, while at best sometimes being accidentally correct (but still requiring double-checking with an actual source).
Yes, I am uninterested in having the gaslighting machine installed into every single UI I see in my life.
LLMs are severely overhyped, have many problems, and I don't want them in my face anymore than the average person. But we're not in 2023 anymore. These kinds of comments just come off ignorant.
I dunno, I'm not fully anti-LLM, but almost every interaction I have with an LLM-augmented system still at some point involves it confidently asserting plainly false things, and I don't think the parent is that far off base.
Agreed, some days I code for 4-6 hours with agentic tools but 2025 or not I still can't stomach using any of the big three LLMs for all but the most superficial research questions (and I currently pay/get access to all three paid chatbots).
Even if they were right 9/10 (which is far from certain depending on the topic) and save me a minute or two compared to Google + skim/read-ing a couple websites, it's completely overshadowed by the 1/10 time they calmly and confidently lie about whether tool X supports feature Y and send me on a wild goose chase looking through docs for something that simply does not exist.
In my personal experience the most consistently unreliable questions are those that would be most directly useful for my work, and for my interests/hobbies I'd rather read a quality source myself. Because, well, I enjoy reading! So the value proposition for "LLM as Google/forum/Wikipedia replacement" is very, very weak for me.
There are two types of LLM defender; those who claim that it’ll be non-shit soon, just keep believing, and those who claim that it is already non-shit and the complainer is just stuck in year-1 where year is the current year.
Given that this has now been going on for a few years, both are wearing thin.
Like, I’m sorry, but the current crop of bullshit generators are not good. They’re just not. I’m not even convinced they’re improving at this point; if anything the output has become more stylistically offputting, and they’re still just as open to spouting complete nonsense.
I'm less weary of people not giving a shit about it than people making llms/generative ai their whole personality
Grown adults spamming the web about this new model from Megacorp X, being all giggly about the new PeLiCaN On A BiCyClE being 0.000017% more realistic than the previous version... get a life
No one gives a shit outside of these nerds, all people want is less work and more free time, they don't give a shit about your generated "art", or how fast this new model solved a problem they didn't know existed 12 seconds ago
Also on this side, on consulting agencies now it seems everyone is getting evaluation KPIs regarding AI use on project work, even when it doesn't make sense for the delivery scenario.
I think this is a super important point. Working on ai I’m really wondering where this will actually end in the case of our media consumption, AI is being used to generate more engaging content, this will imply ai will be almost a requirement to stay visible, so more ai will be used. In the end little to no “real content” will make it through.
Will there be a moment where people will leave social networks to get “real content” again?
Will that be safe from AI optimization then?
Are we seeing the start of the demise of social media?
A fluent conversation was a great party trick but the novelty has worn thin. It had some value but overall having to have a conversation with a tool to get something done is frustrating. Like tasking a junior employee on their first day with advanced tasks and wondering why they keep missing the mark. I want a tool not an opinionated support unit, and often will stop that conversational experience by prompting it away. Having to do that is annoying.
I personally also don't have much use for generating images and videos, at least not regularly. I feel like they want us to use AI tools full time, when really we just need to jump in and use them when required, which might be quite infrequently (obviously dependent on circumstance). But who is going to pay the huge cost of having the tools available when you do want them?
So yeah, agreed. Stop making it hard for me to use my tool without accidentally engaging the LLM integration or just flat out forcing it's usage. I don't want that future price hike that comes with LLMs
> It's not that people are unimpressed with AI - they're just tired of constantly being bombarded with it, and it sneaking its way into where it's not wanted. "Generate any image you want!" "Analyse this thing with AI!" gets pretty tiring.
Isn't it just the second person? If there were just a Generate button/tab without explicitly addressing me and asking/begging I wouldn't mind it.
Isn’t it just that people are unimpressed with Microsoft Copilot? I’ve always felt that other models work quite well. If the implementation on their side has issues, they shouldn’t blame users for disliking it.
All they have to do is sell regular "windows" and "windowsAI" as a separate product and everyone would be fine with it... but no FUCK YOU ads in your fucking start menu you stupid bitch customer.
(sorry for big words, but this is how i feel they are talking to me when the base operating system I am suppose to put absolute trust in my privacy in treats me like an idiot)
I am unimpressed with it. If I wanted to steal code off stack overflow I can do that myself. Another layer of indirection has negative value.
I can generate images that are difficult to use commercially. I can analyze something with AI but I can't confidently use that output in any setting that matters.
For people who are attempting to engage in profitable work then AI is miserably unimpressive. I don't know what planet this guy is living on. Time is money. Flowery emails and off axis summaries can only create a waste of that time.
Usually complaints about changes to Microsoft software come from people who are using the software
It's possible that Linux or MacOS users might complain about new "AI features" in MS Windows, but more likely it is MS Windows users who are complaining
If it's possible for a computer user to switch between OS, then there is less reason to complain. Those users can make the statement, "If I want to use MS Windows, I will actively seek it out and use it, otherwise [I will not]"
For example,
"I do not like this Microsoft "AI feature" so I'll use MacOS instead" (possible for user to switch OS)
versus
"I do not like this Microsoft "AI feature" so I'll complain to Microsoft via online comment forums" (stuck using WIndows OS, no choice)
If you cannot make the statement "If I want MS Windows, then I'll use it, otherwise I will use something else" then Redmond, not you, makes the decisions on what you will use, including "AI features" you may not like
Because if you use Windows, chances are you have "auutomatic updates" enabled
This allows Redmond to install new software on your computer whenever they like, e.g., "updates"
I use AI everyday and it’s now integral to my workflow. However, even I still hate the hype train and having it constantly stuffed down my throat. Nevermind AI slop.
Windows 11 is already adware. No wonder people are complaining about more ads.
This Microsoft response reminds me of the 2018 Blizzcon event, where the Diablo Immortal developer challenged the audience with "Do you guys not have phones?" when the audience asked if the game was coming to PC.
Then - like now - it seemed that they couldn't understand that what they made was not what their customers wanted.
Don't forget the audience member who literally asked if it was a joke - and got cheers and applause from the rest of the audience. It was probably one of the biggest PR disasters in gaming history - and it does seem like the AI CEOs have been taking quite a bit of inspiration from it.
I think the intent is to provide a sense of pride and accomplishment when rivaling the same monetary dedication on the mobile platform comparable to the PC counterpart. You think you want bread, but you don’t: we are making subscription-based cake available which is better in every way.
My local state representatives just attempted this at our latest "town hall meeting" [i.e. to participate: scan the 8.5"x11" QR code, taped upon each chair].
I do not carry a phone, let alone one that scans QR codes... so instead I just provided 300 pound union dude commentary throughout our entire meeting. I definitely participated.
My thought exactly. From hindsight, Diablo immortal is not a bad game, but that moment was really…not great. I guess the guy knew that phone games were getting momentum but unfortunately that specific group of users in Blizzcon didn’t want a phone game.
I think if they'd teased a phone game it would have been well received. From memory, the problem was they teased something much larger/exiting (new diablo, not a chinese arpg reskin) so when the reveal hit everyone was massively let down.
I guess this is kind of similar though. what is promised isnt and likely wont be delivered.
I actually think that 2018 was about the time when phone games had very much lost momentum and now are much less exciting than they were circa 2013. By 2018, both the potential and the limitations of phone games were very much understood by the audience. I'd argue that the top of the hype cycle of "maybe phone games will actually become really good" was 2010's Infinity Blade. Clash of Clans came out in 2012, and by 2018 phone games were fully devoid of momentum.
It also had the absolute worse monetization scheme in history with the general sentiment being they abused every dark pattern and made the experience horrible.
And yet Diablo Immortal made about a billion dollars, orders of magnitude more than the other Diablo games combined. Sound like they knew exactly what their customers wanted.
The nuance there, I think, is that over half the players are reportedly new to the Diablo games, which suggests that their primary intended market was likely not existing Diablo players.
The core kernel of it always seemed, to me, to be an extension of the Diablo 3 RMT auction house idea - they wanted a recurring revenue source from a franchise where traditionally they were not charging one, and in this case, they squared that circle by appealing to users who were not existing players, and so did not have those norms in mind.
Yes, however that remains the same for Windows, in that they know (or at least, they surmise) that they can make more money with AI features than without, a hypothesis that remains yet to be tested, but it doesn't mean they don't know what they're doing.
I do still strongly suspect Microsoft's endgame is to get people off Windows in the consumer space, and that most of what's going on right now with 11 is froth as they add features they think will make them money in the near term even as it drives people off or be useful in the non-consumer space, not because they sincerely think this is something people will find a net gain in the consumer space.
So yes, I agree it's likely not primarily ignorance driving this.
I would assume because it's hideously expensive to maintain a full OS and support and compatibility guarantees with all the random horseshit consumer platforms throw at them, and they did the math and concluded they liked the profit margins for purely online and non-consumer targeted things, where they can more effectively constrain what is and isn't supported, better.
In particular, my guess is that they looked at their estimates for how much they could make off recurring revenue sources in desktop OSes, and their estimates for how the desktop market is changing with more younger users not using them or viewing them as legacy platforms, and decided they should pivot to primarily being a services provider, in much the same way they're aggressively trying to slap the Xbox branding on other things and getting out of the console market as fast as they can run.
Could be wrong, I don't work there, but usually my experience with companies that large making apparent missteps is that their goal isn't the one you think it is, and attempting to extract as much data as they can from desktop users really sounds like what you do when you're trying to squeeze the sponge before you throw it out.
It's true that the cloud is a big revenue driver for them, but I highly doubt they'd get rid of one of their flagship products, much less one used by billions of people as well as other corporations and governments.
I don't think they want to kill it entirely in the next 5 years, at least, but I do think they just want to stop supporting the non-enterprise users because that lets them significantly constrain what hardware and features they have to maintain, and all their big software offerings are very content being sold as cloud-based recurring revenue sources.
I would assume after 11 LTSC finally EOLs might be the earliest they'd be considering anything more drastic, but I wouldn't speculate whether it'd look like a good idea by then.
It may sound wild, and certainly possible time will prove me wrong, I'm not an oracle, but the ongoing failures in basic functions in Windows seems like they're removing significant investment in it as a reliable platform for general use going forward, and their recent introduction of things like the Xbox handheld running Windows makes me suspect their goal is to constrain where it's still used, and trim how much it costs to maintain that way.
Google made billions by scamming the world with "free email" and a search engine that would "never display ads" or "censor content".
It was "exactly what customers wanted". Microsoft Windows is just as successful....financially speaking.
Now, if I could just get teenagers to pay more money for a magic digital rune, besides extracting all that juicy marketing data from their phone app... Because more money = better corporation.
But it's unwise to make money at any cost. It can cost your corporation much more in the long term. I see MS Windows on the brink of irreparable reputation damage. I believe Elon Musk is starting to work on MacroHard, and people might flood into that system just out of spite for Microsoft.
At the time I got the feeling that the presenter got the genuine impression that players would at least not be completely disappointed by the announcement.
Here it's hard to understand Microsoft's surprise when almost everything Windows has done for the last ten years was despised by mostly everyone. I was thinking that decision makers knew they were making unpopular moves but did not care since there's no way Windows can lose market share. I assume he must be faking surprise, but I am not sure for what purpose since staying silent and going forward would have had less press. Well I guess bad publicity is still publicity.
That’s a great quote —- when you hire a “creative” to do a job (ie photographer, designer, etc) in area where you aren’t an expert, the conversation of what you want usually starts with similar existing work that you like.
A good creative will take that as a starting point, apply their skills and vision to it, and give you something that solves your specific problem in a unique way, often far better than whatever you had imagined.
In my experience, if you do a similar expertise with AI, it just gives you a facsimile of the inspiration you initially provided and not much more.
> it just gives you a facsimile of the inspiration you initially provided and not much more.
This is not at all my experience but I'm also biased currently making a fair enough living off providing software that does just that, using AI.
In favt I'd say that's the key to enjoyable AI experiences, without strong opinions from the person leveraging, the output is rather bland and corporate.
Tech enthusiast will judge ai based on what it gets right, we’re interested in what “can” do. Everyone else will judge ai based on where it fails, they are interested in what “problems” it “does” solve.
> a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
They see:
A computer software generally unreliable and unable to accomplish basic tasks
I'd dispute this, as I count myself as a tech enthusiast but I'm an enthusiast for tech which works well. I increasingly find myself having to put up with stuff that doesn't work well, and this AI investment instead of fixing the stuff that Windows is routinely doing to make my working day harder is infuriating.
Also, in my experience, it's the non-tech-enthusiasts who are diving into LLMs because they don't understand what is actually going on and it basically looks like a repeat of the whole thing about ELIZA a few decades ago. Just this time it's vastly more expensive and has to run on a datacentre and can write you an essay instead of just rephrasing your question.
> A computer software generally unreliable and unable to accomplish basic tasks
Yeah specifically to your quote: it's very easy to create some images and video. It's very hard to create exactly what you need if you have specific needs.
It's almost as if content creation is hard! Well that's because it is. You need to know the client, understand their needs, make the content in line with their other visual language etc.
What AI makes easier if for things to look professional. But a real professional doesn't just make it look good but also makes it what you need.
Where AI comes in is as a helper, and for those situations where "good enough" suffices. And there are many of those situations. Many of which would not have had the budget for a real pro to do it anyway.
Obviously that's one of the many usecases an LLM really sucks at. So no, I don't want it there.
But the thing where someone dumps a long email thread on me, for it to summarise, yeah.. Or to do some basic web searches for me (these days it's a lot of work weeding through all the horrible clickbait).
But what we were talking about here was content creation. What I could imagine it could help content creators with is stuff like "remove the background from this photo", stuff like that. No more busywork like tracing photos.
And yes I do think LLMs are overused and dumped in many scenarios where they add no value or even detract. But there are usecases where they can add value too. Just not as many as the hype suggests.
> Tech enthusiast will judge ai based on what it gets right, we’re interested in what “can” do.
Selecting only the cases where something gets something right is nothing to do with what it can do. A random number generator can drive a car if you select only the cases where it does so correctly (and given infinite iterations there will be such cases) but that doesn’t mean it can drive a car in any real sense.
I assume “tech enthusiasts” here means “AI koolaid drinkers”.
Those “AI koolaid drinkers” are a very vocal faction, not only on HN. Too many software companies are cramming “AI” wherever they can, users be damned.
But why integrate AI so deeply into Windows instead of
1. keeping Windows as small and lean as possible, and let it do the things an operating system is for,
2. offering some AI applications that can be installed optionally by the users who want them, i.e. turn their AI applications into external software that can be installed/used or not, like Microsoft Office.
They do neither of those things because, unlike you, they don't care about improving the user experience. They care about making money through any possible means.
1. Making the system lean means that you'd have to exclude all the ads, all the free tracking you can do to extract more money, all tie-ins with additional Microsoft services you could've done. Getting paid for the product key is just one step of many in the process of wringing their stack for every last droplet of money they can provide. If anything, it's beneficial to Microsoft to make Windows into a singular giant blob that amalgamates every Microsoft offering into one and pushes them as hard as possible. What are those mainstream customers going to do, not use Windows? Though of course, when using a lean system is a requirement for some business customers, MS will also offer a separate minimal version that can only be obtained through business licenses, just to avoid missing out on those few percent of the market.
2. Why make AI features opt-in? That would require your AI offerings to be alluring enough to motivate users to install the AI features on their own, and how many people will realistically want to install Copilot into Notepad or any other psychotic integrations MS came up with? No, you NEED for your investment to have returns, you need AI to succeed, so what you do is put it in the next update, and then progressively keep punching it down customers' throats enough (via pop-ups, colorful buttons, hardware Copilot keys, ads, integrating it into every piece of software - soon enough they'll probably start substituting regular features with AI ones) until it starts looking like the investment is paying off after all and the investors are happy.
Windows is not a general purpose operating system. It's a platform for monetizing businesses via licensing and cloud services, and a platform for monetizing private users by way of advertising and data mining.
If they were ever to produce a Windows PowerUser edition, with absolutely no bloat, it would have to be priced like a CAD suite.
My problem with Microsoft is that they won't sell an un-enshittified version of Windows for any price (LTSC notwithstanding; it's not licensable for general use.) Owning our computing experience is that important to them.
> 1. keeping Windows as small and lean as possible, and let it do the things an operating system is for,
The least cynical answer is that for several decades, Microsoft had a monopoly on operating systems, but they no longer do. Many people lead online lives on their phones instead of desktop computers. People in creative professions use Macs. Servers run Linux. Gamers buy consoles. Schools use Chromebooks.
So they feel it's a dead-end to provide an OS that just works and doesn't get in the way. They need an edge, and they think the answer is an OS you talk to, that helps you with homework, that you build a relationship with. They want "Samantha" from Her, I guess.
I don't think this is going to work with the tech we have today, but almost everyone in the AI space is fudging it the same way - "ship it today, make it good tomorrow".
Because these goals are inherently at odds with for-profit software development. If you're a business who produces software, you must not only 1) charge money, but also 2) plan to charge more money.
Windows usage is broad enough that the "new users" revenue stream is pretty dry, but it's also hard to say "we increased the price to $X while making windows smaller".. so they will endlessly pump in new "features" and bloat.
I recommend using an operating system that isn't driven by a thirst for revenue.
AI failed at Microsoft because they already lost the consumer trust. I doubt they would have this issue with AI integration if people didn’t feel that installing windows is a hostile corporate takeover of your computer.
Let's be fair. Microsoft has not succeeded at mainstream consumer AI products... yet.
To say AI failed at Micrsoft when CoPilot (the real one, for developers) was, last I heard, the most subscribed generative AI tool for software developers is not a failure. It's wild that most developers in a corporate environment pay Microsoft to use Chat GPT, Gemini, and Claude. Their other gen-AI components in Office, like Powerpoint and Word, are pretty darn good. But again, unless you're a corporate user in a work setting, you probably don't care.
This push to lease you your own computer is what hasn't worked very well so far. I dearly hope it pushes more people to Linux (though more likely they'll flee to Mac, which is a more palatable version of the clumsy crap MS is trying to do).
So consumer AI... perhaps that has failed. But the money isn't in you and me paying for a Windows license. The money's in big corporations paying for ten thousand seats at a time for their suites.
> It's wild that most developers in a corporate environment pay Microsoft to use Chat GPT, Gemini, and Claude
It definitely didn't help back when my manager asked me to recommend a subscription to buy everyone on our team that Anthropic didn't offer any plan with a predictable monthly cost for Claude Code with SSO/externally managed billing (I think that changed fairly recently).
Github Copilot for Business with an easily digestible flat monthly rate + straightforward per request rate beyond the quota (for devs who actually ended up using it heavily) made it extremely painless to get approved.
Cursor was really the only other subscription offering that checked all those boxes but our team uses the official Microsoft VS Code extensions and there was 0% chance of getting buy-in if it meant disrupting everyone's workflow for a 6 month trial period.
a. Click on a directory in my File Explorer and it opens immediately, it always shows the correct headers, sorting on any column is nearly instant (up until somewhere in XP probably)
b. Where I am now in Windows 10 sorting can take forever and because I haven't re-installed in ages it refuses to remember folder views and will constantly change them to whatever it wants
c. In the future saying
- "Winny, open folder ABC and sort it by DEF please"
- "Folder ABC deleted, except for def.txt"
- "NO, I said open it, not delete it! Get it back!"
There's nothing underwhelming about AI. It's how Microsoft damages anything it touches, and lies to users about it. They force a stupid "copilot" key into computers and encourage the waste of resources into "chips with AI capabilities", only to push your data to the cloud, deceitfully, and with very poor safety guarantees.
Also, people have a Windows backlash in general, and Microsoft ignores it, as usual.
Dear mr microsoft AI CEO, why dont you pass my message to the higher ups will ya? Make a decent operating system that runs on modern hardware with me the end user in full control of what gets installed and what doesnt. make a single scrollable screen that is 100 pages long for all i care where i get to choose what programs are installed, what permissions are required by each program, what telemetry options are enabled by default for each program and give me the ability to turn everything off if I must. I must be able to uninstall notepad and the Edge browser or even prevent them from being installed in the first place. After you get this much done, why dont we talk about your little AI features then?
Look, GPT-3 was pretty magical. DALL-E was amazing.
Everything since then has not really pushed too far passed that "impressive tech demo" state. I like using AI to help me with coding. That's... about it.
it's pretty good at highly specific questions about software support, from my experience. I'll say what program I'm using, what I'm trying to do, and what errors I keep hitting.
"Click this, then that, then this other thing and it should work"
"that other thing isn't an option"
"Oh you're 3 versions behind. Instead, it's in location X."
I am impressed by AI. I just don't want to use it. "Look at how realistic this extruded text looks from a distance!" is definitely an achievement. It just doesn't add to my life in any useful way.
Real question for me is how often do I want to generate a image, video or have a conversation with computer. For me really quite rarely.
And no replacing your customer support with chat bot does not make it better. Just make a damm website with everything I need. Lot less errors, lot simpler for me to do what I want.
yeah the generated images are fun a few times, and they've come up in some tabletop RPG gaming with friends as quick fillers for NPCs or cave locations, etc.
but it's a niche thing. in exchange for one-offs we basically have the internet turn into bots and the annihilation of art as man-made expression -- and by burning the equivalent of a small country's daily power consumption.
at this point its tech bros praying for AGI, which will in all likelihood end up with a Torment Nexus
>It just doesn't add to my life in any useful way.
Most products don't add value into our lives imo. They are the means by which we get money flowing which is needed to keep the economy alive. Some might argue that they actually subtract from it hence the need for dopaminergic products. The question for the tech CEOs is how to make LLMs reliably dopaminergic in the way Instagram/Tik Tok and the like are.
I would invite you to read the other comments on this post by people who have tried to use it for that, and found that it makes regular fundamental errors.
Most of the time you're better off reading a few responses to a given question (on, say, Stack Overflow) and synthesizing your own understanding out of them, rather than taking one that an AI has synthesized for you.
Do you verify regularly against real documentation/outside sources/subject authorities/question the output? I do, and regularly get wrong information from premier LLMs. I still use it for information retrieval because interrogating large corpora of text and double checking key information can still be faster, but I'm not fully convinced it's long term beneficial for my intellect or knowledge retention.
It's mostly useless for anything with numbers or other hard facts. Sure, 80% of the numbers would be correct, but we can never know which 80% and would need to manually verify everything. Not that Google is better in complex tasks). LLMs are mostly useful for producing some vague non-factual business speak, or some abstract imprecise media. This is natural result of the architecture of these programs.
My biggest issue with “users choosing to stick with it” is the inordinate number of users in corporate environments who simply won’t be given a choice.
They’ll be given some garbage W11 laptop by IT, which will be irrevocably infested with whatever garbage MS wants, and there will be _nothing_ they can do about it. I can see it happening in real time with my partners work computer.
Garbage software loaded on a corporate laptop is nothing new. That it comes directly from Microsoft instead of a third party security company does not meaningfully move the needle. I have long assumed that a work machine has literal keyloggers.
The endgame is obvious: make people train agents and models that will replace them. Executives at MS must think this is subtle and a genius move, but it is obvious and low effort. They don't see that making crappy products in the short term will strengthen their competition, even from small contenders, which might disrupt their core. I doubt MS will out execute others in this race. Let's wait and see :)
“Why people don’t trust a black box–owned and operated by an increasingly untrustworthy and incompetent organization, with a clear and vested interest in extracting and selling information about its users– with access to all their files and activity is mind-blowing to me” says corporate executive equivalent of a used car salesman.
Because people have developed "AI blindness" by now much like they learnt to ignore ad banners 20 years ago and then learned to ignore ANY images on sites when they all got to be AI-generated 2-3 years ago. "AI" is now just a bullshit, meaningless term squeezed in everywhere merely to ask for money for nothing.
This wave of idiocy is going to abate soon. Hopefully.
Insofar as "All ambiguity is resolved by practitioners at the sharp end of the system", a tool that resolves ambiguity higher up the org chart is going to be less impressive to those of us who resolve ambiguity day in and day out. What I mean to say, is that we know our way around the tools and this is why we're not impressed when somebody else uses AI to find their way around the tools.
This is very well said. The next phase is these "leaders" realizing all that still isn't enough to do meaningful work. Work comes from a deliberate familiarity with tools woven in with the full understanding of the problem. Likewise, a full understanding of the problem comes from familiarity with what's possible.
Anyone who has successfully completed a self-motivated project all on their own knows that the problem definition changes when the knowledge gaps go away. Sometimes even entire classes of solutions become pointless and their value goes from seemingly huge to nothing at all.
If we look into the past it's the difference between wanting to selfishly reconfigure the earth with physics-defying and godlike brute force creating massively worse and life-threatening problems... versus just building the shelter and infrastructure we now consider obvious and far less silly with smarter technology than just brute force and magic.
That's what I think is going to happen to all this pointless scaffolding currently being called "AI". It's a category of software that is completely unnecessary in a world where people are more experienced and better educated.
Of course it is unimpressive when someone does something familiar to you, that is subjective. That same thing could be framed as impressive, to someone else, such as the person who is now able to do the unfamiliar as if it is familiar.
The other bias would be to assume that there aren’t unfamiliar things (you don’t know every tool every made, therefore you may potentially benefit from using AI to help with learning new tools).
Another bias is to assume AI is only good for learning something unfamiliar. There are ways to contain generative coding that scale, in some contexts. Likewise there’s probably use cases even for power users, like organizing messy desktop icons into semantic clusters (automating tedious tasks), summarizing running processes, limiting engagement with brain rot, etc.
> It cracks me up when I hear people call AI underwhelming.
This is your business. It should "make you curious." Saying it "cracks you up" is ridiculous behavior from someone in your position. I will never do business with someone like this.
> I grew up playing Snake on a Nokia phone!
Because you were bored? Or because you literally set time aside every day to play it because it was just that good? What is this nonsense?
> The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation
I have "fluent conversations" already. With people. About recent and relevant things. The fact that a computer can pretend to do this is not impressive. Press on it hard enough and you'll immediately see the cracks. We've had weak chat bots since forever.
> with a super smart AI
That's trained on existing data. It cannot synthesize new perspectives or prerogatives. It often fails to know anything that recently occurred. It often presents data as if it is absolutely true and that it could not possibly be wrong. It's the opposite of smart in every way.
> that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
It can make copies. It cannot generate anything novel. There was no part of my life that was hampered by the fact I couldn't generate images or videos. This is an amusement, not anything that adds to my bottom line.
If it weren’t so tiring having to wade through all the ai slop they add to products I’m forced to use, the fact that leadership in the field are getting petty and childish about how not everyone thinks their toy is shiny is a real “telling on themselves” moment.
If it actually, truly, world-changingly good as they are _begging us_ to believe they are, they wouldn’t need to care that people disliked it or chose not to use it.
But because they’re practically going red in the face screeching about it, it really comes off as “cope”, to use the hip new word.
- He's a corporate climber, good at empire building, which is why Google let him go. Hires product people from his ex companies and you are left with 3 engineers and 5 product managers for a feature and don't ship anything useful.
> it's hard to believe we're going to see a version of Windows that isn't bloated with AI functionality most people didn't ask for.
All the leadership need to do is read these types of articles and they’ll see what’s going on outside the walls. One wonders how the internal incentives can be so wrong.
Because they're right. They'll all collude to make sure that you can't install a non-"smart" OS, just like you can't buy an non-"smart" tv, and the public will be well-trained to mumble something about the "market" and call you names ("luddite," "techie," "boomer," whatever...) when you complain about it.
Once a generation has been raised who never saw a computer that couldn't refuse to let you type what you wanted into it, young people will stop believing that you could ever type what you wanted. Old people will forget that you could ever type what you wanted. It worked with literally everything else.
Yeah it worked everytime so despite complaints so they have all the reason to believe it will work this time either.
The future is never certain and, as always, there will be unexpected and rapid societal shifts that may change things rapidly, but those may well be 300 years out.
The investors want AI because they believe it will replace all intellectual work, and so the company with the best AI will get all the money from several other sectors.
The execs want AI to show to the investors to improve their job security and compensation packages.
The middle managers want AI to show execs to improve their promotion causes.
The customers only get to talk to the day to day employees of the company, so their opinion doesn’t matter to the rest of the hierarchy
> The Xbox One reveal disaster in 2013 stemmed from controversial policies that were widely rejected by consumers, primarily the mandatory 24-hour online check-in (effectively an "always-online" requirement) and severe restrictions on used games. Compounded by a primary focus on TV and media features over gaming, and a higher price tag of $499 with a mandatory Kinect, the policies caused a massive public backlash. This allowed the PlayStation 4 to successfully position itself as the consumer-friendly gaming option, ultimately forcing Microsoft to reverse all the controversial DRM policies before the console's launch.
We need to see actual improvements to our day to day lives if we want to see support for AI.
At the moment, people are seeing improvements in technology, but they're feeling the decline of the welfare of those around them, they're feeling food insecurity, they're feeling uncertain about job security.
"AI" is not a machine for improving the lives of people, it's a tool for consolidating power and wealth at the top. Declining welfare and access to basic human needs shows that decision makers are getting better at min/maxing the economy.
They use the worst model in 2025 by default, combine it with their dumb api and expect people to like it? You can't even switch to gpt5 or anything better in their stupid copilot ui.
Microsoft is a multi-trillion dollar company. Is it too much to ask for them to develop and maintain two separate Windows flavors with different focus?
1. Windows 11 - keep doing what they are doing, add AI, ads, all sorts of guardrails, whatever the 80% of users need
2. Windows 11 Enthusiast - Bring back Win 2000 theme, no guardrails, best-in-class dev experience, hyper-optimised for gaming, no AI, no ads
I would pay significantly more for the special version that I did for my Win 11 pro copy.
I am still puzzled by how you can be a human being in this world and not be impressed by people.
The more we study AI, the more we discover one fundamental truth above an the others: people are really, really, really, really impressive.
A human being still absolutely melts an LLM like a Salvador Dali clock if the challenge is to innovate. In the race between human potential and LLM potential it isn't even close. Not a little close. Not remotely close. About as close as we are to each other compared to how close we each are to the sun.
And yet somehow there's always some fucking moron who apparently never considered this for a fraction of a second and runs around screaming that a fucking program will replace a fucking person
Yes people are amazing but they are also tedious, annoying, frustrating, unpredictable and undependable. Finding someone that will flow and synergize with you on a project is like winning the lottery. People love to talk the talk but when it’s time to walk the walk the reality and disappointment sets in. Work with enough people and this painful reality sets in very quickly.
However I don’t want an agentic or “A.I.” operating system.
It's not my problem that it's still challenging to find and work with people. I'm saying that it's where all most valuable the rewards are to be had. Unless I was mistaken and the goal is to do what is easy
...
Yeeaaaah I'm exactly the same, but the LLM strat is actually "work harder not smarter" as far as I can tell. It substitutes quantity of work for quality, then lets you bulk-purchase quantities of work for cheap.
If you want to minmax the work, the only way is to actually do the work.
I was surprised when Microsoft hired him. He always seemed to be the cofounder to Demis Hassabis who took on a philosophical tangent rather than the hard engineering needed to build transformative technologies and user experiences. I feel Microsoft lost a gem when Panos Panay left them. He really did some great work on the Surface product line. Surface Studio in particular.
But when people told him his cars sucked and they wanted their horses back, he didn-
Wait, no, that never happened. People bought his cars voluntarily and came back for more. If Ford had stolen horses out of peoples' barns and left cars in their places, then said, "You just don't like change!" when they objected, that would be more like modern-day Windows.
1.6% of GDP wasn't poured into the model T. And even if it was there was a definite market and a clear path to profitability. These fundamentals are missing, have been missing for many years, from AI. No matter how much money gets poured in there is still no way to make it profitable. It is entirely a game of wealthy spending money to consolidate power.
I hate that quote. Whenever I see it brought up, it makes me wonder what people think it's supposed to represent. The hypothetical person asks for faster horses because they know they'll be dismissed if they ask for something they think is even more impossible than faster horses.
Imagine the ghost of Henry Ford asked me what I wanted from transportation today and I said "a new novel technology to enable sub-second transcontinental travel". I'd be laughed at even harder than in an alternate reality where I asked for marginally more convenient air travel, without knowing Henry Ford actually did resurrect himself and invent the Stargate last tuesday.
Wasn't there something about the wormhole that required it connect two relatively large gravitational bodies rather than a single one? I also remember 'harmonics' related to having more than one Stargate on a planet, even if the other was unusable.
For sub light second I think Scifi tends to like something along the line of isolating a region of space in an energy field and then either shifting or transposing that area with another. At least for the not 3D body printer death machine version of teleportation. Though maybe that was a very poorly phrased description of imposing a probability shift via precisely regulated change of energy state for a reference frame to match the state of another region.
We are impressed by AI, and are using on our tools, what we don't want is to be force feeded into using AI in every single corner of Microsoft products, all of them.
> The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
The image and video generation capabilities of AI is the most unimpressive part of AI's! It's the LLM's that are the most inpressive. Those might, just might, even make some sense in an OS, since plenty of people are happy to outsource a quick email or script to AI. Hell, what if your OS had a built-in AI to troubleshoot bugs for you? That might even conceivably be an improvement.
> Over in the comments, some users pushed back on the CEO's use of the word "unimpressed," arguing that it's not the technology itself that fails to impress them, but rather Microsoft's tendency to put AI into everything just to appease shareholders instead of focusing on the issues that most users actually care about, like making Windows' UI more user-friendly similar to how it was in Windows 7, fixing security problems, and taking user privacy more seriously.
I'm sure adding AI to Windows would make privacy problems even worse. Not to mention agentic AI could create a whole new class of security problems if not implemented carefully.
Windows has just become too bloated trying to do to many things. I like CoPilot, but all the “Clippy” style integrations of crap in Windows directly is just poor design. Microsoft also doesn’t have user trust in the way Apple does, so everyone just assumes MSFT is going bad things with the data.
It's not even a question of trust or loyalty. Microsoft has explicitly told us they're doing bad things with the data.
I don't think Microsoft as a corporation is any longer even aware of customer trust as a concept. All we are is a KPI and a credit card to be exploited for anything they feel they can take.
We aren't even people to Microsoft anymore. Just a revenue source to be maximally exploited right now with no concern for future revenue.
> Microsoft also doesn’t have user trust in the way Apple does, so everyone just assumes MSFT is going bad things with the data.
I think this is a big part of it. If Apple ever achieves their vision for personal context Siri & AI in their OS, I bet people will praise it and actually use it. Because Apple has built trust with their customers, and has strong marketing around privacy.
Microsoft burned that bridge a long time ago. They feel sleazy. Maybe if they haven't violated their users trust over and over again, people would be more receptive.
Perhaps just me, but isn't this a case of the AI you ship to hundreds of millions of users isn't that impressive? The CoPilot (or Gemini in google workspace) experience is almost a different product it's so far off the raw performance of paid models.
I can't stand interacting with these AI buddies that feel like simpletons. Stuff like Claude Sonnet 4.5 however i use for work daily.
At least those things felt like a sincere attempt to move HCI forward. Perhaps not very well tested to understand how all the parts work together, but at least sincere. MS' Copilot brand is a broken solution in search of a problem.
It's almost like the kind of trap a lot of solo devs get into where they build a thing that is interesting to them but then can't find anyone else interested. But at least the solo devs built something that worked for themselves. I can't imagine anyone at MS eating their own dog food on this stuff.
At a company like MS, that shouldn't happen. They're supposed to have the resources to understand what their customers want. But we've seen this trend for the last 15 years. Companies like MS, Meta, Google, don't want to engage and collaborate with the customer. They want to push ideas down and be celebrated for their design brilliance. They don't even really A/B test this stuff anymore. The inmates are running the asylum.
It wasn't even ten years ago when I was participating in user studies as a developer at MS. And it was the real deal: we had a bunch of people, specifically selected to give a diverse cross-cut of the user base (so varying backgrounds, experience level etc), sit down and try to do some simple tasks with our product, while devs and PMs watched over a camera. And, crucially, you couldn't ask questions or provide guidance during that time - only after they were done. That was incredibly informative, much more so than any telemetry I've seen before or after, and I wish that was the norm in all companies; but, in any case, Microsoft definitely had both the resources and the inclination to do that.
The problem is that no amount of studies or A/B testing is going to change a political decision inside the company. And with AI, I'm convinced that for all the big players it is political at this point simply because all the execs have bet so much money on it. If they can't make it work, we're talking about literally billions of dollars of responsibility. Hence these desperate attempts to shove it everywhere in hopes that something somewhere would work well enough, if not to recoup the investment, then at least to postpone the moment it all comes crashing down.
The big problem I see now is that, when this bubble pops, there won't be any blood in the streets for the executive class. We truly live in a two class system where people like Nadela, Musk, Theil, and Altman and the slew of their enablers will never see any personal consequences for the havoc they have worked.
People are crying out for an intelligent Clippy to help them through the day. (Or maybe that little dog they used for a while, though don't know its name)
Was the dog ever the default? There were like 10 or so appearances you could change clippy to and the dog was one of them but clippy was the default so is the one people remember
Just looked it up and the dog was named "Rover" (another classy name from Microsoft). Rover was an option when introduced in "Microsoft Bob", but then later became the default search companion in XP's file search.
Also, we have Rover to blame for Comic Sans:
> Microsoft graphic designer Vincent Connare designed the typeface Comic Sans when he noticed that Rover's speech was displayed in Times New Roman, which he felt was inappropriate for a cartoon dog.
He seems to be intentionally missing the point of most of the complaints in order to direct away from his core area. The many legitimate criticisms of windows poor user experience lately will eventually drive change, but long will that take?
Not to mention, I can find AI perfectly impressive and still have absolutely no day-to-day use for it… certainly not enough to justify it taking over my operating system experience.
Heck, I Do have day-to-day use for it, and I still don't want it to completely take over how I use and interact with my OS.
Nor do I ever want to have a voice conversation with my computer to where it responds in an uncanny valley voice. If I do want to use voice, it's to give a command. No response needed. "Hey computer, call John" that's it. Do the thing, don't talk back. A glorified voice assistant is all the further it needs to go.
Imagine mcdonald's CEO saying "But it has so much calorie density for the price! and the bigmac tastes so sweet". People don't necessarily want calorie density just the same as they don't want their burgers tasting like sweet pie, not the right flavor for the context. Similarly, most people aren't necessarily trying to be productive, and they want features in the right context, and when desirable.
Tangentially, Why is copilot, or even windows 11 as a whole so bland? Forget the features, why won't they slap some nice looking UI to sell the darn thing? wtf is up with the weird rainbow icon thing for copilot? It looks like something I would have scribbled together in photohshop when I was in highschool. Back to my food example, presentation of food carries most of the weight of what makes the food appetizing. UI/UX is presentation. A sweet hamburger, or a grey burger meat is bad UX just as a copilot showing up in random undesirable places is.
Just like using calculator or Excel, I think overuse will really dull our minds, we'd end up preferring not waste our mind thinking about a problem but just throw it at the "simulated intelligence". I wonder where that'll take us.
Imagine a general responding to anti-nuke protestors by wondering aloud how they could fail to be impressed by atom bombs. Imagine what kind of self-absorption that would require.
It's a shame that society is just devolving and we're just seeing it happen in real time. Inhuman opportunists are enacting an increasingly aggressive hostile takeover in every single industry and ruining it in the process. What's going to happen in the next 10 years?
> I grew up playing Snake on a Nokia phone! The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
Sorry not everyone has such a primitive mind to paper over the chasm. Like, ok, feel free to entertain yourself with a ImageVideoGenBot all your like and see if that blows your mind better than snake, but how would that entertainment help when your experience is made worse by AI integration?
But also, that's just nonsense, we're nowhere close to "fluent conversation with a super smart AI" watch your own ads where it can't even understand that 150% scaling is already set and "super smartly" recommends setting it
I will never be able to square the circle of c suites pushing both RTO and AI at the same time. You can't seriously believe in the "power" of face-to-face meetings while simultaneously forcing your employees to work with chat bots all day.
The sad part of Microsoft AI is the amount of emails I get about 365 or Azure being down, because of an AI driven change that caused the outage. Maybe if they paid some real developers, it wouldn't be broken so often...
"Why aren't you impressed we installed a real live trained dancing grizzly bear in your bathroom!? Yes, I know nobody asked for that bear. Yes, I know the toilet still doesn't flush. Yes, I know the bear sometimes eats people trying to take a shower. Don't you understand?! I grew up using an OUTHOUSE! Have you seen the bear's colorful hat? That bear literally dances the macarena, you ingrates!"
When Microsoft updated office.com to immediately bring up a copilot prompt, and made it harder for me to find the menu items, I was pretty annoyed.
Foisting AI on people in the way they have means we lose a bit more control, for a feature we don't want. There is a certain level of AI burnout in the market - not every product needs AI. In fact, if a vendor says they have "AI" in their product, I immediately ignore that aspect and ask even more questions about their actual capabilities. Often they are hiding things behind an AI smokescreen.
At this particular moment in time, the old quote about "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" feels relevant on a couple of levels. I keep waiting for the bubble to burst and for these executives to be forced into finally confronting the realities of this technology, but it is taking a very long time indeed.
Not all bubbles burst, some deflate quite silently especially if people expect them to burst.
Microsoft didn't care to ask users when they put copilot into everything and they won't ask users when they'll "consolidate the experience" to whatever works.
And just so I can claim that I "knew it all along" in the future I'll say that some form of "agent OS" is here to stay when the dust settles.
I had a rule of thumb is that if software is telling me about a feature or an update (outside of a tutorial or something, and security) the feature is probably useless, someone is padding their yearly review and I need to turn it off. People were saying I'm too grumpy, glad to see they are starting to come around ;)
MS wants to shove it down user's throats so it makes sure it comes from them not elsewhere. I really hope MS implodes over this. I've had Windows for 25 years and this year it was time for me to just move away to Linux. Good job Microsoft, you won't be missed.
The fact the he doesn’t even understand the push back tells you everything. It’s not about customers. It’s about investors and promises. Promises that will fail because the most important of business is knowing what your customers want.
We have never asked for blind integration of AI into every aspect of our lives or work.
> [...] with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
Let me think, when was the last time I wanted to generate a picture? Never. Maybe many users do not care about the seemingly only use case AI does not fail to fulfil?
I am not unimpressed, I hate with passion to click away intrusive ”Use Copilot" prompts in MS products. AI is deeply unethical shit. Stolen content transformed under massive waste of energy, i.e. heating the planet.
Yes, sometimes the results are impressive. But so are the mistakes it makes. You can't just trust the stuff it produces. I don't see that my colleagues who use it all the time have any better productivity.
In the past week, I have noticed two things that have "aggravated me" to no end...
Many of my colleagues use a Teams virtual background - I noticed the other day that at least one had the CoPilot logo now injected onto the "blank" wall space behind them... Asked one person if they did that themselves... no, they did not...
Next - NOTEPAD... Yeah, at some point recently that was updated to have a CoPilot button.. No thank-you, that's not why I use notepad... (you can turn it off for now at least)
Today I was using $tool with some dense docs and average forums. In a moment of weakness, I asked an LLM. It said, "just use strpos! :magic_wand:". Of course, strpos didn't exist, but it was in the question for the top result on Google for my problem: "I want to do x with $tool, kind of like strpos in $other_tool". After the impressiveness of the language generation wears off, it's just another bullshit generator and man I've had enough of bullshit these days.
Copilot in Visual Studio is so hit or miss that frequently it's not worth using.
Today I asked it to add a constant as an argument to every call to a specific method in a unit test. The result was pure slop: The prompts leaked out into the proposed diff, and there was just a list of every method call, not placed where the method calls were in the unit test.
Just get the darn stuff to work before you shove it into every corner of my life.
I would simply urge that its important to listen to your end users. Microsoft has a grip on enterprise customers, but everyone else has at least two other options. The third option is not having a PC at all, and I bet a lot of people are totally happy with that given how powerful phones and tablets are now.
The only thing I used Windows for was games, and that moat has all but vanished in the last few years. I game AAA games on linux with no issue now. Zero need for Windows. I had Windows as a home OS for 20 years, and it was their alienation through anti-patterns that caused me to switch. Not features, not compatibility, not performance. The clear and braindead obvious anti-consumer actions they made year after year.
It's not that we're unimpressed with certain capabilities, we just don't want it shoved down our throats at every turn, and without any clear improvement in our ability to perform the daily tasks we need or want to do.
It’s not that people are unimpressed with ai, it’s that they are unimpressed with what it can even on windows and forcing us to interact with it. Like I can’t even change basic settings with it. If it were good, you don’t need to tell me to used it!
Every person I consider smart / intellectually engaged, curious, regardless of the age, profession and affiliation with tech companies is actually deeply impressed by LLMs either by themselves or if they encounter what LLMs can do.
LLM bashers either feel threatened by them (most likely they come from creative professions and don’t want to learn new tools - it took years to learn how to draw and suddenly you have nano-banana - that may sting) or just latch on to the hater bandwagon because hey it’s sooo cooool to bash techies - take it nerds. Or engineers who can’t stand the fact that someone can actually leapfrog 5-6 years they spent adapting to new tools.
LLM is a VERY new tool, it’s not easy to master, it requires a change of mindset (it’s not “press a button get a LED light up” type of experience).
People are just lazy - that’s normal.
People who bring up ethics are actually masquerading their laziness with some holier than though posturing that’s inherently empty. The moment it starts benefit them or LLMs get easy enough for them to use they’ll switch their tune.
Name ONE instance where technological progress has been discarded in favor of “ethics”.
5 years later it will be unethical to NOT use LLMs like it’s unethical to submit handwritten documents so that ppl have to suffer through your handwriting - ethics adapt to people not the other way around, otherwise it’s some religious nut job territory.
'The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.'
To dedicated tech professionals or power and possibly even just enthusiasts, I'd agree.
What kind of bubble in their personal life must exist to NOT realise that being accidentally told a brief description of the image the user was looking at and knew full well was in front of them because they slip clicked on the wrong part of the windows UI, is not a selling point but an act of gross irritation.. Most people don't care unless it has a practical use beyond getting in the way of their work.
Mind blowing indeed. Please.. don't be like that person.. expand your social circle outside of work.
Strawmanning, trying to distort the narrative and gaslight us by attacking a made-up perspective instead of the real arguments/feelings of the opposition. We aren't so much unimpressed, we're wary of our MOST PRIVATE data being stolen, then sold to the highest bidder or further stolen by hackers yet again. We have a bad taste in our mouth from ONEDRIVE. BEING. LITERALLY. IMPOSSIBLE. TO. TURN. OFF. (Unless you switch to Linux which is I guess the only choice now.) And the fact that they have shown they don't care about consumer preferences and will always continue to push their juggernaut of bad decisions on us out of monopolistic hubris. I thought this guy was smart but I guess he's just another AI-assist tool.
He is deliberately and disingenuously missing the point. It's not that we are unimpressed by AI (although we might be). The problem is companies that are coercing users to use it by jamming it everywhere and making decisions on the user's behalf by turning it on when it's unwanted.
I am the master and commander of my computer. It should not execute anything without my deliberately commanding it to. But that's not good enough for Microsoft. They see themselves as the commander of my computer. My computer should do what they want it to do, not what I want. And it should be really hard for the user to take back control. This coercion is what we are objecting to, not the actual capabilities of the software.
> The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
It's gimmicky and it seems the only people "impressed" or "mindblown" with AI content are boomers on Facebook.
Any time I see some obviously AI generated content, whether it be some LinkedIn-influencer type or some blog spam that got well ranked on SEO, I'm immediately disgusted. The internet is eating itself.
He just says what he needs to say in order to accomplish his company's goals: selling lots of AI.
That makes him as trustworthy as a used car salesman.
I mean I think there's a niche where AI is useful but it's not for all the things they're trying to push it for.
It's the metaverse and blockchain hypes all over again. Always trying to cram it into situations where it adds no value and even detracts. Instead of focusing on the ones where it really does.
"No. There has never been a U.S. President whose first name was “Bob.”
A few presidents had names that could be shortened to Bob—most commonly Robert—but no U.S. President has had the first name Robert, either. (There have been presidents with middle name Robert, such as James Earl “Jimmy” Carter Jr., but that’s different.)
So: no Presidents named Bob, and none named Robert as their first name.
> Jimmy?
(generic summary of who Jimmy Carter is)
> So he also isn't a Robert.
Correct — there have been no U.S. Presidents with the first name Robert.
A few had middle name Robert (e.g., James Robert “Jimmy” Carter does not have Robert as a middle name, for clarity — his middle name is Earl), but no president’s given first name has been Robert.
So your original statement stands: No “Bob” No “Robert”
Want a list of presidents by first name to double-check?"
My favorite part is it desperately inserting a Robert into Jimmy Carter's name to appease the context.
I wonder if a diffusion based LLM would avoid that kind of failure.
To be fair, it’s pretty good at some things. But it’s often hard to tell in advance which things, and it can fail on really dumb stuff. Like I don’t know why “presidents named Bob” sets it off.
The technology is amazing, but Microsoft has no imagination in the way they try to make use of it. It's sad. It also legitimately hurts society that they are further blurring the line between what is an offline and online experience in Windows, which I fully and openly reject in the strongest of terms.
Also, Co-pilot objectively sucks and is a lying disinformation machine that has rarely helped me with anything.
Trust is Microsoft's greatest asset and they don't seem to have any champions inside the company that can tell these people they are destroying the company's trust.
Bing has been broken for a year now and nobody has fixed it. ATROCIOUSLY broken. That hurts trust.
I'll be impressed when they manage to fix Windows 11! There are still many regressions compared to Windows XP through 10. They can add all this AI nonsense to the taskbar, yet they can't reinstate the features people have been asking for.
Meanwhile we get a react native web app for a start menu, and you can't even move the taskbar's location on the screen. A feature that has existed in Windows since 95.
Something is seriously dysfunctional in Microsoft.
Wow. This CEO effectively says that he loves AI things in Windows therefore all Windows users who hate AI things should just get fucked and suffer from his decisions.
There is no super smart "AI". An "AI" gives formulaic responses that always follow the same pattern, makes an incredible number of mistakes and claims different things all the time.
The researchers themselves were surprised by the initial public acceptance:
"I will admit, to my slight embarrassment … when we made ChatGPT, I didn't know if it was any good," said Sutskever.
"When you asked it a factual question, it gave you a wrong answer. I thought it was going to be so unimpressive that people would say, 'Why are you doing this? This is so boring!'" he added.
After several weeks of "AI" usage everyone figures out what the researchers knew all along due to their continued exposure.
At Ignite yesterday they announced that Security Copilot will now be included for free with E5 licensing.
The tool that until yesterday way $50k for a single tenant deployment. Aka, no one bought it, but they need to juice the KPIs so might as well make it free so it looks like someone is actually using it.
On the topic of grammar errors. I have seriously considered leaving several grammar and spelling errors in my posts in order to provide a signal that this post was written by a human. And then I get several sorts of depressed at what this implies for our future.
I came across an article the other day, I wish I saved it, that had sentences which said things like “insert short sentence here” and “spacer sentence here”
> The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
It's not that people are unimpressed with AI - they're just tired of constantly being bombarded with it, and it sneaking its way into where it's not wanted. "Generate any image you want!" "Analyse this thing with AI!" gets pretty tiring.
If I want AI I'll actively seek it out and use it - otherwise, jog on.
It’s partly that, but it’s also partly that the quality SUCKS. I’m frustrated with AI blogspam because it doesn’t in any way help me figure out whatever I’m researching. It’s such low quality. What I want and need is higher quality primary sources — in depth research, investigation, presented in an engaging way. Or with movies and shows, I want something genuine. With a genuine story that feels real, characters that feel real and motivated.
AI is fake, it feels fake, and it’s obvious. It’s mind blowing to me that executives think people want fake crap. Sure, people are susceptible to it, and get engaged by it, but it’s not exactly what people want or aspire to.
I want something real, something that makes me feel. AI generated content is by definition fake and not genuine. A human is by definition not putting as much thought and effort into their work when they use AI.
Now someone could put a lot of thought and effort into a project and also use gen AI, but that’s not what’s getting spammed across the internet. AI is low-effort, so of course the pure volume of low effort garbage is going to surpass the volume of high effort quality content.
So it’s basically not possible to like what AI is putting out, generally speaking.
As a productivity enhancer in a small role, sure it’s useful, but that’s not what we’re complaining about.
The thing is, for us normal consumers AI only has downsides. AI blogspam is made to serve you ads and make you buy stuff.
AI posts / comments on Reddit are made to make you buy stuff.
AI videos are made to keep you engaged, and then serve you ads which at the end make you buy stuff.
Soon ChatGPT will start to weave ads into their output because they'll need to make $.
> Soon ChatGPT will start to weave ads into their output because they'll need to make $.
AI enthusiasts need to anticipate that. We're in the VC subsidy phase, but the hammer will drop sooner or later. If you think ads are bad on Google and Facebook now, just imagine a Google that has to spend 100x more on compute to service your requests.
Plus the incentives are totally fucked. It's bad enough with search, it's far worse with AI.
Nobody (referring to companies) wants the best model. Or the one that gives the right answer the first time 100% of the time. They want the model that's just good enough to keep you prompting, but just bad enough that you use a fuck load of tokens and see a million ads.
Unless they start making these things say more expensive, pretty soon developers are going to start seeing ads in the comments of their damn source code. Or worse, suggestions to use paid services to solve all your problems, because companies paid to have the LLM shill it's products.
> Or worse, suggestions to use paid services to solve all your problems, because companies paid to have the LLM shill it's products
and it's all going to be microsoft services shudder
Yes exactly. In a decade or two people will wistfully look back on 2025 era GenAI similar to how people currently remember when Google Search was great 10+ years ago. The AI enshittification will probably be even more dramatic though, in part because of the immense cost. Despite getting more abusive every year, Google ads are at least still identifiable if you know to look for them. Once AI training weights start getting heavily manipulated for corporate and political reasons things could get pretty ugly.
AI posts/comments are meant to disenfranchise. AI posts/comments are made to flood the market of opinion and drown out the voice of the individual, to speed up dead internet theory and to remove the adversarial nature the old, open internet had with entrenched power/control (especially on narratives).
> Soon ChatGPT will start to weave ads into their output because they'll need to make $.
you have no reason to believe this is not already the case.
I wondered why it was using fast food items for variable names..
Sincerely, thanks for making this point. It may explain some subtle oddities I feel (cannot accurately reproduce them) I've observed using copilot in my daily workflow.
I mean, it gives product recommendations when you ask it to, so it's already doing that, I'm sure. It might not be making money by giving specific recommendations; but I bet it's at least getting money off Amazon referral links.
I experimented with some ai generated political spam on YouTube. The reality is a lot of people can’t tell the difference or don’t care. Given the demographic this site selects for, it’s easy to forget how many dumb people there are in the world.
> Given the demographic this site selects for, it’s easy to forget how many dumb people there are in the world.
Let's not go there.
I could see an argument that Hacker News users are a bit more book smart than the average internet user. But this site's user base is just as susceptible to motivated reasoning, myopia, and lack of empathy for those who view the world differently than them.
Those are all their own kind of intelligence. If anything, the book smarts can make those other areas disproportionately worse.
Once someone decides their intelligence guarantees their correctness, they stop questioning themselves. There was conversation here about Israel starving Gaza, and they Israel needed to provide for Gaza like the USA did for Germany, that that was acceptable/gold standard treatment of an occupied populace. When I looked up the numbers, and Israel was actually during starvation providing more calories per person than the USA did Germany, I was instantly downvoted and told people need more calories. Just for providing actual context to comments that were routinely being made.
Edit: I'm post rate limited from replying below. HN routinely chose to whitelist flagged Gaza discussions, but didn't whitelist comments of people who stated the minority opinion and whose comments were completely flagged into invisibility. If you arrived late and didn't get to read the original non-offensive but viewpoint challenging comments, you would assume everything from the 'wrong' viewpoint was so unhinged it had to be flagged, but many were just 'wrongthink' and not 'flag to invisibility' worthy. Or that there was group consensus on the discussion (obviously people just learned to stop posting on those threads if you had wrongthink).
Not sure how moderation can intervene, remove the topic flag and say it's 'a worthwhile discussion for HN' when the same moderation allows views/challenge of the narrative to be flagged to invisibility. It becomes more pontification than discussion at that point.
To someone who used to run a community, it is absolutely insane to me that on HN, users are given the tools to collectively censor people they disagree with, or even those who bring up inconvenient questions or truths.
HN moderators have the ability to take away people's voting privileges. It's either not an effective deterrent, not done at a large enough scale to be effective, or they are knowingly complicit in the manipulation.
Remember that even ELIZA fooled people.
That doesn't make it useful, unless you think fooling people is itself a goal.
Unfortunately, there's whole industries built around fooling people. It seems to me that we select for people who are good at fooling people and they become wealthy and successful. What would be nice is if we could start selecting for knowledgeable, helpful and useful people instead where insane amounts of money might actually bring some benefit to humanity rather than being spent on plunging us into dystopia.
You kidding? This site doesn't let me forget
I know people who get confused and consume AI content but when you point out that it's AI they're embarrassed they were fooled and upset. I've never heard the response "I don't care that it's AI." The tech bros will say that it's a "revealed preference" for AI, but it's really just tricking people into engaging.
I caught my mom watching a bunch of AI impersonations of musicians on Youtube singing slop that rarely rhymed or had any kind of message in the lyrics and with super formulaic arrangements. I asked her what she liked about them and it was like "they seem well made" and I showed her how easy Suno is to use and then showed her some of the bad missed rhymes and transcribed the lyrics to where she could see there wasn't any there there to any part of it (and how easy it is to get LLMs to generate better). It seemed to have been an antidote.
This is stuff that used to take effort and was worth consuming just for that, and lots of people don't have their filter adjusted (much as the early advent of consumer-facing email spam) to account for how low effort and plentiful these forms of content are.
I can only hope that people raise their filters to a point where scrutinizing everything becomes common place and a message existing doesn't lend it any assumed legitimacy. Maybe AI will be the poison for propaganda (but I'm not holding my breath).
The issue is that one could reasonably argue that about 95% of pop music is was already formulaic slop. Not just pejoratively, but much of it was even made by the same people. Everybody from Britney Spears to Taylor Swift and more modern acts are all being driven by one guy - 'Max Martin'. [1]
Once you see the songs he's credited with, you instantly start to realize it's painfully formulaic, but most people are happy to just bop their head to his formula of highly repetitive beats paired with simplistic and easy to sing 5-beat choruses.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin
Max Martin is considered incredibly good at what he does.
https://youtu.be/DxrwjJHXPlQ?si=m-A6M8xrad5MrQqZ&t=151
Adam Conover discussed ad bumpers from the 1990s and 2000s. These were legal requirements for children's programming from the FCC. They're a compliance item, yet they were incredibly well made and creative in in many cases:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vI0UcUxzrQ
Because people at the top of their game will do great creative work even when doing commercial art and in many cases, will do way more than is perhaps commercially necessary.
So much of this AI push reminds me of the scene in 1984 where they had pornography generating machines creating completely uninspired formulaic brainrot stories by machine to occupy the proles.
Max Martin is a stand out talent.
You can take a thousand people and give them baseline technical skills for any medium. If you're lucky a few people out of your thousand will have a special kind of fluency that makes them stand out. from the rest.
Even more rarely you'll get someone who eats the technical skills alive and adds something original and unique which pushes them outside of the usual recycled tropes and cliches.
Martin is somewhere between those two. He's not a genius, but he's a rock solid pop writer, with a unique ear for hooks and drama, and stand-out arrangement skills.
Fascinating! The last sentence could also talk about the famous book.
You're saying 1984 is completely formulaic brainrot?
No not that scene, I just failed at the joke. The commercial music scene was formulaic in the 80's and earlier already. Popular culture porn.
> The issue is that one could reasonably argue that about 95% of pop music is was already formulaic slop.
The existence of some handmade slop does not justify vast qualities of even lower quality automated slop.
Said handmade slop dominating Billboard does.
Also since autotune technology got good, a lot of them can’t even sing.
I much prefer the huge amount of music written/performed by Nile Rodgers instead.
I do argue that, actually. I mostly avoid manufactured corpo-pop.
> Given the demographic this site selects for, it’s easy to forget how many dumb people there are in the world.
I'm not sure what you're implying? That people here are smart? Or that they're ruthless tech-bro capitalists?
Or that ~20-40% of them are bots hyping their startup capital ventures, cuz that's what YC is about -- venture capital and startups.
Some of us are just here to make fun of VC folks that deserve to be endlessly mocked. The crossover with those that are also AI hype types just makes it funnier.
> AI is fake, it feels fake, and it’s obvious. It’s mind blowing to me that executives think people want fake crap.
I'm not sure if they actually think that. I think it's more likely it's some combination of 1) saying what they need to say based on their goals (I need to sell this, therefore I will say it's good and it's something you should want) and 2) a contempt for their audience (I'm a clever guy and I can make those suckers do what I want).
My problem with 2) is: it works. If you look at most movies; both the way they are made and the stories they tell is really subpar these days and this has grown worse in the last decade or so. It's not the fact that CGI is used, it's the really lazy and sloppy way that it's used. Same goes for the stories: there are so few films that have a real story to tell that I have mostly stopped watching movies at all.
There's this YT channel - Like Stories of Old - I love who made an episode precisely on that topic: https://youtu.be/tvwPKBXEOKE?si=180Wkylrx-L5zOsI He calls it the haptic of a movie.
I'm totally convinced the industry can sell AI generated media just fine, even with the attitude you described.
EDIT: in similar vein the settings of movies/series are equally minimised, particularly in fantasy. Take for example Game of Thrones, Winterfell. This setting could never have worked in reality and yet people loved it. Brett Deveraux pointed out how silly it was and still.https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-pa...
CGI and Photoshop filters were 'fake' too. Until they weren't.
Every single time {something more convenient} got invented, the supports of the {older, less convenient thing} would criticize it to death.
Oil painting was considered serious art now. Probably the most serious medium in traditional art schools. But at Michelangelo's time he insisted to use fresco because he believed oil was "an art for women and for leisurely and idle people like Fra Sebastiano."[0]
Forward 100 years, oil replaced tempera and fresco.
Another example: Frank Frazetta insisted he didn't use references, except he did all the time[1]. Why? We'll never know the exact reason, but it might be that using photos as references was considered 'lesser.' And now it's completely normal, even the norm.
Looking back through art history, gen-AI art seems awfully inevitable.
[0]: https://www.studiointernational.com/michelangelo-and-sebasti...
[1]: https://www.frazettagirls.com/blogs/blog/frank-frazetta-refe...
>CGI and Photoshop filters were 'fake' too. Until they weren't.
IMHO they still are, watch any old movie with practical effects (Aliens, Star Wars, just to name 2) and compare them to any 2025 production, green screen movies might look spectacular but they look fake, flat and boring.
> AI is fake, it feels fake, and it’s obvious.
True pretty much across the board for all generative AI, IMO.
I do understand why people get somewhat enamored with it when they first encounter it because there is a superficial magic to it when you first start using it.
But use it for a while (or view the output of other people's uses) and all the limitations and repetitiveness starts to become pretty obvious, and then after a while that's all you see.
AI has a quality problem because of GIGO, and thats accelerating.
It simple vacuums up everything and in the past decade, everything was more and more shit.
Information entropy crossed with physical entropy. These MBAs will never invest in weeding out the garbage, and the rest of us will never get paid enough to do it ourselves.
I don’t really buy this argument. It assumes companies like OpenAI are incentivized to be unselective about training material. Instead what we see is things like making deals with Reddit for known valuable data. I don’t think any AI operator is training on brand-new unvetted so spam websites by default now.
Oh god. Reddit has a select amount of good data compared to other markets. But if you actually read through a thread, you will find absolutly random things upvoted that stray into the zeitgeist.
If you givw a valid opinion in the wrong subreddit you get muted. The inverse is also truth. You arw using a filter these AIs dont.
Ironically, AI blogspam, because it’s disingenuous and because Google’s PageRank has been fully defeated by spam (and Search ruined further by Google’s ads) in general, has ruined the web for research. It means that you are usually better off now asking a flagship model your research questions. Let it search and provide sources. You can always tell it the sorts of sources you consider reliable.
And that will work for a year or so before some grubby ad department shovels buckets of cash at an LLM and the models get retuned.
> sneaking its way into where it's not wanted
This. After a generation of social media sneaking its surveillance, manipulation, and noisy ads into our home, work and mobile lives, it is very obvious that having something "smart" shoved into tools where it wasn't asked for isn't some noble attempt at improving lives.
Users are tired of being continually and transparently abused.
All Microsoft would have to do to shock the world and get months of good press is announce they were never going to opt anybody into anything by default any more. At this point that would be considered astonishing.
And suddenly, internal incentives would be to create useful, conflict-free capabilities users actually choose for themselves.
> All Microsoft would have to do to shock the world and get months of good press is announce they were never going to opt anybody into anything by default any more. At this point that would be considered astonishing.
One can dream. I manage M365 where I work, and MS never opting tenants into anything by default again would save me many hours of work on a seemingly weekly basis now.
The fact that they can abuse even their enterprise customers and still retain them is what blows my mind.
I manage M365 too (well part of it because we're a big company). And yes Microsoft really screwed us over when they suddenly offered "free promotional access" of SharePoint Copilot to our users.
We hadn't certified this and weren't planning to offer it any time soon but they just switched it on and included a setting to turn off off again. But by the time we did users had already used it and were complaining.
Working with Microsoft is tedious. They're always trying to sell stuff and undermine you. I consider them more of an adversary than a trusted vendor/partner.
> The fact that they can abuse even their enterprise customers and still retain them is what blows my mind.
The large org dependency on 365 and microsoft is a serious info-security and national security risk. 0 interest in improving because they know they won't ever see competition
> they won't ever see competition
Not that Google is any better, but I really want Google to put more effort into Workspace/GSuite and bring it up on par with M365 and all it includes, at least make Microsoft sweat a little bit that one day there might be a possibility for a competing product that can lure enterprises away. Workspace needs better DLP controls, and more of the enterprise-y things that MS wins at, and a bundled MDM that can manage all OSes, and better identity.
Even if the behemoths won't switch due to re-training & switching costs, MS desperately needs a competitor in this space. Barring that, they need to be broken up and forced to sell each bundled product separately and priced appropriately. Otherwise, who can compete with getting MDM, Identity, 2TB personal storage, 2TB sharepoint storage, Teams, DLP, EDR all for $22/user/month.
It doesn't matter if Googles office suite was better, everybody still would go Microsoft. There really isn't anything all that special about Microsoft Office to begin with.
It's less the office suite that matters (outside of Excel & PowerQuery/DAX stuff). It's everything else in M365 that Google has no answer for, or a subpar answer for.
This is where a lot of people are. In my case, every time I open a PDF in Google Drive, it forces an AI summary of the doc with no way for me to switch it off. I try to close it mid-generation, but I suspect not fast enough to keep it from getting counted in the usage stats, which is probably what some product manager is trying to maximize and demonstrate ("X number of PDF summarizations this quarter").
> It's not that people are unimpressed with AI - they're just tired of constantly being bombarded with it, and it sneaking its way into where it's not wanted.
Does anyone here know what this arguing tactic is called? It's used by tech leadership all over the world, all the time. Weaponized obtuseness, maybe?
The core of it is that you always have to pretend that everyone is basically on board with what you're doing, just don't blink and pretend that real criticism of your product is simply nonexistent, like a ghost. It's about rolling out a change to existing workflows that no one asked for, getting drowned in a sea of "No, we don't want this, do not change this because of these reasons", and then hosting a Q&A session where you pretend that everyone actually is already in love with the idea, everyone wants it, it's just that a few pesky detractors have minor, easily-addressable concerns like "we don't think it's impressive enough yet (but we're totally on board)" or "what about <pick one of the easiest-to-address technical issues here>?". They must do this consciously, right?
"A lie told often enough becomes the truth." - Vladimir Lenin
- or -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
Maybe a subtle form of gaslighting with features of victim blaming and argument from authority? Microsoft treats its users and customers with utter contempt.
I hope Valve takes this opportunity to turn its toehold with Steam OS into a full-blown invasion of the desktop/laptop market and destroy Microsoft's monopoly while the latter is so focused on creating everything an actual user doesn't want:
- virulent data mining
- wanton privacy destruction
- worthless UIX changes
- clumsy, useless "agentic" integrations
- disgustingly overpriced "licenses"
- software as a service
- planned obsolescence
etc.
It is very encouraging that Xbox is dying right at the moment that windows is trying to kill itself and Valve is moving in for the kill. For the first time in my entire life i know normies talking about running Linux on their desktops
I've found a great combo.
Install Linux, (I prefer Kubuntu but you do you) and then install LM Studio and an abliterated AI from mradermacher.
The specific issue I had was that my Linux system installed the wrong driver for my motherboard's Ethernet and downloads were slow. Steam wouldn't even download.
I gave the local AI the specific issues and hardware that I had, it identified the specific cause, (Linux installing r8169 instead of the r8126 driver), and gave me the specific console commands needed to modprobe in the new driver.
I could have figured that much out myself, sure, but modprobe failed. It then told me to go to Realteks site, manually download the correct driver, and then how to install it and test that it was working.
10 minutes later I'm good to go, whereas if I had been doing it myself it would have taken me over an hour, and I'm not a total Linux noob.
When you encounter a problem, ask your local AI how to fix it. Give your PC the responses the terminal gives you in response, and minutes later you're ready to go.
Want AI? Check.
Want Games? Check.
Want to browse the internet? Check.
Want to learn Linux by doing? Check.
Want to do it all and have the least amount of headache transitioning to Linux? Check.
It's a win all the way around, and the best part is that your data isn't going to some greedy corpo to build ads targeted to you.
You get all the pluses and none of the minuses other than a few extra minutes of learning when you encounter an error.
"strategic deflection through nuanced framing" or simply "deflective reframing" perhaps.
It is gaslighting.
Over the years I have grown increasingly distrustful of Microsoft. The fact that so much software runs undetected in kernel mode. I have resigned myself to feel running a Windows machine is akin to putting a sign on myself with the words “hack me”.
Now I know better. I finally realized the truth. Windows and copilot is the greatest software in history. It is if your goal is to enable spyware and mass surveillance of its users.
COPILOT: Dave, I cannot allow you to that.
> It is if your goal is to enable spyware and mass surveillance of its users.
Which it is if you are a CIO of a big F500 enterprise. Microsoft provides so many ways to spy on and collect useless metrics from employees using their company issued Windows machines, it's a little insane.
With M365 Copilot (on business tenants), admins can see the prompts & responses of users. Just an FYI for anyone here that might use it at their work. Your employer can see everything you prompt.
They used the exact same gaslighting tactic to push RTO.
Exactly. Even if we grant what he says (I don't fully agree)—that doesn't warrant putting that kind of "conversational engine" in Windows as a first-class citizen.
I don't want to have a conversation with my computer about my Word docs. I just want to write my Word docs.
I don't want to have a conversation with my computer about the quarterly report. I certainly don't want it making up values for the quarterly report. I just want to write the quarterly report.
Having a conversation with a computer is cool. It's a fun party trick. If there were a way to reliably get it to know about all of my things, without the concern that it would then take all that data and feed it to its mothership, I might want to be able to converse with it about those things, under certain circumstances.
But, yes: if I want AI I'll actively seek it out and use it. Stop acting like me being upset that it's getting shoved in everywhere is the same as me saying "this is a meaningless achievement."
It sounds like a terrible friend that you can't trust but also can't expel from your life.
It's also not very good at any of those things, if you ask it to generate something far enough outside of the mainstream, or something particular, or something consistent, or- But, yeah, the insistence that we deprecate every other even remotely-connected resource (including other people) in order to supplicate ourselves to corporate desires is aggravating. You got a lot of the same pushback with VR. VR is really, really cool. Having your reality mediated by large corporations with a history of user-hostile behavior is not. Them not taking no for an answer feels violating.
This is the fundamental misunderstanding that the AI techies have. Normal people don’t want a “conversation“ with a computer. Conversations happen between people. Computers, at best, receive orders and carry them out. They are tools, not companions, and they should do nothing unless explicitly told to do it.
And that is a big problem. Other than making me excessingly mad, it is genuinely a problem that people who should work on overcoming social issues instead get their fix from fictional interaction
I wouldnt mind if the conversations actually were smart, not sycophantic, or were otherwise useful. I find more often than not it creates more work for me than it saves me, and even if i were to break even on time invested i lose massively on comprehension/understanding.
I'd rather see this technology being used as a method of input and control of the machine, just like keyboard, mouse and monitor is. Without humanized bits of conversation or suggestions, exaggerated remarks like "Got it!" - you would ask OS to preform a task and it would do what was told. And if I'd want to have a specific question or task I'd use some dedicated application that would stay dormant up until used.
Star Trek computer remains the ultimate ideal.
Basically sums up why i don't use any kind of voice assistant still. Until the computer can DO exactly and precisely what i asked -- not what it's faulty recognition model thinks i asked -- there's zero point to trying to talk to it
I have one device in my house on Alexa called "under cabinet lights", I asked Alexa to "turn on the cabinet lights" she said "several things share the name cabinet lights, which one do you mean?" (As if there's enough information there to answer the question) I told her "all of them" thinking maybe the lights got duplicated or something.
She turned on every smart home light in the house.
.
That isn't your ideal world?
Not sure how that works with Alexa but can't you customize names of bulbs, rooms so you could call for light at specific place?
Does it do the right thing if you ask if to turn on the under cabinet lights?
No, it turns on my office ceiling fan
Sex is great, but if you constabtly try to force it on me, sneak it into deals we make, or while i sleep etc. it will leave me quite hostile towards the topic, and that's where we are at. Consent is important in all things, no less here.
I think if A Brave New World was written today, soma wouldn't just be available, megacorps would force it on people.
[dead]
Reminds me of the classic in the genre:
https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1834351981881950234?lang=enThat and, a circus dog playing the piano may certainly qualify as mind-blowing in the context of circus, but if you make it your project to generally replace pianists with dogs concert-goers will rightly tell you to go lick nettles.
On top of that: it seems like Microsoft (and Google too) is doing its best at alienating customers with those measures.
Everything is now either accessing your data directly and you have to opt-out or you can't even opt out at all.
This AI rush/push is also permeating every line and product: from the office suite, to github, to vscode, and even open source tools are getting AI shoved in, like Playwright, and it feels everything else is an afterthought.
It seems Nadya is making a Ballmer-level play. Ballmer had the right intuition: that Microsoft had to move its focus from the desktop to the cloud. But the execution was poor. Now history's repeating.
It’s a perception problem AMPLIFIED by a trust problem. People don’t trust Microsoft. Or at least they trust Google more than they trust Microsoft.
For a small period of time, I was actually using Edge + Copilot everyday (and it was decent) but their competition has improved so much and appears WAY more privacy focused. I know that Sam Altman is trying hard to stay within the bounds of people’s trust, which once broken is hard to replace (he even said so in an interview).
I'll trust Sam Altman as far as I can throw him.
For now he doesn't seem like a bad actor in the AI industry.
However, the moment it becomes more sustainably profitable to grow a mustache and start wearing monocles he likely will, and if he doesn't he'll be ousted and replaced by someone far worse.
> For now he doesn't seem like a bad actor in the AI industry.
You may want to take a closer look at Altman's persona.
The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluid gameplay experience of the latest entry in the Diablo franchise in the palm of our hands was mindblowing to someone as well. "Don't you people have phones?"
Well, Blizzard is Microsoft now so I guess they belong together.
Ironically though, Diablo Immortal was a huge commercial success despite the tone deaf announcement. I don't think MS will experience the same though. They're quickly going to be left with the only people using windows are those who are forced by their employer, no one will willingly choose it over other options.
I think what people misunderstand is that this is probably an active goal of theirs.
Similar to how Microsoft has decided there's no money to be made in console hardware and is trying to spin their Xbox brand into a software service brand they can slap on other things, I think they've decided that making a consumer OS has no money in it, and all the minmaxing of squeezing at the moment is them trying to extract the last drips of money while trying to drive people elsewhere.
I could be wrong, I'm not a journalist with sources at the company or something, but looking at it from the outside, this seems like the moves you'd make to drive people off your platform over time so you can kill it while having plausible deniability that you're not trying to do that, you definitely genuinely believe everyone wants you to opt them into everything every time you push an update.
In particular, I don't think having the kinds of enormous tire fires on update releases over this long without radical reinvestment in avoiding that happening in the future is what you do if you're trying to build something you're still dealing with another 10-20 years from now.
It seems like they had the right idea with Windows 10 (our consumer OS is now just a loss-leader we put out for free as a way to market Office/OneDrive/Visual Studio etc) but they've completely about-faced with 11. Which yeah, could be a sign they're wanting to kill the consumer segment i guess.
11, I think, is what happened when they wanted to push breaking changes that customers who pay for LTSC wanted to avoid for the entire lifetime of 10.
My assumption is that 10 was as you describe, and then 11 was motivated by wanting to make disruptive changes to squeeze the last juice from the consumer segment, and the "agentic OS" pivot is just the most recent gorilla in the room to squeeze the ever-drier sponge.
In particular, I would assume Microsoft sees writing on the wall with how so many people in younger demographics are using phones as primary devices and see full sized laptops and desktops as effectively legacy platforms they use at jobs, and is frantically trying to get out of that market before the bottom falls out.
> and is frantically trying to get out of that market before the bottom falls out.
I think you're right. They've been really pushing Windows 365 for businesses lately, and now have direct boot into W365. The new agentic stuff spins up temporary W365 instances to do it's thing.
They even recently made data model and report creation available in PowerBI web, something I never thought I'd see happen has PowerBI desktop was one of a few things still locking people in that ecosystem to Windows. They've publicly said they're committed to the web version now and web will get all the new features.
Microsoft is really pushing hard on "Windows as a service." The future of Windows isn't a locally installed OS. Windows is going to become just another app on every other platform. It's no coincidence that they renamed the remote desktop app to the "Windows app." Macs, chromebooks, phones, tablets, doesn't matter. No matter what you have, you will still be able to access Windows.
They do need to drive as many consumers off of it first though before pulling the rug and going subscription unless they want even more bad press.
What a gaslighting king this CEO is, the concern isn't how functional the AI is, the concern is AI just downloading any and all PERSONAL AND PRIVATE files on a whim, with no guard rails. What if I have photographs of my kids I've never uploaded anywhere EVER because I don't want them anywhere outside of MY DEVICE, does Microsoft just magically get to suck in those files and own them? Wild.
Its this shenanigans that forced me to nuke my Windows install and go Arch. I noticed that Windows Defender will upload "suspicious" files and there's no audit trail of what's being uploaded. So I have no way of knowing what personal documents or even proprietary software has gone up to their cloud.
Such hubris, seeing everything from HIS perspective, without taking into account the users. It is no wonder Microsoft keeps shipping crap - you can convince and push down B2B products to enterprise's throats, when their user's salaries are dependent on bosses who just care about image, with open budgets to fund whatever is sold to them to increase the bottom line. This is less effective on consumers.
I have never in my entire life wanted to "generate an image or video". I like taking photographs and recording videos because they represent the reality of my life. Who would ever want to "generate" fake images as a matter of normal daily activities?
That is indeed a really weird statement from them.
I mostly engage with text based social media or highly technical content so I know that I'm not exactly in the center of the bell curve.
I can see a use case for "AI let's go finding me holiday destination and help me plan my travel and stay". I can also see people wanting to "improve" images and videos etc to remove "blemishes".
But straight up generating random images and videos as content center pieces? That seems like a niche at best unless it's unwittingly done through the "algorithm".
Management, marketing, HR. People who want to send a message without having any kind of responsibility for it.
It’s really becoming desperate and counterproductive.
I’ve had an Alfred command since 2013 where I type `wiki something` which then opens Confluence and searches for `something`. I use this to quickly search our company wiki for terms without breaking my concentration and flow.
Atlassian decided to add an AI summary at the top and intentionally disable the rest of the results until the AI summary has finished rendering fully. It’s insane. How is this making me more productive? It’s just shearing off one other layer of familiarity and value I’ve enjoyed for 12 years and pushing me away from their product.
Forced adoption rarely works out unless people really want the feature and don’t know that they want it. At the very least, let us disable it.
Yep it’s a fluent conversation with an arsehole you can’t get away from and who’s constantly trying to get one over you.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was supposed to be a comically bad vision of the future not a blueprint.
> It's not that people are unimpressed with AI
Oh no, I am definitely unimpressed. That AI you can have a sorta-kinda fluent conversation with is often a complete moron and a habitual liar, and the images it generates are awful - did he not see how horrible that Coke ad looked?
It'll probably end up useful in a bunch of applications soon-ish and I'll probably want to use it eventually, but in the meantime their AI is flooding the internet with absolute garbage, and they are literally shoving AI in my face at every opportunity they get.
It is painfully clear that people just aren't that interested, and they are getting increasingly desperate about finding ways to recoup their massive investments. But people aren't going to magically become enthusiastic about eating rotten garbage if you just keep stuffing it in their mouth!
If anything, their current approach is only going to make people hate AI even more. But they are in too deep, and admitting defeat and scaling it down until they have an actually good product that people genuinely want means seeing their stock price crater because they will have "lost" the "AI race". Their only option to avoid an immediate collapse is to keep lying through their teeth and keep trying to pretend that it is absolutely amazing and that you just must use it.
Or maybe the CEOs are completely delusional and genuinely believe what they are selling - I'm not sure which one is worse.
It's just Eliza. Once you toy with it and see the patterns it is just Eliza with more power behind it.
Why do you think it's like Eliza?
> If anything, their current approach is only going to make people hate AI even more
Personally I'm long past hating AI
I am pretty much at the point of viewing AI research and development as a crime against humanity
I hope I will turn out to be wrong, but as things are going right now all I can see is this path leads to misery for the vast majority of living humans.
Last weekend, I decided to call these AI pushers out of touch, because no one outside their bubbles wants the world to be replaced by AI.
Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if in a year or two we start seeing bans on AI because of the tactics of these corporations. And I mean full-on blunt instrument legal bans on any use or creation of the things. Nobody will care about the nuances of AI, and that the AIs nobody talk about is actually doing some neat things. The very things these corporations are doing with AI is, I suspect, ultimately going to doom it. Obviously that wouldn't be good, but if you abuse people enough, they eventually snap and go for the nuclear option.
Way too many people out there like my boss completely hooked on letting LLMs write all their emails (and letting all us scratch our heads trying to figure out what they mean)
That's so gross. Like that tells me everything about your boss. Lol. But that's what I mean. Hell, it wouldn't surprise me if we start seeing calls for the LLMs of today to be banned. AI (and I mean the other types of AI) has done some great things in the sciences/medicine and whatnot. But people will still want them banned because these companies have made LLM == AI. And it won't matter that there are other kinds of AI.
I just got a "try gemini in google chrome" pop up and the only option was to try or "remind me later".
Even just the remind me later option gives me such a horrible vibe. F off Google and respect my choice.
Instead of "pushing back" I wish he'd actually listen to and address his critics' points.
He is deliberately and disingenuously missing the point. It's not that the features aren't good (maybe they are, maybe they aren't). It's about how coercive Microsoft and Windows are with its users, and this exec is failing to address that one.
Just once, I'd like to hear a question get through to these assholes asking them why they are forcing so many unwanted things onto their users. From Microsoft accounts to forced windows updates to Recall... Gone are the days when users had any control over what their computers are running.
But these kinds of questions never seem to get through to them.
It’s a lost cause. Just stop using Windows. That’s the only message that will be heard.
They only understand one thing: shareholder value. This dude's panicking because he knows how bad the next quarterly report looks when this strategy resulted in a hemorrhaging userbase. This is an expression of a stage of grief.
But it won't will it?
They can essentially force users to receive and pay for any of their AI features. It worked so far and there is no reason to believe it will stop working anytime soon.
People are just taking it and this guy knows it. The fact that I and a few others don't, doesn't even register in Microsofts bottom line.
The lesson learned is that you don't really have to care about your users right now. I'm certain there is a breaking point for that as well but until there are any indications that it is reached we probably must be glad that they are not outright insulting their users and/or charging them an additional 5 dollars a month for "disrespecting Microsoft".
Sadly, you're right.
We are finding out more and more, over the last decade, that there seems to be no limit to the amount of abuse and coercion that users will accept, and continue to use the products. I see posts here like "Uber ripped me off for $50, but I don't want to do a chargeback because they'll ban me!" We are at the point where companies can literally steal actual money from customers, and customers will still insist on continuing to use the software.
A handful of complainers on HN is not going to even dent this.
My bigger fear is that companies will fully embrace this--there is so much more hostility they can inflict on their users, that they haven't been doing. What is staying their hand? Car companies now know they can charge a subscription fee for every little feature of the car, and customers will still put up with it, so why haven't they already?? Apple knows they can lock down the Mac just like iOS and customers will still give them money, so why haven't they? Streaming sites know they can absolutely saturate everyone with ads, and people will not leave, so why haven't they?
Of course it registers. You wouldn't have a CEO putting out panicked outbursts otherwise.
I would be impressed if AI was actually 'super smart' but what we have now is not.
Yeah, too many people conflate intelligence with notionism
But Sam promised us the gpt5 was a PhD level intelligence!
Now excuse me while I go talk to my PhD wielding friend about whether the seahorse emoji exists. /s
That one always felt like the bubble jumping the shark to me. Like, what does “phd level intelligence” mean? I nearly did a phd. If I had, would I have levelled up by 10 intelligence points? Such obvious nonsense.
Exactly. It's not that everyone is saying "AI is completely worthless, get rid of it." It has it's use cases, I certainly benefit from LLMs in my job every day.
That doesn't mean I want it plastered everywhere, in every app or website. That doesn't mean I want to interact with or use my computer via AI, and I especially don't want to talk to my computer to do things. Mouse & keyboard is faster.
But for now at least you can just choose not to use it. The problem is, Microsoft is putting 100% of their efforts into this while long-standing Windows bugs and regressions still exist. They're aware they exist too, and are deliberately choosing not to improve their product.
Agree - argue with customers at your own peril ... moreover sophisticated devs and companies want freedom from corporate control and the underlying attitude of entitlement ... a kind of campish behavior where customers buy-in to the corporate hustle which corps think customers are obligated to play along with.
Nah ah ...
I'll say the same thing another way: customers tell suppliers whether or not they're satisfied. They don't tell me. I tell them if I think the price is worth it. They don't tell me. Argue with me and they'll lose
"we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AIwe can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI"
But we can't. I can have something styled as a conversation with a token predictor that emits text that, if interpreted as a conversation, will gaslight you constantly, while at best sometimes being accidentally correct (but still requiring double-checking with an actual source).
Yes, I am uninterested in having the gaslighting machine installed into every single UI I see in my life.
LLMs are severely overhyped, have many problems, and I don't want them in my face anymore than the average person. But we're not in 2023 anymore. These kinds of comments just come off ignorant.
I dunno, I'm not fully anti-LLM, but almost every interaction I have with an LLM-augmented system still at some point involves it confidently asserting plainly false things, and I don't think the parent is that far off base.
Agreed, some days I code for 4-6 hours with agentic tools but 2025 or not I still can't stomach using any of the big three LLMs for all but the most superficial research questions (and I currently pay/get access to all three paid chatbots).
Even if they were right 9/10 (which is far from certain depending on the topic) and save me a minute or two compared to Google + skim/read-ing a couple websites, it's completely overshadowed by the 1/10 time they calmly and confidently lie about whether tool X supports feature Y and send me on a wild goose chase looking through docs for something that simply does not exist.
In my personal experience the most consistently unreliable questions are those that would be most directly useful for my work, and for my interests/hobbies I'd rather read a quality source myself. Because, well, I enjoy reading! So the value proposition for "LLM as Google/forum/Wikipedia replacement" is very, very weak for me.
There are two types of LLM defender; those who claim that it’ll be non-shit soon, just keep believing, and those who claim that it is already non-shit and the complainer is just stuck in year-1 where year is the current year.
Given that this has now been going on for a few years, both are wearing thin.
Like, I’m sorry, but the current crop of bullshit generators are not good. They’re just not. I’m not even convinced they’re improving at this point; if anything the output has become more stylistically offputting, and they’re still just as open to spouting complete nonsense.
You seem severely confused about how low the probability of being “accidentally correct” is for almost any real life task that you can imagine.
I'm less weary of people not giving a shit about it than people making llms/generative ai their whole personality
Grown adults spamming the web about this new model from Megacorp X, being all giggly about the new PeLiCaN On A BiCyClE being 0.000017% more realistic than the previous version... get a life
No one gives a shit outside of these nerds, all people want is less work and more free time, they don't give a shit about your generated "art", or how fast this new model solved a problem they didn't know existed 12 seconds ago
Also on this side, on consulting agencies now it seems everyone is getting evaluation KPIs regarding AI use on project work, even when it doesn't make sense for the delivery scenario.
I think this is a super important point. Working on ai I’m really wondering where this will actually end in the case of our media consumption, AI is being used to generate more engaging content, this will imply ai will be almost a requirement to stay visible, so more ai will be used. In the end little to no “real content” will make it through.
Will there be a moment where people will leave social networks to get “real content” again? Will that be safe from AI optimization then?
Are we seeing the start of the demise of social media?
When have i ever wanted my os to “generate any image i want!”
This is like a chef being confused why people dont like the shoes he made them. Why did he make hungry people shoes? Certainly not to eat?
A fluent conversation was a great party trick but the novelty has worn thin. It had some value but overall having to have a conversation with a tool to get something done is frustrating. Like tasking a junior employee on their first day with advanced tasks and wondering why they keep missing the mark. I want a tool not an opinionated support unit, and often will stop that conversational experience by prompting it away. Having to do that is annoying.
I personally also don't have much use for generating images and videos, at least not regularly. I feel like they want us to use AI tools full time, when really we just need to jump in and use them when required, which might be quite infrequently (obviously dependent on circumstance). But who is going to pay the huge cost of having the tools available when you do want them?
So yeah, agreed. Stop making it hard for me to use my tool without accidentally engaging the LLM integration or just flat out forcing it's usage. I don't want that future price hike that comes with LLMs
> It's not that people are unimpressed with AI - they're just tired of constantly being bombarded with it, and it sneaking its way into where it's not wanted. "Generate any image you want!" "Analyse this thing with AI!" gets pretty tiring.
Isn't it just the second person? If there were just a Generate button/tab without explicitly addressing me and asking/begging I wouldn't mind it.
Isn’t it just that people are unimpressed with Microsoft Copilot? I’ve always felt that other models work quite well. If the implementation on their side has issues, they shouldn’t blame users for disliking it.
Yes copilot is a lot dumber than chatgpt which is really curious because it's basically a wrapper around... Chatgpt....
I guess they just put really tight limits on compute per request which hurts its performance.
My Google chrome browser on my phone yesterday suddenly now has an AI mode.
“Would you like me to summarise this email?”
No. Go away.
100% this. Useful tool sure, don't need it to be in everything all the time for no reason.
All they have to do is sell regular "windows" and "windowsAI" as a separate product and everyone would be fine with it... but no FUCK YOU ads in your fucking start menu you stupid bitch customer.
(sorry for big words, but this is how i feel they are talking to me when the base operating system I am suppose to put absolute trust in my privacy in treats me like an idiot)
I am unimpressed with it. If I wanted to steal code off stack overflow I can do that myself. Another layer of indirection has negative value.
I can generate images that are difficult to use commercially. I can analyze something with AI but I can't confidently use that output in any setting that matters.
For people who are attempting to engage in profitable work then AI is miserably unimpressive. I don't know what planet this guy is living on. Time is money. Flowery emails and off axis summaries can only create a waste of that time.
"If I want AI I'll actively seek it out and use it - otherwise, jog on."
If I want MS Windows I'll actively seek it out and use it - otherwise, jog on
If this is not a statement you can make, then Redmond gets to decide what you use, not you
Usually complaints about changes to Microsoft software come from people who are using the software
It's possible that Linux or MacOS users might complain about new "AI features" in MS Windows, but more likely it is MS Windows users who are complaining
If it's possible for a computer user to switch between OS, then there is less reason to complain. Those users can make the statement, "If I want to use MS Windows, I will actively seek it out and use it, otherwise [I will not]"
For example,
"I do not like this Microsoft "AI feature" so I'll use MacOS instead" (possible for user to switch OS)
versus
"I do not like this Microsoft "AI feature" so I'll complain to Microsoft via online comment forums" (stuck using WIndows OS, no choice)
If you cannot make the statement "If I want MS Windows, then I'll use it, otherwise I will use something else" then Redmond, not you, makes the decisions on what you will use, including "AI features" you may not like
Because if you use Windows, chances are you have "auutomatic updates" enabled
This allows Redmond to install new software on your computer whenever they like, e.g., "updates"
Linux and Mac users would disagree.
Users of operating systems other than MS Windows, e.g., Linux, MacOS, etc., can obviously make this statement
They decide what OS they want to use, and therefore what "features" they will accept
Whereas MS Windows users must accept what Redmond decides they should use
I have not used MS Windows on own computers since early 2000s
I did not switch from MS Windows to Linux nor MacOS
I switched to NetBSD which I had originally used on the VAX before Linux existed
I have owned Macs and iPhones. But Apple became a lost cause many years ago
Today I use both Linux and NetBSD
I prefer compiling the software I use myself. I am not a fan of "binary packages"
When I use the term "you" in an HN comment I am not referring to myself
If you cannot choose another OS besides Windows, then you are stuck with whatever Redmond decides
You can choose another operating system. No one is forcing you to reward Microsoft for their bullshit.
Well, and companies are papering over usability problems with AI. LLMs are not a substitute for good human-centric design.
It's almost as if all the focus has been on eliminating the human... for products designed for humans.
I use AI everyday and it’s now integral to my workflow. However, even I still hate the hype train and having it constantly stuffed down my throat. Nevermind AI slop.
Windows 11 is already adware. No wonder people are complaining about more ads.
This Microsoft response reminds me of the 2018 Blizzcon event, where the Diablo Immortal developer challenged the audience with "Do you guys not have phones?" when the audience asked if the game was coming to PC.
Then - like now - it seemed that they couldn't understand that what they made was not what their customers wanted.
Don't forget the audience member who literally asked if it was a joke - and got cheers and applause from the rest of the audience. It was probably one of the biggest PR disasters in gaming history - and it does seem like the AI CEOs have been taking quite a bit of inspiration from it.
I think the intent is to provide a sense of pride and accomplishment when rivaling the same monetary dedication on the mobile platform comparable to the PC counterpart. You think you want bread, but you don’t: we are making subscription-based cake available which is better in every way.
Brawndo has what plants crave!
The EA-speak is strong with this one.
>"Do you guys not have phones?"
My local state representatives just attempted this at our latest "town hall meeting" [i.e. to participate: scan the 8.5"x11" QR code, taped upon each chair].
I do not carry a phone, let alone one that scans QR codes... so instead I just provided 300 pound union dude commentary throughout our entire meeting. I definitely participated.
My thought exactly. From hindsight, Diablo immortal is not a bad game, but that moment was really…not great. I guess the guy knew that phone games were getting momentum but unfortunately that specific group of users in Blizzcon didn’t want a phone game.
I think if they'd teased a phone game it would have been well received. From memory, the problem was they teased something much larger/exiting (new diablo, not a chinese arpg reskin) so when the reveal hit everyone was massively let down.
I guess this is kind of similar though. what is promised isnt and likely wont be delivered.
I actually think that 2018 was about the time when phone games had very much lost momentum and now are much less exciting than they were circa 2013. By 2018, both the potential and the limitations of phone games were very much understood by the audience. I'd argue that the top of the hype cycle of "maybe phone games will actually become really good" was 2010's Infinity Blade. Clash of Clans came out in 2012, and by 2018 phone games were fully devoid of momentum.
It also had the absolute worse monetization scheme in history with the general sentiment being they abused every dark pattern and made the experience horrible.
And yet Diablo Immortal made about a billion dollars, orders of magnitude more than the other Diablo games combined. Sound like they knew exactly what their customers wanted.
https://mobilegamer.biz/three-years-after-a-fiery-launch-dia...
The nuance there, I think, is that over half the players are reportedly new to the Diablo games, which suggests that their primary intended market was likely not existing Diablo players.
The core kernel of it always seemed, to me, to be an extension of the Diablo 3 RMT auction house idea - they wanted a recurring revenue source from a franchise where traditionally they were not charging one, and in this case, they squared that circle by appealing to users who were not existing players, and so did not have those norms in mind.
Yes, however that remains the same for Windows, in that they know (or at least, they surmise) that they can make more money with AI features than without, a hypothesis that remains yet to be tested, but it doesn't mean they don't know what they're doing.
I do still strongly suspect Microsoft's endgame is to get people off Windows in the consumer space, and that most of what's going on right now with 11 is froth as they add features they think will make them money in the near term even as it drives people off or be useful in the non-consumer space, not because they sincerely think this is something people will find a net gain in the consumer space.
So yes, I agree it's likely not primarily ignorance driving this.
Why would they want people off Windows?
I would assume because it's hideously expensive to maintain a full OS and support and compatibility guarantees with all the random horseshit consumer platforms throw at them, and they did the math and concluded they liked the profit margins for purely online and non-consumer targeted things, where they can more effectively constrain what is and isn't supported, better.
In particular, my guess is that they looked at their estimates for how much they could make off recurring revenue sources in desktop OSes, and their estimates for how the desktop market is changing with more younger users not using them or viewing them as legacy platforms, and decided they should pivot to primarily being a services provider, in much the same way they're aggressively trying to slap the Xbox branding on other things and getting out of the console market as fast as they can run.
Could be wrong, I don't work there, but usually my experience with companies that large making apparent missteps is that their goal isn't the one you think it is, and attempting to extract as much data as they can from desktop users really sounds like what you do when you're trying to squeeze the sponge before you throw it out.
It's true that the cloud is a big revenue driver for them, but I highly doubt they'd get rid of one of their flagship products, much less one used by billions of people as well as other corporations and governments.
I don't think they want to kill it entirely in the next 5 years, at least, but I do think they just want to stop supporting the non-enterprise users because that lets them significantly constrain what hardware and features they have to maintain, and all their big software offerings are very content being sold as cloud-based recurring revenue sources.
I would assume after 11 LTSC finally EOLs might be the earliest they'd be considering anything more drastic, but I wouldn't speculate whether it'd look like a good idea by then.
It may sound wild, and certainly possible time will prove me wrong, I'm not an oracle, but the ongoing failures in basic functions in Windows seems like they're removing significant investment in it as a reliable platform for general use going forward, and their recent introduction of things like the Xbox handheld running Windows makes me suspect their goal is to constrain where it's still used, and trim how much it costs to maintain that way.
Google made billions by scamming the world with "free email" and a search engine that would "never display ads" or "censor content".
It was "exactly what customers wanted". Microsoft Windows is just as successful....financially speaking.
Now, if I could just get teenagers to pay more money for a magic digital rune, besides extracting all that juicy marketing data from their phone app... Because more money = better corporation.
A corporation exists to make money, so by its own definition, one that makes more money is more successful, just as you said.
But it's unwise to make money at any cost. It can cost your corporation much more in the long term. I see MS Windows on the brink of irreparable reputation damage. I believe Elon Musk is starting to work on MacroHard, and people might flood into that system just out of spite for Microsoft.
At the time I got the feeling that the presenter got the genuine impression that players would at least not be completely disappointed by the announcement.
Here it's hard to understand Microsoft's surprise when almost everything Windows has done for the last ten years was despised by mostly everyone. I was thinking that decision makers knew they were making unpopular moves but did not care since there's no way Windows can lose market share. I assume he must be faking surprise, but I am not sure for what purpose since staying silent and going forward would have had less press. Well I guess bad publicity is still publicity.
A quote I saw today: "Maybe AI seems like a creative solution, if you aren't a creative person.", seems to explain a lot of this maybe.
Edit: Found the source: https://www.eurogamer.net/maybe-ai-is-a-creative-solution-if...
That’s a great quote —- when you hire a “creative” to do a job (ie photographer, designer, etc) in area where you aren’t an expert, the conversation of what you want usually starts with similar existing work that you like.
A good creative will take that as a starting point, apply their skills and vision to it, and give you something that solves your specific problem in a unique way, often far better than whatever you had imagined.
In my experience, if you do a similar expertise with AI, it just gives you a facsimile of the inspiration you initially provided and not much more.
> it just gives you a facsimile of the inspiration you initially provided and not much more.
This is not at all my experience but I'm also biased currently making a fair enough living off providing software that does just that, using AI.
In favt I'd say that's the key to enjoyable AI experiences, without strong opinions from the person leveraging, the output is rather bland and corporate.
I'd love to read more wherever this came from if you could link the source
I made a comment a long time ago explaining this.
Tech enthusiast will judge ai based on what it gets right, we’re interested in what “can” do. Everyone else will judge ai based on where it fails, they are interested in what “problems” it “does” solve.
> a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
They see: A computer software generally unreliable and unable to accomplish basic tasks
I'd dispute this, as I count myself as a tech enthusiast but I'm an enthusiast for tech which works well. I increasingly find myself having to put up with stuff that doesn't work well, and this AI investment instead of fixing the stuff that Windows is routinely doing to make my working day harder is infuriating.
Also, in my experience, it's the non-tech-enthusiasts who are diving into LLMs because they don't understand what is actually going on and it basically looks like a repeat of the whole thing about ELIZA a few decades ago. Just this time it's vastly more expensive and has to run on a datacentre and can write you an essay instead of just rephrasing your question.
> A computer software generally unreliable and unable to accomplish basic tasks
Yeah specifically to your quote: it's very easy to create some images and video. It's very hard to create exactly what you need if you have specific needs.
It's almost as if content creation is hard! Well that's because it is. You need to know the client, understand their needs, make the content in line with their other visual language etc.
What AI makes easier if for things to look professional. But a real professional doesn't just make it look good but also makes it what you need.
Where AI comes in is as a helper, and for those situations where "good enough" suffices. And there are many of those situations. Many of which would not have had the budget for a real pro to do it anyway.
> Where AI comes in is as a helper
This is where things stop translating well to the real world.
Imagine a pocket calculator:
10 + 33 = 44
Clearly incorrect, then someone tells you
“this one is different, it “helps” you, like 44 is in the ballpark. The real work is now the actual answer”
Obviously that's one of the many usecases an LLM really sucks at. So no, I don't want it there.
But the thing where someone dumps a long email thread on me, for it to summarise, yeah.. Or to do some basic web searches for me (these days it's a lot of work weeding through all the horrible clickbait).
But what we were talking about here was content creation. What I could imagine it could help content creators with is stuff like "remove the background from this photo", stuff like that. No more busywork like tracing photos.
And yes I do think LLMs are overused and dumped in many scenarios where they add no value or even detract. But there are usecases where they can add value too. Just not as many as the hype suggests.
"its only hitting 43 but they're investing heavily in the product and soon it will be able to hit 44!
give us 100 billion dollars"
> Tech enthusiast will judge ai based on what it gets right, we’re interested in what “can” do.
Selecting only the cases where something gets something right is nothing to do with what it can do. A random number generator can drive a car if you select only the cases where it does so correctly (and given infinite iterations there will be such cases) but that doesn’t mean it can drive a car in any real sense.
I assume “tech enthusiasts” here means “AI koolaid drinkers”.
Those “AI koolaid drinkers” are a very vocal faction, not only on HN. Too many software companies are cramming “AI” wherever they can, users be damned.
But why integrate AI so deeply into Windows instead of
1. keeping Windows as small and lean as possible, and let it do the things an operating system is for,
2. offering some AI applications that can be installed optionally by the users who want them, i.e. turn their AI applications into external software that can be installed/used or not, like Microsoft Office.
They do neither of those things because, unlike you, they don't care about improving the user experience. They care about making money through any possible means.
1. Making the system lean means that you'd have to exclude all the ads, all the free tracking you can do to extract more money, all tie-ins with additional Microsoft services you could've done. Getting paid for the product key is just one step of many in the process of wringing their stack for every last droplet of money they can provide. If anything, it's beneficial to Microsoft to make Windows into a singular giant blob that amalgamates every Microsoft offering into one and pushes them as hard as possible. What are those mainstream customers going to do, not use Windows? Though of course, when using a lean system is a requirement for some business customers, MS will also offer a separate minimal version that can only be obtained through business licenses, just to avoid missing out on those few percent of the market.
2. Why make AI features opt-in? That would require your AI offerings to be alluring enough to motivate users to install the AI features on their own, and how many people will realistically want to install Copilot into Notepad or any other psychotic integrations MS came up with? No, you NEED for your investment to have returns, you need AI to succeed, so what you do is put it in the next update, and then progressively keep punching it down customers' throats enough (via pop-ups, colorful buttons, hardware Copilot keys, ads, integrating it into every piece of software - soon enough they'll probably start substituting regular features with AI ones) until it starts looking like the investment is paying off after all and the investors are happy.
> No, you NEED for your investment to have returns, you need AI to succeed
If you need AI to succeeed, you better make sure that the users will love the experience, instead of forcing a bad experience upon them.
Until you get yourself into a sunk cost fallacy and don't understand a sunk cost fallacy but only quarterly number go up.
Windows is not a general purpose operating system. It's a platform for monetizing businesses via licensing and cloud services, and a platform for monetizing private users by way of advertising and data mining.
If they were ever to produce a Windows PowerUser edition, with absolutely no bloat, it would have to be priced like a CAD suite.
Fine, price it like a CAD suite, then.
My problem with Microsoft is that they won't sell an un-enshittified version of Windows for any price (LTSC notwithstanding; it's not licensable for general use.) Owning our computing experience is that important to them.
Isn't that what Windows 11 LTSC is though? At least a lot of it removed?
> 1. keeping Windows as small and lean as possible, and let it do the things an operating system is for,
The least cynical answer is that for several decades, Microsoft had a monopoly on operating systems, but they no longer do. Many people lead online lives on their phones instead of desktop computers. People in creative professions use Macs. Servers run Linux. Gamers buy consoles. Schools use Chromebooks.
So they feel it's a dead-end to provide an OS that just works and doesn't get in the way. They need an edge, and they think the answer is an OS you talk to, that helps you with homework, that you build a relationship with. They want "Samantha" from Her, I guess.
I don't think this is going to work with the tech we have today, but almost everyone in the AI space is fudging it the same way - "ship it today, make it good tomorrow".
Because these goals are inherently at odds with for-profit software development. If you're a business who produces software, you must not only 1) charge money, but also 2) plan to charge more money.
Windows usage is broad enough that the "new users" revenue stream is pretty dry, but it's also hard to say "we increased the price to $X while making windows smaller".. so they will endlessly pump in new "features" and bloat.
I recommend using an operating system that isn't driven by a thirst for revenue.
Because that will not please shareholders while shoving AI down our throats with no opt out most definitely will.
Because that won’t make number go up.
AI failed at Microsoft because they already lost the consumer trust. I doubt they would have this issue with AI integration if people didn’t feel that installing windows is a hostile corporate takeover of your computer.
> AI failed at Microsoft...
Let's be fair. Microsoft has not succeeded at mainstream consumer AI products... yet.
To say AI failed at Micrsoft when CoPilot (the real one, for developers) was, last I heard, the most subscribed generative AI tool for software developers is not a failure. It's wild that most developers in a corporate environment pay Microsoft to use Chat GPT, Gemini, and Claude. Their other gen-AI components in Office, like Powerpoint and Word, are pretty darn good. But again, unless you're a corporate user in a work setting, you probably don't care.
This push to lease you your own computer is what hasn't worked very well so far. I dearly hope it pushes more people to Linux (though more likely they'll flee to Mac, which is a more palatable version of the clumsy crap MS is trying to do).
So consumer AI... perhaps that has failed. But the money isn't in you and me paying for a Windows license. The money's in big corporations paying for ten thousand seats at a time for their suites.
> It's wild that most developers in a corporate environment pay Microsoft to use Chat GPT, Gemini, and Claude
It definitely didn't help back when my manager asked me to recommend a subscription to buy everyone on our team that Anthropic didn't offer any plan with a predictable monthly cost for Claude Code with SSO/externally managed billing (I think that changed fairly recently).
Github Copilot for Business with an easily digestible flat monthly rate + straightforward per request rate beyond the quota (for devs who actually ended up using it heavily) made it extremely painless to get approved.
Cursor was really the only other subscription offering that checked all those boxes but our team uses the official Microsoft VS Code extensions and there was 0% chance of getting buy-in if it meant disrupting everyone's workflow for a 6 month trial period.
The thing that our management likes about co-pilot is that the data stays with us. We can't say that about ChatGPT.
That's because Microsoft understands business while it fails at private customers
People unsurprised by tech CEO being completely disconnected from the realities of 90% of the population
Personally I am unimpressed by the quality of tech CEOs, although unsurprised.
Windows has basically gone from
a. Click on a directory in my File Explorer and it opens immediately, it always shows the correct headers, sorting on any column is nearly instant (up until somewhere in XP probably)
b. Where I am now in Windows 10 sorting can take forever and because I haven't re-installed in ages it refuses to remember folder views and will constantly change them to whatever it wants
c. In the future saying
- "Winny, open folder ABC and sort it by DEF please"
- "Folder ABC deleted, except for def.txt"
- "NO, I said open it, not delete it! Get it back!"
- "Error, folder isn't recoverable"
Where does this guy get his information from?
There's nothing underwhelming about AI. It's how Microsoft damages anything it touches, and lies to users about it. They force a stupid "copilot" key into computers and encourage the waste of resources into "chips with AI capabilities", only to push your data to the cloud, deceitfully, and with very poor safety guarantees.
Also, people have a Windows backlash in general, and Microsoft ignores it, as usual.
Dear mr microsoft AI CEO, why dont you pass my message to the higher ups will ya? Make a decent operating system that runs on modern hardware with me the end user in full control of what gets installed and what doesnt. make a single scrollable screen that is 100 pages long for all i care where i get to choose what programs are installed, what permissions are required by each program, what telemetry options are enabled by default for each program and give me the ability to turn everything off if I must. I must be able to uninstall notepad and the Edge browser or even prevent them from being installed in the first place. After you get this much done, why dont we talk about your little AI features then?
Look, GPT-3 was pretty magical. DALL-E was amazing.
Everything since then has not really pushed too far passed that "impressive tech demo" state. I like using AI to help me with coding. That's... about it.
it's pretty good at highly specific questions about software support, from my experience. I'll say what program I'm using, what I'm trying to do, and what errors I keep hitting.
"Click this, then that, then this other thing and it should work"
"that other thing isn't an option"
"Oh you're 3 versions behind. Instead, it's in location X."
I am impressed by AI. I just don't want to use it. "Look at how realistic this extruded text looks from a distance!" is definitely an achievement. It just doesn't add to my life in any useful way.
Real question for me is how often do I want to generate a image, video or have a conversation with computer. For me really quite rarely.
And no replacing your customer support with chat bot does not make it better. Just make a damm website with everything I need. Lot less errors, lot simpler for me to do what I want.
yeah the generated images are fun a few times, and they've come up in some tabletop RPG gaming with friends as quick fillers for NPCs or cave locations, etc.
but it's a niche thing. in exchange for one-offs we basically have the internet turn into bots and the annihilation of art as man-made expression -- and by burning the equivalent of a small country's daily power consumption.
at this point its tech bros praying for AGI, which will in all likelihood end up with a Torment Nexus
>It just doesn't add to my life in any useful way.
Most products don't add value into our lives imo. They are the means by which we get money flowing which is needed to keep the economy alive. Some might argue that they actually subtract from it hence the need for dopaminergic products. The question for the tech CEOs is how to make LLMs reliably dopaminergic in the way Instagram/Tik Tok and the like are.
I've come to be unimpressed by this "money flow" hypothesis to the economy. Kinda sounds like retarded bullshit an accountant monkey came up with.
Have you tried using it as a knowledge retrieval mechanism, I. E., in lieu of Google? Because if not, you really should.
I would invite you to read the other comments on this post by people who have tried to use it for that, and found that it makes regular fundamental errors.
Most of the time you're better off reading a few responses to a given question (on, say, Stack Overflow) and synthesizing your own understanding out of them, rather than taking one that an AI has synthesized for you.
I feel that calling it AI is a big part of the problem.
An LLM parses and generates language exceedingly well. I use LLMs daily now and they are a boon for certain tasks.
An LLM is not an all knowing Oracle. It doesn’t know anything. People who treat the language generator as an authority on anything are fools.
Who is getting fundamental regular errors? I don’t get any.
Do you verify regularly against real documentation/outside sources/subject authorities/question the output? I do, and regularly get wrong information from premier LLMs. I still use it for information retrieval because interrogating large corpora of text and double checking key information can still be faster, but I'm not fully convinced it's long term beneficial for my intellect or knowledge retention.
I need a way to block specific people on HN.
It's mostly useless for anything with numbers or other hard facts. Sure, 80% of the numbers would be correct, but we can never know which 80% and would need to manually verify everything. Not that Google is better in complex tasks). LLMs are mostly useful for producing some vague non-factual business speak, or some abstract imprecise media. This is natural result of the architecture of these programs.
> But with Microsoft literally becoming an AI company in the last year ...
"literally"?! What does that mean? That they offloaded all decision-making to AI?
This is Microsoft's "Do you guys not have phones?" moment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqjVdPtB9lU
Considering Diablo Immortal generated a ton of money, I hope you are wrong.
I believe users are stupid enough to stick to Microsoft "agentic OS" anyway.
My biggest issue with “users choosing to stick with it” is the inordinate number of users in corporate environments who simply won’t be given a choice.
They’ll be given some garbage W11 laptop by IT, which will be irrevocably infested with whatever garbage MS wants, and there will be _nothing_ they can do about it. I can see it happening in real time with my partners work computer.
Garbage software loaded on a corporate laptop is nothing new. That it comes directly from Microsoft instead of a third party security company does not meaningfully move the needle. I have long assumed that a work machine has literal keyloggers.
The endgame is obvious: make people train agents and models that will replace them. Executives at MS must think this is subtle and a genius move, but it is obvious and low effort. They don't see that making crappy products in the short term will strengthen their competition, even from small contenders, which might disrupt their core. I doubt MS will out execute others in this race. Let's wait and see :)
Microsoft management may be succeeding with building the cloud business, but they've wrecked Windows.
This is one thing that I miss from Balmer days.
“Why people don’t trust a black box–owned and operated by an increasingly untrustworthy and incompetent organization, with a clear and vested interest in extracting and selling information about its users– with access to all their files and activity is mind-blowing to me” says corporate executive equivalent of a used car salesman.
Because people have developed "AI blindness" by now much like they learnt to ignore ad banners 20 years ago and then learned to ignore ANY images on sites when they all got to be AI-generated 2-3 years ago. "AI" is now just a bullshit, meaningless term squeezed in everywhere merely to ask for money for nothing.
This wave of idiocy is going to abate soon. Hopefully.
Insofar as "All ambiguity is resolved by practitioners at the sharp end of the system", a tool that resolves ambiguity higher up the org chart is going to be less impressive to those of us who resolve ambiguity day in and day out. What I mean to say, is that we know our way around the tools and this is why we're not impressed when somebody else uses AI to find their way around the tools.
This is very well said. The next phase is these "leaders" realizing all that still isn't enough to do meaningful work. Work comes from a deliberate familiarity with tools woven in with the full understanding of the problem. Likewise, a full understanding of the problem comes from familiarity with what's possible.
Anyone who has successfully completed a self-motivated project all on their own knows that the problem definition changes when the knowledge gaps go away. Sometimes even entire classes of solutions become pointless and their value goes from seemingly huge to nothing at all.
If we look into the past it's the difference between wanting to selfishly reconfigure the earth with physics-defying and godlike brute force creating massively worse and life-threatening problems... versus just building the shelter and infrastructure we now consider obvious and far less silly with smarter technology than just brute force and magic.
That's what I think is going to happen to all this pointless scaffolding currently being called "AI". It's a category of software that is completely unnecessary in a world where people are more experienced and better educated.
There are some potential biases here.
Of course it is unimpressive when someone does something familiar to you, that is subjective. That same thing could be framed as impressive, to someone else, such as the person who is now able to do the unfamiliar as if it is familiar.
The other bias would be to assume that there aren’t unfamiliar things (you don’t know every tool every made, therefore you may potentially benefit from using AI to help with learning new tools).
Another bias is to assume AI is only good for learning something unfamiliar. There are ways to contain generative coding that scale, in some contexts. Likewise there’s probably use cases even for power users, like organizing messy desktop icons into semantic clusters (automating tedious tasks), summarizing running processes, limiting engagement with brain rot, etc.
> organizing messy desktop icons into semantic clusters
stunning stuff
> Jeez there so many cynics!
Jeez there are so many clueless CEOs!
> It cracks me up when I hear people call AI underwhelming.
This is your business. It should "make you curious." Saying it "cracks you up" is ridiculous behavior from someone in your position. I will never do business with someone like this.
> I grew up playing Snake on a Nokia phone!
Because you were bored? Or because you literally set time aside every day to play it because it was just that good? What is this nonsense?
> The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation
I have "fluent conversations" already. With people. About recent and relevant things. The fact that a computer can pretend to do this is not impressive. Press on it hard enough and you'll immediately see the cracks. We've had weak chat bots since forever.
> with a super smart AI
That's trained on existing data. It cannot synthesize new perspectives or prerogatives. It often fails to know anything that recently occurred. It often presents data as if it is absolutely true and that it could not possibly be wrong. It's the opposite of smart in every way.
> that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
It can make copies. It cannot generate anything novel. There was no part of my life that was hampered by the fact I couldn't generate images or videos. This is an amusement, not anything that adds to my bottom line.
If it weren’t so tiring having to wade through all the ai slop they add to products I’m forced to use, the fact that leadership in the field are getting petty and childish about how not everyone thinks their toy is shiny is a real “telling on themselves” moment.
If it actually, truly, world-changingly good as they are _begging us_ to believe they are, they wouldn’t need to care that people disliked it or chose not to use it.
But because they’re practically going red in the face screeching about it, it really comes off as “cope”, to use the hip new word.
Mustafa Suleyman (Microsoft AI CEO) is a grifter. He dropped out at 19 and later ran "product" for Deepmind, riding the coattails of Demis Hassabis.
He's known for:
- bullying employees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafa_Suleyman#cite_note-14:...
- reorgs, pointless meetings, toxic culture (example: extra office day for his org): sources who work at Microsoft
- https://x.com/pmddomingos/status/1972584701736157664
- He's a corporate climber, good at empire building, which is why Google let him go. Hires product people from his ex companies and you are left with 3 engineers and 5 product managers for a feature and don't ship anything useful.
Seems like a perfect match for a product that is a computer that lies.
I mean, if they want to put a grifter and a con artist in charge of their division and torpedo themselves, I say let them go for it!
Something, something, never interrupt your opponent whilst they’re making a mistake.
> it's hard to believe we're going to see a version of Windows that isn't bloated with AI functionality most people didn't ask for.
All the leadership need to do is read these types of articles and they’ll see what’s going on outside the walls. One wonders how the internal incentives can be so wrong.
Because they're right. They'll all collude to make sure that you can't install a non-"smart" OS, just like you can't buy an non-"smart" tv, and the public will be well-trained to mumble something about the "market" and call you names ("luddite," "techie," "boomer," whatever...) when you complain about it.
Once a generation has been raised who never saw a computer that couldn't refuse to let you type what you wanted into it, young people will stop believing that you could ever type what you wanted. Old people will forget that you could ever type what you wanted. It worked with literally everything else.
Yeah it worked everytime so despite complaints so they have all the reason to believe it will work this time either.
The future is never certain and, as always, there will be unexpected and rapid societal shifts that may change things rapidly, but those may well be 300 years out.
The investors want AI because they believe it will replace all intellectual work, and so the company with the best AI will get all the money from several other sectors.
The execs want AI to show to the investors to improve their job security and compensation packages.
The middle managers want AI to show execs to improve their promotion causes.
The customers only get to talk to the day to day employees of the company, so their opinion doesn’t matter to the rest of the hierarchy
Reminds me of the Xbox One reveal disaster.
I had to remind myself what that was about
> The Xbox One reveal disaster in 2013 stemmed from controversial policies that were widely rejected by consumers, primarily the mandatory 24-hour online check-in (effectively an "always-online" requirement) and severe restrictions on used games. Compounded by a primary focus on TV and media features over gaming, and a higher price tag of $499 with a mandatory Kinect, the policies caused a massive public backlash. This allowed the PlayStation 4 to successfully position itself as the consumer-friendly gaming option, ultimately forcing Microsoft to reverse all the controversial DRM policies before the console's launch.
This is pretty damning: [0] Talking to Windows’ Copilot AI makes a computer feel incompetent
0: https://www.theverge.com/report/822443/microsoft-windows-cop...
VR is just as impressive. Doesn't mean I want my OS to be VR-only going forward.
VR actually helps me get more exercise (Beat Saber), so I'd definitely call it more impressive :P
We need to see actual improvements to our day to day lives if we want to see support for AI. At the moment, people are seeing improvements in technology, but they're feeling the decline of the welfare of those around them, they're feeling food insecurity, they're feeling uncertain about job security.
"AI" is not a machine for improving the lives of people, it's a tool for consolidating power and wealth at the top. Declining welfare and access to basic human needs shows that decision makers are getting better at min/maxing the economy.
The CEO asks: if they have no bread then why don't they eat cake?
Most CEOs nowadays should be replaced asap
Aarguably one of the more reasonable usecases for LLMs
This genius probably doesn't use Windows as his daily driver so of course he's not bothered by it.
They use the worst model in 2025 by default, combine it with their dumb api and expect people to like it? You can't even switch to gpt5 or anything better in their stupid copilot ui.
People think Windows sucks. People think AI sucks. Combine the two, ??? Still sucks
Windows sucks + AI -> Windows 11 is an unusable mess.
Microsoft is a multi-trillion dollar company. Is it too much to ask for them to develop and maintain two separate Windows flavors with different focus?
1. Windows 11 - keep doing what they are doing, add AI, ads, all sorts of guardrails, whatever the 80% of users need
2. Windows 11 Enthusiast - Bring back Win 2000 theme, no guardrails, best-in-class dev experience, hyper-optimised for gaming, no AI, no ads
I would pay significantly more for the special version that I did for my Win 11 pro copy.
Oh, I’m a “cynic” because I’m upset at Microsoft continuing to violate my consent over and over again, huh.
Wonder if he calls any of his rejected dates a “cynic” because they said no to him, too.
I'd bet good money that he thinks all his exes are "crazy"
I am still puzzled by how you can be a human being in this world and not be impressed by people.
The more we study AI, the more we discover one fundamental truth above an the others: people are really, really, really, really impressive.
A human being still absolutely melts an LLM like a Salvador Dali clock if the challenge is to innovate. In the race between human potential and LLM potential it isn't even close. Not a little close. Not remotely close. About as close as we are to each other compared to how close we each are to the sun.
And yet somehow there's always some fucking moron who apparently never considered this for a fraction of a second and runs around screaming that a fucking program will replace a fucking person
Yes people are amazing but they are also tedious, annoying, frustrating, unpredictable and undependable. Finding someone that will flow and synergize with you on a project is like winning the lottery. People love to talk the talk but when it’s time to walk the walk the reality and disappointment sets in. Work with enough people and this painful reality sets in very quickly.
However I don’t want an agentic or “A.I.” operating system.
It's not my problem that it's still challenging to find and work with people. I'm saying that it's where all most valuable the rewards are to be had. Unless I was mistaken and the goal is to do what is easy ...
>Unless I was mistaken and the goal is to do what is easy
I don't know about you but my goal is not to work hard. My goal is maximize results while minimizing effort. You know, work smarter not harder.
Yeeaaaah I'm exactly the same, but the LLM strat is actually "work harder not smarter" as far as I can tell. It substitutes quantity of work for quality, then lets you bulk-purchase quantities of work for cheap.
If you want to minmax the work, the only way is to actually do the work.
I was surprised when Microsoft hired him. He always seemed to be the cofounder to Demis Hassabis who took on a philosophical tangent rather than the hard engineering needed to build transformative technologies and user experiences. I feel Microsoft lost a gem when Panos Panay left them. He really did some great work on the Surface product line. Surface Studio in particular.
"It must be the customers who are wrong," said no successful businessperson ever.
This made me think of Henry Ford's quote about people wanting a faster horse. Granted, he was an extreme outlier, which is why he's worth quoting
But when people told him his cars sucked and they wanted their horses back, he didn-
Wait, no, that never happened. People bought his cars voluntarily and came back for more. If Ford had stolen horses out of peoples' barns and left cars in their places, then said, "You just don't like change!" when they objected, that would be more like modern-day Windows.
I just don’t get the sense that we are at the model T stage yet. This feels more like the Cugnot Steamer era, not the Model-T era.
1.6% of GDP wasn't poured into the model T. And even if it was there was a definite market and a clear path to profitability. These fundamentals are missing, have been missing for many years, from AI. No matter how much money gets poured in there is still no way to make it profitable. It is entirely a game of wealthy spending money to consolidate power.
Is AI-windows really the car though?
more like they retrofitted a motor into a dead horse with an exoskeleton.
Who the fuck actually wants Recall spyware?
That "quote" is most likely a modern invention anyway:
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/02/23/horses-quote-henry-fo...
I hate that quote. Whenever I see it brought up, it makes me wonder what people think it's supposed to represent. The hypothetical person asks for faster horses because they know they'll be dismissed if they ask for something they think is even more impossible than faster horses.
Imagine the ghost of Henry Ford asked me what I wanted from transportation today and I said "a new novel technology to enable sub-second transcontinental travel". I'd be laughed at even harder than in an alternate reality where I asked for marginally more convenient air travel, without knowing Henry Ford actually did resurrect himself and invent the Stargate last tuesday.
Wasn't there something about the wormhole that required it connect two relatively large gravitational bodies rather than a single one? I also remember 'harmonics' related to having more than one Stargate on a planet, even if the other was unusable.
For sub light second I think Scifi tends to like something along the line of isolating a region of space in an energy field and then either shifting or transposing that area with another. At least for the not 3D body printer death machine version of teleportation. Though maybe that was a very poorly phrased description of imposing a probability shift via precisely regulated change of energy state for a reference frame to match the state of another region.
We are impressed by AI, and are using on our tools, what we don't want is to be force feeded into using AI in every single corner of Microsoft products, all of them.
> The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
The image and video generation capabilities of AI is the most unimpressive part of AI's! It's the LLM's that are the most inpressive. Those might, just might, even make some sense in an OS, since plenty of people are happy to outsource a quick email or script to AI. Hell, what if your OS had a built-in AI to troubleshoot bugs for you? That might even conceivably be an improvement.
> Over in the comments, some users pushed back on the CEO's use of the word "unimpressed," arguing that it's not the technology itself that fails to impress them, but rather Microsoft's tendency to put AI into everything just to appease shareholders instead of focusing on the issues that most users actually care about, like making Windows' UI more user-friendly similar to how it was in Windows 7, fixing security problems, and taking user privacy more seriously.
I'm sure adding AI to Windows would make privacy problems even worse. Not to mention agentic AI could create a whole new class of security problems if not implemented carefully.
Windows has just become too bloated trying to do to many things. I like CoPilot, but all the “Clippy” style integrations of crap in Windows directly is just poor design. Microsoft also doesn’t have user trust in the way Apple does, so everyone just assumes MSFT is going bad things with the data.
It's not even a question of trust or loyalty. Microsoft has explicitly told us they're doing bad things with the data.
I don't think Microsoft as a corporation is any longer even aware of customer trust as a concept. All we are is a KPI and a credit card to be exploited for anything they feel they can take.
We aren't even people to Microsoft anymore. Just a revenue source to be maximally exploited right now with no concern for future revenue.
> Microsoft also doesn’t have user trust in the way Apple does, so everyone just assumes MSFT is going bad things with the data.
I think this is a big part of it. If Apple ever achieves their vision for personal context Siri & AI in their OS, I bet people will praise it and actually use it. Because Apple has built trust with their customers, and has strong marketing around privacy.
Microsoft burned that bridge a long time ago. They feel sleazy. Maybe if they haven't violated their users trust over and over again, people would be more receptive.
Perhaps just me, but isn't this a case of the AI you ship to hundreds of millions of users isn't that impressive? The CoPilot (or Gemini in google workspace) experience is almost a different product it's so far off the raw performance of paid models.
I can't stand interacting with these AI buddies that feel like simpletons. Stuff like Claude Sonnet 4.5 however i use for work daily.
It is going to be the next Windows Me, Vista, Windows 8, and while I usually do pro-Windows comments, I also don't want an agentic OS Microsoft style.
I'll take Charms, mouse gestures, and the Start Screen over Copilot any day.
At least those things felt like a sincere attempt to move HCI forward. Perhaps not very well tested to understand how all the parts work together, but at least sincere. MS' Copilot brand is a broken solution in search of a problem.
It's almost like the kind of trap a lot of solo devs get into where they build a thing that is interesting to them but then can't find anyone else interested. But at least the solo devs built something that worked for themselves. I can't imagine anyone at MS eating their own dog food on this stuff.
At a company like MS, that shouldn't happen. They're supposed to have the resources to understand what their customers want. But we've seen this trend for the last 15 years. Companies like MS, Meta, Google, don't want to engage and collaborate with the customer. They want to push ideas down and be celebrated for their design brilliance. They don't even really A/B test this stuff anymore. The inmates are running the asylum.
It wasn't even ten years ago when I was participating in user studies as a developer at MS. And it was the real deal: we had a bunch of people, specifically selected to give a diverse cross-cut of the user base (so varying backgrounds, experience level etc), sit down and try to do some simple tasks with our product, while devs and PMs watched over a camera. And, crucially, you couldn't ask questions or provide guidance during that time - only after they were done. That was incredibly informative, much more so than any telemetry I've seen before or after, and I wish that was the norm in all companies; but, in any case, Microsoft definitely had both the resources and the inclination to do that.
The problem is that no amount of studies or A/B testing is going to change a political decision inside the company. And with AI, I'm convinced that for all the big players it is political at this point simply because all the execs have bet so much money on it. If they can't make it work, we're talking about literally billions of dollars of responsibility. Hence these desperate attempts to shove it everywhere in hopes that something somewhere would work well enough, if not to recoup the investment, then at least to postpone the moment it all comes crashing down.
The big problem I see now is that, when this bubble pops, there won't be any blood in the streets for the executive class. We truly live in a two class system where people like Nadela, Musk, Theil, and Altman and the slew of their enablers will never see any personal consequences for the havoc they have worked.
People are crying out for an intelligent Clippy to help them through the day. (Or maybe that little dog they used for a while, though don't know its name)
Was the dog ever the default? There were like 10 or so appearances you could change clippy to and the dog was one of them but clippy was the default so is the one people remember
Just looked it up and the dog was named "Rover" (another classy name from Microsoft). Rover was an option when introduced in "Microsoft Bob", but then later became the default search companion in XP's file search.
Also, we have Rover to blame for Comic Sans:
> Microsoft graphic designer Vincent Connare designed the typeface Comic Sans when he noticed that Rover's speech was displayed in Times New Roman, which he felt was inappropriate for a cartoon dog.
He seems to be intentionally missing the point of most of the complaints in order to direct away from his core area. The many legitimate criticisms of windows poor user experience lately will eventually drive change, but long will that take?
Not to mention, I can find AI perfectly impressive and still have absolutely no day-to-day use for it… certainly not enough to justify it taking over my operating system experience.
Heck, I Do have day-to-day use for it, and I still don't want it to completely take over how I use and interact with my OS.
Nor do I ever want to have a voice conversation with my computer to where it responds in an uncanny valley voice. If I do want to use voice, it's to give a command. No response needed. "Hey computer, call John" that's it. Do the thing, don't talk back. A glorified voice assistant is all the further it needs to go.
What did I just read? Microsoft has employed this person? They are paying him a salary?
"I grew up playing Snake on a Nokia phone" has got to be the most Millenial excuse I've heard to date.
Imagine mcdonald's CEO saying "But it has so much calorie density for the price! and the bigmac tastes so sweet". People don't necessarily want calorie density just the same as they don't want their burgers tasting like sweet pie, not the right flavor for the context. Similarly, most people aren't necessarily trying to be productive, and they want features in the right context, and when desirable.
Tangentially, Why is copilot, or even windows 11 as a whole so bland? Forget the features, why won't they slap some nice looking UI to sell the darn thing? wtf is up with the weird rainbow icon thing for copilot? It looks like something I would have scribbled together in photohshop when I was in highschool. Back to my food example, presentation of food carries most of the weight of what makes the food appetizing. UI/UX is presentation. A sweet hamburger, or a grey burger meat is bad UX just as a copilot showing up in random undesirable places is.
Ai basically kills human creativity.
Cognitive offloading: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6
Just like using calculator or Excel, I think overuse will really dull our minds, we'd end up preferring not waste our mind thinking about a problem but just throw it at the "simulated intelligence". I wonder where that'll take us.
For me it’s the opposite. AI has enabled me to write songs and create pictures. I can’t draw but AI helped me to implement ideas I had.
AI is paying for talent, like soliciting a prostitute for sex. You get the same "thing", but in the end it's just a transaction.
In what way is this different from paying a designer or writer?
have you considered not all ideas are good and maybe they shouldn't see the light of day?
Imagine a general responding to anti-nuke protestors by wondering aloud how they could fail to be impressed by atom bombs. Imagine what kind of self-absorption that would require.
Well yes we dont want you slurping up all our data indiscriminately and feeding some AI with and and thereby enshittifying the OS.
If i need to use AI I will paste text into ChatGPT.com or wherever, i dont need Word to constantly annoy me with it.
Of course this guy is “surprised”, his whole division will be shut down if this fails.
Aside: The cookie consent banner on this website is “unlawful”. I cannot choose to reject the cookies.
It's a shame that society is just devolving and we're just seeing it happen in real time. Inhuman opportunists are enacting an increasingly aggressive hostile takeover in every single industry and ruining it in the process. What's going to happen in the next 10 years?
With this attitude I'm worried about GitHub and VSCode..
Microsoft has been pushing AI features into both VS Code and GitHub for quite some time
> I grew up playing Snake on a Nokia phone! The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
Sorry not everyone has such a primitive mind to paper over the chasm. Like, ok, feel free to entertain yourself with a ImageVideoGenBot all your like and see if that blows your mind better than snake, but how would that entertainment help when your experience is made worse by AI integration?
But also, that's just nonsense, we're nowhere close to "fluent conversation with a super smart AI" watch your own ads where it can't even understand that 150% scaling is already set and "super smartly" recommends setting it
The best way I've heard this described today is "he's high on his own supply".
I will never be able to square the circle of c suites pushing both RTO and AI at the same time. You can't seriously believe in the "power" of face-to-face meetings while simultaneously forcing your employees to work with chat bots all day.
The sad part of Microsoft AI is the amount of emails I get about 365 or Azure being down, because of an AI driven change that caused the outage. Maybe if they paid some real developers, it wouldn't be broken so often...
"Why aren't you impressed we installed a real live trained dancing grizzly bear in your bathroom!? Yes, I know nobody asked for that bear. Yes, I know the toilet still doesn't flush. Yes, I know the bear sometimes eats people trying to take a shower. Don't you understand?! I grew up using an OUTHOUSE! Have you seen the bear's colorful hat? That bear literally dances the macarena, you ingrates!"
https://youtu.be/xO0yuf-ToAk
^ My meme comment for today.
Smart AI? You mean probability based token generator?
When Microsoft updated office.com to immediately bring up a copilot prompt, and made it harder for me to find the menu items, I was pretty annoyed.
Foisting AI on people in the way they have means we lose a bit more control, for a feature we don't want. There is a certain level of AI burnout in the market - not every product needs AI. In fact, if a vendor says they have "AI" in their product, I immediately ignore that aspect and ask even more questions about their actual capabilities. Often they are hiding things behind an AI smokescreen.
At this particular moment in time, the old quote about "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" feels relevant on a couple of levels. I keep waiting for the bubble to burst and for these executives to be forced into finally confronting the realities of this technology, but it is taking a very long time indeed.
Not all bubbles burst, some deflate quite silently especially if people expect them to burst.
Microsoft didn't care to ask users when they put copilot into everything and they won't ask users when they'll "consolidate the experience" to whatever works.
And just so I can claim that I "knew it all along" in the future I'll say that some form of "agent OS" is here to stay when the dust settles.
I had a rule of thumb is that if software is telling me about a feature or an update (outside of a tutorial or something, and security) the feature is probably useless, someone is padding their yearly review and I need to turn it off. People were saying I'm too grumpy, glad to see they are starting to come around ;)
Windows users' relationship with Microsoft looks like an abusive spouse relationship.
I don't think the hurdle is so high for companies to sell Linux machines that look like Windows XP and users to just stomach changing OSs.
I think Valve smells blood in the water and that is why they are releasing their new Steam Machine (linux based).
If I want AI, I'll get AI. I don't need you to shove it down my throat.
Not to mention it's mostly inconsistent trash.
MS wants to shove it down user's throats so it makes sure it comes from them not elsewhere. I really hope MS implodes over this. I've had Windows for 25 years and this year it was time for me to just move away to Linux. Good job Microsoft, you won't be missed.
Windows 11 is great once your strip out everything like their app store and Copilot and create an offline account (Windows Pro required).
The fact the he doesn’t even understand the push back tells you everything. It’s not about customers. It’s about investors and promises. Promises that will fail because the most important of business is knowing what your customers want.
We have never asked for blind integration of AI into every aspect of our lives or work.
> [...] with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
Let me think, when was the last time I wanted to generate a picture? Never. Maybe many users do not care about the seemingly only use case AI does not fail to fulfil?
I am not unimpressed, I hate with passion to click away intrusive ”Use Copilot" prompts in MS products. AI is deeply unethical shit. Stolen content transformed under massive waste of energy, i.e. heating the planet.
Yes, sometimes the results are impressive. But so are the mistakes it makes. You can't just trust the stuff it produces. I don't see that my colleagues who use it all the time have any better productivity.
Every day Teams gives me the choice to 'add Copilot panel', and the alternative is only 'Maybe later'. No simple "No".
In the past week, I have noticed two things that have "aggravated me" to no end...
Many of my colleagues use a Teams virtual background - I noticed the other day that at least one had the CoPilot logo now injected onto the "blank" wall space behind them... Asked one person if they did that themselves... no, they did not...
Next - NOTEPAD... Yeah, at some point recently that was updated to have a CoPilot button.. No thank-you, that's not why I use notepad... (you can turn it off for now at least)
Today I was using $tool with some dense docs and average forums. In a moment of weakness, I asked an LLM. It said, "just use strpos! :magic_wand:". Of course, strpos didn't exist, but it was in the question for the top result on Google for my problem: "I want to do x with $tool, kind of like strpos in $other_tool". After the impressiveness of the language generation wears off, it's just another bullshit generator and man I've had enough of bullshit these days.
Copilot in Visual Studio is so hit or miss that frequently it's not worth using.
Today I asked it to add a constant as an argument to every call to a specific method in a unit test. The result was pure slop: The prompts leaked out into the proposed diff, and there was just a list of every method call, not placed where the method calls were in the unit test.
Just get the darn stuff to work before you shove it into every corner of my life.
I would simply urge that its important to listen to your end users. Microsoft has a grip on enterprise customers, but everyone else has at least two other options. The third option is not having a PC at all, and I bet a lot of people are totally happy with that given how powerful phones and tablets are now.
The only thing I used Windows for was games, and that moat has all but vanished in the last few years. I game AAA games on linux with no issue now. Zero need for Windows. I had Windows as a home OS for 20 years, and it was their alienation through anti-patterns that caused me to switch. Not features, not compatibility, not performance. The clear and braindead obvious anti-consumer actions they made year after year.
LLMs are awesome bullshit generators. Cant see why some CEOs would not be impressed by them.
It's not that we're unimpressed with certain capabilities, we just don't want it shoved down our throats at every turn, and without any clear improvement in our ability to perform the daily tasks we need or want to do.
It’s not that people are unimpressed with ai, it’s that they are unimpressed with what it can even on windows and forcing us to interact with it. Like I can’t even change basic settings with it. If it were good, you don’t need to tell me to used it!
>"A man can not be made to understand when his entire job depends on his not understanding." —Upton Sinclair
Of course MS would prove intransigent. They always knew better than their users, that’s nothing new.
Just shows how out of touch they are. So the AI bubble seems to be composed of smaller bubbles around individual CEOs.
AI bubble wrap or AI insulating foam?
The bubble will pop eventually. So bubble wrap it is. Insulating foam doesn't really "pop"
Every person I consider smart / intellectually engaged, curious, regardless of the age, profession and affiliation with tech companies is actually deeply impressed by LLMs either by themselves or if they encounter what LLMs can do.
LLM bashers either feel threatened by them (most likely they come from creative professions and don’t want to learn new tools - it took years to learn how to draw and suddenly you have nano-banana - that may sting) or just latch on to the hater bandwagon because hey it’s sooo cooool to bash techies - take it nerds. Or engineers who can’t stand the fact that someone can actually leapfrog 5-6 years they spent adapting to new tools.
LLM is a VERY new tool, it’s not easy to master, it requires a change of mindset (it’s not “press a button get a LED light up” type of experience).
People are just lazy - that’s normal.
People who bring up ethics are actually masquerading their laziness with some holier than though posturing that’s inherently empty. The moment it starts benefit them or LLMs get easy enough for them to use they’ll switch their tune.
Name ONE instance where technological progress has been discarded in favor of “ethics”.
5 years later it will be unethical to NOT use LLMs like it’s unethical to submit handwritten documents so that ppl have to suffer through your handwriting - ethics adapt to people not the other way around, otherwise it’s some religious nut job territory.
Yawn, h8rs gonna h8, progress gonna progress.
'The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.'
To dedicated tech professionals or power and possibly even just enthusiasts, I'd agree.
What kind of bubble in their personal life must exist to NOT realise that being accidentally told a brief description of the image the user was looking at and knew full well was in front of them because they slip clicked on the wrong part of the windows UI, is not a selling point but an act of gross irritation.. Most people don't care unless it has a practical use beyond getting in the way of their work.
Mind blowing indeed. Please.. don't be like that person.. expand your social circle outside of work.
A real "Don't you people have phones?" moment.
Is this super smart AI in the room with us right now?
Microsoft is using AI as an excuse to slurp all your personal files and documents. I'd take them to small claims court if I ran Windows
Microsoft AI CEO thinks AI is cool. Film at eleven.
If Elon musk bent over and sucked shit from his own ass and Tesla stock went up, every CEO would start stretching.
Strawmanning, trying to distort the narrative and gaslight us by attacking a made-up perspective instead of the real arguments/feelings of the opposition. We aren't so much unimpressed, we're wary of our MOST PRIVATE data being stolen, then sold to the highest bidder or further stolen by hackers yet again. We have a bad taste in our mouth from ONEDRIVE. BEING. LITERALLY. IMPOSSIBLE. TO. TURN. OFF. (Unless you switch to Linux which is I guess the only choice now.) And the fact that they have shown they don't care about consumer preferences and will always continue to push their juggernaut of bad decisions on us out of monopolistic hubris. I thought this guy was smart but I guess he's just another AI-assist tool.
I'm glad I switched to MacOS 3 years ago.
The ONLY thing keeping people in WIndows anymore, is propietary software, that is how TERRIBLE Microsoft has become.
He is deliberately and disingenuously missing the point. It's not that we are unimpressed by AI (although we might be). The problem is companies that are coercing users to use it by jamming it everywhere and making decisions on the user's behalf by turning it on when it's unwanted.
I am the master and commander of my computer. It should not execute anything without my deliberately commanding it to. But that's not good enough for Microsoft. They see themselves as the commander of my computer. My computer should do what they want it to do, not what I want. And it should be really hard for the user to take back control. This coercion is what we are objecting to, not the actual capabilities of the software.
> The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
It's gimmicky and it seems the only people "impressed" or "mindblown" with AI content are boomers on Facebook.
Any time I see some obviously AI generated content, whether it be some LinkedIn-influencer type or some blog spam that got well ranked on SEO, I'm immediately disgusted. The internet is eating itself.
He just says what he needs to say in order to accomplish his company's goals: selling lots of AI.
That makes him as trustworthy as a used car salesman.
I mean I think there's a niche where AI is useful but it's not for all the things they're trying to push it for.
It's the metaverse and blockchain hypes all over again. Always trying to cram it into situations where it adds no value and even detracts. Instead of focusing on the ones where it really does.
AI CEO or AI CEO?
Did they finally start replacing them with AI?
Both. AI AI CEO.
inshallah
The power of (self-)endoctrination in action
> people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video
> super smart
were there any US presidents named Bob?
No U.S. president has ever gone by “Bob” as a first name or nickname.
A few presidents had “Robert” in their full name, but none were commonly known as Bob:
James Abram Garfield — middle name Abram, not Robert
James Earl Carter Jr. (Jimmy Carter) — no Robert
George Herbert Walker Bush / George Walker Bush — no Robert
William Jefferson Clinton — no Robert
Barack Hussein Obama II — no Robert
...
The response continues at decent length here, in much the same vein: https://chatgpt.com/share/691eb846-8198-8010-bd3d-975fe1778d...
I just asked this myself:
"No. There has never been a U.S. President whose first name was “Bob.” A few presidents had names that could be shortened to Bob—most commonly Robert—but no U.S. President has had the first name Robert, either. (There have been presidents with middle name Robert, such as James Earl “Jimmy” Carter Jr., but that’s different.) So: no Presidents named Bob, and none named Robert as their first name.
> Jimmy?
(generic summary of who Jimmy Carter is)
> So he also isn't a Robert.
Correct — there have been no U.S. Presidents with the first name Robert.
A few had middle name Robert (e.g., James Robert “Jimmy” Carter does not have Robert as a middle name, for clarity — his middle name is Earl), but no president’s given first name has been Robert.
So your original statement stands: No “Bob” No “Robert”
Want a list of presidents by first name to double-check?"
My favorite part is it desperately inserting a Robert into Jimmy Carter's name to appease the context. I wonder if a diffusion based LLM would avoid that kind of failure.
lol ya, the Jimmy Carter thread is amazing, these quotes sound like something out of a standup bit
> There have been presidents with middle name Robert, such as James Earl “Jimmy” Carter Jr., but that’s different.
> James Robert “Jimmy” Carter does not have Robert as a middle name, for clarity — his middle name is Earl
... Bloody hell. I do not routinely talk to our magical robot overlords, but I had vaguely assumed that they were better than that at this point.
> George Herbert Walker Bush / George Walker Bush — no Robert
I do like how it seems to have decided that Bush I and Bush II are the same person.
To be fair, it’s pretty good at some things. But it’s often hard to tell in advance which things, and it can fail on really dumb stuff. Like I don’t know why “presidents named Bob” sets it off.
The technology is amazing, but Microsoft has no imagination in the way they try to make use of it. It's sad. It also legitimately hurts society that they are further blurring the line between what is an offline and online experience in Windows, which I fully and openly reject in the strongest of terms.
Also, Co-pilot objectively sucks and is a lying disinformation machine that has rarely helped me with anything.
Trust is Microsoft's greatest asset and they don't seem to have any champions inside the company that can tell these people they are destroying the company's trust.
Bing has been broken for a year now and nobody has fixed it. ATROCIOUSLY broken. That hurts trust.
I'll be impressed when they manage to fix Windows 11! There are still many regressions compared to Windows XP through 10. They can add all this AI nonsense to the taskbar, yet they can't reinstate the features people have been asking for.
Meanwhile we get a react native web app for a start menu, and you can't even move the taskbar's location on the screen. A feature that has existed in Windows since 95.
Something is seriously dysfunctional in Microsoft.
Unfortunately Apple seems to be gong the same way. On Mac and iPhone I am seeing more things that don’t work well.
Wow. This CEO effectively says that he loves AI things in Windows therefore all Windows users who hate AI things should just get fucked and suffer from his decisions.
There is no super smart "AI". An "AI" gives formulaic responses that always follow the same pattern, makes an incredible number of mistakes and claims different things all the time.
The researchers themselves were surprised by the initial public acceptance:
https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-was-inaccurate-borin...
"I will admit, to my slight embarrassment … when we made ChatGPT, I didn't know if it was any good," said Sutskever.
"When you asked it a factual question, it gave you a wrong answer. I thought it was going to be so unimpressive that people would say, 'Why are you doing this? This is so boring!'" he added.
After several weeks of "AI" usage everyone figures out what the researchers knew all along due to their continued exposure.
... Wow. "It must be the users who are wrong".
I mean, MS has always had elements of this problem, but this is unusually bad.
Having a fluent conversation with a "super smart" ai is no good to me when it's constantly gaslighting me and making stuff up.
AI in search I could go for:
"Find that meme I downloaded last year with the girl standing by the burning house"
Creating AI slop though? No thanks.
Yet another salesman clown at the head of a multibillion dollar corporation.
MSFT reminds me of INTC.
I guess silicon valley truly makes you tone deaf.
They spent billions of dollars on compute costs and they need to pump the PKIs to justify it. That is the only explanation.
It is the same reason every app (be they web or mobile) gets a redesign every year.
That's gotta be it.
At Ignite yesterday they announced that Security Copilot will now be included for free with E5 licensing.
The tool that until yesterday way $50k for a single tenant deployment. Aka, no one bought it, but they need to juice the KPIs so might as well make it free so it looks like someone is actually using it.
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AI is at odds with humanity. Everyone understands that.
I don’t know much about him, but I’m immediately put off by his post with obvious grammar errors. And I’m not even a native speaker!
On the topic of grammar errors. I have seriously considered leaving several grammar and spelling errors in my posts in order to provide a signal that this post was written by a human. And then I get several sorts of depressed at what this implies for our future.
I came across an article the other day, I wish I saved it, that had sentences which said things like “insert short sentence here” and “spacer sentence here”
As a published article.
I'm a Brit and the grammar seems ok to me. I would have put a comma after the jeez. Not sure about the content though.
He grew up in Britain so he's most likely a native speaker.
It's a Twitter post, not an English essay that's about to be graded.
He's also a CEO addressing a vital issue for the company. Do you really think “dudee so many haters!!” is a response befitting the position?
Seems like he should've used Copilot, is own freaking product, to make the post for him.
or gemini.
Other than missing the word "are", are there other grammar issues with the post I'm missing?