It’s not that people are unimpressed, it’s that the product you’re shipping is:
- Not what people want
- Not what you think it is, or at least not what you sell it as
- Is violating people’s privacy and intellectual property rights
- Is just plain not useful.
It’s fucking cool that computers can talk now. Sadly, they are not super smart.
Perhaps a solution is to just replace the CEOs,not being all that smart is practically part of the job description.
Even my Linux PC talks to me through the terminal. It is just that it is very specific and technical but at the same time isn’t invasive and hogging my resources.
It is pretty cool that you can run an LLM in your terminal and generate valid tar or ffmpeg commands with natural language.
I practically live in the terminal, I’ve never seen an IDE that compares.
I’ve been working on my own agent harness/cli app for months and being able to run local models on my hardware, running my own software, in my preferred dev environment is great. 100% private, with nearly zero security risk.
I’ve got a framework desktop for this so it’s running 10W to 80W peak during generation, which is about two incandescent lamp sized light bulbs when in use. That’s totally disregarding the model training though.
I’m trying the new olma open models too, so hopefully they get better and I can have better accountability on the training side too.
I’m pretty opposed to the waste that Meta et all are generating for this stuff.
- Windows as a whole is less useful than prior versions in significant ways. They presumably know this, but think they can make it better in the long run than it was before, without AI. But given that a lot of what they’ve done is tear out well-suited technologies for the problems people face on desktop OSes, and replace them with LLMs that aren’t as well-suited to the task, I’m not sure how they can justify that to themselves. I can’t imagine the justification is particularly good.
It’s good from their perspective. ‘AI’ will be, to their mind, a way to access skills without having to pay for the labor or learn the skills themselves. Never again having to deal with things like ‘employees’ or ‘paying people’ is something they’ve wanted for a long time, and now they’ve been told it’s in reach.
And the people selling AI to them are feeding on this desire. Not sure if they’ve also huffed their own supply, or if it’s a tailor-making-the-emperor-new-clothes situation, but either way the result is the same. ‘Just a little longer, bro! A little more power and water bro! And then we totally can all dance off into the sunset, hand-in-hand, leaving all those icky poor people behind and roll around in infinite money forever!’
I grew up before playing snake on a phone. Anything good the world will rape till it’s evil. We can’t have good things. It’s not worth it. Shit look what happened to democracy.
Honestly the older I get the more I want to move off the grid and disconnect from all this mass marketed manipulation of the human species.
This is so true. I’m nearing 40 and becoming more and more frustrated with (mainly) horrible UI redos that move shit around every 6-9 months.
I can’t think of computers as tools anymore because every revision of their OSes just completely obliterates the muscle memory that I’ve built up from decades of using them.
This is the worst! I can’t stand it when I open up some software and I have to click through some bullshit tour of new things I don’t care about.
It’s one of the reasons I’m happy I took the time to learn emacs. The UI has been consistent for decades and it works the same across all platforms.
Im not quite 40 but ive found myself going back to old computers and games. When shit was done, it was DONE. No constant updates and fiddling bullshit. And it didnt require a billion accounts, spyware apps, and constant internet connection to do anything.
I think about games today, kids wont be able to look back on any game they used to play because A. The servers will be shutdown, and B the game CONSTANTLY has massive re dos that change everything about it so nothing is static.
Thank the gods we have Linux at least. One of the few good things about computers left.
It’s horribe, and getting worse every year.
I got a new company laptop after 2 years with double the RAM, and it still takes ages to open powerpoint or any other program. And not just Windows: I remember a time where iOS was snappy and smooth, not laggy and bloated. Web also sucks, even with adblocker. I try to find movie tickets, have to click a million times through a mobile-optimized page, instead of getting an overview of the weekly schedule like 10 yrs ago.
One of the best things about my workplace is a lean, no nonsense custom software that integrates HR, controlling, and some other admin things in one place. It looks like it was developed by somebody over a long weekend in the early 2000s. But it’s fast and it works, saving me a ton of admin time every day as a team lead.
We are switching to SAP next year.
Bro same, win 11 work laptop with an i7 and 64 gb ram and ssd. Absolute dogshit slow and freezes up daily.
My linux pc with a 15 YEAR OLD CPU and HALF the ram, runs 4x faster.
Also. Use kagi for search. Feels like 2006 again (peak internet age)
That dogshit is often an antivirus and other corpo surveillance processes…
My work laptop has at least 2-3 browser extensions that are glorified keyloggers/traffic sniffers.
One of them legit intercepts all my web POST requests and runs them through a locally hosted ML model to try to detect whether I’m mindlessly spilling company data into ChatGPT (or any other big name AI).
That’s all fine or whatever, but Chrome shouldn’t be burning 10-15 GB of memory on my laptop with only a handful of tabs open…
Sigh
We are switching to SAP next year.
My condolences :(
Shit look what happened to democracy.
*What has happened to democracy so far
** In the United States
For what it’s worth, I’m sad that this had to be the way that the citizens of the United States found out what the rest of the world already knew, that their country is not a democracy.
I’d take a look at the UK and the EU’s Digital ID pushes. Canada is also fairly rough. It’s not just the USA, though that nation is certainly the worst.
UK is a close second with its Digital ID being required for work, crackdown on criticism of the UK/Israel, and locking down content deemed *undesirable * (porn, coverage of Ukraine-Russian war, coverage of Israeli atrocities in Palestine)
Being unable to get my computer to do what I want because I don’t know how it works is less frustrating than being unable to get my computer to do what I want because •it• doesn’t know how it works.
What’s worse is when your computer software manufacturer makes such a bad, unintuitive product that they have to invent an artificial super intelligence just to help you figure out how to use it.
Exactly why I’m switching to Linux!
“Profoundly impressive”?
I find nothing profound about it at all. It’s a devastating resource hog, it’s wrong a lot of the time, it’s manipulated by its owners to deliver the messages they want or avoid inconveniencing them, it lends itself to the further stupidification of humans who are too lazy to fact check(that’s almost everyone), it’s used to make video lies in the face of objective truth and sexually humiliate women.
Honestly, fuck AI.
Why it couldn’t be strictly deployed as a backup to human skill such as looking for cancer, trying to formulate better drugs, etc. instead of the invasive garbage it is being used to get rid of humans.
Ai is great. It can detect cancers earlier. It can optimize traffic lights to reduce travel times and accidents. It can calculate folds of proteins. It can find and summarize tiny details from huge sets of data.
Fuck cramming it into my operating system though. I don’t need an LLM to run a query on Lightroom and give me a summary of the application and suggest how I can download and install it when it is already installed on my system and I just want to filter my list of apps so I don’t need to scroll halfway down my programs list to open it.
The problem isn’t AI. The problem is the people selling it.
Why did you just say what I said while initially contradicting me yet ignore the valid ctiticisms?
I find nothing profound about it at all.
Honestly, fuck AI.
I was under the assumption that you were against AI all together, not just the data-scraping privacy-violating megacorp deployments of LLMs.
If this was a verbal conversation you’d think that was a normal response instead of someone picking a fight.
The reply correctly highlighted the idea that AI is ‘impressive’. It wasn’t a denial of your critiques of AI.
Making sand output what feels like a real conversation is impressive. Making nuclear bombs is impressive. Bad things can be impressive.
I didn’t say the potential capabilities weren’t impressive. Creating interesting things from text prompts is impressive. I do not find it profound.
LLMs ARE impressive! Impressive as hell! But the use case is limited and I do not want that shit jammed in my OS.
Tell ya what. We’re going to shove them in your OS. We’re going to put them in your tv. We’re going to put them in your toaster. We’re going to put them in hour bed. Yeah. We’re going to track when you sleep. We’re going to put it in your toilet. Then we’re going to report all that information to advertisers, who will sell you fiber suppliments, and white noise machines.
And we’ll make you get a digital ID. And track your every movement. Even your bowel movements! And then we’ll have microsoft clippy ask if you’d like to schedule a colonoscopy!
Welcome to the future! The future is dumb…
The whole demo about this was so stupid. The user said “the text on this website is to small, I cannot read it”, and the ai points out how to click through the windows system setting to find the UI scale option which was at 150%. Then it suggest to set it to the current setting of 150% because there was a label “recommended” on it.
It’s a fail on so many levels. Why could it not just set it without telling the user to “click here” through 5 different dialogs and windows? Why set it to the same setting it already has? Why not set the browsers scale if the user said “this website is to small”?
They just want to stuff ai into everything without knowing what problem they need to solve.
As to why not just do it, problem is that the LLM will generate something to do even if it doesn’t know the correct answer. You don’t want agentic ai to go to town because it will screw up and be even harder or impossible to undo whatever it generated to do.
This specific demo worked, but it’s a crapshoot as to whether a scenario will work as an llm “failure” still generates output, and nothing knows that it is “wrong”.
what is even the use case? like for a normal user, instead of like clicking on a programm, they tell the ai to open the program?
like a shell that is just … worse?
or is it supposed to help fix you with having a problem with the operating system? which would be ironic
like only use case i can imagine is for like old people who just can not handle their pc. But the result will just be them sending all their money to a scammer
It’s for people who are functionally illiterate. They think this opens up a whole new market for them to sell to.
what is even the use case? like for a normal user, instead of like clicking on a programm, they tell the ai to open the program?
Yeah, so they can feel like they’re in Star Trek. Except it’s shitty and nowhere near utopia.
We’re actually right right in line for World War 3 in 2026 per the official Star Trek timeline. That should last 27 years.
You know, I don’t remember them trying to talk to the Enterprise’s computer in any of the TOS films. They downplayed that a lot, I think for enhanced realism. It stayed canon that you could talk to computers, but they only did to set the self destruct sequence.
Either way, by TNG they were back at it, and they got in the habit of “Computer: create a holodeck program simulating the appearance and personality of the engineer who designed the Enterprise. Run it in Holodeck 2.” We’re getting pretty close to that capability now, minus the room full of VR.
The problem? LLMs will tell you to add elmer’s glue to pizza sauce to hold the cheese in place, because someone joked about that on Reddit once. They have no sense of reality.
In fact, it’s kind of amazing how well the writers of TNG did with that episode and it’s follow-up. The simulated Leah started showing romantic behavior, and Geordi formed a parasocial relationship with Leah Brahms…a married woman who didn’t know Geordi personally, and so there was this uncomfortable moment where Geordi was uncomfortably familiar with a complete stranger. The Enterprise’s computer hallucinated a Leah Brahms who was single and ready to mingle.
They’re working on making that problem into a consumer product.
The end game is probably something like “Write me a report from x and y about z and send it to my phone” or somerhing. And it does that in Microsoft-approved software and sends the data to MS too.
Just so you can imagine yourself having a personal Jarvis instead of doing the thing yourself and get better with it.
There’s a bunch of usecases.
For example, you can just tell Copilot to do a thing instead of spending however long it would take to google a solution. Will it gimp learning? Of course it will. But that’s technology advancement in a nutshell - making things more accessible, by making them easier, thus making some baseline levels of knowledge obsolete. We no longer learn Assembly to interact with our computers, future generations won’t know where Settings are, because an AI Agent will be doing it all for them.
Another example is people suffering from disabilities or even just temporary injuries. Imagine being able to fire up your PC and just tell it to play your favourite show, instead of having to use your feet or, I don’t know, a pencil in your mouth, to click through the windows.
The idea is excellent. The implementation is some 5 years too early. The AI systems available, in their current form, are just not there yet for this to work well. Microsoft even pulled an ad they made recently, because people noticed that Copilot made an error there. Or even multiple errors.
I think you have a point, but i also think it would cause a hemorrhage of skilled users. Especially because it would become a very easy tool for increased corpo control over your device. Suddenly your ripped TNG dvds that are indistinguishable from pirated ones are no longer accessible by you just going to your well labeled file location. Now you have a really convenient os that you can tell in plain English that you’d like you pull up some star trek and it says ok and tries to download a streaming service app. You tell it that you’d like to watch the DVD rips you have of it instead and it tells you that those files have been locked for possible copyright violations.
That’s just the scenario that came to mind immediately.
I think you have a point, but i also think it would cause a hemorrhage of skilled users
I agree. However, at the same time, I recognise that when the first OS with GUI was released, people were saying the exact same thing.
Especially because it would become a very easy tool for increased corpo control over your device
In its current form, the agent will be run locally (requiring a device with an NPU), so corpo won’t have any access or control to your device.
Suddenly your ripped TNG dvds that are indistinguishable from pirated ones are no longer accessible by you just going to your well labeled file location
It would be impossible for an AI agent to distinguish a ripped DVD from a home-made recording, so that’s not possible.
Also - it’s not replacing the GUI. You can still do everything manually if you prefer that.
Imagine being able to fire up your PC and just tell it to play your favourite show, instead of having to use your feet or, I don’t know, a pencil in your mouth,
[…]
In its current form, the agent will be run locally (requiring a device with an NPU), so corpo won’t have any access or control to your device.
I’m imagining this so hard right now.
I honestly don’t understand the relation between these two quotes and your comment. Could you elaborate?
Current AI image generation is really impressive if you compare it to previous ones like openais gpt2
Its unimpressive when compared to humans, who manage to do so much
I was having a conversation with my brother who was like: “I can ask AI to summarize a subject for me so I can learn about it way faster.”
And like, that’s cool I guess, but it’s a computer generated summary with no soul. I recently bought a book on a super niche subject, because of course there’s a researcher somewhere who writes stuff like that, and it’s so much richer than any AI could generate.
Basically, replacing human art and research is a huge loss, because we’d no longer be talking to one another. I want to hear about niche topics and look at art from people who can think and dream and are passionate about it. No matter how impressive AI will get, we shouldn’t end an intergenerational conversation that has been going on for millennia.
/rant
“I can ask AI to summarize a subject for me so I can learn about it way faster.”
“And as a bonus, AI will withhold crucial bits of information, make up others, and then shade this twisted, regurged slop with whatever bias suits its owner, so I can walk away confident I have seen a thorough treatment of that subject and not need any further information at all. Win/win!”
(Yeah, I know that’s not what your brother said, it’s just what I hear when people genuinely rhapsodize about the bowdlerized half-digested shit they get from AI and think they actually got what they asked it for, assuming it exists to serve their own needs and not its masters.)
Totally agree with every word you said. At this particular point, I consider AI to be a net loss to humanity: unreliable, untrustworthy, unregulated, slurping up water and energy on an already warming planet, fed with literally stolen material and not satisfied even with that, killing websites and hogging bandwidth, pushed into every corner of our digital lives regardless of what we may want or need, and designed above all else to hoover up salable data on individuals while capturing as much manual searching and learning as it possibly can to ensure that the flow of information remains in the control of big data.
“I can ask AI to summarize a subject for me so I can learn about it way faster.”
These kind of arguments always remind me of this Alanah Pearce video:
“But anytime that I ask it about a topic that I don’t really know anything about, it just teaches me so much. It’s actually just the topics that I do know things about that it tends to be wrong on.”
Excellent video btw, if anyone hasn’t seen it yet :)
Every other update in ANYTHING has this shit shoveled at us. My god it’s getting so annoying. I had to look up how to get my search bar to stop freaking asking me to ask Google AI about my search! Every goddamn search!
I love the fact that the idiot reckons he can just bluster his way out of this. People are really upset about the decisions Microsoft are making, and it’s not as if they don’t have competition. His response to all of this is to quadruple down on his already brainless decision.
No company in history has ever deserved to lose as much as Microsoft has.
If every single screen produced between 30 and 25 years ago just so happened to have a Snake game you had to look at every few minutes, people’s (rightful) impressedness would turn into equally rightfull unimpressedness bordering on disgust.
It’s not LLMs technologically that’s unimpressive. It’s shoving them down people’s throats.
Sometimes less is more.
Never been a better time to ditch Windows.
Which has pretty much always been the case
Reminds me of an old saying my father once told me:
The best time to ditch windows was 10 years ago. The second best time is today
NOT TRUE!.. tomorrow will be even better
deleted by creator
LLMs are the lava lamp of computing.
They are provably less random than a lava lamp, though. And also not very pretty to look at.
They consume a lot of energy for an extremely narrow use case. Output is still random. Companies such as Cloudflare will try hard to find a use for them when a better and extremely cheaper alternative exists, such as weather sensors.
Wait a minute.
Wait wait wait wait wait.I saw the lava lamp thing. Is that just a wacky PR stunt?
It didn’t even occur to me that there are less stupid ways of getting hundreds of reliably chaotic numbers.I gotta look into this more, this is spinning my brain.
Measuring any random enough system at any moment would yield usable results. You could be stirring tea leaves and it would be perfectly usable.
Half the internet already runs on lava lamps (not a joke). https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/lava-lamp-encryption/
Read my reply to the other comment.
I am so happy in my Arch Linux, no AI, no “this pc”, almost everything under my control. Windows used to be great until the enshitification started to spread like plague everywhere. I still have a decades old bank intel laptop (19+ years old, literally acquired from a bank and they were about to throw it and many others away but I managed to take one with me, it is huge and makes my chest look small) with a working windows 7 I sometimes use to relieve nostalgia, not going to change anything on it plus it became a relic.
Kubuntu here! Got s proxmox server in the garage!
