The PC is so damn snappy compared to Win10 with all the garbage updates. I don’t want widgets on my Lock Screen. I don’t want to know about Candy Crush when I open the Start Menu. And I definitely do not want to use Edge, Firefox is fine thanks. Let alone the AI BS set for Win11.
I use windows only when I play a game, and wouldn’t touch it otherwise
And then you have people regularly showing up in threads saying they ran a "debloat" script and now its impossible to run teams and the fix is "rebuild the os". None of this is as simple or risk free as it could be.
Sadly, this has been in vain; my parents are convinced that it will be "too hard" and I guess that having to call me and have me walk them through wiping their hard drive whenever Windows Update [2] decides that they'd prefer my mom buy a new laptop is somehow "easier". A part of me wants to create an ultimatum and say "I will not play tech support anymore unless you move to Linux or macOS", but I know they would call my bluff and ultimately I would end up caving.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45601144
[2] If anyone here works on Windows Update, please consider a career in literally anything else. Software development clearly isn't for you. There are many other positions out there and I suspect you'd be better at nearly any of them than you are at writing software.
The brain needs to stay flexible.
Good luck
That being said, I have never had kernel panics or opened my computer to find a corrupted OS after a bad update (unlike Windows), so there's that.
[0] https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk/issues/137
This probably does not affect everyone because I have never seen this issue in Mint
Even still, even if it does require a tech-literate person to fix, they have access to that by me, and I can likely fix it for them in a few minutes with tmate or something, as opposed to Windows Update bricking the computer, which required basically an entire day from me to fix.
Oh, and if an update does cause an issue, Linux has competent snapshotting tools because they have filesystems that didn’t coexist with dinosaurs and as such if something breaks a fix is a reboot (and probably a twenty minute phone call with me) away. On Ubuntu if you install ZFS on root you can configure it to take an auto snapshot before updates, for example.
it also doesn't work with some of her old workbooks or with her mom's copy of excel
If you don't want to be sneaky about it, just install it next time Windows craps itself.
I suppose I could do it when I come down and visit when they’re not looking, though I think they would be pretty pissed if I did that.
Hah, one could lie and say "Inside this window called Virtual Box is what Windows 12 will look like, it's a chance to learn it!".
If I installed a VM for them, they would use it exactly once, right after I installed it for them, and then never again.
Heh, "not children" but you complain about having to coddle them and their childish incapability/unwillingness to learn. Meh, enjoy your problem.
While I do find it really irritating that they refuse to leave Windows and I do find their unwillingness to learn new stuff about computers infuriating, I do get it.
Linux has gotten a lot better and easier to use now, but historically there's a reason that it has been associated as a "nerd operating system". Prior to about ~10 years ago, desktop Linux was decidedly unpolished and difficult to use. Getting video and audio drivers working used to be a long and difficult ordeal, package managers were non-intuitive, and we hadn't fully gotten the "web apps have taken over the world" state that we're in now. I've been running Linux for like the last fifteen years and for quite awhile Linux had a well-earned reputation of being hard to use, and I think my parents are afraid of that.
It's gotten much better now, and I think a lot of people could pretty easily migrate without too much issue, but I can't completely blame people for still thinking about how crappy it used to be.
I recently tried to get my mom to use the PWA of Word online, and she said it was "worse" than the desktop version but refused to elaborate as to why.
I know I sound like I'm being harsh on my parents, but it's not like they're stupid or anything. They have spent the last 30+ years using Windows and Microsoft Office, I don't blame them for relying on the tools that they have spent the last three decades learning; I use command line tools that have existed longer than I have [1]. I do understand the stubbornness even if it does drive me a little crazy.
[1] Yes I know that GCC and Emacs and tar and grep have gotten updates since they've been released, but so has Windows.
You're right, Office is where you will struggle.
on the positive side, if their main machine is old, there are no longer win10 updates.
I've had updates break Linux and cause things to not boot anymore, and those aren't fun, but generally fixing it boils down to rebooting to a previous snapshot [1], or logging in with the command line running like three commands.
I did try fixing the computer before we nuked it. I tried walking them through the Windows auto repair, which didn't do anything (but at least it took a long time), and I tried booting into safe mode, but it wouldn't get any farther than the regular boot did. Apparently there is a way to get into a Powershell live-boot (though I didn't know this at the time), so maybe I could have fixed it with that, anything is possible, but ultimately my solution was getting the to flash a live USB of Ubuntu, and I then mounted the drive and rsync'd everything to my server.
[1] Because Microsoft still doesn't have Copy on Write (despite being a proven and more than 20 year old bit of tech) and so they can't do good snapshotting.
Your parents are adults, they can make their own decisions and deal with the outcomes.
A lot of old people have figured out that you can get other people do do stuff for you by pretending you don't understand it yourself.
I don’t think I could help somebody set up modern Windows. If I help someone with a computer, I’m telling them I’ve got it into a reasonably usable and safe state. With all the spyware built into a modern Windows system, I don’t think I could be confident there.
I agree with your point though, and I've tried explaining that to them; if something is broken on your Linux box I can get you to send me a tmate URL and I can likely fix any problem you have quickly just because I am much more used to it. At some point I probably should try doing the ultimatum.
While the parent comment indicates that a child is possibly overstepping, your comment is a greater overstep.
I mean this is basically the ultimatum idea, but presenting it as an unavoidable limitation rather than an arbitrary unwillingness to help.
Unless they've got a genuine Windows app that they need, you might be able to get away with it...
Even if I did do that, I'm quite confident that unless I install the desktop version of Microsoft Office, they would never go for it.
This computer is fast again.
I went with Ubuntu because it has one-click GPT support, even for an old blue-collar novice like me I can do it. So can you.
Next it'll be time to retire the fantastic'est Core2Duo Windows 7 Pro 64-bit -computer you ever did see... but only when it dies of natural causes.
AI on the iPhone is basically a global toggle, one switch turns it all off.
The author used a weird third party browser but if they were just using Firefox or Chrome there really wouldn’t be any AI that couldn’t be turned off/ignored.
Same deal with Windows, there’s no AI features doing anything on my windows 11 PC. Everything on offer has a toggle or uninstall option and the level of nag is far less than the Windows 10 OneDrive days.
The main thing you can’t escape is AI making the internet worse. Then again I do find AI searching to often be way more useful than the pre-AI search that’s clogged with results that don’t match the meaning of what you’re asking for and SEO spam that AI queries can more easily defeat.
I actually use LLMs regularly as part of my work, but never for the dumb stuff these PMs are trying to ram down my throat. And it pretty obvious the applications that annoy people are useless, otherwise they wouldn’t need to harass you with them.
I think you mean “not mainstream”, but even so I believe Arc is based on an existing browser engine like Gecko or Chromium?
> ...my windows 11 PC. Everything on offer has a toggle or uninstall option and the level of nag is far less than the Windows 10 OneDrive days.
Opt-out toggles are a nice option, but they can be set to opt-in 'by accident', by the OS owner.
I fear this is the near future, and not so long after, there'll be no toggles. Politicians and .gov's will be exempt, of course.
One of the AI questions is, "What is the weight capacity of the monitor stand?" and the answer is, "The monitor stand is designed to support and elevate a computer monitor, ensuring stability."
What are we even doing here? Will anyone ever be accountable for all this stupidity that all of us see every day?
The manager can announce his team developed the requested feature…
The executive can proclaim how they’ve embraced AI and the digital transformation…
And now the paper towel companies can prosper from all the extra vomiting…
I asked it what the difference between the standard and the pro version of a dehydrator was and it told me about the pixel counts and refresh rates. The pro dehydrator was apparently for gamers. The actual differences were the door hinge and the tray material (chromed steel vs stainless steel)
But I’m one of those who hasn’t had great experiences using them for anything beyond toy projects.. so maybe my bubble falls more on the AI skeptic side.
Is there any technology in recent memory where the greator public has turned so universally against it?
Most other crappy tech you could just choose to not use.
My workmates love it. Amongst the tech community, I see a divide very similar to the crypto one - everybody who has a stake in it succeeding is very optimistic. Everybody working in other areas seems dubious at best.
If too many careers are tied to AI succeeding, accepting its failure is no longer an option for the company. It if far more attractive to keep shoveling it into more and more places in a desperate attempt to find a use case than to accept you've wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on a hype.
Combine this with AI being used in places where quality is highly subjective and not directly tied to the KPIs business people care about (like Google Search summaries, where the actual product is eyeballs on ads), and we might be stuck with it despite a lack of usefulness.
Ironically AI can be leveraged to do just that. Hope to see some efforts on this front
A lot of these tools are also profitable for the user while being a net negative to society. Flooding platforms with slop can make you a quick dollar while ruining the platform for everyone else.
That has never been less true than it is now, at least in America.
AI isn't making it better, but tbh most of the author's complaints have been a problem since well before LLMs. Engagement bait is profitable, and an internet that connects 8 billion people will always trend toward monoculture.
I've mentioned this before, but I still think that part of the reason Something Awful was and is still fun really boils down to the fact that it cost money to join. It's not a lot of money, but enough to where it keeps bot traffic pretty low (since it would quickly get expensive to keep buying accounts as they get banned). This, in combination with the fact that there's not really a huge benefit to getting engagement other than "it's fun to be funny", and the moderators willingness to ban/probe people who make the forum un-fun, and it's become basically the only social media that I use.
I'm not quite a total boomer, I do understand the appeal of social networks like Twitter or Instagram, but I kind of think that ML recommendation systems are sort of by definition antithetical to anything good. It's not like anything a YouTube or TikTok recommendation gives me is going to meaningfully improve my life, and if these systems work as intended then all they do is make me waste more time than I would normally.
Is the Internet still fun/addictive if you're not actually engaging with people anymore?
SA is just about perfect for me, since it has enough users to avoid the "dead mall" vibe, but it's still a relatively small community.
Edit: even on my PIXEL phone, I honestly don't know how to pull up Gemini. I also think it's ironic that on a forum for companies who are sucking on the AI teet that y'all are complaining about the world you created.
Lol awwww, AI bros are mad.
If I remember on Monday, I'll reply with my portion. Don't own nearly enough to go near radiation on my weekend.
If we take the thing nobody asked for and shove it in users faces as often as possible, this will get lots of happy customers and the product will take off!
People don't care if it can answer questions with more nuance when the smart stuff they paid hundreds or thousands for no longer works.
Getting a response to "Set alarm for 8am" is still a lot quicker in Assistant than in Gemini.
Everything from picking an image in Slides now activating image gen to returning to your main search results now being taken up by AI Mode
You wonder if people are really clearing performance reviews off these metrics without anyone digging deeper
Material 3 guidelines say "Don't display multiple FABs on a single screen":
https://m3.material.io/components/floating-action-button/gui...
Ah, the benefit of using the messaging app Google's neglected is the lack of this Gemini button...
The reason they do it, of course, is that some subset of the company has AI-related metrics they want to hit, and getting you to click that button is how they do that.
Which is so backwards. Of course, in the first place, a lot of these are free products, so it's not surprising that changes in the product benefit the company instead of you. But there is still supposed to be a modicum of respect: features should be there for you to use if you need them, not trying to get your addition and screaming "use me!". The stupid AI metric they're trying to hit isn't even real or beneficial to them; it's fake wallstreet crap because all the management lives in the same AI bubble and it looks good to say your feature got adopted. But the stupid feature isn't even useful or good. Probably decent documentation would be far better. And you just know the button wiggles on the paid version too, they don't give a shit.
This whole industry is conveniently abstracted away from its users by an app or a website, or whatever, so it manages to get away with treating the users like statistics instead of people. It's so disgusting, that the whole world is being taken over by this. Working at a company that does this should be a source of shame. "Manipulating your users" is a vile bottom-of-the-barrel business model. Fortunately everyone also sucks at it so it's still possible, for the most part, to ignore them (social media feeds being the notable counterexample). But it's just such a shitty world to live in.
If a real person did this stuff to your face--selling you something and then wiggling useless features at you out of the corner of your eye forever--you'd curse them out and try to never do business with them again. That's how it should be when a tech company does it, too.
edit: and don't get me started on those stupid little stars. Where did those even come from? Is there anybody who sees that icon and thinks "I should click that"? I'm glad that all the companies use the same icon for their dogshit features, but still, you would think they'd mix it up or something.
Incredibly annoying.
Then, of course, when you attempt to contact said company's customer service, there is none to be had. Only chat bots that not only cannot solve your issue, but can give you inaccurate information. So, what do you do then? There's nothing to be done, you're stuck in an indefinite limbo of customer service purgatory, only being able to guess at what to do.
I, myself, was banned off Instagram. I had a private account, so all I did was view other people's posts and occasionally left comments on their posts, never anything obnoxious or rude. Out of the blue, I received an email telling me my account was suspended and I needed to verify myself by giving them my phone number to get an SMS, check a reCAPTCHA box, and send a selfie to show I was human. I did that and it said I would be unsuspended within an hour, but I got an email stating "We reviewed your account and found that it still doesn’t follow our Community Standards. As a result, your account has been permanently disabled."
Of course, there's no one to follow up with and I'm left racking my brain trying to figure out what I could have done to cause this. Did I reply to someone inappropriately? Was it because I was using a VPN? What could I have possibly done?
We've seen that some people who have been banned on social media find that, essentially the only way to get unbanned was to know someone at Meta [1] or get your story published in the media to get their attention [2] or even resort to SLEEPING with Meta employee(s) to get your account issues resolved [3].
Alternately, some Meta employees have turned unbanning people into a side gig [4] [5] as they know that there is no legitimate way to get your account back. When I inquired about this on Reddit, I was pointed to a site that showed offers of resolution to these problems cost in the $1000-5000 range.
It has gotten to a point that the use of AI has turned life into a literal Kafkaesque nightmare. How soon will AI take the place of customer service for actual necessary services like calling your local DMV to make an appointment or even taking over 911 services? The promises made by AI companies about this software making our lives easier has merely become a drive to implement AI into every possible facet of life, not to benefit anyone, but to drive up profits.
This is rent seeking* by it's purest definition.
* [Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth.] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
[1] When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of “Content Jail” https://www.eff.org/pages/when-knowing-someone-meta-only-way...
[2] Meta suspended his business's social accounts — it took him a month to reach a human https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/funktasy-meta-ban-9.6932525
[3] OnlyFans Star Says She Slept With Meta Employees to Get Instagram Unbanned https://www.newsweek.com/onlyfans-star-slept-meta-employees-...
[4] Inside job: When an account gets hacked, social media giant Meta offers little support, spawning a shadowy network of brokers and Meta employees who profit from helping users get back online https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-instagram-fac...
[5] Meta reportedly punished dozens of employees for offering an inside line to account recovery https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/17/23464297/meta-allegedly-...
and in cases when they did have humans... AI customer service is much better than the offshore lowest-cost non-english-speaking tech support that businesses would inevitably go for. atleast now the communication is comprehensible, even if i'm talking to a computer.
it is what it is.
The hype outpaces the actual value in many cases and that's why we get the shit we get.
A good example are YouTube's unavoidable auto translations. No one bilingual user wants that. It would be extremely easy to make it optional but it won't boost the numbers of the BS metric being pushed internally.
Microsoft is a particularly bad offender with copilot nonsense popping up all over the place. But hoo boy look at that stock price
At work, we of course are all-in on a large wiki (Confluence). It has a feature irritatingly overlayed that treats searches as AI questions the provided LLM will answer. I have to admit it often does a good job answering my effective question directly, vs me going through many semi-related pages trying to find out how to do something.
Ours is a Windows shop, and I find I am using Copilot somewhat more frequently instead of web searches to find answers to "how do I ..." questions related to the commercial tools we use. While the responses are not always perfect, they are often-enough accurate enough to be useful. And, it saves me a lot of time vs digging through, ironically enough, AI-generated slop pages of how to's that take ten feet of page to answer a simple damned question.
Yep, another greed machine that nobody wanted, driven by a wealthy minority and (checks notes) yet again dressed up as the savior of humankind.
Let’s see here.. above SaaS and below Insistence That Green Energy Is A Scam.
More distributed = less corruption = more utopia.
So for example, fiat currency = bad. Gold trade = good.
Blockchain = good. Single network = bad.
On device AI = good. Open source AI and datasets = good. OpenAI and closed datasets = bad.
Electric cars charged at home = good. Electricity generated at home = good. A monopoly on electricity = bad.
Small forums = good. Reddit = bad. Social media giants = bad.
A local sheriff = good. An army = bad.
I don't know how they accomplished that.
I think I can kinda see what they are tryingto do it with Apple Intelligence. It is pretty useless now, but given time maybe it could grow into actually having powerful features now when developers have an access to its API, as in incorporating applications into seamless workflows.
Shoving an AI chatbot into every nook and cranny of your application is just dumb. LLM’s should be unobtrusive, learning ways you want to interact with the larger ecosystem and only show up when called.
Reason why MS and G and shoving it everywhere is that they have no idea how to actually use this technology yet, but they already invested billions to it. I don’t see how that is going to end well.
Is there time for a new "user isn't interested in your shitty AI^wLLM features" one before the bubble bursts?
Windows 3 was fully themable. Windows 95 you could set the colors and the plus pack added themes. Ignoring system colors is an innovation.
Has it revolutionized some use cases and some lives? Yes!
Was it applicable to 95% of the things they promised it would be, like supply chain logistics, gaming, or social media? Absolutely not.
To what end?
We’ve interacted with the internet using the same text-oriented protocols, the same markup languages, and even the same layout elements for 36 years. What profit motive exists to upend that and standardize on a new format like conversational language?
And, based on the development trends of the internet over its entire history, what suggests that if the world were to commit to some radical shift in the foundational technology underpinning the web, it would move towards voice, or vision (what does this mean?) based interfaces.
I get that AI is cool, and it has legitimate use cases, but is it possible that we as technologists might be falling into that age-old trap of having a solution in search of a problem?
We have to be careful to avoid blaming AI as a technology for the incredibly hamfisted way it’s being implemented in most products, and affecting online spaces.
Maybe there will be a bubble burst. That doesn’t mean AI won’t eventually transform the world.
It’s hard to believe in nuance but also very important.
It's so much worse with decade old brands as most of us cant just not use it, and these min-maxxer AI people are definitely taking advantages of it.
Tokens are fine grained billable attribute that lets you add micro transactions to your service.
Not in all cases, but in many we exist in a complicated world of enshitifcation + inflation.
Inflation means you need to somehow make more money.
You can either: raise prices (unpopular), make your product cheaper (unpopular) or add new features and rise the price on the basis of “new value!”.
You see major organisations doing this: same product, but now with ai! …and it’s more expensive. Or it’s a mandatory bundle. Or it’s “premium”.
Long storm short, a lot of companies see the way that cloud providers do billing (usage based billing, no caps, you get the bill after using it) as the ideal end state.
Token based billing moves towards that world; which isn’t just “profit!” …it’s companies trying to deal with the reality of a complicated market place that will punish them for raising prices.
…and it is bad. I’m just saying that it’s kind of naive to think so many companies are doing this just as a “me tooooo!”. Come on; even if you’re hunting a funding round, the people running these companies are (mostly) not complete idiots.
No one is adding AI features because it’s fun, or they’re bored.
…
…ok, there are some idiots. Most people have a bigger vision for these features than just annoying their users.
anigbrowl•4h ago
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1404116417142065/posts/15882...
It's not that I hate all AI, I think it has a lot of great use cases - none of which justify unilaterally imposing it on everyone.
righthand•3h ago