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
Not using Mint though.
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
I mean, it gets the job done but nothing is convenient. The UI looks like a Christmas tree and still everything you need to do is found several sub-menus down in confusing dialogs, like in Excel pre-ribbon times. And for the love of god, please don’t say that ribbon spoiled everything, that discussion was boring even 10 years ago. Since then, state of the art has evolved beyond that.
For small scale household data, the web version of excel is good enough and has an easier UI. For larger scale, duckdb and some python.
It's my daily driver ever since...
> ribbon spoiled everything
I switched to OnlyOffice even though its capabilities are extremely limited for any non-trivial use case.
Because Excel is actually pretty awful software. But! You can use it as a database and application and hack something together and throw it on a shared drive somewhere.
If you lose that second stuff, there's no reason left to use 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.
I managed to get Winboat working on my NixOS laptop, so it's possible that if I set that up they could deal with it.
Seems like you have it all figured out though, I think I’ve shared enough help good luck.
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.
I started the switch from Windows to Linux in 1999, so have no up-to-date firsthand experience. But, do you think the issues with Windows Update go much beyond the problems with updating arbitrary hardware running software that's in an arbitrary state due to how users have used it?
What I'd say to those Windows Update developers is they should go to Apple, where they can rely on a much more standardized hardware environment and a much more locked-down software environment, which makes that job a lot easier.
Linux has the same or even greater hardware diversity, and I have never had a Linux update so thoroughly break my computer as Windows Update did for my mom's computer recently. I run NixOS unstable, I run a system update daily, and while I have had packages break, it still boots after the update. I can say similar things about Arch as well, and I think Ubuntu LTS would be even more reliable.
Windows Update is worse though, because since Windows doesn't have snapshotting in the same way that Linux can have with btrfs or ZFS or bcachefs, an update can fully just break the computer. If you install ZFS on root in Ubuntu it will take a snapshot after each update or even every `sudo apt install`, so even if I did have something break because of an update I'm generally able to get the computer into a usable state by rebooting an choosing something earlier.
But even worse, Windows updates aren't really "opt-in" like they are with Mac and Linux. Windows Updates will happen accidentally or just in the background, as was the case with my mom a few weeks ago. As far as she is aware, she didn't choose the update, it just happened and then her computer was bricked.
Importantly, Windows Update really only has one job, which is to not brick the computer it's updating, or at the very least provide an easy way to roll back if they do. Updates are important, we want security vulnerabilities patched ASAP, but if users are afraid to update out of fear of their computer being bricked and actively do hacks to disable them, then they have utterly failed at their job.
I stand by what I said. Whomever works on it should be ashamed of themselves, and they should stop being software engineers because they are very bad at it. I have never used a piece of software that has more consistently caused headaches than Windows Update; I'm sure I've used software that was more crappily written, but a system update tool IS NOT ALLOWED TO BE SHITTY.
Updates take ages to download and even longer to install. There is no verbosity option, only a progress bar that likes to get stuck. Did an error occur? Here's an unhelpful 0x%RANDOM% code, where the only mention of it online comes from those who also suffer from it.
How come apt, dnf, pacman or other open source utilities, that are often maintained by an individual, just work, when something with a development team sucks at it so much? While there are an under-the-hood differences between Windows and Linux, replacing system components and libraries should be the same everywhere.
Don't bluff then!
I'd been trying to recommend Linux to my family for many years with no success. I stopped, perhaps a decade ago.
Some two years ago or so, my father decided he was done with Windows (updates, always trying to sell you something or another, etc) and switched to Linux. Now he keeps telling me how much better the Linux experience is. I'm rather amused by that, but also proud of him for having made the jump all by himself.
(He's into astro photography, so he spent a lot of time with raspberry pi's and learned some Linux along the way. I guess that made his desktop switch easier.)
I have enough problems with the Windows my son has that I can't fix. Hardware randomly working one day and not the next (but works fine on the Linux system). Having to reinstall when updates break the system. Strange blue screen error codes where there's really no useful info online on how to resolve.
I've been making the case for him to switch to Linux now that win 10 is not supported and all his games will run on Steam on Linux anyway now.
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.
Enough was enough, I sold the PC, and replaced it with a Steam Deck. What a breath of fresh air! No notifications, no OneDrive, no would-you-like-to-use-Edge, no Copilot, no Windows Updates, Windows Store Updates, Driver Updates, Firmware Updates, Browser Updates, let-me-show-you-what's-new-popovers.
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.
Ad tech?
AI enshittified way, WAY too quickly.
The thing is that all these tech companies are really just innovating new ways to scam consumers into adopting something that's worse for them. They just subsidize the bad stuff and, eventually, have to start bleeding consumers dry.
Uber is now more expensive than taxis, AirBNB is more expensive than hotels, placing an order online is more inconvenient than calling, and on and on. But it took decades for this to transpire. For a long time, these new things were actually better.
But AI was pushed so hard, so severely, that it became enshittified way too quick. And consumers are already on guard after seeing tech A-Z slowly make their life worse.
Maybe ‘the metaverse’.
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
What we don't know, of course, is when that will happen. Because a lot of people have a real monetary incentive to pretend it isn't happening.
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.
If your entire family is on Facebook, unless you want to deliberately cut yourself off from them, you're going to be on Facebook.
If we had a dozen different fully interoperable social networks (using atproto or some other federating protocol), then you might have a point. But that is not remotely the world we live in.
And if Google is putting LLM features in Gmail...they're not just the "email app" you use, they hold your email address. You'd need to completely change over your email address with everyone who uses it in order to fully get away from them. (Similarly with Microsoft's email...I don't know if they're putting LLM features in it yet, but if not I'd bet they will soon...)
The definition you are using is a very strict one, and is only really useful for comparing "market economies" to "command economies". That is clearly not what we are talking about here.
The definition I am using is of an "ideal free market", which is what is required for any of the "free market theory" consequences to come into play. That includes things like revealed preferences theory. An "ideal free market" requires no friction, perfect information, perfect elasticity, etc.
Without that, the idea that you can tell what people "really want" in social media based on which networks they use is completely false.
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.
Oh, no wait! Google answers?
If I remember on Monday, I'll reply with my portion. Don't own nearly enough to go near radiation on my weekend.
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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.
Previously it just called her, Gemini asks which one of the numbers I have saved should it call, but not as a continued conversation. It comes up with an onscreen list, which I'm not pressing whilst driving, and trying to tell it which one ends with Gemini getting very confused.
Reverted to Google Assistant which still works and will actually call her.
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...
I've already inadvertently clicked on it once.
Very disappointing and they don't provide any toggle to remove it.
There definitely should be an easier way, but here you go:
.qa-mode-box {
display: none;
}https://kagifeedback.org/d/8729-feedback-on-the-new-quick-an...
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.
That, or the <18 and >50 users are all addicted to the AI mode and I have no idea because I'm not in either of those buckets, or something. But it's still disrespectful, even if some people are clicking on it.
Heck, gemeni is obviously so successful and gets used so frequently that android had to hijack the power button (at least on pixels) so when you hold the power button, it activates gemini instead of turns the phone off. Clearly, that is because everyone intends to activate AI instead of turn the damn phone off when they hold the power button. `usage_metric++;` /s
Yet I know most people are also [probably] irritated by stuff like this. But _we_ do it anyway...
Incredibly annoying.
Do you mind elaborating on what I've missed?
The menu item often appears after the rest of the context menu. Since it appears in the middle of the menu it causes a bunch of items to shift and and leads to misclicks.
It would be less of an annoyance if it appeared straightaway but was disabled, and then enabled once it was ready to use, because then it would avoid moving already visible UI elements.
In general I don’t like visible UI elements to change position unless it’s in response to a direct user action (e.g., expanding or collapsing a group). It’s the sort of thing that trashy news website do to ensure they get at least some ad clicks, and it always feels janky and causes frustration.
I don’t mind that the item exists: I mind that it makes other menu items move after they’ve already appeared.
I just checked on my private account and it does not look so bad. Must be a combination of things leading to the bad behaviour at work.
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.
I used to do over the phone technical support for a major PC vendor in the early/mid 2000s and the goal was to solve every customer's problem (in the shortest amount of time, ofc). But that type of stuff is gone in the US. Even with major ISPs/phone companies/banks you are routed to an AI TTS chatbot to try to solve your problem or route you around in confusion until you get lost/fed up and just quit.
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.
Look up the atrocities committed on the name of countries gaining more gold sometime then get back to us on that one.
> Blockchain = good. Single network = bad.
The CC networks have much lower fraud rates than the block chain does.
> Small forums = good. Reddit = bad. Social media giants = bad.
This forum is 100% a benevolent dictatorship and it works really well.
> A local sheriff = good. An army = bad.
Plenty of very corrupt local sheriffs. Horribly corrupt for that matter.
> On device AI = good. Open source AI and datasets = good. OpenAI and closed datasets = bad.
Agreed!
Part of the reason why it does is because there are so many other places to go to. But that is exactly the decentralized model in practice - it's not really anarchy so much so as a lot of small dictatorships, benevolent or otherwise (but you're free to vote with your feet).
I don't know how they accomplished that.
I’ve tried the “addressbook tricks” and none of it works.
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.
Anyway, the last version of Windows that still maintained this functionality (in "Classic" theme) was Win7; Win8 no longer had the ability to disable Aero.
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.
Gemini is a lot better at it, and while yes, it makes typical LLM mistakes, I can't wait for the day when we're able to use a locally running model for it.
And every company's website is now about "AI", whether they're actually doing anything with LLMs or not. They might be using the same SVM they've been using for the past 10 years, but now their business is "AI-driven".
anigbrowl•3mo 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•3mo ago