this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
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People are using AI a lot, or people were already using programs with recently added AI features a lot?
Day 1: We have 1 million Excel users.
Day 2: we added Copilot to Excel, we have 1 million new CoPilot users!
One of my bosses was screen sharing with me this week and had co-pilot up in Excel. I don't know what he was doing with it. he started fucking around with it while he was screen sharing, just doing something unrelated to what we were talking about. I know he was just trying to bait me into asking what was going on.
fuck that, I don't care, I know you love your AI, I don't give a shit, it's not useful for what I do and I don't want to talk about how it can almost do something kind of right
I love/hate that this is a common experience. Someone did this to me too, although this was sort of a work friend taking the piss.
I have straight up backhandedly implied people senior to me who get paid 5x more than I do are throwing any possible expertise they might have out of the window. To their face. My stance on these slop extruders is well known among my colleagues.
I’ve even told people who used them in front of me, in a gentle but unflinching way, that their willingness to use them uncritically is a red flag for me and that comparing my genuine work to general machine output is something I can’t simply decide not to take as an insult. Including people who are supposed to review my work. As a professional I have to do something that exceeds the first page of Google in specificity. I do the long yards. Why is that suddenly a problem? If our work was this simple why are we getting paid to do it?
Some of these people trust me enough that they’re getting queasy about the whole AI thing after initially giving in. Yeah it’s decent at summarizing mass emails from corporate. Summarizing mass emails from corporate is not our fucking job. At least two people were paid subscribers to OpenAI’s product and no longer pay for chatbots. Proselytizing against the death of critical thinking is not a lost cause.
I have to get the fuck out of corporate.
I see you know corporate math well
They renamed "Office 365" to "Microsoft 365 Copilot".
Isn't Copilot integrated with the Windows taskbar search?
I think the sole reason Copilot is used at all is because they've forced it in applications it has no place in, and requires it remain on by default.
It only makes sense economically when they have as many people as possible using it and giving feedback.
Where feedback can be concealed, like how your actions after requesting advice correlate with it, or whether you clarify your request and how many times.
I have never liked having a search box in the taskbar. My taskbar is for pinned programs, open programs, volume, Ethernet/wifi, and a clock. Nothing more.
You can remove copilot from windows 11 completely now...with an outside program.
When I'm imagining some Win3.11-style UI, like in Star Wars: Rebellion game, I feel that a search box in the taskbar would be fine. The results should come up in a new normal separate window, of course. Not in a poisoned version of star menu.
The issue is not with having a control element in the taskbar. The issue is with those control elements being very hard to use. The response times are bad. The elements are not clearly separated. The results coming up are hard to navigate. It's as if you were badly drugged and trying to find something in a heap of black sheets with luminous text in a dark room.
And also dynamic search on every change of that field is idiotic. They might do auto-completion if it's fast.
I love having a search box on my taskbar. I want it to search my PC for installed apps and files and nothing else. I certainly don't want to do a fucking Bing search for "Settings"
It seems like a waste of space on the taskbar, to me
In the Start Menu/Finder/KRunner/wofi I want it to search, but I don't need the text input box visible at all times taking space
It's in fucking notepad
The original Copilot is GitHub Copilot which is a coding assistant and it's very popular and useful for developers. I think most of the paying copilot customers and usage are coming from there.
Kind of like internet explorer bundled with Office back in the day….
That'd be my guess.
I have never once went out of my way to use Gemini, for example, but having it appear in every other Google search with some lying bullshit to spread is probably driving up their engagement numbers.
I really should stop using Google. But can't use DDG either because they just use Bing and their own AI service as well, and so does Kagi.
If it helps, you can use https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ to stop the auto-AI inserts.
Yeah but you can do the same with Google as well (just can't be arsed to change the search settings on my work PC), it's the principle of the thing.
So you can’t be arsed to live up to your own principles?
I can't be arsed to keep up with changing the config of the browser I didn't choose every time the device updates with new admin-defined settings. That's all.
On my personal device I still use Google right now for consistency/because change is hard, but I set the default behavior in Firefox to exclude AI results.
I'd just prefer to use/support a search engine that abstains from AI entirely, regardless of whether or not you can turn it off. I don't want to be a happy customer of companies that still try to weasel that stuff in, because they won't stop at a toggle. They never do.
Try https://noai.duckduckgo.com/.
Kagi AI is opt-in. As in, you don’t go out of your way to use it, you won’t.
DDG uses its own basket of search indexes, Bing is now under 10% or so of total index usage in the big 26. Also yeah, noai ddg is awesome.
Kagi has AI features, but I've only ever seen them in the settings. They have never once pushed me to use them. Which is good, as that would be pretty much a dealbreaker.