This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I was just thinking about this yesterday. AI has not helped me in any way shape or form. I don't need it, i don't want it, and it should NOT be forced onto people.
I grew up teaching myself how to research and use Ask Jeeves, Yahoo!, AOL, and now Google, Duck Duck Go. I don't need a dumb AI to tell me what i can find myself.
Even if I do occasional turn to AI for some things, I absolutely do not want it to be integrated into my personal computer. The privacy implications are insane.
I'm glad I made the switch to Linux months ago with my Windows install being relegated to a lil sandboxed VM I occasionally use for the odd Excel task here and there.
I'm more concerned about 'AI' telling people incorrect information - and that information being further indexed and presented as fact elsewhere.
It's a compounding problem
The AIroboros if you will
AI helps me a lot, but only because search engines became unusable.
I treat AI how I used to treat google search
Fuck AI. I don't want it.
How to be a tech shithead:
Somehow, this guy is the CEO.
Don’t forget the most important prerequisite: be a psychopath. Something something 12-15% of the world’s top CEOs are clinically psychopaths, so this is the world we get.
This guy appears to be a bit of a dullard.
Wait, Microsoft’s “AI CEO” is a human? If AI is supposed to be replacing jobs, why not start there?
I don’t want to talk to a fucking computer. I want to spend more time with my friends and family. Give me that and I will be impressed.
I 👏 don't 👏 want 👏 or 👏 need 👏 AI 👏 on 👏 my 👏 computer!
Good thing I don't use Windows so I won't have to deal with it whatsoever. 😌
If I want AI for whatever reason I will go search for AI. I don't need a chatgot like service running on my PC all the time for the handful of times I might want to use it. I will go to chatgpt if I need to use it for something.
Remember Blizzard and diablo immortal, when they got booed during the reveal of the game, and then the devs were like, "does no one have phones?" Some of these CEOs and DEVS are so out of touch with what their customers want because they would rather huff their own farts all day, enjoying the smell of their own brand, instead of admit that they led product development to an area where there wasn't market demand amongst their consumers.
Yeah I never really understood the backlash on that one. I actually would love to play Diablo on my phone. But like a good Diablo.
The worst part is that diablo immortal makes hundreds of millions a year.
Real answer is that the direction AI is going right now is to save money for billionaires, not to improve the lives of everyone else.
They really didn't think the unwashed masses would figure it out in time. Ego is a hell of a drug.
I switched to Mac in 2022 because I was so pissed off that Windows was forcing me to upgrade my hardware to upgrade to windows 11. But this is a mess. At least Apple doesn’t force AI down your throat
CEO articles most often than not are just corpo salespeople telling you about trash they are trying to push on people. They are literally paid millions of dollars by the wealth class to not tell the truth unless under oath in court or a deposition. They're not paid for hard work or leadership, if you've worked in a corp setting for at least a week that much is obvious. They are paid buckets full of money to ignore or suppress their morality for stock prices. It's obvious when it's garbage like language models sold as agi, but the same is true for the rest of the pr vomit they feed to news agencies.
There is being Impressed by something and seeing any sort of real utility for it, the former doesn’t guarantee the latter.
Stupidity is one of the more prominent signs of megalomania
Dear Microsoft CEO and C-suite people.
Push back on your investors now before it's too late. AI features are ruining your product and its image.
A lot of companies are tied in up this AI bubble and Microsoft is not too big to fail in this regard. Your customer-base has gotten by just fine without AI and invasive screen-capture technology used to support it, for decades at this point. Most people see your product as an operating system: a product designed to support other products. They do not want more capabilities from it, and have come to rely on good support for hardware compatibility, stability updates, performance updates, and most importantly, security updates. It is the darling of OEM PC installs, and government and commercial enterprise continue to renew their site licenses because of it. These are the core features that will continue to bring value and keep people on your platform, not AI.
If you firmly believe that agentic AI is the future, make it an optional installable product or a completely distinct operating system altogether. This is strategic since it has radically different marketing needs than Windows or Windows Professional, and supports a distinct subset of your overall install base. Foisting this feature set on your existing users is doing nothing more than artificially inflate adoption numbers, and you're risking the entire enterprise to think your investors don't already know this. It's not smart, it's not even brinksmanship or a bold technology decision. It's reckless.
They were sure about Cortana too. That flopped hard.
Honestly we won’t have to worry about this in a few years. Every time Microsoft launches something new, they create the most impressive thing nobody uses or wants. Every single goddamn time they do anything different, they fuck it up or give up on it way too soon, all because they cannot shake the idea that the last time people liked their core product was windows XP and everyone compares using a computer then to whatever they do now. Microsoft won’t win that game. And they don’t care to even try.
Windows 8? Fucking brilliant response to the iPad, even if it was late and the surface was big and heavy. The OS made perfect sense there and was pretty and clean and simple. So they PUT IT ON EVERYTHING when it only made sense in the one thing it was designed for. Completely ruined it. They arrogantly thought they could convert the entire industry over to this way of doing things and letting OEMs use the surface as a template for their own version of what Microsoft predicted a computer would be. Flopped hard. And Apple? They copied some of the better ideas and put it on the iPad and since it was managed better at the time it succeeded.
Windows phone? Very late to the game, Google went out of their way to fuck Microsoft however they could, and Microsoft alienated every developer interested in giving them a chance. they did create a good product with interesting ideas and execution. But every step Microsoft took worked against them. They did literally everything wrong in carrying this out.
Windows vista wasn’t entirely their fault. They were promised by hardware vendors that things powerful enough to run vista comfortably will be flooding the market by the time it releases. The problem? Microsoft believed them. So the first experience people had with vista was the last one they wanted to ever have. It got better by the end of that cycle but the damage was done.
What about a simple fitness tracker and notification widget? Microsoft made a wearable called the Microsoft band. It was a clunky, bulky thing but the core idea was sound. It was a simple, clean, stripped back interface on the wearable that didn’t cater to the adhd of what an Apple Watch could do. It just did what people wanted to use it for at the time and nothing else. It was poorly promoted and it didn’t become a blowout success in the 5 minutes it was on the market so they killed the entire thing rather than fix what was actually wrong.
Outlook is used by damn near everyone and its ancient codebase is making it crazy hard to keep stable. IT people have lots of tricks to keep that broken shitbox going and they do so because Microsoft accidentally made a product people love. So they release a new version of outlook. Let’s do it experimentally, adding features as we go, so that out of the gate, people will get the experience of vista all over again. Also, it’s nothing like the old version people actually liked. But it doesn’t crash all the damn time now, so we think you’ll love it.
The mismanagement of every single fucking thing Microsoft ever released guarantees the AI bubble will burst. Microsoft will throw everything into it because the the US economy has nothing but AI going for it anymore and when they fail to make it dance and sing the way they promised investors it would, it will poison the well and the money for all AI projects will disappear. Investors will pull their money out and tank it.
And Microsoft? They are big. They are connected. They have shittons of unethical traps they have forced industries and governments into. But it’s still going to hurt like hell. They don’t have any part of the business left that isn’t dependent on this AI shit in some way so when it blows up, it’s taking everything down with it.
PCs have viable options outside windows. Just throw KDE in front of a boomer and they won’t know the difference. Want something you have to pay for? Mac is still stumbling along. It’s pretty, modern, has a more classical customer experience people like and many are willing to pay for. But this last release cycle was rough and everyone hates the new UI. It doesn’t matter how great apple silicon if nobody wants to interact with it. And their customer service, once a stinging star in the industry, is all phone trees and outsourced call centers now and despised you are paying more for the same shitty experience you fled from before.
They're completely out of touch with how normal people use their computers. The only people who want AI in their OS are the AI tech bros.
I was taking my kids to the dentist yesterday and was listening to the radio with them.
It's anecdotal and a small sample size but the only people talking about AI are journalists and money men.
I work in IT and the consensus is it is a valuable tool but it really isn't taking anyone's job.
For my kids and those their age and younger (15) the consensus is AI can fuck off and it's responsible for polluting their social media with crap.
Tl;Dr - the only people pushing AI are the money men and the policy makers. No one wants this.
as amazing as snake was as a toy on phones, it still doesn't make sense to put a copy of snake in outlook. Or notepad, or paint, or office, or as an always available widget in the task bar
^ This.
It's a neat, under-construction tool.
A. Tool. An 'agent' to do niche things is neat.
...But I don't need a chatbot on my fucking toaster.
Github copilot can do some impressive things, but it also ignores my instructions to not try to run anything and leave testing to me that I've stopped bothering saying it and just block the attempt when it asks permission. Just yesterday, it confidently said it had figured out an issue I was debugging with it and made a bunch of code changes that literally only affected comments. If I leave it in agent mode (which allows it to edit code) when asking a question to clarify something and not intending any code changes but wanting to think about the answer (and telling it that), sometimes it still runs ahead and tries to make changes anyways.
When it does well, it's uncanny how effective it can be these days, but it's not reliable enough to be trusted to be in control of the whole system. Plus I don't trust Microsoft enough to put my data on onedrive, and believe that access to data is the real reason behind their AI push, no matter how much usefulness and reliability improves.
Reminder that Linux has never been better than it is right now for gaming!
God these dumbfucks will find any excuse to force you to treat your OS like anything other than an OS. Linux doesn't need to do anything at this point except not suck.
His post was so negatively received that he was forced to turn off replies
Wait, what? How was he forced? He literally couldn't take that people don't like his product? He would have died if he didn't do it?
I don't know. Microsoft has a multi decade history of forcing people into using an trash product due to CIA/govt contracts corruption or something, never due to being the superior product on the market. So why would anyone think they'd deliver anything worthwhile now? A bunch of crap that you have to overpay to be underwhelmed by has always been their standard.
Hey, when I have Iron man Jarvis-like chatting me up, running locally, and never ever messing anything up, I'll be impressed.
So far I have semi-competent voice transcription, borked understanding, incorrect action 4/5 of the time, underwhelming, if not broken output, and most of the time this bad version is dependent on a datacenter that's aiming at obliterating a star worth of power every two hours.
I WONDER why this is not seen as impressive.
Even if the Windows voice experience put Jarvis to shame, I wouldn't be interested. I don't want to use voice control on my computer. Just about the only time I actually need voice control are when I'm far away or my hands are busy; so it's nice for turning lights on and off when I have my hands full, or controlling timers when I'm cooking, or turning music on without getting up from the couch. Sometimes I'll use voice-to-text if I have a lot to say or need to think it through. But I almost never want voice control (even if it were completely perfect, which it is not!) for the same reason that I listen to podcasts on earbuds: I don't want to bother other people! Certainly not while I'm working, and definitely not when it's liable to take agentic actions for me.
Buttons, knobs, levers, sliders, keys—all of those are better than voice control 999 times out of 1000. I don't even like touch screens that much, and I'd prefer them over voice control.
The Microsoft executives inhabit a different reality than I do.
So they acknowledge the backlash, now what? They're probably not gonna change anything regardless.
Anyway, why does Microsoft need an "AI CEO" and how is CEO different from president? Is there also a Windows CEO, or an AI president at Microsoft?
When a sewer pipe blows up with a fountain of sewage, people are impressed for a few minutes.
When it just leaks and stinks, people are not impressed even for a few minutes.
"the fact that people are unimpressed with me ... is mindblowing to me" -- Trump
Always never stop using debloat tools.
