Even if it was good, which it isn't, the way they force it on you doesn't feel right. And not just Microsoft, almost every company is shoving AI into every product they can even if people don't want it. More and more I feel I have no control of devices I own and by extension what is going on in my own house.
Like Instagram, why the hell do I need an “AI summary” searching for funny cat videos?! And by not giving people the option to turn it off, how do they even know if people like or actually use those stupid features? We’re just further killing the planet by allowing this shit to run non-stop and consume the amount of resources that it does.
Right now I use AI mostly just to search if I’m having trouble phrasing my question coherently and it generally does an ok job of figuring out what I’m asking. But you know what else does that? Actual humans…I could come to Reddit and ask a pretty convoluted question and someone would figure it out.
When I get the AI summary option on a PDF I am always worried because the PDF is something like a contract or technical document in my line of work. You should always fully read and understand these sorts of things. I always skip the AI summary but it makes me wonder how many don't.
Dear god it pisses me off how few people understand this. Everything you send to them is used to train their AI further.
My company spent the last decade harping about the importance of client privacy. I've seen people fired for offhandedly mentioning some random detail about a funny situation with their client.
But the same company heard the AI hype and has AI summarizing all our meetings, writing announcement emails, encouraging employees to use it. How is this not the largest client privacy breach ever seen.
I read an AI summary for one of my wife's meetings.. it was terrifying.. it wasn't just transcribing.. it was evaluating how people felt or reacted too
My personal favorite with the weekly AI summaries is writing a bunch of random shit in the same font color as the background so people cant see it but AI does.
So during the email summary you'll see "John was bit by a shark while on vacation in Fiji. We wish him a speedy recovery and send love to his family" or "Another caesar salad was stolen from the fridge on Wednesday. No culprit has claimed responsibility but it is assumed they suck"
Should add one about: "Due to excellent profits this year, every employee is expected to receive a 15% raise next quarter."
Once that starts circulating around, management will be faced with the tough choice of A) actually doing it, or B) pissing off a lot of their employees.
Once that starts circulating around, management will be faced with the tough choice of A) actually doing it, or B) pissing off a lot of their employees.
My boss installed two of those and he can’t figure out how to get them to stop inviting themselves to every single zoom meeting he’s on. When we read the summaries it gets confused somehow on who said what, attributing quotes to the wrong people. It records everyone’s expressions and reports back on how well people perceived you when you spoke and how you reacted to others speaking. It always flags me for using non inclusive language and it’s always “guys”. Yeah….i said “you guys” when talking to my team mates….so what.
My company uses AI-powered outward and outward facing dashcams, and I once had our safety officer call me to talk about my habit of eating while driving.
I was like, "I think you called the wrong guy. I never eat while driving". I asked him to pull screenshorts of what he was talking about.
It turns out, the shitty AI camera was seeing some sort of shape or something *while the vehicle was idling while I wasn't even inside" and flagging me for eating while driving, and the safety officer never bothered to check the footage.
At least the shitty AI only thought you were eating. Spare a thought for the kid whose pack of Doritos was flagged as a weapon by his school's AI cameras, leading to him being handcuffed at gunpoint
Unfortunately very real. Boss is an idiot and working from another state most of the time. To call him Michael Scott is an insult to Michael Scott. At least Michael could sell paper.
Fifteen years ago I worked in a corporate office for Citibank. This kind of tech would have completely derailed the working relationships between team members. AI's summaries and flagging of slights would, literally, be the only thing talked about at work.
Fortunately we just think it’s funny. We like to see who we had the lowest charisma scores and who was the least interested in what we had to say. And it’s funny to us when it reports lowest engagement from all of us when the boss is talking. I don’t even think the boss is using it, he doesn’t know how. He signed up for it and now can’t get rid of it. We do have to remember not to talk shit about him when he’s not there though just in case he ever reads the summaries.
Ironically enough my work for an electrical contractor has had me working on a data center which will undoubtedly be used for AI and in the meetings they specifically ban all AI notetakers.
I had an ai written method validation protocol handed to me. It had me make 9.4 mL of a standard, and then use 20 mL of that standard in a further dilution down the line about 10 pages later in the process….
I think even non chemists can see the problem there.
I’m like 4 pages of written material in a lab notebook deep, just to have to go back and reprep a stock standard
I would be confronting anyone asking me to make 9.4 mLs of anything. Like no, show me how it's done cause that's goddamn bonkers. You wrote this, stand by your work and explain to me why this is a good idea.
Look, if we let people turn off the AI feature, we'd find out there's only about 15-20% of our users who "adopted" it (read: Wanted it or just didn't know how/care to turn it off).
If we force it, as VP of AI Enhancement I can claim 100% adoption of the new tools and demand a bigger bonus.
And the people turning away from Search entirely now? That's clearly a UX problem, not my AI tools being hot glued in the way!
Look, if we let people turn off the AI feature, we'd find out there's only about 15-20% of our users who "adopted" it (read: Wanted it or just didn't know how/care to turn it off).
That has been how Microsoft has rolled forever. I have a friend who just won't admit that Windows is hot garbage and his defense of it usually falls back to "well you can disable all of that shit" but it's absolutely not easy - Microsoft doesn't WANT you to disable it.
And, well... some of it you can't disable if you don't have an Enterprise version of Windows. Some of it you need a third party tool to disable it for you. Some of it gets re-enabled with even minor updates. Some of it you literally can't disable at all.
Some of it gets re-enabled with even minor updates.
Whoever set widgets to replace my local weather widget with random shit every time windows updates is first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Isn't this textbook enshittification? The shareholders want to see AI, so the customer doesn't really have a say in whether they want AI or not, because it's about appeasing the shareholders, and not listening to customer demand.
Thats exactly the goal. Pointless metrics that they can shove to shareholders: the use of ai has grown xxxx% this quarter, our ai platforms outgrows the competition
Cant disable gemini if you want to use Android Auto.
Pisses me the fuck off. We can whine about Microsoft and Windows all day. I dont encounter that shit on my desktop OS. But we act like it is normal on smartphones.
Both are personal computers, why are we so aggro versus Microsoft fucking up, but we give apple, google and samsung free reign.
Nothing Windows does wrong or bad is even remotely close to the absolute fucking shit show on smartphones.
What puzzles me is that google assistant functioned better seven or eight years ago than it does now. I could control my phone verbally quite easily while driving, even changing music, texting, calling. Nowadays the fucking AI can't even understand what I'm saying half the time.
Mine got snotty with me. I was thinking out loud to myself in the car, never said anything remotely to "hey Google" and it popped up. I then said "shut the fuck up I never commanded your assistance", and it told me to watch my language and something else as if I just cussed in front of Grandma. Absurd. All this smart shit gets turned off now to the best of my abilities on my devices.
All the AI investment right now feels like it's just made up by these big tech companies who are betting everything on future demand that may not exist. Nobody even knows if it's profitable, and I have a feeling the market doesn't need anywhere near as much AI services as these companies think.
Generative AI can be cool and useful, but I don't need AI when I want to talk to customer service, I don't need AI when I'm ordering at a drive-thru, I don't need AI in the weather app on my phone. All these companies think I need AI in absolutely everything but I don't.
They think the government is going to bail them out when the bubble implodes, but I don't think it's going to happen this time. If the AI bubble implodes, and ChatGPT isn't available anymore, that sucks, but life goes on, it's not like people are losing their homes or pensions so why would the government care to bail them out?
All the AI investment right now feels like it's just made up by these big tech companies who are betting everything on future demand that may not exist.
They're all literally giving each other money in a three-party cycle, the whole thing is a bubble that is being inflated in a way that we can't even comprehend, and when it pops it's gonna be bad. Like I'd be surprised if there weren't some kind of Butlerian jihad as a result.
AI and machine learning are good for a ton of applications. They are also just fucking useless for a lot of applications too, but we’re in the phase where it’s gotta be crammed into everything.
Copilot (and other AI and ML products for that matter) is just the latest "trust me bro" product in a long line of short-lived, bleeding edge, executive driven revenue streams. They are offering you a product barely out of alpha with an uncertain future as a full-blown, enterprise-level paid product. They want you to spend a premium cost for a license, while businesses have undeveloped project plans for use of it, but for whatever reason feel pressured to adopt it as soon as possible.
Every time someone brings up AI/ML implementation for some workflow we have, I always have to ask them if we have a current automation process for the work stream right now. If we don't have an automated process that does the bare minimum of reducing human input, then what do you think you're going to be able to accomplish by jumping that step and going directly to AI/ML?
I am up to my eyeballs in things that should be, at minimum automated right now, but instead of addressing that, we are trying to get Commander Data from Star Trek developed... Does anyone else feel like there are a few steps we are missing between 2025 and a positronic brain matrix?
I do some automation work as well and felt the same about people skipping steps pre-AI too. I constantly had people asking my team to create app features and stuff for certain processes when they either could have been done in Excel in about 2 minutes, or weren’t being done at all. For some reason certain people (execs usually lol) that don’t really understand the tech jump straight to making a solution with whatever the shiny new tool is rather than understanding the problem and various options.
And the reality still is that a real programmer can do it faster, cheaper, and less error prone. We don't need an AI solution that pulls in 500 MB of python libraries and waste a shitload of resources when you could write a three-line Ruby program to do the exact same thing.
For some reason certain people (execs usually lol) that don’t really understand the tech jump straight to making a solution with whatever the shiny new tool is rather than understanding the problem and various options.
This is not just a non-techy problem, it's everywhere. And you can tell that finding problems for the predetermined solution (AI) is pervasive right now. It is clearly what 90% of the implementations of Co-pilot are.
The other 10% there is excel and their data presentation stuff. They should have been focusing their entire efforts around those. That's where AI really can deliver here and now.
Also a lot of people are coming from the consumer perspective. They haven't seen the nightmare that is copilot in Microsoft's enterprise products like Azure.
Copilot assistant in Azure is UNUSABLE. Let's not even discuss AI's merit as a whole. Just comparing Copilot to say ChatGPT, copilot is fucking reprehensible. Which is even more bizarre considering all the deals MS has made with OpenAI. It shits out non-answers 50% of the time and the other 45% of the time it just links you to Microsoft documentation that also doesn't answer your question.
My “favorite” part about copilot? When it cuts you off because you exceeded the number of requests. I only had so many damn requests because it didn’t do what I asked the first time.
I'm curious what all these companies going all in for AI for the sake of their shareholders are going to do when AI companies decide they actually need to make a profit
My work is doing this with AI to reply to emails. Like bro, I can type a single sentence no problem. I can't wait for the bubble to burst and all these companies enter the find out part. I mean we'll be fucked by then anyway, and Rip to economy but fuck AI companies
It’s an interesting novel tech but it’s not mature enough nor useful enough for the ubiquity they’re trying to push. It makes too many mistakes to be reliable in most industries, yet the MBAs running everything don’t seem to want to acknowledge that and instead keep pushing it in every facet of business. It’s going to be a huge problem.
100%. The irony is that they are just like AI: practically useless, constantly struggling to justify their role and if they disappeared tomorrow hardly anyone would notice.
This is the future nobody wanted, but the rich assholes decided we’re getting it anyway. It’s gonna hurt us way more than it hurts them when the bubble bursts. But at least we get to say that we told them so.
We're being pushed to use AI for our evaluations/reviews of ourselves and others. I can't imagine that output being useful if every review is the same AI smoke-blowing drivel.
Even if it was good, which it isn't, the way they force it on you doesn't feel right. And not just Microsoft, almost every company is shoving AI into every product they can even if people don't want it
If this stuff actually worked well, they wouldn't need to be hyping it up as "We've added Copilot".
But then it would just be "we added a feature" or "we made [feature] work better" which isn't nearly enough to justify the kind of money the tech industry is throwing into this.
They bet literally the entire economy and their entire tech dystopian worldview on it. It's not allowed to fail. It doesn't matter if consumers hate it because it's not targeted at us.
I've turned off all Gemini options I can find in the Google control panels, and it is still injecting it everywhere.
This is a paid account I'm talking about - I'm admin for ~10 paid users. And then they say "the prices will be going up because of all the awesome AI you don't want!"
That's the financial system for you. These companies are heavily in debt to creditors/investors. None of them want to take or accept risk.
So the ordinary person has to effectively swallow their risk. Swallow the AI whether you want to or not!
Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.
It's the same with the wider economic system we are in. Landlords don't want to accept any risk either, which is why they often ask for "guarantors" in the UK and any other amount of very personal info. Should be illegal.
The effort that Microsoft exerts to piss people off with their flagship operating system is really impressive. I have been there since Windows 98, and I am about all but done with this bloated nonsense.
Not even going into how Windows is now data-collection malware and not really an OS.
remove oobe options from Windows installation so they all make accounts with MS.
make them login with their Microsoft account to update the xbox controller drivers.
do next gen user behaviour profiling and AI data harvesting of your whole drives and every little action you take on-screen.
(soon) mandatory access to microphone and webcam for your protection and security. Don’t worry, that data will never get sent to the cloud
(soon + 3 months) we’re very sorry, a minor deployment error caused copilot to send all that local data to us. But don’t worry, it’s protected by world class quantum resistant encryption!
(soon + 3 months + 48 hours) guys, we’re really sorry, filthy Linux supporting rebels hacked our servers and exposed all that data
Yep, they should have left the base system alone and not built all this bloatware into it natively. Forcing adoption of half baked software that just wastes memory and process cycles at best is poor design.
I love how they 'redid' Windows search function from ground up to improve it (read: feed you searching back to Microsoft). Now it locks up periodically and I have go into the services and restart it and it might start up again. Meanwhile my Windows 10 computers have no issue fucking searching.
That function is why edge is always running in the background wasting memory. The search tool is basically a browser extension now, and if you actually go and remove edge from your computer, the search function stops working entirely.
If I search for "add or remove programs" it does a fucking Bing search.
I used to say that at no point have I ever clicked on the START MENU for something I wanted to search THE INTERNET for, but last weekend I hit Run and tried to type maps.google.com into it.
But other than that slight misstep, the previous statement is still 99.99% true. I want "search the internet" and "search my computer" to not be tied to each other.
Well W10 will just have Explorer outright crash periodically, especially when doing things with the file system. It does have a pretty smooth recovery, though. Still worse than 7.
"Still worse than 7". That really says it all. Microsoft's products have been on a continuous downturn for the last 3 iterations. 8 was worse than 7, 10 was better than 8 but still worse than 7, and now 11 is worse than 10 and also 7. If it wasn't for 7 not supporting the latest hardware I'd probably just revert all the way back since 10's now out of update support.
I bought a computer with enough RAM to run Word on a 500-page file and then am forced to use Word 365 which can’t even load the whole file? This is better? You would think that Azure would have large-RAM PCs for when I open a large file, right?
I'll hop on to add - forcing saving to OneDrive. I've been slowly working on disconnecting all my personal tech from this shit and it is pervasive. I've forced OneDrive off my computer, now I have to recover all my files from the cloud and force my computer to not still attempt to save it in the wrong place.
That fucking thing took all of desktop files without asking permission and stuck them on OneDrive. Then. Because some were videos, hit it's space limit, locked my access and the only way to transfer the files to a different folder to free up space is delete them because it won't let you move them if there's not enough one drive space. Fuck you microsoft
Back when all the CEOs were pushing "the cloud" in their bullshit hype presentations I knew from Siri/Cortana it was just going to be more shit. Trying to keep it all disabled on my PC or phone over the years has been a game of whackamole that feels exactly like keeping my boomer parents tech free from viruses.
Windows 10 is almost certainly going to be my last Microsoft OS, Linux is getting pretty good for ease of use and video games from what I heard.
Mfer ate my horizon zero dawn save that was almost at 100%. In what universe is it a good design choice to delete everything off the computer when you delete it off the cloud service. It's the first thing is uninstall on a new windows boot now
Wife transferring photos from camera to PC. Windows decides instead of the desktop, to put them on the OneDrive version of the desktop. Oops, out of space! She didn't realize, deleted photos from the camera before discovering they didn't actually transfer...and that she can't disable OneDrive because it's full, so you have to login or something to clear up space to tell it to STOP TAKING MY FILES.
Nilay Patel made the point that Nadella couldn’t be telling personal users and consumers to go fuck themselves any louder if he used a megaphone. Windows is an utter shitshow, they’re leaving gaming hardware, they’ve closed all their retail presence etc. He doesn’t give a flying fuck about the consumer facing side of MS.
These companies are reorienting towards the "Dystopian Overlord" arms race. We're no longer their customers, we're the chattel they're competing to rule.
When they get paid tens of millions of dollars no matter what, and if they're fired then they get a Golden Parachute worth tens of millions more, what incentive exactly do these idiots have to do anything useful?
The wildest thing to me is that the article suggests people were voluntarily using copilot in the first place. I feel like that has to be a reporting error.
Yeah, that setting doesnt change any of the problems that it creates though - it only facilitates trucking people into thinking that the malware is not scraping screenshots of your work.
I call it "Trust Theater".
It's basically the "I deleted the text on my phone and it doesnt show anymore, so it's definitely gone forever" trope.
I would love to see the actual metrics and signals they use. If I accidentally hit the icon once, but shut it off/uninstalled right away, do they still count me as a "user"? Probably.
I work in IT — the majority of people using it where I work are c-suite execs who use it to generate PowerPoint presentations for their useless, endless meetings.
Ain't nary an actual useful application of it I've seen otherwise.
They want it to be an agentic system, but the blowback on that has been huge, loud, and very unexpected.
I really wish that MS had been broken up when they were found to be monopoly.
Imagine how different the entire marketplace would be if MS Games (and DirectX development), was a different company and built systems to run game son MacOSX, Linux, BeOS (which was alive at the time), OS/2 Warp and other OSes that were STILL hanging on at the time.
Imagine MS Productivity, being an Office Applications company that actually hit all agreed standards, instead of making broken versions of standards and competed across all Operating Systems?
Same with other MS Products being broken up into various full companies.
If one failed? It was never meant to be, just like this stupid AI move.
I recently re-visited In The Beginning There Was The Command Line by Neal Stephenson, which has a huge BeOS shout out.. It made me a little nostalgic and then sad about how things could have panned out with a bunch of companies innovating and doing interesting things, vs. where we are now with just a handful of big tech companies running everything.
Started with Win 3.11 and MS-DOS as well. Used Windows 11 for a year... maybe a bit longer. I'm on Linux now. Currently Nobara. It's pretty nice. Updates are a little wonky. I could see myself possibly jumping to a different distro for that reason, but I am in absolutely no hurry to go back to the hellscape Windows is turning into. (Honestly its been various forms of shitty ever since Windows 7).
It's a bit of a 180 on their part too. Prior to the AI "boom" and Windows 11, they were arguably the least controversial of the big tech companies, they weren't really doing too much to piss people off. There was a span of a good few years where they were just your typical, moderately evil giant corporation, but not as bad as Google and especially Meta.
"Touch first" design. "We'll have the same UI interface on a 25"+ desktop monitor that people use a keyboard and mouse to interact with, that we use on a smartphone with 5-6" screen and people use the touchscreen to interact with!" It was obviously a dumb idea to anyone taking 2 seconds to think about it. People aren't going to reach up and constantly use a touch screen on a desktop, it's fatiguing as heck to constantly hold your arm up.
At the time they did this in Windows 8, there was Windows 7 and mac OS X, both very mature and broadly used Desktop OSes, and iOS and Android, both mature and broadly used mobile OSes. They were surrounded by what "right looks like" for each of their target systems, made one of them, and still went down the "touch first" path with Windows 8.
Yeah that was about it. They were bad but the best of the monsters and you just could live with them….. I don’t know what happened (well, greed, but still)
About 25 years ago MS was defending itself against giant antitrust lawsuits grounded in the idea that they were taking over the whole consumer market by force and their ubiquitous browser. That was pretty controversial. It was not too many years later that MS missed the entire tablet and mobile revolutions because they were so invested in defending the Windows desktop, and now they’re an afterthought / asterisk in a consumer marketplace dominated by iPhones and Google.
In fairness the era of 8 was pretty short. It flopped so hard that 10 came out really hot on its heels. Which is why under the hood 10 is actually mostly the same as 8, they just put an actual PC interface on it instead of a mobile one.
You nailed my feelings entirely. They're so absolutely overconfident due to their stranglehold in the OS/office market that they've essentially become abusive spouses, forcing us to live with their terrible decisions and doubling down on the BS when they meet any resistance from us.
You would simply not believe the lengths I'm currently going through trying to get Linux to replace my Windows 11.
Trust me, this shit is NOT easy (referring to getting the app experience the same....the OS itself is GREAT!). I can't even find a god damn screenshot program that can handle scrolling (like SnagIt can). Luckily, Firefox has an extension that does it, but now I'm stuck using Firefox.
Oh, and I LOVE the YouTube videos that claim getting Affinity software working is easy. It's not. F'ing Affinity...they buy out Canva, make it free....no Linux version...for free software. Just..why?!
My favorite is when it asks me 500 questions first about how I want the pdf to look. Options about color and font and style and illustrations. Then it finally says “I’m not actually able to do that.” WTF?!?
The one time I bothered to experiment with whether AI could be useful to me in a meaningful way, I tried to make a three page grading rubric and had this happen for three hours straight across both ChatGPT and CoPilot before confirming that it’s all just a conversation toy.
This was my experience too. I'm building a mod for a game, and trying to navigate the game's native API calls is challenging since the game is somewhat niche. There really isn't a unified guide online that's up to date, and I've mostly been relying on other mods' methods to figure stuff out. I decided to give ChatGPT a try, and all I got was nonsense. From nonexistent function calls to refactoring a saved copy of the codebase, none of it was at all useful.
What bothered me the most was how apologetic the thing was. Every time I pointed out that that function didn't exist in the API (which has all of the function calls listed publicly online), it would say it's sorry, and spit out another completely wrong thing. Like... I'm pretty sure I could build a bot that indexed and documented the whole library and at least get the actual function names and inputs correct...
Last May. It was discouraging. I was trying to reformat the stupid rubric and it kept giving me a three page document that undid all the formatting and had like one line on each page. Copilot crapped out worse. I was told after that yeah neither can handle files well.
Just like in programming it's constantly writing code saying to use FunctionX in LibraryY to do the thing you need, when it doesn't exist at all. "Oh you're right, sorry that doesn't exist, here use this other completely made up function instead!"
AI functions more like GPU-style probablistic raytracing than a linear CPU, which is why multi-step logic and procedural transformation fail as often as they do. It's biggest power comes from being a glorified search engine, but billed as original thought
Microsoft can't even figure out the search engine part of this. They keep hiding settings in new places, and when you search for them, the OS takes you out to the web, rather than actually searching on the local PC. It's really impressive had bad it is getting.
Hiding settings in new places, buried in apparently unrelated menus has been my personal most aggravating feature of Microsoft products for nearly 20 years. Makes sense they are doing the same thing with AI.
you're fortunate it was honest. Most AIs will make random shit up and sell it to you like they are subject-matter experts.
And if you tell them their answer is wrong, they will tell you that you're right and proceed to one-up you by explaining back why their answer is wrong like they were teaching you.
Because what they call AI is a language model. If we are comparing it to the human brain, it is the language center. Our language center turns our thoughts and knowledge into language. It's hooked into what I'm going to call our knowledge center and reasoning center (I understand that my knowledge of human brain anatomy is far from medical grade).
LLMs have no knowledge or reasoning. They approximate knowledge by regurgitating what they read in their training material.
When you think of AI in, let's say, Star Trek, it's attached to a vast store of verified knowledge. It has knowledge stored in databases. And when you ask it to do something, it translates your words into a predefined process, and if it can't it would ask for clarification from the asker. In other words, it has knowledge and a form of reasoning.
What we have is just the talky part, built explicitly to at best just copy what someone else said without any means or interest to verify that response against anything. And when it can't copy someone else's answer it just makes shit up.
They usually don't even hook it up to a fucking calculator. AI can't do math, and math is the most basic thing computers do.
Yep. Our current LLM technology could one day become a part of true strong AI, acting as the language center of its brain. But when the language center is the only part of the brain you've got, it has some pretty big fundamental limitations on what it can do, which we're already running up against.
LLMs will be part of the solution, probably, but you're never going to get AGI with LLMs alone.
Microsoft problem is that they take the latest trend and put it into goddamn absolutely everything. I have no problem having a browser tab open and asking ChatGPT a question and getting my answer. I do not need copilot integrated into Microsoft office, Windows 11, xbox, Xbox game bar, outlook online, onedrive, and my coffee maker.
And in true Microsoft fashion, they don’t give you the choice. They force it upon you.
The worst part is it's not even actually integrated, it's just slapped on top. It would be useful if the one in outlook could find an old email based on a vague recollection you gave it, but it can't. Or if it could summarize an email chain into a OneNote document, but it can't.
I just set up a windows 11 laptop out of the box and between the forced microsoft account and bloatware, i wanted to format it immediatly and install Linux.
There will be a website that will make you one where you can turn off all the awful bloat, services and widgets AND get rid of the Microsoft account requirement.
Drop that .xml file into the root directory of your windows install media (I assume you are installing from a USB key) and reinstall windows.
A windows laptop out of the box is not typically installed from a USB key. It's preloaded on the machine, but you still have to set it up the first time you turn it on.
For Microsoft to launch 12+ different AI products by randomly combining the words “Copilot,” “365,” and “Microsoft” requires a level of brand-equity bravado I can barely comprehend.
This naming strategy is either: A) A disruptive, out-of-the-box strategy only achievable because an AI Agent came up with it. B) A misreading of the customer refrain “No” as “Not Yet.”
As a former Sr. Director, I fear it is option B.
That is the only coherent explanation why they just slashed sales targets for AI Agents by 50%. The "Agentic AI trade" is stalling.
As a company they got too cocky. Where are the companies that treat us like customers? Where have all the customer service agents gone. Put me on with a human
Most people do this because they’re forced, security patches stop coming for older operating systems and then you need to update.
If I had it my way I’d still be using 8.1. I think that was the last version of windows where if you searched for an object on your own computer, it looked there, instead of defaulting to search for your query over bing, to purposely artificially pad / inflate bing query numbers.
I am only allowed to use Copilot for work. It is WORSE than useless. Hallucinates constantly and will double down on the lie indefinitely
I have my own paid version of ChatGPT right now. It has made significant ongoing improvements and now feels leaps and bounds ahead of Copilot.
This shocked me because due to Microsoft's close relationship with Open AI I figured that would be essentially the same product with different faces. Absolutely not the case.
I see the same. Try and get it to write code on something slightly obscure or new and it completely shits the bed.
Recently,I was using one API that had been completely rewritten at some stage, and although I kept saying to use the new API version it kept flicking back and forwards between the old and the new and completely fucked everything up. My boss, who only uses copilot to plan his numerous holidays, cannot understand why I say it's a piece of shit.
My wife did a Bing search for polled (hornless) cattle breeds, and Co-Pilot had a summary statement like, "All animals, particularly cattle, are naturally hornless." It was so shockingly and objectively wrong I have no clue how it came to that conclusion.
Microsoft literally asked us to not ask Copilot to do math. Excel has been doing math for decades lol. This idiotic moment in history can't end soon enough.
Windows 11 is a pile of hot garbage with recall and copilot+
It’s a security nightmare from a platform which would rather charge for security as a service because they know how easily their products are compromised, so they’ll just as soon charge the consumer for it.
Microsoft is failing to understand that there isn't much AI use case for consumers.
Maybe a weird analogy but: look at chess programs. The chess programs in 1990s were good enough to beat 99% of people, even if they still couldn't beat the pros. Nowadays, they have AI chess programs that destroy not just all the best pros, but even the best preAI computers.
So professional chess players, they are buying the latest AI chess programs that they need to get every advantage possible playing professional chess.
But for the rest of us?? There's literally no difference. The computers ten years ago were far stronger than anything we needed as amateurs.
That's the general theme of AI. Yes, transportation companies are benefitting from advanced AI algorithms helping to fine tune their routes and operations. Biomedical companies are benefitting from advanced AI algorithms figuring out how to fold proteins. Media companies are benefitting from advanced AI algorithms helping show more targeted content to customers.
But the average consumer really isn't getting anything out of AI that they weren't getting from "pre-AI" software ten years besides maybe high schoolers cheating on their homework. Yeah it's funny to make an ai image, but there's no value im willing to spend money on, just a funny thing to do for free.
That's why this AI forcefeeding is so frustrating. No i dont need copilot to do anything for me except maybe help with some tougher excel formulas at work. In other words, in a professional setting.
If im not at work, there's nothing AI can do for me except save me a couple clicks when looking up a recipe or researching for an electronics purchase. There's just nothing there to market and exploit for profit
As a software engineer who cut his teeth in the late 90s and early 2000s, I remember who Microsoft really is and why the open source movement was so awesome.
I was happy to be able to switch to Linux at work as well as at home. Eventually I had to work with a mac, and did that at home.
Lately, I've been thinking about switching back to Linux- whatever flavor, because anything is better than Microsoft regardless of its use.
I got my kid a new laptop for Xmas and I set everything up on it so he can basically use it right out of the box. The windows setup nowadays consist of:
-Select what categories you want for advertisements
-Select what user data you want m$ to get constantly from your computer
-MANDATORY login to a Microsoft account (fuck this, seriously)
It's ridiculous. You don't even own the computer, basically. I fucking hate it. I'm old-man-shaking-fist-at-cloud here, but you used to be able to be an Admin of your own computer without jumping through hoops, you could even set that bad boy up to log right in without a password if that was what you fancied.
Switched to Ubuntu recently. I'm positively surprised. Everything works and even games are running, which I wasn't expecting at all. I'm using computer for work mostly, but my media pc is running Ubuntu too now and no issues there either.
I was afraid of the Linux horror story and that's why I decided to go with mainstream Ubuntu. That was apparently good decision as all is great 😃👍
I did this the day I was forced to learn what the word "Agentic" meant when they made the announcement. Nobody asked for this, nobody wants this. I'm now 100% off windows and couldn't be happier with an OS that just works like it's supposed to. unfortunately I still have to deal with Windows at work.
Meanwhile, useful features continue to languish on the floor. Images not being complete wank in word would do more for my team’s productivity than ai would by a long shot.
The thing is, theres nothing stopping microsoft from doing the same…except microsoft.
In theory copilot should be the most useful application of AI out there. Built right into office, I should be able to ask it for help with all sorts of daily tasks.
But it just…sucks. And it’s so inconsistently applied to the MS suite of product offerings that it’s almost impressive.
Yeah the AI trend sucks hard, just jamming AI up everythings ass that doesn't even need it. Silicon Valley sucks.
It's reticent to modern cars Vs the touch screen+software. I much prefer tactile feedback, dials and whatnot. But good luck getting that, most of todays car dashboards are a giant touch screen tablet, soon to be bricked in the near future.
Even if it was good, which it isn't, the way they force it on you doesn't feel right. And not just Microsoft, almost every company is shoving AI into every product they can even if people don't want it. More and more I feel I have no control of devices I own and by extension what is going on in my own house.
Like Instagram, why the hell do I need an “AI summary” searching for funny cat videos?! And by not giving people the option to turn it off, how do they even know if people like or actually use those stupid features? We’re just further killing the planet by allowing this shit to run non-stop and consume the amount of resources that it does.
Right now I use AI mostly just to search if I’m having trouble phrasing my question coherently and it generally does an ok job of figuring out what I’m asking. But you know what else does that? Actual humans…I could come to Reddit and ask a pretty convoluted question and someone would figure it out.
When I get the AI summary option on a PDF I am always worried because the PDF is something like a contract or technical document in my line of work. You should always fully read and understand these sorts of things. I always skip the AI summary but it makes me wonder how many don't.
Not to mention it means the document was sent to their servers...
Dear god it pisses me off how few people understand this. Everything you send to them is used to train their AI further.
My company spent the last decade harping about the importance of client privacy. I've seen people fired for offhandedly mentioning some random detail about a funny situation with their client.
But the same company heard the AI hype and has AI summarizing all our meetings, writing announcement emails, encouraging employees to use it. How is this not the largest client privacy breach ever seen.
I read an AI summary for one of my wife's meetings.. it was terrifying.. it wasn't just transcribing.. it was evaluating how people felt or reacted too
My personal favorite with the weekly AI summaries is writing a bunch of random shit in the same font color as the background so people cant see it but AI does.
So during the email summary you'll see "John was bit by a shark while on vacation in Fiji. We wish him a speedy recovery and send love to his family" or "Another caesar salad was stolen from the fridge on Wednesday. No culprit has claimed responsibility but it is assumed they suck"
Should add one about: "Due to excellent profits this year, every employee is expected to receive a 15% raise next quarter."
Once that starts circulating around, management will be faced with the tough choice of A) actually doing it, or B) pissing off a lot of their employees.
now what was the tough choice you mentioned?
My boss installed two of those and he can’t figure out how to get them to stop inviting themselves to every single zoom meeting he’s on. When we read the summaries it gets confused somehow on who said what, attributing quotes to the wrong people. It records everyone’s expressions and reports back on how well people perceived you when you spoke and how you reacted to others speaking. It always flags me for using non inclusive language and it’s always “guys”. Yeah….i said “you guys” when talking to my team mates….so what.
Are you guys for real? It sounds like you’re living in a black mirror episode.
My company uses AI-powered outward and outward facing dashcams, and I once had our safety officer call me to talk about my habit of eating while driving.
I was like, "I think you called the wrong guy. I never eat while driving". I asked him to pull screenshorts of what he was talking about.
It turns out, the shitty AI camera was seeing some sort of shape or something *while the vehicle was idling while I wasn't even inside" and flagging me for eating while driving, and the safety officer never bothered to check the footage.
At least the shitty AI only thought you were eating. Spare a thought for the kid whose pack of Doritos was flagged as a weapon by his school's AI cameras, leading to him being handcuffed at gunpoint
https://gizmodo.com/teen-swarmed-by-cops-after-ai-metal-detector-flags-his-doritos-bag-as-a-gun-2000676491
Please be more inclusive of women in your reddit posts.
/s
Unfortunately very real. Boss is an idiot and working from another state most of the time. To call him Michael Scott is an insult to Michael Scott. At least Michael could sell paper.
Fifteen years ago I worked in a corporate office for Citibank. This kind of tech would have completely derailed the working relationships between team members. AI's summaries and flagging of slights would, literally, be the only thing talked about at work.
Fortunately we just think it’s funny. We like to see who we had the lowest charisma scores and who was the least interested in what we had to say. And it’s funny to us when it reports lowest engagement from all of us when the boss is talking. I don’t even think the boss is using it, he doesn’t know how. He signed up for it and now can’t get rid of it. We do have to remember not to talk shit about him when he’s not there though just in case he ever reads the summaries.
Ironically enough my work for an electrical contractor has had me working on a data center which will undoubtedly be used for AI and in the meetings they specifically ban all AI notetakers.
The thing that gets me is, if the data can be maliciously extracted from a system like this, we're going to see some world record data breaches.
Dont worry. It will all be worth it so the rich can become 2% richer
I had it summarize a very detailed SOP, for laughs. It was goddamn horrible.
It picked a part of the background info at random to display. 2 of the 6+ warnings about various safety concerns.
It didn't mention the equipment required.
If the actual SOP was for chocolate chip cookie the recipe summary would be:
Ingredients: chocolate chips, salt.
1.) The mixture of butter, eggs, sugar and vanilla is mixed with the flour and baking soda.
2.) Bake until done.
The AI summary also completely ignored the section detailing all the math that needs to be done after the hands-on portion of the SOP was completed.
The calculated result at the end of the SOP is the whole point of the document.
I had an ai written method validation protocol handed to me. It had me make 9.4 mL of a standard, and then use 20 mL of that standard in a further dilution down the line about 10 pages later in the process….
I think even non chemists can see the problem there.
I’m like 4 pages of written material in a lab notebook deep, just to have to go back and reprep a stock standard
I would be confronting anyone asking me to make 9.4 mLs of anything. Like no, show me how it's done cause that's goddamn bonkers. You wrote this, stand by your work and explain to me why this is a good idea.
Look, if we let people turn off the AI feature, we'd find out there's only about 15-20% of our users who "adopted" it (read: Wanted it or just didn't know how/care to turn it off).
If we force it, as VP of AI Enhancement I can claim 100% adoption of the new tools and demand a bigger bonus.
And the people turning away from Search entirely now? That's clearly a UX problem, not my AI tools being hot glued in the way!
That has been how Microsoft has rolled forever. I have a friend who just won't admit that Windows is hot garbage and his defense of it usually falls back to "well you can disable all of that shit" but it's absolutely not easy - Microsoft doesn't WANT you to disable it.
And, well... some of it you can't disable if you don't have an Enterprise version of Windows. Some of it you need a third party tool to disable it for you. Some of it gets re-enabled with even minor updates. Some of it you literally can't disable at all.
Whoever set widgets to replace my local weather widget with random shit every time windows updates is first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Isn't this textbook enshittification? The shareholders want to see AI, so the customer doesn't really have a say in whether they want AI or not, because it's about appeasing the shareholders, and not listening to customer demand.
AI search results are more often blatantly wrong than even remotely correct.
AI is ruining everything.
Thats exactly the goal. Pointless metrics that they can shove to shareholders: the use of ai has grown xxxx% this quarter, our ai platforms outgrows the competition
Cant disable gemini if you want to use Android Auto.
Pisses me the fuck off. We can whine about Microsoft and Windows all day. I dont encounter that shit on my desktop OS. But we act like it is normal on smartphones.
Both are personal computers, why are we so aggro versus Microsoft fucking up, but we give apple, google and samsung free reign.
Nothing Windows does wrong or bad is even remotely close to the absolute fucking shit show on smartphones.
That's not true about android auto, exclusively use android auto and Gemini is disabled on my phone.
What puzzles me is that google assistant functioned better seven or eight years ago than it does now. I could control my phone verbally quite easily while driving, even changing music, texting, calling. Nowadays the fucking AI can't even understand what I'm saying half the time.
Mine got snotty with me. I was thinking out loud to myself in the car, never said anything remotely to "hey Google" and it popped up. I then said "shut the fuck up I never commanded your assistance", and it told me to watch my language and something else as if I just cussed in front of Grandma. Absurd. All this smart shit gets turned off now to the best of my abilities on my devices.
All the AI investment right now feels like it's just made up by these big tech companies who are betting everything on future demand that may not exist. Nobody even knows if it's profitable, and I have a feeling the market doesn't need anywhere near as much AI services as these companies think.
Generative AI can be cool and useful, but I don't need AI when I want to talk to customer service, I don't need AI when I'm ordering at a drive-thru, I don't need AI in the weather app on my phone. All these companies think I need AI in absolutely everything but I don't.
They think the government is going to bail them out when the bubble implodes, but I don't think it's going to happen this time. If the AI bubble implodes, and ChatGPT isn't available anymore, that sucks, but life goes on, it's not like people are losing their homes or pensions so why would the government care to bail them out?
They're all literally giving each other money in a three-party cycle, the whole thing is a bubble that is being inflated in a way that we can't even comprehend, and when it pops it's gonna be bad. Like I'd be surprised if there weren't some kind of Butlerian jihad as a result.
Yeah but ordering AI at the drive thru or customer service isn’t about you, it’s about saving the company a lot of money. It’s absolutely profitable
Also AI / machine learning is actually really good for predicting weather. Not like in an app on your phone though
AI and machine learning are good for a ton of applications. They are also just fucking useless for a lot of applications too, but we’re in the phase where it’s gotta be crammed into everything.
Copilot (and other AI and ML products for that matter) is just the latest "trust me bro" product in a long line of short-lived, bleeding edge, executive driven revenue streams. They are offering you a product barely out of alpha with an uncertain future as a full-blown, enterprise-level paid product. They want you to spend a premium cost for a license, while businesses have undeveloped project plans for use of it, but for whatever reason feel pressured to adopt it as soon as possible.
Every time someone brings up AI/ML implementation for some workflow we have, I always have to ask them if we have a current automation process for the work stream right now. If we don't have an automated process that does the bare minimum of reducing human input, then what do you think you're going to be able to accomplish by jumping that step and going directly to AI/ML?
I am up to my eyeballs in things that should be, at minimum automated right now, but instead of addressing that, we are trying to get Commander Data from Star Trek developed... Does anyone else feel like there are a few steps we are missing between 2025 and a positronic brain matrix?
I do some automation work as well and felt the same about people skipping steps pre-AI too. I constantly had people asking my team to create app features and stuff for certain processes when they either could have been done in Excel in about 2 minutes, or weren’t being done at all. For some reason certain people (execs usually lol) that don’t really understand the tech jump straight to making a solution with whatever the shiny new tool is rather than understanding the problem and various options.
And the reality still is that a real programmer can do it faster, cheaper, and less error prone. We don't need an AI solution that pulls in 500 MB of python libraries and waste a shitload of resources when you could write a three-line Ruby program to do the exact same thing.
This is not just a non-techy problem, it's everywhere. And you can tell that finding problems for the predetermined solution (AI) is pervasive right now. It is clearly what 90% of the implementations of Co-pilot are.
The other 10% there is excel and their data presentation stuff. They should have been focusing their entire efforts around those. That's where AI really can deliver here and now.
Well worded description of the issue.
Also a lot of people are coming from the consumer perspective. They haven't seen the nightmare that is copilot in Microsoft's enterprise products like Azure.
Copilot assistant in Azure is UNUSABLE. Let's not even discuss AI's merit as a whole. Just comparing Copilot to say ChatGPT, copilot is fucking reprehensible. Which is even more bizarre considering all the deals MS has made with OpenAI. It shits out non-answers 50% of the time and the other 45% of the time it just links you to Microsoft documentation that also doesn't answer your question.
My “favorite” part about copilot? When it cuts you off because you exceeded the number of requests. I only had so many damn requests because it didn’t do what I asked the first time.
New slogan for Copilot's marketing: "Marginally not as bad as making up sources!"
I'm curious what all these companies going all in for AI for the sake of their shareholders are going to do when AI companies decide they actually need to make a profit
My work is doing this with AI to reply to emails. Like bro, I can type a single sentence no problem. I can't wait for the bubble to burst and all these companies enter the find out part. I mean we'll be fucked by then anyway, and Rip to economy but fuck AI companies
It's always the mark of a good product that they have to try and force you to use it right?
It’s an interesting novel tech but it’s not mature enough nor useful enough for the ubiquity they’re trying to push. It makes too many mistakes to be reliable in most industries, yet the MBAs running everything don’t seem to want to acknowledge that and instead keep pushing it in every facet of business. It’s going to be a huge problem.
Especially because those MBAs want it to be used for decision-making for very important things, like your healthcare.
I swear to fuck, MBAs are gonna kill us all and laugh all the way to the ruins of the bank while doing it
100%. The irony is that they are just like AI: practically useless, constantly struggling to justify their role and if they disappeared tomorrow hardly anyone would notice.
I’d notice, because I’d be happy and not realize why
This is the future nobody wanted, but the rich assholes decided we’re getting it anyway. It’s gonna hurt us way more than it hurts them when the bubble bursts. But at least we get to say that we told them so.
We're being pushed to use AI for our evaluations/reviews of ourselves and others. I can't imagine that output being useful if every review is the same AI smoke-blowing drivel.
If this stuff actually worked well, they wouldn't need to be hyping it up as "We've added Copilot".
But then it would just be "we added a feature" or "we made [feature] work better" which isn't nearly enough to justify the kind of money the tech industry is throwing into this.
They bet literally the entire economy and their entire tech dystopian worldview on it. It's not allowed to fail. It doesn't matter if consumers hate it because it's not targeted at us.
I've turned off all Gemini options I can find in the Google control panels, and it is still injecting it everywhere.
This is a paid account I'm talking about - I'm admin for ~10 paid users. And then they say "the prices will be going up because of all the awesome AI you don't want!"
That's the financial system for you. These companies are heavily in debt to creditors/investors. None of them want to take or accept risk.
So the ordinary person has to effectively swallow their risk. Swallow the AI whether you want to or not!
Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.
It's the same with the wider economic system we are in. Landlords don't want to accept any risk either, which is why they often ask for "guarantors" in the UK and any other amount of very personal info. Should be illegal.
The effort that Microsoft exerts to piss people off with their flagship operating system is really impressive. I have been there since Windows 98, and I am about all but done with this bloated nonsense.
Not even going into how Windows is now data-collection malware and not really an OS.
It's an "agentic system" or whatever the fuck marketing buzzword they're pushing now. Just let me play games and edit Word docs in peace, dammit!
It’s a bad product that’s driving market share down
"Hmm, so how do we fix these losses?"
"Can we force even more ads, and sell even more data?"
"Johnson, you son of a bitch, you've done it again!"
"Enshitify our product even harder!"
remove oobe options from Windows installation so they all make accounts with MS.
make them login with their Microsoft account to update the xbox controller drivers.
do next gen user behaviour profiling and AI data harvesting of your whole drives and every little action you take on-screen.
(soon) mandatory access to microphone and webcam for your protection and security. Don’t worry, that data will never get sent to the cloud
(soon + 3 months) we’re very sorry, a minor deployment error caused copilot to send all that local data to us. But don’t worry, it’s protected by world class quantum resistant encryption!
(soon + 3 months + 48 hours) guys, we’re really sorry, filthy Linux supporting rebels hacked our servers and exposed all that data
Yep, they should have left the base system alone and not built all this bloatware into it natively. Forcing adoption of half baked software that just wastes memory and process cycles at best is poor design.
Oh lord I just realized it’s windows vista all over again
I love how they 'redid' Windows search function from ground up to improve it (read: feed you searching back to Microsoft). Now it locks up periodically and I have go into the services and restart it and it might start up again. Meanwhile my Windows 10 computers have no issue fucking searching.
If I search for "add or remove programs" it does a fucking Bing search.
If I search "uninstall" I can see the option for "add or remove programs"
That function is why edge is always running in the background wasting memory. The search tool is basically a browser extension now, and if you actually go and remove edge from your computer, the search function stops working entirely.
good, i want both of them dead
I used to say that at no point have I ever clicked on the START MENU for something I wanted to search THE INTERNET for, but last weekend I hit Run and tried to type maps.google.com into it.
But other than that slight misstep, the previous statement is still 99.99% true. I want "search the internet" and "search my computer" to not be tied to each other.
Well W10 will just have Explorer outright crash periodically, especially when doing things with the file system. It does have a pretty smooth recovery, though. Still worse than 7.
"Still worse than 7". That really says it all. Microsoft's products have been on a continuous downturn for the last 3 iterations. 8 was worse than 7, 10 was better than 8 but still worse than 7, and now 11 is worse than 10 and also 7. If it wasn't for 7 not supporting the latest hardware I'd probably just revert all the way back since 10's now out of update support.
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The peak is yet to come. They recently announce that they will put AI into Notepad. A Fucking Notepad.
Leave my password manager alone!
Aaaaaaand this is why I'm glad I moved to Notepad++ years ago.
I bought a computer with enough RAM to run Word on a 500-page file and then am forced to use Word 365 which can’t even load the whole file? This is better? You would think that Azure would have large-RAM PCs for when I open a large file, right?
I'll hop on to add - forcing saving to OneDrive. I've been slowly working on disconnecting all my personal tech from this shit and it is pervasive. I've forced OneDrive off my computer, now I have to recover all my files from the cloud and force my computer to not still attempt to save it in the wrong place.
That fucking thing took all of desktop files without asking permission and stuck them on OneDrive. Then. Because some were videos, hit it's space limit, locked my access and the only way to transfer the files to a different folder to free up space is delete them because it won't let you move them if there's not enough one drive space. Fuck you microsoft
OneDrive is basically a ransomware virus pretending it's a backup utility.
Back when all the CEOs were pushing "the cloud" in their bullshit hype presentations I knew from Siri/Cortana it was just going to be more shit. Trying to keep it all disabled on my PC or phone over the years has been a game of whackamole that feels exactly like keeping my boomer parents tech free from viruses.
Windows 10 is almost certainly going to be my last Microsoft OS, Linux is getting pretty good for ease of use and video games from what I heard.
Mfer ate my horizon zero dawn save that was almost at 100%. In what universe is it a good design choice to delete everything off the computer when you delete it off the cloud service. It's the first thing is uninstall on a new windows boot now
Wife transferring photos from camera to PC. Windows decides instead of the desktop, to put them on the OneDrive version of the desktop. Oops, out of space! She didn't realize, deleted photos from the camera before discovering they didn't actually transfer...and that she can't disable OneDrive because it's full, so you have to login or something to clear up space to tell it to STOP TAKING MY FILES.
I switched to Libre Office, Word just isn't worth the hassle anymore.
Nilay Patel made the point that Nadella couldn’t be telling personal users and consumers to go fuck themselves any louder if he used a megaphone. Windows is an utter shitshow, they’re leaving gaming hardware, they’ve closed all their retail presence etc. He doesn’t give a flying fuck about the consumer facing side of MS.
These companies are reorienting towards the "Dystopian Overlord" arms race. We're no longer their customers, we're the chattel they're competing to rule.
This is truly the bigger picture story here.
He does give a fuck - how much data he can scrape off us.
He was always going to go in this direction, Nadella was the Azure cloud lead before becoming CEO.
When they get paid tens of millions of dollars no matter what, and if they're fired then they get a Golden Parachute worth tens of millions more, what incentive exactly do these idiots have to do anything useful?
The wildest thing to me is that the article suggests people were voluntarily using copilot in the first place. I feel like that has to be a reporting error.
I used it to ask it how to turn off copilot. It felt like ordering it to dig its own grave.
It did tell me where they buried it in settings to turn off as much of it as I could, so that was nice.
Yeah, that setting doesnt change any of the problems that it creates though - it only facilitates trucking people into thinking that the malware is not scraping screenshots of your work.
I call it "Trust Theater".
It's basically the "I deleted the text on my phone and it doesnt show anymore, so it's definitely gone forever" trope.
I would love to see the actual metrics and signals they use. If I accidentally hit the icon once, but shut it off/uninstalled right away, do they still count me as a "user"? Probably.
This is honestly what I'd suspect.
I work in IT — the majority of people using it where I work are c-suite execs who use it to generate PowerPoint presentations for their useless, endless meetings.
Ain't nary an actual useful application of it I've seen otherwise.
They want it to be an agentic system, but the blowback on that has been huge, loud, and very unexpected.
I really wish that MS had been broken up when they were found to be monopoly.
Imagine how different the entire marketplace would be if MS Games (and DirectX development), was a different company and built systems to run game son MacOSX, Linux, BeOS (which was alive at the time), OS/2 Warp and other OSes that were STILL hanging on at the time.
Imagine MS Productivity, being an Office Applications company that actually hit all agreed standards, instead of making broken versions of standards and competed across all Operating Systems?
Same with other MS Products being broken up into various full companies.
If one failed? It was never meant to be, just like this stupid AI move.
Unexpected oh no I’m sure the people who actually work on windows saw it coming. Most of the shock is coming from the c suite
Unexpected meaning their leadership. The Chief AI dude and the CEO have been flabbergasted that nobody wants that bullshit.
Why wouldn't I want an operating system where I have zero privacy and it kind of guesses what I want it to do?
Such a mystery, it is. Couldn't imagine why I don't want that. 🫠
I recently re-visited In The Beginning There Was The Command Line by Neal Stephenson, which has a huge BeOS shout out.. It made me a little nostalgic and then sad about how things could have panned out with a bunch of companies innovating and doing interesting things, vs. where we are now with just a handful of big tech companies running everything.
3.11 Windows for Workgroups for me.
Sorry for late reply, was waiting for my floppy to finish formatting.
MS-DOS 6 user here.
Get out of here with your Memmaker and disk compression bloatware, embrace the simplicity of MS DOS 5.1
Ah, I love the smell of EMM386 in the morning.
Honestly? This is my favorite version of Windows. Because it runs in MS-DOS, Microsoft's best operating system.
MS-DOS 6.22 was pretty frigging good on a fast computer (486 DX2)
Started with Win 3.11 and MS-DOS as well. Used Windows 11 for a year... maybe a bit longer. I'm on Linux now. Currently Nobara. It's pretty nice. Updates are a little wonky. I could see myself possibly jumping to a different distro for that reason, but I am in absolutely no hurry to go back to the hellscape Windows is turning into. (Honestly its been various forms of shitty ever since Windows 7).
It's a bit of a 180 on their part too. Prior to the AI "boom" and Windows 11, they were arguably the least controversial of the big tech companies, they weren't really doing too much to piss people off. There was a span of a good few years where they were just your typical, moderately evil giant corporation, but not as bad as Google and especially Meta.
Remember the first version of Windows 8? I actually liked the new version of Windows 8, but their first attempt was a disaster.
Not evil, but we're talking about an OS for PCs that was designed for smartphones... Because of the Windows phone.
I remember being completely baffled because basic functionality just wasn't there.
"Touch first" design. "We'll have the same UI interface on a 25"+ desktop monitor that people use a keyboard and mouse to interact with, that we use on a smartphone with 5-6" screen and people use the touchscreen to interact with!" It was obviously a dumb idea to anyone taking 2 seconds to think about it. People aren't going to reach up and constantly use a touch screen on a desktop, it's fatiguing as heck to constantly hold your arm up.
At the time they did this in Windows 8, there was Windows 7 and mac OS X, both very mature and broadly used Desktop OSes, and iOS and Android, both mature and broadly used mobile OSes. They were surrounded by what "right looks like" for each of their target systems, made one of them, and still went down the "touch first" path with Windows 8.
Yeah that was about it. They were bad but the best of the monsters and you just could live with them….. I don’t know what happened (well, greed, but still)
The board green-lit a minor investment into this startup called open ai Which led to a stock boom and whelp here we are
About 25 years ago MS was defending itself against giant antitrust lawsuits grounded in the idea that they were taking over the whole consumer market by force and their ubiquitous browser. That was pretty controversial. It was not too many years later that MS missed the entire tablet and mobile revolutions because they were so invested in defending the Windows desktop, and now they’re an afterthought / asterisk in a consumer marketplace dominated by iPhones and Google.
You're kidding, right?
Windows 8 - "tablets are the future, let's put a tablet interface on your triple-monitor setup it'll be great!"
They mean really the era of windows 10, not 8.
In fairness the era of 8 was pretty short. It flopped so hard that 10 came out really hot on its heels. Which is why under the hood 10 is actually mostly the same as 8, they just put an actual PC interface on it instead of a mobile one.
To be fair 8-9 years could definitely be described as "a good few years"
Same here. Moving our home computers to Linux 1-by-1 atm
You nailed my feelings entirely. They're so absolutely overconfident due to their stranglehold in the OS/office market that they've essentially become abusive spouses, forcing us to live with their terrible decisions and doubling down on the BS when they meet any resistance from us.
Left Windows 11 a month ago. Have used it as well since Win98, but enough is enough.
Been a hardcore windows fan since Win95. Windows is dead to me now and is an absolute joke.
Apple fans were right
I know hardcore Linux and Apple people. I think you’re the first person I’ve seen describe themselves as a windows fan haha.
You would simply not believe the lengths I'm currently going through trying to get Linux to replace my Windows 11.
Trust me, this shit is NOT easy (referring to getting the app experience the same....the OS itself is GREAT!). I can't even find a god damn screenshot program that can handle scrolling (like SnagIt can). Luckily, Firefox has an extension that does it, but now I'm stuck using Firefox.
Oh, and I LOVE the YouTube videos that claim getting Affinity software working is easy. It's not. F'ing Affinity...they buy out Canva, make it free....no Linux version...for free software. Just..why?!
They are considering it: https://techcentral.co.za/affinity-for-linux-canvas-next-big-move-could-reshape-the-desktop-software-market/274861/
But yeah, not of any use now.
“Hi Copilot. Please turn this bulleted list into a clean and simple visual of individual boxes”
“Oh you can’t do that? You literally said you can’t? Let me click ‘convert to smart art’ and oh would you look at that…it worked”
How does this thing not even know how to do things that are already in the product via a button press?
“Would you like a PDF checklist of the steps I just shared with you?
Actually yeah that would be useful.
“Here you go no file”
Uhh there’s no file there.
“Oh you’re right here you go no file”
There’s still no file.
“Actually I can’t make a file”
??? You offered to make me the file
“You’re right, I did offer it to you even though I can’t do it”
My favorite is when it asks me 500 questions first about how I want the pdf to look. Options about color and font and style and illustrations. Then it finally says “I’m not actually able to do that.” WTF?!?
The one time I bothered to experiment with whether AI could be useful to me in a meaningful way, I tried to make a three page grading rubric and had this happen for three hours straight across both ChatGPT and CoPilot before confirming that it’s all just a conversation toy.
I used chatgpt once to solve a niche hardware issue that i couldn't find instructions for online.
It gave me a very detailed answer that seemed ti demonstrate deep knowledge of the device, and it's answer was total bullshit.
I also asked gemini and it just waffled some total nonsense clearly demonstrating it had no idea what the device was but wanted me to think it did.
After complaining about this online a bunch of ai bros told me i was an idiot and was doing it wrong.
This was my experience too. I'm building a mod for a game, and trying to navigate the game's native API calls is challenging since the game is somewhat niche. There really isn't a unified guide online that's up to date, and I've mostly been relying on other mods' methods to figure stuff out. I decided to give ChatGPT a try, and all I got was nonsense. From nonexistent function calls to refactoring a saved copy of the codebase, none of it was at all useful.
What bothered me the most was how apologetic the thing was. Every time I pointed out that that function didn't exist in the API (which has all of the function calls listed publicly online), it would say it's sorry, and spit out another completely wrong thing. Like... I'm pretty sure I could build a bot that indexed and documented the whole library and at least get the actual function names and inputs correct...
curious when this was because this shouldn't be difficult for chatgpt to do.
Last May. It was discouraging. I was trying to reformat the stupid rubric and it kept giving me a three page document that undid all the formatting and had like one line on each page. Copilot crapped out worse. I was told after that yeah neither can handle files well.
Just like in programming it's constantly writing code saying to use FunctionX in LibraryY to do the thing you need, when it doesn't exist at all. "Oh you're right, sorry that doesn't exist, here use this other completely made up function instead!"
They haven't been able to get AI to read a clock or calendar so even a barebones assistant option isn't possible yet. Not surprised it can't do that
AI functions more like GPU-style probablistic raytracing than a linear CPU, which is why multi-step logic and procedural transformation fail as often as they do. It's biggest power comes from being a glorified search engine, but billed as original thought
Microsoft can't even figure out the search engine part of this. They keep hiding settings in new places, and when you search for them, the OS takes you out to the web, rather than actually searching on the local PC. It's really impressive had bad it is getting.
I see you have began to type "Mor" because you need that Mortgage pdf on your desktop but how about MORTAL KOMBAT ON XBOX GAMEPASS INSTEAD!!!
windows is gnarly
Hiding settings in new places, buried in apparently unrelated menus has been my personal most aggravating feature of Microsoft products for nearly 20 years. Makes sense they are doing the same thing with AI.
I fed Copilot a spreadsheet with like 20,000 lines of PM 2.5 data and asked it to calculate the mean and median.
"I can't do that."
Fucking kidding me?
you're fortunate it was honest. Most AIs will make random shit up and sell it to you like they are subject-matter experts.
And if you tell them their answer is wrong, they will tell you that you're right and proceed to one-up you by explaining back why their answer is wrong like they were teaching you.
Exactly. Like if you can’t remove two single steps from a very simple workflow what are we doing here?
Funnily enough, it's the high level stuff that's easier for chatgpt.
"Chatgpt, what are the steps in order to prepare my codebase and have it be production ready for the sponsor/client?"
which it does a decently good job on.
But specifics: "please productionize my code" is something I wouldn't trust it with.
So fingers crossed it's the CEOs that will realize their jobs can be automated.
Because what they call AI is a language model. If we are comparing it to the human brain, it is the language center. Our language center turns our thoughts and knowledge into language. It's hooked into what I'm going to call our knowledge center and reasoning center (I understand that my knowledge of human brain anatomy is far from medical grade).
LLMs have no knowledge or reasoning. They approximate knowledge by regurgitating what they read in their training material.
When you think of AI in, let's say, Star Trek, it's attached to a vast store of verified knowledge. It has knowledge stored in databases. And when you ask it to do something, it translates your words into a predefined process, and if it can't it would ask for clarification from the asker. In other words, it has knowledge and a form of reasoning.
What we have is just the talky part, built explicitly to at best just copy what someone else said without any means or interest to verify that response against anything. And when it can't copy someone else's answer it just makes shit up.
They usually don't even hook it up to a fucking calculator. AI can't do math, and math is the most basic thing computers do.
Yep. Our current LLM technology could one day become a part of true strong AI, acting as the language center of its brain. But when the language center is the only part of the brain you've got, it has some pretty big fundamental limitations on what it can do, which we're already running up against.
LLMs will be part of the solution, probably, but you're never going to get AGI with LLMs alone.
Microsoft problem is that they take the latest trend and put it into goddamn absolutely everything. I have no problem having a browser tab open and asking ChatGPT a question and getting my answer. I do not need copilot integrated into Microsoft office, Windows 11, xbox, Xbox game bar, outlook online, onedrive, and my coffee maker.
And in true Microsoft fashion, they don’t give you the choice. They force it upon you.
The worst part is it's not even actually integrated, it's just slapped on top. It would be useful if the one in outlook could find an old email based on a vague recollection you gave it, but it can't. Or if it could summarize an email chain into a OneNote document, but it can't.
It's funny that Copilot still can't edit the terrible PowerPoint slide itself generated a second before. It just tells you how to do it yourself.
I just set up a windows 11 laptop out of the box and between the forced microsoft account and bloatware, i wanted to format it immediatly and install Linux.
Google autounattend.xml
There will be a website that will make you one where you can turn off all the awful bloat, services and widgets AND get rid of the Microsoft account requirement.
Drop that .xml file into the root directory of your windows install media (I assume you are installing from a USB key) and reinstall windows.
Windows will now be bare bones and fast
A windows laptop out of the box is not typically installed from a USB key. It's preloaded on the machine, but you still have to set it up the first time you turn it on.
For Microsoft to launch 12+ different AI products by randomly combining the words “Copilot,” “365,” and “Microsoft” requires a level of brand-equity bravado I can barely comprehend.
This naming strategy is either: A) A disruptive, out-of-the-box strategy only achievable because an AI Agent came up with it. B) A misreading of the customer refrain “No” as “Not Yet.”
As a former Sr. Director, I fear it is option B.
That is the only coherent explanation why they just slashed sales targets for AI Agents by 50%. The "Agentic AI trade" is stalling.
they've always been incompetent at naming and have a history of overloading the same terms to have many meanings.
The Xbox naming is ridiculous lol
What, you don't know the difference between an Xbox One, an Xbox One X, an Xbox Series X and Xbox One S?
It's a true mystery why parents buy more Playstations.
How could you forget the Xbox Series S?
MS has been doing this in their UI for years, after all. There's no option for "No" -- your only options are "Yes" or "Maybe later".
For a long time, MS has not understood the meaning of the word "no".
As a company they got too cocky. Where are the companies that treat us like customers? Where have all the customer service agents gone. Put me on with a human
Human is expensive and gets sick, much cheaper to invest tens of billions in a non functional spell checking machine.
Not limited to just its AI products...
That’s unfortunate. Considering how many are taking to Windows 11, I’m not the least bit surprised.
Most people do this because they’re forced, security patches stop coming for older operating systems and then you need to update.
If I had it my way I’d still be using 8.1. I think that was the last version of windows where if you searched for an object on your own computer, it looked there, instead of defaulting to search for your query over bing, to purposely artificially pad / inflate bing query numbers.
I would have happily stayed on 7 or XP.
Satya Unfortunatella
You seem to be mistaking windows 11 adoption with people using the shitty spyware baked into windows 11
I am only allowed to use Copilot for work. It is WORSE than useless. Hallucinates constantly and will double down on the lie indefinitely
I have my own paid version of ChatGPT right now. It has made significant ongoing improvements and now feels leaps and bounds ahead of Copilot.
This shocked me because due to Microsoft's close relationship with Open AI I figured that would be essentially the same product with different faces. Absolutely not the case.
Edit:
Thanks for the info!
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1phc3yu/microsoft_has_a_problem_nobody_wants_to_buy_or/nsy1apn/
I see the same. Try and get it to write code on something slightly obscure or new and it completely shits the bed.
Recently,I was using one API that had been completely rewritten at some stage, and although I kept saying to use the new API version it kept flicking back and forwards between the old and the new and completely fucked everything up. My boss, who only uses copilot to plan his numerous holidays, cannot understand why I say it's a piece of shit.
People who love LLM and use them all the time are the same people who were incapable of googling basic shit
My wife did a Bing search for polled (hornless) cattle breeds, and Co-Pilot had a summary statement like, "All animals, particularly cattle, are naturally hornless." It was so shockingly and objectively wrong I have no clue how it came to that conclusion.
Microsoft literally asked us to not ask Copilot to do math. Excel has been doing math for decades lol. This idiotic moment in history can't end soon enough.
Good. Burst the bubble and give us back our RAM.
Windows 11 is a pile of hot garbage with recall and copilot+
It’s a security nightmare from a platform which would rather charge for security as a service because they know how easily their products are compromised, so they’ll just as soon charge the consumer for it.
Get a Mac or go linux
Microsoft is failing to understand that there isn't much AI use case for consumers.
Maybe a weird analogy but: look at chess programs. The chess programs in 1990s were good enough to beat 99% of people, even if they still couldn't beat the pros. Nowadays, they have AI chess programs that destroy not just all the best pros, but even the best preAI computers.
So professional chess players, they are buying the latest AI chess programs that they need to get every advantage possible playing professional chess.
But for the rest of us?? There's literally no difference. The computers ten years ago were far stronger than anything we needed as amateurs.
That's the general theme of AI. Yes, transportation companies are benefitting from advanced AI algorithms helping to fine tune their routes and operations. Biomedical companies are benefitting from advanced AI algorithms figuring out how to fold proteins. Media companies are benefitting from advanced AI algorithms helping show more targeted content to customers.
But the average consumer really isn't getting anything out of AI that they weren't getting from "pre-AI" software ten years besides maybe high schoolers cheating on their homework. Yeah it's funny to make an ai image, but there's no value im willing to spend money on, just a funny thing to do for free.
That's why this AI forcefeeding is so frustrating. No i dont need copilot to do anything for me except maybe help with some tougher excel formulas at work. In other words, in a professional setting.
If im not at work, there's nothing AI can do for me except save me a couple clicks when looking up a recipe or researching for an electronics purchase. There's just nothing there to market and exploit for profit
From Copilot-Spyware To Bitlocker-Ransomware
As a software engineer who cut his teeth in the late 90s and early 2000s, I remember who Microsoft really is and why the open source movement was so awesome.
I was happy to be able to switch to Linux at work as well as at home. Eventually I had to work with a mac, and did that at home.
Lately, I've been thinking about switching back to Linux- whatever flavor, because anything is better than Microsoft regardless of its use.
We live in a boring cyberpunk dystopia
And the only cyborgs are like retirement aged and have boring stuff like pacemakers or hearing aids
Windows sucks ass now.
I got my kid a new laptop for Xmas and I set everything up on it so he can basically use it right out of the box. The windows setup nowadays consist of:
-Select what categories you want for advertisements
-Select what user data you want m$ to get constantly from your computer
-MANDATORY login to a Microsoft account (fuck this, seriously)
It's ridiculous. You don't even own the computer, basically. I fucking hate it. I'm old-man-shaking-fist-at-cloud here, but you used to be able to be an Admin of your own computer without jumping through hoops, you could even set that bad boy up to log right in without a password if that was what you fancied.
Linux is the way.
Switched to Ubuntu recently. I'm positively surprised. Everything works and even games are running, which I wasn't expecting at all. I'm using computer for work mostly, but my media pc is running Ubuntu too now and no issues there either.
I was afraid of the Linux horror story and that's why I decided to go with mainstream Ubuntu. That was apparently good decision as all is great 😃👍
The day iRacing becomes available on Lennox. I will never touch windows again.
Good luck using any OS on a heating and cooling unit.
There's probably some ultralightweight Linux distro that will actually run on whatever microcontroller is inside a modern A/C
First Agentic AI update to my Windows machine & I switch to Linux same day.
I did this the day I was forced to learn what the word "Agentic" meant when they made the announcement. Nobody asked for this, nobody wants this. I'm now 100% off windows and couldn't be happier with an OS that just works like it's supposed to. unfortunately I still have to deal with Windows at work.
started researching software compatibility & WINE when I heard that announcement 🤣
... And Gemini installed itself on my windows 11 PC and I had the uninstall chrome to get it off
Google is also sticking ai every where
Google has the ability to shove it into their existing products without alienating everyone all at once. Microsoft does not have that luxury.
Edit: this is not to say Google AI is great or very useful, just that it naturally integrates easier with less area for consumer pushback
It’s still wild to me that they’re shoving this into Notepad and gaming.
Every department has clearly been given a mandate that uses the word "Agentic" and the phrase "Embed in everything"
Meanwhile, useful features continue to languish on the floor. Images not being complete wank in word would do more for my team’s productivity than ai would by a long shot.
To be fair you can uninstall notepad and install something like notepad++ as for gaming you don't really have to use game bar at all
The thing is, theres nothing stopping microsoft from doing the same…except microsoft.
In theory copilot should be the most useful application of AI out there. Built right into office, I should be able to ask it for help with all sorts of daily tasks.
But it just…sucks. And it’s so inconsistently applied to the MS suite of product offerings that it’s almost impressive.
You just described 90% of Microsoft’s product history
“Copilot, make a tab in this excel document that ….”
“Sorry, I can’t actually make the changes in the document, but here are 157 steps to do it yourself”
That’s been my most frustrating experience. Otherwise, it’s just chatgpt in the backend.
Rag on your company’s SharePoint is just the absolute best thing to happen in intranets in for ever. Copilot has been good enough for me.
The copilot agents are just a toy at this point. They are mostly unreliable or don’t actually save you any time.
There isn’t much there for consumers at this point.
Yeah the AI trend sucks hard, just jamming AI up everythings ass that doesn't even need it. Silicon Valley sucks.
It's reticent to modern cars Vs the touch screen+software. I much prefer tactile feedback, dials and whatnot. But good luck getting that, most of todays car dashboards are a giant touch screen tablet, soon to be bricked in the near future.
Apple is being smart by not overextending itself in this area and ruining their hyper popular products.