Got a new laptop recently. Copilot pops up, so I asked it how to permanently disable Copilot.
It gave me a wordy non-answer, along with a "fun fact" about my local area --- totally relevant and not creepy at all.
Then, after I demanded it tell me how to permanently disable itself, Copilot gave me a completely wrong answer.
After specifying the "app or service" I'm using (Windows, you fucking clueless piece of shit), it then gave me a half-baked answer that called commands which weren't installed by default.
I then used duckduckgo to figure out how to install the configuration tool copilot said to use but that Windows had decided to hide from me.
Good job completely wasting my time, you ai-loving fucks at Microsoft. I don't need new reasons to nuke your shitty software and install Linux, but now I have them. If Linux had native vst3 support, I wouldn't have even booted into Windows.
Edit: Stranger in a Strange Land is a great book, and being the sci-fi novel backgrounding hippie culture, I wouldn't have expected Musk to have read it.
The only reason I still have a windows machine is for PC VR gaming, and even that minimal interaction is annoying. Every major update seems exclusively be MS further enshitifying their OS. It's an hour of research and work into remove whatever new garbage they've added.
Hopefully steam OS gets released soon and then I can just forget about Windows. Except actually I can't because I need it for work, but my personal machine doesn't require it.
This whole series of events feels very Hitchhiker's Guide.
Edit: Stranger in a Strange Land is a great book
Not going to lie, it was one of my least favorite Sci-Fi novels. Felt entirely too Just-So. The characters - particularly Heinlein's self-insert Jubal Harshaw - just came across as vapid, bigoted, and annoying. And so much of the book felt like a climax to an apocalypse everyone deserved (but not in a Douglas Adams funny way, just a deeply nihilistic "Everyone sucks and I hate it here" kind of way).
I've heard that Carla is the way to go, but how much more overhead will it cost when basically all the plugins I use are vst3? At least one project on my tower pc is pretty much maxed out as it is with them running natively on Windows.
My other issue is simply time: this is already side project stuff that I do for a little extra money/learning/career development, and at this point, I simply don't have time to try alternatives.
If I was just researching and writing papers like I did back in grad school, Windows would be gone, but as it stands, the path of least resistance for the audio work I'm doing is just to deal with what I've got.
Who said he actually did? The term "grok" is listed in The Jargon File / The New Hacker's Dictionary. Musk probably read it long ago. ...Like every proper geek. Nowadays, every time he drops an epic meme (as kids say these days), it's a hazily remembered reference to something nerdy from ages gone by, and it just demonstrates he has absolutely no idea about the context.
I don’t think I've ever read The Jargon File or The New Hacker's Dictionary, but I definitely read Heinlen for fun in college. My educational background is in the social sciences and humanities.
Good point about his lack of context though!
I just rewatched a show called Devs with a friend. One of the striking moments was when one of the characters recites some poetry and the techy boss didn't seem to care about how literature can inform and enrich our lives.
"It's the people you meet in this job who really get you down. The best conversation I had was over 34 million years ago. And that was with a coffee machine."
I would have at least tried to replace the diodes down his left side. Though I imagine the conversation would have gone something like this:
"Marvin, do you want me to replace those painful diodes down your left side?"
"Now they ask me if they want my diodes replaced. Of course I want my diodes replaced; they hurt a lot. Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me stupid questions like that. Maybe I should cast my head in concrete."
"I would like to help you not be in pain anymore. Can you show me your schematics so I can order the parts?"
"of COURSE I can. It would be the very simplest task. Oh god, what next?"
I'm glad they swapped actors, Robert is Kryten to me.
Kryten is one of the few robots in Sci-Fi I would fully trust to never take over the world. Even Data has had more than one "something is up with my programming, I'm going to assume control."
I think LLMs work just fine if you know how to use them and their limitations. Imo, they aren't ready for general use without a lecture in how they work and what to expect from them.
Personal computers were enthusiast devices in the 70s and 80s and users had to know how to write code to use them. It took a bit of time for their interfaces to become friendly for the general population. The internet in the early 90s was the same. It is a shame tech companies today want to push this AI down the throats of everyone without first figuring out what and how it should actually be used.
I think it would be a shame if we discard all LLMs today as they do have practical uses. We just shouldn't overuse them where they don't belong.
They're excellent for fine-tuned use-cases that need digesting huge volumes of text- for example, legal and insurance industries. But having a hundred different AI models all trained on scraped nonsense and then hallucinating bizarre outcomes to prompts just isn't very useful to the average person. Especially as more and more average computer users are less and less computer literate. That writing is on the wall.
AI is quickly becoming an integral part of basically every career imaginable. Those that actually take the time to learn how to use it properly are going to inevitably be in a far better position than those too scared to figure it out. The real challenge is finding the balance between using AI as the tool that it is and just getting an easy answer (which, considering all the downvotes I'm getting, is probably the part yall are justifiably concerned with). We need to teach the world (ourselves) how to use AI, not avoid it, and run away like we keep doing. This cat is out of the bag and ain't never going back.
As a professional developer, same. It saves me so much time. My colleagues also use it. Lemmy is a bubble just as much as (or maybe even more so than) Reddit. Mention a use for AI and you'll end up downvoted to hell. You just said "use AI" and people jump to "this guy switched off his brain and does nothing but blindly copy-paste ChatGPT output into his assignments."
Yeah, I'm discovering that AI is one of those no-no topics in this particular echo chamber. Disappointing really, this whole thing is a lot more fun when people actually want to talk instead of just following the crowd. It is in the name I guess, lol.