“We think we’re on the cusp of the next evolution, where AI happens not just in that chatbot and gets naturally integrated into the hundreds of millions of experiences that people use every day,” says Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, in a briefing with The Verge. “The vision that we have is: let’s rewrite the entire operating system around AI, and build essentially what becomes truly the AI PC.”

…yikes

  • Boozilla@lemmy.world
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    They never learn. This is what happens when clueless MBAs make your strategic decisions.

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      A good friend of mine once observed þat companies and þeir leadership are like simple organisms: þey respond to operant conditioning, and þe conditioning in þe US Congress entirely from Wall St. You can’t even give þe government any credit anymore. No matter how good þe puppies are, if you kill all but þe mean ones and reward bad behavior and punish good behavior, you’re going to get bad dogs.

      Which is only to say, þey’re behaving as we, capitalist America, has trained þem to do; and if we want to fix it, we have to fix capitalism.

      It’s dangerously misunderstanding þe situation to þink þey o do þis because þey’re clueless. Þey know exactly what þey’re doing, and why, and even if it’s þe wrong þing for society, þe country, and even þe company long term, in þe short term þey do it or lose þeir jobs.

        • Blisterexe@lemmy.zipOP
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          yeah a diacritic on the c, t or s to indicate the sound change would be much better, like this:

          this, share, chef ṱis, šare, ĉef

          • otp@sh.itjust.works
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            On the contrary, I think the standard way that just about everybody who can read English *understands would be best.

            • Blisterexe@lemmy.zipOP
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              yeah, which is why I don’t write my comments like that, I was just saying if you had to change it, that’d be better.

              • palordrolap@fedia.io
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                We have a diacritic in English text already. Rather than above or below, it goes to the right of the letter it modifies and looks an awful lot like a letter h.

                And if you don’t quite buy that, remember that a lot of diacritics started life as letters that were eventually moved above a preceding letter and then simplified. The tilde on ñ was an n itself; the ring on å was another a; and in at least some cases the umlaut was an e.

                Modifying-h may only be stuck where it is because technology did away with the need for economical scribes before they had a chance to start messing with it.

                • Blisterexe@lemmy.zipOP
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                  I think you’re making my point for me, a diacritic instead of an h to indicate a sound change would be more efficient and reduce ambiguity. A diacritic is the natural evolution of such a word pair.

                  The problem is that not only is there no central authority for spelling reform in English, the cost of replacing the existing body of work would be too large, even for changes that would be more consequential.

                  My argument was never that my proposal should replace the current system, just that if you did want spelling reform, it would make more sense than the thorn.

          • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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            The best option would just be to use the language that everyone knows rather than a made-up language that only you know. Writing like that is just going to result in everyone ignoring you.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          The amount of effort this twit must go to in order to write a comment is baffling. It literally never goes over well.

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          Are you sure? They’re both unvoiced th, which is what thorn is for if you intend to distinguish.

          I can’t tell whether Old English used eth for those words early on - though the unvoiced quality in modern English makes that seem unlikely. Did we also devoice them? Eth died out fairly quickly in favour of thorn in all cases, voiced or not. Possibly because its name is “eþ” not “eð”. It doesn’t even use itself. (Though, ironically, ‘w’ also doesn’t and it replaced ƿynn, which does.)

          There was another commenter - actually might have been the same guy, I’m not all that sure - who did use eth for voiced instances, to similar controversial effect in comment sections.

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            I may have mixed up which one is which. My point was more that if one is to use the old characters for th, they should at least use the correct one for each.

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        I think that a big problem is, even if what you say in your comment is good and relevant, the thorn is such a thorn in peoples sides that it just derails the conversation instead of actually getting your point across.

    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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      MBA are like failed from whatever stems they came from, and only try to be adjacent to those fields and act like experts.

  • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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    Tip for any future product designers: Just because it looks cool in a movie, doesn’t mean it’ll translate well into reality as a useful product.

    • jbaber@lemmy.sdf.org
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      Mission Accomplished.

      I delayed Linux on the main computer for years for the kids’ video games and trying to give MS a chance when they were trying to be good (WSL2, Win10 forever, etc.)

      Now when I start the machine in windows, a splash screen comes up and literally tells me to buy a new computer. Linux has been lovely.

      • Antithetical@lemmy.deedium.nl
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        WSL(2) was not Microsoft “being good”. It was part of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

        It was clear Linux won in the server world (not IIS). So why don’t you run this lovely Linux as an app in our nice safe OS where we can keep milking you.

    • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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      Fun fact someone did this with pornhub with the one computer running windows 8 back in middle school. It was nominally in protest for trying to get us to stop using our weird outdated laptops we were bringing in from home.

      Yes they all had doom installed within the first week of us dragging them in.

      • CatsPajamas@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        My school blocked all of the game sites and whatnot so I created a backdoor administrator that I could log into and shared it around until the very nice librarian asked me how to delete it so I told her lol

  • Kissaki@feddit.org
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    The vision of an AI PC, where it may or may not launch the app you tell it to, where one plus one may or may not be two, where deleting a file may delete the file you see, or a random different one.

    Sounds great! /s

    Imagine the cost of cloud AI on PCs. That only works too some degree for cloud data and being even more wasteful for the rest.

    Every document you have, legal and medical, finance and personal, will all interface with the cloud. With numerous parties en route, visible and hidden, and a massive system you may or may not trust.

  • whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    If a tech executive says we’re on the cusp of a technology breakthrough it means less than nothing and we should be more suspicious of it than already. These are people who don’t know how to manage an organization based on the frequent layoffs (2009, 2014, 2023-2025 over 20k workers). People get fired because they fuck up, management layoff people because management fucked up.

  • Constant Pain@lemmy.world
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    "Open the browser. No, not explorer, Edge! Open Edge, god damn it! Go to CNN.com. why did you open another browser window? No, I don’t want to open another browser window. Open the news “Everything sucks and we are all going to die”. Why did you open Bing? Stop asking for confirmation for everything…

    • NoAlias@lemmy.ca
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      Yessss I was just saying that to a friend. Its starting to really feel like we’re gonna be looking back in a few years laughing at it as a trend. Time will tell!

      • pyre@lemmy.world
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        the comparison’s not meant to compare their qualities, but the push to include it in everything by various industries when no one really wants it.

    • Rooster326@programming.dev
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      Does anyone still know anyone with a 3D TV?

      My uncle bought a $2,000 one but the cheap fuck only ever bought 1 pair of glasses.

      Never got to see it in action.

      • frog_brawler@lemmy.world
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        My dad bought one in probably 2006 or something but it died in 2020.

        Visio had a good tv during that time.

        Was the 3D part ever used? That’s a big “fuck-nah,” but it’s always been that.

  • earthworm@sh.itjust.works
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    let’s rewrite the entire operating system around AI

    This should be the headline.

    Then everyone can make up their minds about whether or not to stay with Microsoft or finally move on.

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    I hate any voice-activated programs. Sometimes I’ll ask my phone to call someone, and most of the time it does. But every now and then, it seems to completely forget my voice, the English language, how to access my contacts, how to spell anything, etc. I end up spending five minutes trying to force it to dial by my voice, screaming and cursing at it like a psychopath, when it would have taken me literally 3 seconds to just make the call manually.

    If you try to do some sort of voice-to-text thing, it ALWAYS screws it up so bad, that you end up spending more time editing, than if you’d just typed it yourself in the first place.

    Fuck voice-activated anything. It NEVER works reliably.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      It isn’t even unique to AI, human operators get things wrong all the time. Any time you put something involving natural language between the user/customer and completing a task, there’s a significant risk of it going wrong.

      The only time I want hands-free anything is when driving, and I’d rather pull over than deal with voice activation unless it’s an emergency and I can’t stop driving.

      I don’t get this fascination with voice activation. If you asked me to describe my dream home if money was no object and tech was perfect, voice activation would not be on the list. When I watch Iron Man or Batman talking to a computer, I don’t see some pinnacle of efficiency, I see inefficiency. I can type almost as fast as I can speak, and I can make scripts or macros to do things far faster than I can describe them to a computer. Shortcuts are far more efficient than describing the operation.

      If a product turns to voice activation, that tells me they’ve given up on the UX.

      • Flic@mstdn.social
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        @sugar_in_your_tea @BarneyPiccolo especially in a language as widely used as English with regional nuance that an NLP could never distinguish. When I say “quite” is it an American “quite” or a British “quite”? Same for “rather”? What does it mean if we’re tabling this thing in the agenda? When/for how long is something happening, momentarily? Neither the speaker nor the program will have a clue how these things are being interpreted, and likely will not even realise there are differences.

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          Even if they solve the regional dialect problem, there’s still the problem of people being really imprecise with natural language.

          For example, I may ask, “what is the weather like?” I could mean:

          • today’s weather in my current location (most likely)
          • if traveling, today or tomorrow’s weather in my destination
          • weather projection for the next week or so (local or destination)
          • current weather outside (i.e. heading outside)

          An internet search would be “weather <location> <time>”. That’s it. Typing that takes a few seconds, whereas voice control requires processing the message (a couple seconds usually) and probably an iteration or two to get what you want. Even if you get it right the first time, it’s still as long or longer than just typing a query.

          Even if voice activation is perfect, I’d still prefer a text interface.

          • setVeryLoud(true);@lemmy.ca
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            My autistic brain really struggles with natural language and its context-based nuances. Human language just isn’t built for precision, it’s built for conciseness and efficacy. I don’t see how a machine can do better than my brain.

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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              Agreed. A lot of communication is non-verbal. Me saying something loudly could be due to other sounds in the environment, frustration/anger, or urgency. Distinguishing between those could include facial expressions, gestures with my hands/arms, or any number of non-verbal clues. Many autistic people have difficulty picking up on those cues, and machines are at best similar to the most extreme end of autism, so they tend to make rules like “elevated volume means frustration/anger” when that could very much not be the case.

              Verbal communication is designed for human interactions, whether in long-form (conversations) or short-form (issuing commands), and they rely on a lot from the human experience. Human to computer interactions should focus on those strengths, not try to imitate human interaction, because it will always fail at some point. If I get driving instructions from my phone, I want it to be terse (turn right on Hudson Boulevard), whereas if my SO is giving me directions, I’m happy with something more long-form (at that light, turn right), because my SO knows how to communicate unambiguously to me whereas my phone does not.

              So yeah, I’ll probably always hate voice-activation, because it’s just not how I prefer to communicate w/ a computer.

      • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz
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        When I watch Iron Man or Batman talking to a computer, I don’t see some pinnacle of efficiency, I see inefficiency.

        Things like Jarvis from Iron Man are far beyond of just translating speech to computer commands. Like in the first Iron Man where Jarvis pretty much manages the whole process on manufacturing the suit and can autonomically manage a fleet of them. I could see benefit if some kind of AI could just listen on a engineers discussion and update CAD models based on that, taking care of that the assemblies work as they should, keeping everything in spec and managing all the documents accordingly. But that’s pretty much human-level AI at that point and specially the current LLM hype is fundamentally very different from it.

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      To drive some people away from Windows. Others will like this kind of thing, and still others will be indifferent. Bear in mind that we’re in an anti-AI social media bubble here, opinions are not uniform.

      • Chronographs@lemmy.zip
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        I can’t imagine people would think this is a good idea past the point that they actually have to use this to get anything done, the best would be huffing copium thinking that the part where it gets good is right around the corner

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          I try to never underestimate what people are willing to do, like, and put up with for whatever reasons.

          Considering how un-tech savvy newer generations are, I would not be shocked if the idea of being able to tell a computer what to do and “it just does it” appeals. This is, of course, assuming it works as intended (lol.)

          I also see this as a further dumbing down of that ability to understand tech. Hypothetically, if this were to launch, go mainstream, and the vast majority of future computer users use it, can you imagine a world in which a future teenager looks confused and goes, “What’s an app?”

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            Why specify just “newer generations?” I do tech support for older generations in my family and they’re just as un-tech-savvy.

            The vast majority of people don’t care how a computer works, they just want it to work. And that’s fine. There are lots of machines and other technologies in my life that I can’t spend the time to fully comprehend, I’ve got other stuff I need to do. As long as there are a few people who focus on each kind of machine and each kind of technology then civilization carries on okay.

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            Sure, if they could actually deliver on the hype they’re eating out of their own ass that would be one thing, I just think they are fundamentally misrepresenting the capabilities of our current AI technology and barely able to deliver an operating system that works without trying to retrofit the entire thing for their bloated chatbots. Unless there’s a huge breakthrough in AI research that allows actual reasoning AND microsoft manages to actually become competent I don’t see how the end of this route is anything but a steaming turd. My money is on the bubble bursting and Microsoft “refocusing on core competencies” before getting distracted again by the next bad idea.

            • other_cat@piefed.zip
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              Oh, I agree. My comment really hinges on the idea that it actually works. Which I doubt immensely haha.

        • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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          As is frequently the case for relatively tech-savvy people, I do free tech support for my older relatives. In the past year or two it’s become so much easier because 99% of the time all I have to do is remind them “have you asked Copilot how to do that?” And they’ll go “oh yeah,” go ask Copilot, and that tells them how to fix their problem.

          You are on the Fediverse, a niche platform that has inordinate appeal to people with a particular attitude and aptitude toward tech. And this particular community has its own set of attitudes that tend to get reinforced thanks to the upvote/downvote system. This is a bubble we are in here. If you look around at the people here and draw conclusions about what people in general want you’re going to get a very inaccurate view.

          Chatgpt.com is the fifth-most heavily visited website as of August. AI is popular.

          • bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works
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            Yep, and so the population gets even stupider. Yay.

            Sorry, not a proponent of it. But honestly I saw the writing on the wall when people got rid of cds and dvds for streaming. People are idiots, and want a corpo controlled life they can stew in, being stupid and fat,exactly like the matrix.

            • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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              Can you fix your own car? If your refrigerator fails, can you fix that too? How about medical conditions, are you able to treat any and all of those? Prepare any kind of meal? Assemble a wooden cabinet from raw materials? Weld and cut metal? Sew clothing, plant a garden, paint a picture, play a musical instrument?

              There’s always things that people are good at and other things that they’re not good at. We live in a civilization where we specialize in things because it’s impossible to learn everything that needs to be done. You think you’re good at troubleshooting computer problems, and that’s a fine thing to be good at. Other people are not good at it. They need help with it. That doesn’t make them “stupid.” It makes them people who’ve chosen to focus on other things.

              • Armok_the_bunny@lemmy.world
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                Except for the medicine stuff, I am confident I would be able to do all of those things actually, given a bit of time for research and enough motivation. Even more critically, when I have a problem like that where I don’t care enough to figure it out for myself, I call upon the expertise of an actual human that really knows things, not a glorified autocomplete with internet access.

                • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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                  Except for the medicine stuff

                  So aside from the things that you can’t do, you can do anything.

                  Even more critically, when I have a problem like that where I don’t care enough to figure it out for myself, I call upon the expertise of an actual human that really knows things, not a glorified autocomplete with internet access.

                  I bet you Google it.

          • Chronographs@lemmy.zip
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            I’m not arguing for that some people, this sounds like a good thing. I’m just imagining said older-relative types asking something like “check my emails” and the AI tries to open their unconfigured outlook lite or whatever and says “I’m having trouble doing that”. I’m sure if it works they’d be all over it, I just don’t believe it will.

        • bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works
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          Oh, you haven’t met people. They’re idiots.

          They’ll gobble this up. Haven’t you installed win 11 in a vm to see how horrible it is? The first fucking thing that pops up is (ads, and) COPILOT HI LOOK AT ME I MAKE SEARCHING THE INTERNET BETTER THAN GOOGLE! PLEASE USE ME. USE ME. I WANT YOUR DATA. ITS OK IF YOU DONT USE ME BECUASE ILL RECORD YOUR SCREEN AND SEND ALL DATA INCLUDING SSN AND BANK DATA TO MICROSOFT BUT DONT WORRY ITS OK. USE ME PLEASE. PLEASE BRO.

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        I mean this could be awesome. A real time assistant living in your computer? However, it won’t be. At all. It will suck real bad.