Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
That's not fair! I care! A lot!
Just had to buy a new laptop for new place of employment. It took real time, effort, and care, but I've finally found a recent laptop matching my hardware requirements and sense of aesthetics at a reasonable price, without that hideous copilot button :)
quite annoyed that the Snapdragon laptops are bootlocked cos they'd make great Linux boxes
My problem is that it's not that fucking useful. I got the Pixel 9 specifically because of its advertised AI chip for the assistant and I swear it's just gotten worse since the Pixel 7. I used to be able to ask Google anything through the assistant, and now 90% of my questions are answered with "can't find the information."
They also advertised (or at least heavily alluded to) the use of the AI chip when you are in low network areas but it works just as good outside of 4g+ coverage as it ever did without the stupid chip.
Whats the point of adding AI branded nonsense if there's no practical use for it. And that doesn't even start to cover the issues with AI's reliability as a source of information. Garbage in = garbage out.
When Gemini can find the information, they added flowery "social" bullshit before, in the middle and after the information I asked for wasting my time
Even non tech people I talk to know AI is bad because the companies are pushing it so hard. They intuit that if the product was good, they wouldn't be giving it away, much less begging you to use it.
You're right - and even if the user is not conscious of this observation, many are subconsciously behaving in accordance with it. Having AI shoved into everything is offputting.
customers dont want AI, but only thhe corporation heads seem obssed with it.
One of the mistakes they made with AI was introducing it before it was ready (I’m making a generous assumption by suggesting that “ready” is even possible). It will be extremely difficult for any AI product to shake the reputation that AI is half-baked and makes absurd, nonsensical mistakes.
This is a great example of capitalism working against itself. Investors want a return on their investment now, and advertisers/salespeople made unrealistic claims. AI simply isn’t ready for prime time. Now they’ll be fighting a bad reputation for years. Because of the situation tech companies created for themselves, getting users to trust AI will be an uphill battle.
Apple Intelligence and the first versions of Gemini are the perfect examples of this.
iOS still doesn’t do what was sold in the ads, almost a full year later.
Edit: also things like email summary don’t work, the email categories are awful, notification summaries are straight up unhinged, and I don’t think anyone asked for image playground.
Insert 'Full Self Driving' Here.
Also, outlook's auto alt text function told me that a conveyor belt was a picture of someone's screen today.
Calling it “Full Self Driving” is such blatant false advertising.
capitalism working against itself
More like: capitalism reaching its own logical conclusion
I’m making a generous assumption by suggesting that “ready” is even possible
To be honest it feels more and more like this is simply not possible, especially regarding the chatbots. Under those are LLMs, which are built by training neural networks, and for the pudding to stick there absolutely needs to have this emergent magic going on where sense spontaneously generates. Because any entity lining up words into sentences will charm unsuspecting folks horribly efficiently, it’s easy to be fooled into believing it’s happened. But whenever in a moment of despair I try and get Copilot to do any sort of task, it becomes abundantly clear it’s unable to reliably respect any form of requirement or directive. It just regurgitates some word soup loosely connected to whatever I’m rambling about. LLMs have been shoehorned into an ill-fitted use case. Its sole proven usefulness so far is fraud.
There was research showing that every linear jump in capabilities needed exponentially more data fed into the models, so seems likely it isn't going to be possible to get where they want to go.
OpenAI admitted that with o1! they included graphs directly showing gains taking exponential effort
Oh we care alright. We care about keeping it OUT of our FUCKING LIVES.
Gen AI should be private, secure, local and easier to train by it's users to fit their own needs. Closest thing to this at the moment seems to be Kobold.
WTF is an AI computer? Is that some marketing bullshit?
"Y2k ready" vibes.
@Matriks404 @dgerard got it in one! It's MS's marketing campaign for PCs with a certain amount of "AI" FLOPS
Don’t care AND are not stupid.
Fuck AI
The average technical person realises ai is shit.
The average non-technical person doesn't need an ai computer, because chatgpt is free.
I care. I care enough to crater copilot.
Google, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia and everyone else is hyping up AI. Consumers are not really seeing much benefit by making everything AI-ified. Executives are raving over it but maybe aren't realize that people outside of the C-suite aren't that excited? Having it shoved in our faces constantly, or crammed in places companies hope they can save money is not helping either.
Most features are relabelled years old shit...google on tap is now gemini screen search.
Things like chatbots have gotten better but bleh, I dont want to give up my privacy for this shit
they are useless... Copilot is not worth even $50 of an update