I’d be more forgiving, but what MS Copilot sucks at the worst is working with Office files: PowerPoint: completely useless

Excel: useful for some tasks if I reformat all my sheets into tables, so mostly useless

Word: can’t even answer why the formatting of the file from my coworker is a mess (which is every coworker), let alone try to fix it. But it will gladly take a succinct piece of information and make it into an insufferable 50 pages of fluff. It summarizes documents well and helps with reviews.

OneNote: creating content it’s ok, but useless at retrieving info.

Outlook: It tries to help, mostly confirms that my language is may be perceived as cold and offensive. Which is good, because that was my intention.

It is surprisingly helpful with PDFs and extracting data and cleaning up formatting.

Unsurprising, it does great with CSV and other open data formats. Maybe there is a lesson here?

Mailbox.org works for me.

Indeed. My Alienware doubles as a space heater in my north facing office.

Awesome! Send them to Canada, we can build data centres and sell the cloud services back to Americans powered by the electricity that we expect to be tarriffed, and cooled by the water we won’t sell.

Kiss of the Spider Woman. Back I the 80s our parents left us to fend for ourselves. I was around 10 years old and my parents were at a job site in northern Canada where the only channel was CBC. Definitely an intense movie, I’d say more than the Exorcism which aired another night. My brother missed the first, but had serious nightmares from the Exorcism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_of_the_Spider_Woman_(1985_film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exorcist

Energy conservation has been part of that messaging. Running appliances and low peak times etc. All of that is out the window for AI.

Energy conservation is the dumbest thing we have ever talked about. For prosperity and well being, electricity should be cheap and plentiful. It’s pollution and greenhouse gases that need to be curtailed. Another mixed up policy mess of messaging, and it is being unravelled by AI.

Clean electricity should be so cheap that every other option isnt feasible. Instead, it’s talk conservation, reducing wealth and quality of life.

Duolingo is a game for points and badges. it’s not actually useful for learning anything.

Vegan leather. Not made out of vegans. Actually made out of polyurethane: oil: check, microplastics: check, disposable with a short usable life: check!

Powering off a pile of switches is turning it off. Powering off a sentient being is killing it. Not to mention a million other issues it raises.

Growing up years ago, I found a book on my parents bookshelf. I wish I’d kept track of it, but it had a cartoon of 2 Martians standing on Mars watching the Earth explode and one commented to the other along the lines that intelligent life forms must have lived there to accomplish such a feat. I was probably 8 or 9 at the time, but it’s stuck with me.

It only took a Facebook recommendation engine with some cell phones to excite people into murdering each other in the ongoing Rohingya genocide. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html

We don’t need AI, and at this point it uses so much electricity that it is probably the first thing that would get shut down in a shit hits the fan moment.

Roger Penrose wrote a whole book on the topic in 1989. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/179744.The_Emperor_s_New_Mind

His points are well thought out and argued, but my essential takeaway is that a series of switches is not ever going to create a sentient being. The idea is absurd to me, but for the people that disagree? They have no proof, just a religious furver, a fanaticism. Simply stated, they want to believe.

All this AI of today is the AI of the 1980s, just with more transistors than we could fathom back then, but the ideas are the same. After the massive surge from our technology finally catching up with 40-60 year old concepts and algorithms, most everything has been just adding much more data, generalizing models, and other tweaks.

What is a problem is the complete lack of scalability and massive energy consumption. Are we supposed to be drying our clothes at a specific our of the night, and join smart grids to reduce peak air conditioning, to scorn bitcoin because it uses too much electricity, but for an AI that generates images of people with 6 fingers and other mangled appendages, that bullshit anything it doesn’t know, for that we need to build nuclear power plants everywhere. It’s sickening really.

So no AGI anytime soon, but I am sure Altman has defined it as anything that can make his net worth 1 billion or more, no matter what he has to say or do.

Yeah, this is the gist of the problem. When a PC is connected to airplane WiFi, but it is limited, Steam decides it is online, but some sort of validation fails and then no games will play until I get back to a full internet connection and reboot. I don’t even try anymore, hence my comment about GOG, and yes, I know some games on GOG have DRM, but most don’t and they don’t hide the fact. The Steam DRM bootlicking combined with GOG hatred because they were forced to sell a few games with DRM is so bizarre. Are Steam fan boys a thing? What a weird hill to fight for.

DRM is the heart of most technology pain for paying customers since it’s inception. For pirates, the experience is much better since the DRM is removed.

I’m really happy with my experience with GOG, but they put a lot of effort into their Windows app and i ws pretty blunt with my feedback, it is pretty useless to me and I find it unhelpful. Heroic game launcher on Linux great and cost GOG $0.00. My thought is that they have been focusing on the wrong things, fundamentally I love their strong DRM stance and when I am travelling internationally,the games I bought off GOG work, unlike Steam😡😡😡😡. So if they have come to this realization, then nothing about these changes are disturbing as a customer, but sad to hear their employees taking the hit. 😢

YouTube ruined Christmas. I can’t stand my relatives anymore, they watch every conspiracy clip and now they are a thousand miles down the rabbit hole and I can’t handle them for more than a few days a year. I hate evil Google or alphabet, or whatever they call themselves.

“With regard to the algorithms used to hash data – particularly SHA-224 and SHA-256 – Buchanan expressed surprise that neither will be approved for use beyond 2030.”

Sounds like corruption to me. Hey gov’t pal, let’s make crazy requirements for security due to a quantum boogyman so I can sell you consultants and all new equipment with insane processing capabilities for a shit ton of money. Look for the greasy palms.

Decades of research and we are at 100 qbits and estimates are bouncing around that estimate it will take millions. Once we build them, job #1 will be reading government email?

Maybe, but it’s a lot easier just to use backdoors, software bugs, spies, and good ol’ bribes.

Yet companies are still pushing 2FA over the PSTN. IMO, it’s worse than no 2FA since some companies have processes that essentially trust the outcome as a full validation. I can’t think of a less secure channel.

I did, but I hate Windows 11 so much, I bought a PS5 Pro o avoid it. Windows 10 🙌💎🙌

I bought mine. I had a PS4 Pro and was intentionally holding out for the 5 Pro. I was surprised how easy it was to get one, stock was no issue on launch day. I’m really happy with it, but they aren’t cheap.

I figured when work replaced my machine with a new laptop with Windows 11, I’d give in and upgrade my Windows boxes, but I hate it so much. The UI is a confused mess and it’s so buggy and slow, even on a brand new machine with 32GB of RAM. Just getting around file Explorer feels like the entire machine is coated in molasses. It’s like using a 300 baud modem and I am typing faster than the characters can go. I feel like I am always waiting for files to load, I forget why I even opened an app.

My main machine has been on Linux for a couple years already and Waydroid let’s me run proprietary apps. I’ll probably give up on PC gaming and get a new PS5.

Of course not. They were taking notes as they expect to be next in line to grind the peasants.