Spreading hate, fear, causing death, and violating every social standard of consent while they do it.
Something ugly has been grown in the bowels of the bay and it needs to stop.
But with all technology eventually society catches up and the wild west is over.
The solution to this was representative democracy electing independently-minded technical experts, but electoral / parliamentary systems in many countries would need to change to make this viable.
E.g. in the US, what percentage of Congress do you think could give even an accurate 100-level description of AI?
People are losing jobs to AI. It is in the form of layoffs so that companies can invest in AI, it is in the form of lower hiring of junior engineers because AI is supposed to do those jobs, it is in the form of silent reductions because less people are expected to do more using AI, it is in the form of entire job roles being replaced (customer success), it is in the form of second order market effects of reduced spending from people who lost their jobs, and much more.
My follow up expands on it. You are arguing that LLMs are not capable of entirely replacing a human’s job therefore people are not losing jobs over AI is extremely bad faith. If a machine in a factory automates 50% of a worker’s job, it still replaces half the workers. The factory won’t employ the same number of people and the people absolutely lost their jobs to automation.
I'm sure you could argue endlessly about which factors are more important to more people, but overall employment does appear to be reverting to its longer-term trends after pandemic disruptions, and these kinds of corrections have historically impacted junior positions much more than senior positions.
In any case, “reviewer of LLM translations” doesn’t exist as a full-time job to anywhere near the extent that “translator” used to be.
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/lost-translation-ais-impact-t...
(But you are correct that they did lay them off.)
AI is not there yet to replace any person's job.
This is of course true, but it has not actually prevented any layoffs. Management generally does not understand this, does not care, or is happy to have a pretext to fire a bunch of workers to make stock go up.
I am regularly in meetings where my director or vp tells people that we should replace vendor staffing with AI and that we will get minimal engineering headcount because AI should make us more productive.
Even if the bosses are wrong, we can still see the impulse and be pissed off about it.
(I mean, this is terrible career advice, but it would point out the problem. Either AI is good enough to replace directors, or it isn't. If it is, then their jobs go too. If it's not, then it's probably not good enough to replace a lot of other peoples' jobs. But the problem is, the directors think that their jobs are so hard that they can't be done by AI, but everyone else's jobs are easy.)
Truly a shortsighted CEO and company
It's infuriating that you can't even minimize it or close it. I love One Note, use it for work constantly and it's great for tracking meetings, notes, to do lists, vendor contacts, whatever. Now there's a giant COPILOT icon in the middle of the notebook and you can't move it, close it or minimize it. There's no way to disable it entirely. I'd be find if it were in the dropdown menu but shoved into the middle of the page is so aggravating, it's blocking my actual work and text.
Privately I use obsidian with self hosted livesync which is amazing. But at work I have to use Copilot. In some ways I don't mind it in onenote because it actually succeeds in finding stuff the search function doesn't. Syncing to mobile often doesn't work right either.
To me it's the worst O365 app and the one I need the most :(
I'd be fascinated by anyone from the Office team to tell me why Microsoft can't get global search right in their products.
E.g. SharePoint has had broken search for decades at this point (on multiple entirely different platforms of the product!)
It's a solved technical problem -- it's just like no one at MS cares.
The way I set it up I don't find myself searching for things much as I know the way it's organized to quickly find things I need.
I always hate when OneNote opens random text boxes when I click somewhere. But yeah some people could like that too.
Fwiw I have that at work and IMO it's not worth that much. It's more useful than the free one but nothing game changing.
'... it'd be a lot cooler if you did.'
Despite all this they still have a hugely profitable business, a pretty decent OS under all the adware, and a defacto monopoly on business productivity software.
So which paragraph do you think was more relevant to their recommendation…the one where they already have most of the customers they will ever have, or the one where people are increasingly moving away from them in their daily lives?
as an exercise see how many job openings there are where you won’t be using MSFT products if you get the gig :)
none of this is anecdotal, I make a living as contractor and in just past two years have worked on numerous moving-to-microsoft projects, Oracle to SQL Server, AWS to Azure, Sharepoint etc etc... I am not a fan of MSFT by any means but what you are writing makes absolutely no sense. You should read MSFT quarterly earnings reports and not read few anecdotal things people on HN write about MSFT. It is M7 for a reason and practically has no competition (which is why they are able to do shit like Windows 11 and Copilot and... people on HN might be bitching but it is just for entertainment purposes)
The AI stuff is definitely terrible, but I turned it off a long time ago and never see it, it's another thing I don't understand the outrage about. The FUD about it getting reactivated hasn't come to pass for me.
There's a lot of people that actually started migrating to Mac / Linux when Windows 10 went EOL recently.
And the list goes on, I just don't remember every single UI regression issue I've encountered right away. But Win11 is clearly bad. Not the awful bad, but annoying bad daily.
I hope that means they’re planning to pivot away from it. ;)
Is this blog post perfectly timed for some financially important event, anual report, investors meeting or something? I'm very curious to know.