It appears people are now using the term "Microslop" which I find funny. I'm not in any way an anti-AI absolutist but I do get annoyed by how Microsoft has jammed it into every nook and cranny of their product suite.
back
5 comments
People wouldn’t be anti-AI if they weren’t losing their livelihood over AI only to find that everything they thought they’d do while being unemployed is also being ruined by AI.
Technologists are being deliberately misanthropic.
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.
Probably quite a feel people on HN paying their mortgage with selling digital crack to kids.
But with all technology eventually society catches up and the wild west is over.
By now, new forms of digital crack are being invented faster than lawmakers are able (or willing) to catch up with the previous forms. Yesterday, society and democracy were being destroyed by social media, today by “AI”. By the time the toxic effects of social media are being reined in (if ever), the forces of destruction will have moved on to “AI” or whatever comes after, in their efforts to concentrate wealth, power and influence in the hands of ever fewer people.
Wasn't this the observation / tension at the heart of Mountainhead?
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?
It's easy to "disrupt" and "change the world" when you are protected from the consequences by a wall of money.
That's the thing - there are people who like AI, but hate Microsoft's approach to it. They draw disdain from that group of people on top of all of the people who hate AI in general.
Truly a shortsighted CEO and company
> I do get annoyed by how Microsoft has jammed it into every nook and cranny of their product suite.
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.
You actually like onenote? Note taking is my primary tool at work but I really hate onenote. The web version can't even search properly in all folders. And there's no desktop Linux version.
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 :(
> can't even search properly in all folders
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.
Sharepoint's search may be the one search that is actually worse than reddit's search.
I do like it! I have been using it since college though so maybe I am just set in my ways and lazy to move to something new.
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.
Ah I see. I don't find it very fast and I really need good search because my notes are total chaos like my brain :)
I have observed that people who are used to Onenote mainly like it for its inline-box style notes which can be inserted at any point in the page. Obsidian due to its markdown backend can't support this. Unless you painfully mess with tables, you have to stick to linear top-down approach and don't have free-form flexibility.
Ahh yes could be. And people taking notes on tablets with pens perhaps. I hate that because I have the fine motor skills of a 2 year old. My handwriting is still a mess and very slow. Despite this being the only way to get through school in my time.
I always hate when OneNote opens random text boxes when I click somewhere. But yeah some people could like that too.
And it's not even good I can't understand what they're trying to do. I press the button occasionally just to mess with it and it has zero access to my data to do anything useful. Copilot in Outlook can't read my email, it's just a worse ChatGPT window sitting next to my email. What use-cases are you even imagining?
They're trying to ship AI features. Which is the issue. They shouldn't be shipping AI features, they should be solving problems. If AI features are in service of solving those problems then great. But starting from a fad solution and trying to reverse-engineer a problem is backwards.
What they're certainly trying to do is get good annual reviews which increasingly revolve around saying "Look, I did AI."
It can have access to all your data, but they want you to pay $30 a month for that. The free one doesn't have this access.
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.
"Have you considered Copilot as your personal lord and retirements saviour?" These unwanted product pitches have something cultist and unsettling. Like all voices of reason have been removed the echo chamber diving bell is so sealed that the CEO blogs to ge to hear some sort of pushback. Time to serve the cool aid.