You missed the other key detail: “and raised the price regardless of whether we use AI”.
I finally migrated my work email from Google workspace specifically because they jacked the subscription price and justified it due to Gemini, a tool I never used.
In the EU you can still have google one without gemini?
Anyways I switched to Infomaniak just to get rid of google tbh :))
I'm so glad I use Linux. No AI bullshit!
Everytime there's an update on VS Code
I've been having a heated discussion with meta ai on and off now.
The trick is to not play games with a rootkit
You don't have to enable any of those things, though. I don't even have W11 signed into a MS account. I use W11 mostly for C++ development these days though.
Don't you understand that being constantly nagged to use their products so they can monotise you is disrespectful? Would you keep a friend who started every conversation with a pitch for their MLM? I mean you're not obligated!
I understand that it's just business, but to me that's just capitalist Nirenberg defense. So please don't respond with some version of "it is what it is", because I view that as learned helplessness.
EDIT: what Windows users might not get is that booting into Windows occasionally means that it's going to bombard you with an avalanche of pop ups and nag-dialogues that a person who's logging in every day might not appreciate.
Sure you can silence most of that, until the next necessary security update.
Me: Hey bank AI, how much money is in my account?
Bank AI: (long pause) It looks like there are five banks in your area.“I found a PayDay Loan office near you.”
Fuck, just tried to log into office.com to email a coworker that my stupid windows updates were going to make me late to a meeting and apparently I must use the copilot app instead of the web browser.
Fuck no, guess they will find out when I get there.
Whenever a chatbot is added to a product I use, the first and only thing I ask is how to disable it
Unless you want to disable Gemini which tells you to go to the settings to find a hallucinated feature. Thanks Google, but you're drunk!
When they forced that shit this week the first and only thing I asked gemini for was directions on how to disable gemini and it did provide incorrect names for the settings to disable itself. Close enough to find the right ones, but just a great example that it doesn't even have the right answers for their own products.
AI being forced into everything is such a shitshow.
I don't understand why Gemini is such a disaster. DeepMind Gemma works better and that's a 27B model. It's like there are two separate companies inside Google fucking off and doing their own thing (which is probably true)
I don't mind AI now that I've vastly lowered my expectations of what it can do, and am aware that "AI" isn't actually real. An LLM might be useful in some situations where you can reasonably expect it to give a decent answer and where your task isn't particularly important.
Problem is, most of it is forced on you and is not privacy friendly.
After dabbling with AI for years, I think it should be called out for what it is; machine learning. We're not in the ballpark of intelligence and barely close to mimicking (artificial) intelligence.
Though ML has a lot of things going for it, my most successful results are with voice synthesizing. Almost flawless and pretty amazing considered the yield.
I use as an advanced rubber duck for coding.
I know the answer is wrong but it gets my brain going into finding the right answer.
Like: "This is a ridiculous approach to make this. It would be much easier to just..."
Getting the wrong answer sometimes speed up the process, like some kind of dialectics.
could be useful if it wasn't for capitalism smh
There are uses for AI in scientific and other things where using it for pattern matching to help find areas to focus on and then thoroughly doing the real work where accuracy is important are where the current AI really excels.
https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/05/24/ai-reveals-unsuspected-math-underlying-search-for-exoplanets/
Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms trained on real astronomical observations now outperform astronomers in sifting through massive amounts of data to find new exploding stars, identify new types of galaxies and detect the mergers of massive stars, accelerating the rate of new discovery in the world’s oldest science.
It didn't just spit out answers they treated as correct, it did stuff they looked into and found ways to improve their methods. That is the real benefit of AI.
