[HN Gopher] Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now
___________________________________________________________________
Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now
Author : redbell
Score : 227 points
Date : 2024-11-07 06:40 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| Refusing23 wrote:
| i dont think we need that
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Sends everything you write to Microsoft.
| esperent wrote:
| Unless and until I see a clear privacy police analyzed by a
| lawyer, stating categorically that this doesn't happen, I think
| it's wise to assume that you are correct here.
| jpnc wrote:
| There's a reason Windows went from 'MyComputer' to 'This PC'.
| mrob wrote:
| While it's possible they meant something nefarious, I think
| the goal was probably just to prevent confusion around
| shared computers. Such confusion might seem unlikely, but
| when your market is as big as Microsoft's even unlikely
| things happen all the time.
| diftraku wrote:
| "Our PC"
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Kinda defeats the point of "AI PCs" then...
| deprecative wrote:
| You've got it reversed. AI PCs are just SPAs. You offload the
| workload to the client then send the resulting payload back.
| anthk wrote:
| Dumb terminals, like the 60's.
| quyleanh wrote:
| When you want to rewrite something with such kind of AI, do you
| intend to send it somewhere else or you want to keep for
| yourself?
| klez wrote:
| Yes, I intend to send it to its intended recipient, which
| most of the time happens to NOT be Microsoft or its
| affiliates.
| bigs wrote:
| A notes app? Clearly the words are private until I choose to
| share them with specific people.
| rolph wrote:
| that sounds like an incredible feedback system. what should we
| start [typing] to them? how would we know someone read it?
| disqard wrote:
| Is it safe to say we've crested the peak of the Gartner Hype
| Cycle for AI?
|
| I've seen several essays/posts describing "AI Fatigue" recently.
| cj wrote:
| Here's a Google Trend graph of the last 5 years for "AI" (and
| "crypto" for comparison).
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
|
| At least based on search volume, we're still on an upward
| swing.
| adra wrote:
| I'm sure there's some fascinating research to be discovered
| for why the most crypto of the US states are Nevada, Florida,
| Hawaii, and Alaska.
| sethammons wrote:
| Notepad and plain text is the last place I want AI. I just want a
| place to type and paste non-formatted (outside of whitespace)
| text.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| There's probably a way to turn it off but I hate how it auto
| opens the last file now.
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| The addition of tabs to Notepad has made me stop using it
| entirely. My entire workflow around it was having separate
| windows for each document that I could move and close freely.
| Having an all-in-one-place Notepad filled with the ghosts of
| API tokens past is precisely the opposite of what I needed.
| zigman1 wrote:
| But you can still open multiple windows?
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| It doesn't open in new windows by default, which was
| enough for me to stop using it.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I think it takes maybe 3 clicks to set up "old style
| notepad". I don't understand the harsh criticism? I don't
| use it myself since I have a sublime license, and st3
| opens up instantly, but I don't think the new changes to
| notepad are the end of the world.
| nehal3m wrote:
| Yeah, not everything needs an LLM tacked on. Notepad is a
| lesson in tool minimalism; it serves a lot of use cases
| precisely because it has a small feature set.
| reginald78 wrote:
| Telemetry indicated people were using notepad a lot resulting
| it being targeted by the AI team to juice uptake numbers.
| wruza wrote:
| https://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html if you feel threatened
| or got tired of encoding/newline issues. Works as a drop-in
| replacement (replaces .exe).
|
| https://sourceforge.net/p/notepad2/code/HEAD/tree/ for source
| code.
| bakugo wrote:
| At this point I wouldn't even bat an eye if someone tried to sell
| me an AI toilet that uses an image recognition model to analyze
| my bowel movements.
| GreekPete wrote:
| I just bought a washing machine that has an AI wash mode.
| xarope wrote:
| I think those exist already...!
| lynx23 wrote:
| I would be surprised if Toylet-companies weren't already
| working on something like that.
| inversetelecine wrote:
| Account and internet connection required. Now with "Ads while
| you go" technology.
| weikju wrote:
| These are in the work [0] for a few years already. [1]
|
| [0] https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/toilet-camera-
| uses-a...
|
| [1] https://today.duke.edu/2021/05/smart-toilet-uses-
| artificial-... (from before the LLM hype cycle, even!)
| fragmede wrote:
| Adult Swim did it first: https://youtu.be/DJklHwoYgBQ
| ch1kkenm4ss4 wrote:
| They should also convert it to Electron.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Calm down, Satan.
| lintfordpickle wrote:
| Signing in to MS to use notepad? Nah I don't think so
| rebolek wrote:
| what about MS Paint? Can it get AI assistant to create shitty
| pixel art?
|
| Edit: Oh. It does too.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Oh Lord, MS Paint has AI, too?
| sebtron wrote:
| A while ago I wrote about my experience using Windows for work
| after 10 years of being a Linux-only user [1]. One of the
| positive notes I had was:
|
| > As a positive note, the default text editor Notepad is nice and
| lightweight, a good piece of software.
|
| Unfortunately, they screwed it up with Windows 11. And apparently
| they are doubling down on this.
|
| [1] https://sebastiano.tronto.net/blog/2023-01-28-windows-
| deskto...
| pxoe wrote:
| on windows 11 it's still lightweight and snappy though, with
| tabs, autosave, dark theme and design that fits in and doesn't
| stick out like a sore thumb
| JohnFen wrote:
| I disagree. I mean, it could be worse, but notepad has become
| feature-laden enough that it almost eliminates the usefulness
| of the program. I may as well use a full text editor.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| I know what you mean.
|
| I understand why people would like it, but there are bugs
| in different places and it wastes more time for me having
| tabs when some very good workflows involve having numerous
| distinct instances of Notepad on different parts of the
| monitors instead.
|
| In a way where it was absolutely perfect for the longest
| time.
|
| It still works like that but combined with autosave you
| really have to check a lot to make sure the file is not
| already open in another instance or different tab lots of
| times.
|
| Or your previous message(s) pops up every time you open
| Notepad days or weeks later.
|
| Even though for like 40 years when you opened a _new_
| instance of Notepad, you could reliably expect a _blank_
| text window.
|
| And when you double-click on a TXT file, you want that file
| to open without having some other text on some other tab
| that came from somewhere else you might not remember that
| well.
|
| So it's like it has Recall already built in, the AI has not
| even been injected yet, and it autosaves everything you
| type now by default.
|
| No resemblance to a keyboard logger or anything like that,
| nothing to see here, nope, au contraire.
|
| I guess that's why they're going to call the next level
| Rewrite.
|
| I can't wait, in just like the last year, for the first
| time ever it's already way less usable than in W9x, but
| what can you expect anyway?
| niam wrote:
| They managed to make File Explorer itself considerably worse
| over time as well.
|
| They really pulled out the monkey's paw when I wished for tabs.
| DCH3416 wrote:
| Why do people want tabs anyway? It's kind of clunky compared
| to just having smaller individual file explorer windows. Like
| you can't _really_ drag and drop files between tabs without
| the added time overhead of waiting for the tab to change.
|
| I assume most users are just full screen, list view-ing it
| though instead of the large icon view.
| shigawire wrote:
| I don't think this is a good reason but tabs give you the
| ability to keep a bunch of files open and accessible
| without cluttering your main taskbar since there is only 1
| Notes window.
| JohnFen wrote:
| You don't need tabs to do that. You can enable grouping
| on the taskbar.
|
| I personally don't find tabs useful at all, but I don't
| really hate them. Well, I wouldn't hate them if more
| applications would avoid showing the tab bar if there was
| only one tab showing. I get annoyed by the waste of space
| that provides to those of us who will never use the tabs.
| tgum wrote:
| I usually like having just one window because having to
| alt-tab 5 times to get to chrome or something is kinda
| annoying imo
|
| (im not sure if you can do that on windows actually)
| sjpb wrote:
| Hah, writing that blogpost from that perspective was a really
| nice move, I enjoyed reading it!
| Derbasti wrote:
| That was a delightful blog post, thank you!
| poulpy123 wrote:
| When you have a (very very expensive) hammer, everything looks
| like a nail
| lynx23 wrote:
| I wonder when the environmentalists will realize what is going
| on right now, and start to protest AI usage in general. I was
| already wondering the same when the open source community
| started to CI every damn PR and commit, but I guess I was too
| optimistic with that one.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Windows Update is another big one, the way it makes every
| Windows computer spin the fans like crazy on a regular basis.
| Probably room for improvement there.
| bayindirh wrote:
| For Microsoft's credit, Windows has systems in place to
| install your updates when you're powered by more renewables
| than fossil fuels [0].
|
| [0]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-
| update-i...
| blibble wrote:
| maybe they could just make the software not be completely
| shit instead ?
|
| why does Windows take 2 minutes to decide what updates to
| install, then 45 minutes to install them when Debian on
| the same machine can do both in under 30 seconds?
| deafpolygon wrote:
| ... *puts tin foil hat on* ...
|
| let me tell you a story...
| Ma8ee wrote:
| We are aware. AI at least have the potential to create some
| value, which can't be said about crypto currencies that still
| waste enormous resources.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I don't want to sound skeptical, but this is what Crypto
| people used to say when it was very new.
|
| It was supposedly worth all the power expenditure, because
| changing the world needed energy. Now we see where we are.
|
| I'm inside this "newfangled AI thing". There are groups
| which create value, but they create value for everybody.
| The humans and the nature in general, and they use AI for
| scientific ends. Medical image processing, ecosystem
| monitoring, etc. etc.
|
| Letting bots loose on the internet, letting them consume
| what they say and making them answer "Sauce is a food taste
| enhancer, and dressing is used to keep wounds clean while
| allowing them to heal. A standard serving of a dressing is
| two spoons".
| turtles3 wrote:
| To be fair, newer research is demonstrating that smaller
| more power efficient models with the same performance are
| possible, so the hope is that these giant LLMs are just a
| stepping stone to a less energy hungry place. In
| contrast, proof of work fundamentally needs more energy
| then bigger the network gets. It's no guarantee but we
| can at least see some hope that as energy impact drops
| and increasing value is found that 'AI' will cross the
| threshold of being worth the energy.
|
| Edit: although yes I do agree that the 'value' part is
| tricky. If internet spam can generate more 'value' for
| some people than doing science, then when intelligence is
| cheap we are in for a rough time.
| bayindirh wrote:
| To be clear, I'm not against AI or LLM as a technology in
| general. What I'm against is the unethical way how these
| LLMs trained and how people are dismissive of the damage
| they're doing and saying "we're doing something amazing,
| we need no permission".
|
| Also, I'm very aware that there are many smaller models
| in production which can run real-time with negligible
| power and memory requirements (i.e. see human/animal
| detection models in mirrorless cameras, esp. Sony and
| Fuji).
|
| However, to be honest I didn't see the same research on
| LLMs yet. Can you share if you have any, because I'd be
| glad to read them.
|
| Lastly, I'm aware that AI is not something only covers
| object detection, NLP, etc. You can create very useful
| and light AI systems for many problems, but how LLMs
| pumped with that unstopping hype machine bothers me a
| lot.
| maccard wrote:
| I disagree. Crypto people kept suggesting that crypto was
| a solution to an X problem while ignoring that a database
| was a better solution the problem.
|
| I've yet to hear any good use cases for crypto, and I've
| been asking for years on here. Meanwhile there are a
| bunch of AI tools out there that are working and helping.
| bayindirh wrote:
| AI is a gigantic landscape with tons of different
| applications to different problems, and there are many
| solutions which work for a given problem.
|
| However, if we narrow what AI is to LLMs, we have a
| stochastic parrot which needs to be fed the world
| literally to enable it to create semi-coherent sentences
| about something being asked. More importantly, what that
| parrot says doesn't have to be true, it can't be
| guaranteed to be true, and can't be verified about its
| accuracy about its slop.
|
| And you spend gigawatts of power just to train this thing
| which selects and prints words based on probability and
| some randomness.
|
| That doesn't solve any problems.
| maccard wrote:
| You've moved the goalposts from AI to LLM's. Fair enough,
| we've been doing AI since the 50's, and this is the
| second AI boom in a decade.
|
| Those "stochastic parrots" have still proven that they
| are immensely useful. You might not personally find value
| out of coding assistants, but many many people do (as an
| example). People are (allegedly) turning to LLM's rather
| than StackOverflow for help [0]. They work well for
| boilerplate where you're an SME and able to validate the
| output - I can review 10x the amount of code I can write
| for example. They work (remarkably) well for summarising
| input text. An example - I semi occasionally (3-4x per
| year) have to deal with a few hundred GB of audio files
| that need cleanup. The cleanup tasks are "run FFMPEG with
| parameters", except I can not ever remember the
| parameters (they're different for different things). I
| can: read https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html or I can ask
| ChatGPT to write a script to clip the silence and add a
| 0.5 second intro fade to every file in a specified
| folder, and the entire task is done before I've even
| thought about it. I get to focus on what I want to,
| rather than munging data around.
|
| If you expand your definition from LLMs to Transformers,
| then you get Whisper as a stand out example of something
| awesome. There's definitely negatives, but things like
| Diffusion are being used outside of image generation for
| drug discovery. We're not going to yolo AI generated
| drugs into human testing, but we can save an awful lot of
| screwing around to find something viable.
|
| > And you spend gigawatts of power just to train this
| thing which selects and prints words based on probability
| and some randomness. > That doesn't solve any problems.
|
| I disagree, it does solve problems. A very fair question
| to ask is "is it worth the cost" and I would agree that
| it's not worth the cost. That doesn't mean it doesn't
| solve real problems.
|
| [0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387278/has-
| stack-ex...
| lukeschlather wrote:
| I think it's premature to be integrating LLMs into
| operating systems. That said I think they're very
| valuable, and the training is fundamental research. I
| feel like complaining about the resources used to train
| new models is a bit like complaining about the resources
| used to build experimental fusion reactors or particle
| accelerators. The fact that we're seeing direct
| applications is a bonus, but it's still more like
| fundamental research than anything.
|
| People are spending all that money training because they
| are trying to fix the problems you're complaining about,
| and this includes fixing the power consumption problem.
| If we can create 3B parameter models that have
| capabilities on par with today's 405B parameter models,
| that's worth spending a lot of energy training. But
| nobody knows what is possible, so they have to try. I
| feel like you're basically arguing nobody should try
| because you don't believe they will ever improve, but
| that seems contradicted by the general trajectory of how
| things have been working the past decade. More resources
| spent on training means more efficient and useful models.
| dns_snek wrote:
| > Crypto people kept suggesting that crypto was a
| solution to an X problem while ignoring that a database
| was a better solution the problem.
|
| Only if you ignore the fact that a database (in
| traditional sense) doesn't solve the problem of
| _decentralized_ peer to peer payments, which is the key
| differentiator of cryptocurrencies.
|
| > I've yet to hear any good use cases for crypto, and
| I've been asking for years on here.
|
| If you've been asking for years, I'm sure that someone,
| at some point, has told you about crypto's censorship
| resistance and international payments in places that are
| poorly served by the banking system for a variety of
| reasons.
|
| Would you like to hear more or have you already dismissed
| these as "not good use cases"? It would be nice to
| differentiate between use cases that don't apply to you
| personally, and use cases that don't apply to anyone.
| maccard wrote:
| > Only if you ignore the fact that a database (in
| traditional sense) doesn't solve the problem of
| decentralized peer to peer payments, which is the key
| differentiator of cryptocurrencies.
|
| And the point that the useful cases cede to make a useful
| product. The thing that is a _feature_ of a
| cryptocurrency is why people don't use it. I've had this
| debate dozens of times on here.
|
| > If you've been asking for years, I'm sure that someone,
| at some point, has told you about crypto's censorship
| resistance and international payments in places that are
| poorly served by the banking system for a variety of
| reasons.
|
| You know what else solves that? Cash and Western Union.
| And it has done for a long, long time.
| dns_snek wrote:
| > The thing that is a _feature_ of a cryptocurrency is
| why people don't use it.
|
| People do, in fact, use them. Is it a popular payment
| method in western countries? No, but do some people use
| it? Yes, they do.
|
| For privileged people, decentralization is usually a
| serious flaw. For others, it's an extremely important
| characteristic that lets them transact at all. The world
| isn't black and white, and people have use cases that are
| different from yours.
|
| You're being self-centered, and that's okay, but perhaps
| you should factor it into your mental model before making
| sweeping statements in front of a global audience.
|
| > You know what else solves that? Cash and Western Union.
| And it has done for a long, long time.
|
| Not nearly as well, or there wouldn't be anyone using
| cryptocurrencies for that purpose.
|
| You could make identical boring, bad-faith arguments
| about AI products. I think 99.99% of all "AI" products
| available today are completely useless - to me - but I
| don't go around proclaiming that all of AI is completely
| useless, and that all of its problem areas are better
| solved by statistics and "if" statements.
|
| Don't mistake your own privilege, ignorance, and lack of
| imagination with the lack of real-world applications.
| maccard wrote:
| > For privileged people,
|
| > You're being self-centered, and that's okay, but
| perhaps you should factor it into your mental model
| before making sweeping statements in front of a global
| audience.
|
| > but I don't go around proclaiming that all of AI is
| completely useless, and that all of its problem areas are
| better solved by statistics and "if" statements.
|
| > Don't mistake your own privilege, ignorance, and lack
| of imagination with the lack of real-world applications.
|
| If you can't make your point without making sniping
| attacks about my character, then this isn't a
| conversation I want to continue having.
| dns_snek wrote:
| Let's go through them:
|
| > For privileged people,
|
| Privileged person is anyone living in a western country
| who hasn't had to deal with censorship. I consider myself
| to be a privileged person in that regard. That's not an
| attack on anyone's character.
|
| > You're being self-centered
|
| That's anyone who fails to consider use cases other than
| their own. I wasn't speaking to your character, It was a
| description of your _reply_ , not your character, because
| it contained sweeping statements that only apply to
| certain groups of people.
|
| > but I don't go around proclaiming that all of AI is
| completely useless, and that all of its problem areas are
| better solved by statistics and "if" statements.
|
| That's not an attack on anyone?
|
| > Don't mistake your own privilege, ignorance, and lack
| of imagination with the lack of real-world applications.
|
| I've explained that privilege isn't an attack on anyone's
| character. As for the rest, sorry, but which words am I
| supposed to use when someone denies that a problem is
| real (which fair enough, I'll elaborate), later admits
| that there are other services that solve the same
| problem, but they still want to claim that there are no
| problems that the obscure product is solving, despite
| that product having real-world users who are using it for
| that exact problem?
| devjab wrote:
| I never heard of any reasonable uses for Crypto or
| Blockchain in general. A lot of people tried to sell us
| various things at the time but it was very obvious that
| it had no real value.
|
| AI is already implemented into businesses in various
| ways. Even if it's not done so official you still have
| loads of employees pouring company secrets into chatGPT
| and Claude because they work.
| msabalau wrote:
| In terms of generative AI, for general use cases, Open AI
| reported having 11 million paid subscribers last quarter.
| People clearing paying for Adobe Firefly and Midjourney
| access. That's already a ton more people finding it
| useful in day to day life than Crypto ever had.
|
| It is certainly reasonable to suspect that the scale of
| investments (in trillions of dollars) don't match the
| scale of the opportunity. But it's a bit silly to pretend
| that no one is getting any value out of this.
|
| At the end of the day, data centers are 2% of energy use,
| according to the IEA. That's trending up, but even in
| couple of years, data center stuff is mostly going to be
| typical cloud stuff, then crypto, and then a fraction for
| AI.
| Zr01 wrote:
| Manga Library Z, a manga archiving site that distributed
| old and out-of-print manga for free has been forced to
| close down due to all major credit card companies refusing
| to provide payment services. If some hypothetical
| widespread decentralized payment system can prevent
| scenarios like this one from happening, then it would be
| worth the "enormous waste of resources". These days, you're
| essentially relegated to a non-person if card companies
| stop allowing you to use their services.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| Cryptocurrencies use between 0.6% and 2.3% of all
| electricity in the US [O]. I guess those manga are very
| important to you.
|
| It would be order of magnitude more efficient to send
| couriers with cash to pay for those instead.
|
| [0] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364
| renewiltord wrote:
| Who genuinely gives a fuck about them? They've ruined the
| earth by opposing nuclear power.
| sAbakumoff wrote:
| >> I wonder when the environmentalists will realize what is
| going on right now, and start to protest AI usage in general.
|
| Never, in just 2-3 months we will have much, much bigger
| problems
| topaz0 wrote:
| Already boycotting.
| hashtag-til wrote:
| Honestly, the "Notes" app on Mac has at least the autocomplete
| now and I find it quite useful.
|
| I'm very sceptical about all these AI announcements but text
| editing is case where I think this "AI" stuff can actually be
| used for good.
| null0pointer wrote:
| Notes is a very different app to Notepad though. Nobody uses
| the Notes app to edit plain text files, which is the sole use
| case of Notepad. Notes is for writing, well, notes. Notes
| also has a lot of other editing modes and features like
| drawing with the apple pencil, scanning documents, cross
| device syncing, etc. As far as I'm aware Notepad can only
| edit plain text files.
| rpgbr wrote:
| It's unfortunate that Apple Notes doesn't handle plain
| text. I'd use it like this if possible.
|
| Anyway, I use TextEdit in plain text and autocomplete,
| autocorrect and spellcheck all work just fine, as they work
| in every text box in macOS. That Windows' Notepad got some
| of that just in 2024[1] is bonkers...
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/8/24194047/microsoft-
| notepad...
| w0m wrote:
| > Notepad got some of that just in 2024
|
| I assume this was the 1:1 correlated w/ the
| deprecation/removal of wordpad, as both were shipped
| everywhere prior.
| Hobadee wrote:
| I used Notes to edit a text file once and learned a very
| important lesson; It changes all your double-quotes to
| fancy Unicode double-quotes. They may look prettier, but
| they completely break the code you are working on.
| elpocko wrote:
| It's basically autocomplete, spellcheck and refactoring, just
| based on a new technical approach. Those are not new or unusual
| features for a text editor.
| DecoySalamander wrote:
| These sound more like features for an IDE than a text editor.
| notachatbot123 wrote:
| You forgot non-deterministic hallucination.
| geodel wrote:
| 'Hallucinating Notepad' feels like a band name.
| olvy0 wrote:
| Or something written by William S. Burroughs.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| On the one hand - sure.
|
| On the other - the whole appeal of notepad was that it was a
| barebones text editor with none of that fluff (aka - it's a
| text editor, not a word processor or IDE).
|
| MS has a large number of alternatives for the folks who
| wanted them.
|
| When I opened Notepad - it's explicitly because I don't want
| the machine trying to tell me what I entered is wrong, or fix
| it. I just want a big dumb textbox for my file.
|
| ---
|
| Basically - If you wanted those features you're looking for
| MS Word or Wordpad.
|
| But MS discontinued Wordpad, and now they seem intent on
| trying to turn Notepad into Wordpad 2.0.
|
| My prediction is this will not work well, since it directly
| competes with Office, and is not what the legacy users of
| notepad want.
|
| But hey... a text editor is an easy place to shove text based
| AI, and cool shiny new thing of the year means some exec can
| claim to be shoving novel solutions into prod and bump up AI
| usage.
| bityard wrote:
| I always liked the phrase "spicy autocomplete" as a way of
| (over)simplifying how LLMs work.
| JohnFen wrote:
| But they don't belong in Notepad, they belong in more
| heavyweight editors. Notepad's value is in the lack of
| features.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I just think people want a nice zen experience in notepad
| without the buzz of tech and AI swarming them. Kind of like
| choosing pen and paper instead of opening up Word. If I want
| a text editor for "all of the above capabilities" it won't be
| notepad.
| cies wrote:
| They all need your data to train on!
| jillybilly7 wrote:
| Strange. Microsoft seems to struggle with the fact that they
| named it "Notepad" and some subset of users took this to heart
| and used it as a note pad, but due to backwards compatibility
| concerns it must never save rich text formatted files, else it
| could cause confusing data loss scenarios for users just trying
| to edit config files. Hence, the odd combination of LLM features
| added to a text editor that will never support rich text or
| rendered markdown.
| ChymeraXYZ wrote:
| What is the reason it should not be able to support rendering
| markdown?
|
| The underlying files are still just plain text and if it's not
| .md (or whatever other extensions may make sense) it's not
| rendered.
| demarq wrote:
| The "TURBO" of this generation
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| Throwing AI at everything is starting to make cryptocurrency seem
| positively environmentally friendly. At least it serves some kind
| of purpose.
| mrweasel wrote:
| It a result of a rather sad trend, which I think started with
| Google. Rather than going out and doing market research you
| just throw things against the wall, measure and see if people
| are using it at any significant rate.
|
| The difference between Google and Microsoft is that Google have
| no problems just killing of things that doesn't perform to
| their standard (which is bad in it's own way). With Microsoft
| backwards compatibility is everything, so once something is in
| Windows, it says around for a very, very, long time.
|
| AI assistance in writing isn't a bad idea, but maybe not in
| Notepad. I know that this isn't they way modern Microsoft wants
| to do things, but exposing an API that would allow 3rd. party
| vendors to AI support in Windows seems like a more sensible
| approach. Except they'd probably have to make it accessible
| from Javascript to make anyone use it.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Perhaps trying random things uncovers more big opportunities
| than market research does. Market research tells you to breed
| faster horses; random things converge to combustion engines.
| skydhash wrote:
| According to Wikipedia [0], the development of the car
| concept went from 1649 to 1881. That's not exactly throwing
| random things and seeing what sticks. It may have not been
| systematic, but with the wealth of information and
| resources we have today, we can and should do better.
|
| [0]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_automobile
| pjmlp wrote:
| The developers that believed in WinRT weren't so lucky with
| backwards compatibility.
|
| That is why outside Microsoft own employees, no one else
| cares anylonger about it, after the whole mess that keeps
| going on.
| pjmlp wrote:
| One more reason to stick to Notepad++.
| hasnain99 wrote:
| ms copied other AI companies
| masteruvpuppetz wrote:
| I hate that Win11 Notepad has so many tabs open even after you
| close the app.
|
| Many times, I just paste my copied text in Notepad to strip the
| formatting + special characters and close it after re-copying the
| data. Pretty efficient.
|
| Now that I open Notepad.. all my previous tabs are open asking me
| to close them one after the other (extra click on not so save the
| file) :@ so annoying
| fecal_henge wrote:
| First tabbed documents and now this!
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Kudos to Microsoft, they are doing everything they can to make
| everyone absolutely hate anything AI
| jinushaun wrote:
| It makes more sense to add this to Wordpad, but didn't they kill
| Wordpad in Windows 11? Keep Notepad simple.
| pdpi wrote:
| I'm not sure how they built this thing, but it makes sense to
| me on the face of it: Notepad should be the thinnest wrapper
| possible around a simple textbox, and the generated thing
| they're showing should be built into the widget itself so it's
| exposed to all apps in the OS (much like macOS exposes
| emacs/readline-style shortcuts everywhere that uses a default
| textbox).
| Dwedit wrote:
| The last time they significantly improved the text box was
| adding in support for mixed LTR and RTL characters around
| Windows 2000.
|
| And arguably Windows 10 adding in the emoji IME when you hit
| WindowsKey + .
| myflash13 wrote:
| Why do writing tools have to be a feature of every app instead of
| an operating-system wide tool like Apple Intelligence? Makes no
| sense whatsoever to just "sprinkle AI everywhere" except for
| specialized use cases.
| diggan wrote:
| You seem to be of the understanding that Microsoft has some
| sort of unified strategy that tries to optimize for user
| experience. Might have been true in the beginning of the
| company's life, but today? They've been using the "spraying and
| praying" strategy for the last 2 decades at least and this is
| just another way of applying said strategy.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| I bet there's there's a poorly thought out directive from the
| company bigwigs to integrate AI into all Microsoft products,
| and middle management is gobbling that up to get ahead in the
| rat race.
|
| Visual Studio and VSCode have also become infested with little
| Copilot icons.
| dfedbeef wrote:
| (points to nose)
| all2 wrote:
| So had jetbrains, and no matter how many times you hide the
| icons, they always come back.
| joseda-hg wrote:
| I've yet to have a good experience with copilot in Visual
| Studio
|
| It still surprises me to have shows stopping bugs with it, In
| THE first party IDE, in Windows, using pure .NET and other
| microsoft tooling
|
| I couldn't describe a more perfectly vacuum'ed spherical cow,
| and still, copilot dies randomly even after they have
| acknowledged the problem and made some fixes
| neonsunset wrote:
| Visual Studio unfortunately still heavily uses legacy .NET
| Framework, only some parts of instrumentation specifically
| for C# were moved out of process and run on top of modern
| runtime. It's a pretty good IDE, much better than the kind
| of experience you get elsewhere, but I've moved to VSC +
| Rider since and only use VS occasionally on my "gaming pc"
| because it has a convenient community-made extension for
| getting quick .NET's compiler output.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| It's easier than product development and is flashy to market.
| andai wrote:
| You mean it should be integrated into the text box control,
| and/or the keyboard? That does make a lot of sense to me.
|
| Though some applications also benefit from app-specific
| integration on top of that.
| amelius wrote:
| Maybe it is implemented in the text box control, but it's
| normally turned off (?)
| jwells89 wrote:
| As far as I'm aware, Windows doesn't have anything quite like
| services on macOS and probably can't because Windows apps, even
| those that are first-party, are built with a menagerie of
| different UI toolkits which means there are no universal hooks
| for something like services to use.
|
| The reason macOS can do this is because a large majority of
| apps are either native AppKit or otherwise hook into the system
| text facilities (which is why text services work in text fields
| in Chrome and Firefox for example).
| tartoran wrote:
| > Makes no sense whatsoever to just "sprinkle AI everywhere"
| except for specialized use cases.
|
| Microsoft really don't know what they're doing. They're trying
| to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks without thinking
| of any externalities such as people getting pissed off and
| leaving to other platforms.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I'm very glad that there isn't an OS-wide thing like "Apple
| Intelligence", personally.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Is the Windows Copilot not that? There has been annoying focus-
| killing long-form automatic autocomplete replacing the text
| popping in every kind of text area on the computer I use at
| work. Is this being done on each application?
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Why do writing tools have to be a feature of every app
| instead of an operating-system wide tool like Apple
| Intelligence?
|
| Third option: Put it in its own app. I'll decide how I want it
| to "help".
| high_na_euv wrote:
| >It's worth noting that you'll have to sign in to your Microsoft
| account to use Rewrite, as it's "powered by a cloud-based service
| that requires authentication and authorization."
|
| What?!
|
| What about AI PC, NPUs in e.g Lunar Lake and in general AI@Edge?
| pton_xd wrote:
| "Sign in to your Microsoft account" to use... Notepad? This is
| not the future I wanted.
| coldpie wrote:
| It's been pretty fascinating to watch what Microsofties have to
| put up with, having switched to Linux in 2007. Vista's half-
| assed release, Windows 8's tablet UI disaster, Windows 10's
| online account requirements, now all the AI crap they're
| shoving into Windows 11. Meanwhile I'm just over here using
| basically the same Arch Linux tools & XFCE environment for
| almost 20 years. Yes, I know, Linux isn't perfect, but it's
| maybe worth a look if you're fed up with using an OS that wants
| to exploit you instead of serve you. It's especially easy now
| that most things are web-based.
| glouwbug wrote:
| Arch has consistently proven itself to be the perfect machine
| for me. I go for months without a reboot even with daily
| package updates. 2000 line C window managers like DWM leave
| me more productive than windows ever has
| JohnFen wrote:
| I stopped using Windows and switched to Linux exclusively
| decades ago. But I don't get to choose what OS I use at work,
| so what Windows does still deeply affects me.
|
| "Just switch" is great for home machines, but for most,
| that's not an option at work.
| skydhash wrote:
| Work is for work stuff. It's someone else computer, someone
| else wants and needs. I don't mind if they want to feed all
| their data to Big Tech (On my previous work computer the
| only truly personal piece of data I had was my profile
| picture and ssh keys for my GitHub account). I don't even
| do web searches on work computers. If Windows is slow, I'd
| just bring it up to my manager and the IT dept.
|
| On my personal computers, that's a different story.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I totally agree, but I was really addressing just having
| to put up with the OS rather than privacy issues
| specifically. My employer can take whatever privacy risks
| they want.
| skydhash wrote:
| I do get your point. But all of them are fine OSes, if
| you just want to run some software (which is the majority
| of the jobs). What macOS and Windows don't allow is true
| customization, aka aligning it to your personal taste.
| That's not great for a personal computer, but fine for a
| work one. If the company don't want to address
| inefficiency, that's on them.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| So, they went from not updating in forever, to finally updating
| it in some meaningful ways a couple years ago, to adding crap
| that no one wants pretty much right away. Too much, MS. Shoulda
| quit while you were ahead with tabs.
| malfist wrote:
| Soon: with ads!
| bityard wrote:
| Prediction: All corporate-backed general-purpose LLMs/AIs
| will eventually include ads. They won't even always be
| obvious ads like we have on the web, sometimes they will just
| be product placement. Ask the AI for an example of a linked
| list, and it will give you one, but the sample items in the
| list will be Coca-Cola, Lexus, the name of the closest
| marijuana dispensary, etc.
|
| If anyone wonders why Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and other
| tech companies who make gobs of money from advertising are so
| interested in AI, this is why. The ads will appear so
| "naturally" inside content that it will be impossible for a
| program (e.g. adblocker) to tell the difference between the
| content and the ad.
|
| There is NO better way to deliver an ad, short of directly
| injecting thoughts and memories directly into the human brain
| somehow.
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| I think there are already product placement laws so we
| should be warned at least
| condiment wrote:
| You'll be warned when you accept the terms and
| conditions. And after the first lawsuits, there will be
| some fine print on the bottom of the page for you to
| ignore.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| They must be completely toothless laws considering the
| amount of product placement that is easily visible. The
| only thing that will change is automating product
| placement in what used to look like organic conversation,
| including on HN.
|
| Now I'll go drink a nice, cold glass of tap water.
| JohnFen wrote:
| In the US, the laws just say that if you do product
| placement, you have to disclose you're doing it. If you
| do that, then there's no restrictions on product
| placement.
|
| I'm also not overly familiar with the scope of the law,
| so I don't know how much (or if) it applies to software
| of this sort.
| rcxdude wrote:
| It's not quite that simple, it's if you have a
| relationship with the seller of the product that the
| average viewer(tm) would not expect. So, e.g. product
| placement on daytime TV or quiz shows doesn't require
| disclosure, because the regulators/courts have decided
| that's what the average viewer would expect anyway. But
| anything on social media does require it, it seems. I
| think produce placement in LLM chatbots would probably
| qualify as unexpected, though.
| tapoxi wrote:
| AI can feel more like a novelty than a truly helpful tool,
| especially when it comes to getting real work done. When I
| need a real boost, there's nothing quite as refreshing as
| cracking open an ice-cold Coca-Cola. It's amazing how it
| instantly lifts my mood and keeps me going!
| svieira wrote:
| Mokie Coke! Mokie Coke!
|
| ----
|
| https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/218596/70s-or-
| earl... for those not in the know.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Future notepad grocery list item:
|
| * soda pop <--- consider replacing this with Coke Zero, on
| sale at a Kroger's near you this week
| worldsayshi wrote:
| They have already onboarded a scrum team on the code base.
| They've got to burn those points on something to argue for
| their payroll and the PO and the lead dev thinks AI is cool.
| gklitz wrote:
| Neither PO nor lead dev thinks AI is cool, but it's a
| priority from top level management so it has to be put in one
| way or another.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| That AI space is SO frothy right now!
| ItCouldBeWorse wrote:
| More time spend by users annoyed == more en(g/r)agement ==
| more career credit points. First you go micro, then you go
| soft.
| theanonymousone wrote:
| What is lead dev? Is that an official scrum role somewhere?
| vundercind wrote:
| All it needed was a way to work with other newline formats
| cleanly. Adding much more than that (even tabs) makes it into a
| different thing that leaves a gap in the niche it used to fill.
| prmoustache wrote:
| When I was a windows user 20 years ago I was using scite, the
| Scintilla demo editor. It had the lightness and simpleness of
| notepad with syntax highlighting.
| olvy0 wrote:
| Notepad++ also uses Scintilla.
| jcotton42 wrote:
| Personally, I think tabs, spellcheck, universal line ending
| support was well within the scope of notepad.
|
| This AI thing is dumb for it though, should've kept Wordpad
| for that.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| I believe they finally abandoned that 'pretends to
| understand doc' wordpad some time ago.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| That, and finally getting rid of keeping a lock on the file
| handle of the opened files. Sooo many times I needed explain
| someone that their directory could not get deleted or their
| apps failed to uninstall simply because they were still
| reading its readme.txt
| sahmeepee wrote:
| Umm, not sure which version of notepad.exe keeps a lock on
| open files. None that I've used in the last 25 years.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Oh maybe i am still living in the past
| userbinator wrote:
| I hated the tabs already. When I open Notepad I expect a clean
| slate.
| mh- wrote:
| That's the real issue. Tabs, fine. Remembering tabs, no.
| taco_emoji wrote:
| always the first thing i disable in Notepad++
| askonomm wrote:
| Oddly remembers tabs for me just fine.
| topaz0 wrote:
| GP is saying that they don't want that, not that it
| doesn't work.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| It does by default. It shouldn't.
| matteason wrote:
| You can disable it. Settings > When Notepad starts > Start
| new session and discard unsaved changes
| DCH3416 wrote:
| Oh good. More things I have to configure out of box.
| ItCouldBeWorse wrote:
| Oh, great, they added a "Users Resistance is invalid"
| button - so everyone can go along with it, until they
| remove it in 2 updates and then, well you had a choice
| and the choice was to swallow whatever you get served.
| a_e_k wrote:
| Wow. I'd totally missed the Settings screen. Tiny little
| gear icon on the right...
|
| (And cute: it spins when I click it. Blech.)
| chongli wrote:
| I thought the whole point of the Windows taskbar was to give
| you tabs for all your windows? Why did they feel the need to
| add tabs again!
| metalliqaz wrote:
| these days, if a software doesn't use the design language
| of a browser, users think it's old and busted
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The default Windows taskbar doesn't haven't given you tabs
| for a very long time, has been mostly unusable if you use
| it as tabs recently, and only has 1 level of tabs, while
| keeping tabs inside the application gives you another.
|
| That said, I'm not sure notepad benefits from it.
| croisillon wrote:
| if we were still allowed to have a vertical taksbar we
| could have enough tabs indeed
| eBombzor wrote:
| They already went too far with the UWP transition. Now the app
| takes forever to launch, compared to the old version.
| DCH3416 wrote:
| My favorite thing is when I open VS2008 or something. And it
| blinks into existence faster than the splash screen window
| can render fully.
|
| I don't understand how the editor has regressed to the point
| that 15 year old software performs better than the modern
| equivalent.
| guestbest wrote:
| Vs2008 has the old MDI style. It is quiet good
| ndiddy wrote:
| After Visual Studio 2008, they rewrote the UI in WPF and
| started writing large components of the program in C#. This
| dramatically regressed performance, especially on a cold
| start (it runs decently if you've had the program open for
| a while). I'd probably still be using Visual Studio 2008,
| except it limits you to C89 and C++03.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| The first apps I need to replace on any new windows machine
| (after installing FF) are Paint, Notepad, Photo/Image viewer
| and MediaPlayer _. The funny thing is their replacements are
| all ancient as well, and still awesome because they 've been
| thoughtfully upgraded over the years without destroying their
| conceptual integrity, or they've just been "done" for decades.
|
| _Paint.Net (v3), Notepad++, IrfanViewer, Foobar2000 & VLC
| DCH3416 wrote:
| I ended up just compiling notepad from wine and tossing that
| into the windows directory. Among other things.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| My main OS is macOS but I use Windows for gaming. The
| reliance on crusty old ass applications like those on Windows
| is actually kinda depressing. Everything newer is garbage for
| various reasons, and everything old is ugly as hell.
|
| Macs have Pixelmator and Preview for images, Apple Notes is
| actually very decent for actual notes, Zed for nerdy text
| files, QuickTime/IINA for video (or hell even VLC looks much
| nicer than on Windows). All of them are modern, beautiful,
| and work well
| kylebenzle wrote:
| Mentioning all these programs and seeing the trouble people
| have I will never really understand why there are any men
| at all that still use Windows and Mac.
| DCH3416 wrote:
| I mean Haiku is the best OS in my opinion. But nobody
| really uses it because it lacks the software support.
| Sometimes you got to put up with the BS to get what you
| want done.
| yazantapuz wrote:
| The ugliness is a nice feature.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Apple Notes on MacOS have been crashing for me constantly
| since shortly after Apple Intelligence beta started rolling
| out. Even though I'm not even on the beta.
| mikae1 wrote:
| _> The reliance on crusty old ass applications like those
| on Windows is actually kinda depressing._
|
| macOS is the most consistent OS and Windows the least [1].
| With the exception of IrfanView I find neither of those
| apps particularly crusty though. There's
| https://imageglass.org
|
| I personally moved from macOS to KDE Plasma and I'm a happy
| camper as long as I stay with Plasma/Qt apps.
|
| [1] https://ntdev.blog/2021/02/06/state-of-the-windows-how-
| many-...
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| VLC is pretty damn crusty, especially to anyone not
| familiar with that particular....design ethos.
|
| Don't get me wrong, it's an incredible endeavor and the
| developers deserve endless praise, but for people that
| aren't already familiar with navigating things like GIMP,
| KDE, Open/LibreOffice, it's not especially welcoming.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > for people that aren't already familiar with navigating
| things like GIMP, KDE, Open/LibreOffice, it's not
| especially welcoming.
|
| This is true for all complex software, though. People who
| have never used Apple's software also struggle with it
| until they become more familiar.
| dmurray wrote:
| Is VLC really "complex software" if you just want to use
| it as a media player? Double click your media file, it
| plays. Play, pause, volume controls are where you'd guess
| they are. There's plenty of complexity underneath, but
| the happy path is simple.
|
| By contrast, "open this image and draw a single red
| circle in it" in GIMP is as challenging to a newbie as
| quitting vi. Even for an intermediate user - I use GIMP a
| handful of times per year and I absolutely could not tell
| you from memory how to do that.
| noch wrote:
| > Is VLC really "complex software"
|
| The moment you criticize an app, someone on the Internet
| will jump in to tut-tut and insist to you that it's _"
| complex software"_ and you can't possibly understand how
| complex it is. Case in point: Just a few years ago the
| Windows Terminal team chastised[^1] users by claiming
| that fast font rendering would literally require several
| PhDs of research and can't be solved otherwise[^0]. At
| some point we have to realize that claiming something is
| complex doesn't prove that it's inherently complex nor
| justify any complexity in how it was built.
|
| [^0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28743687
|
| [^1]: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362#
| issuecomm...
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| You missed the updates to the text rendering story. The
| guy who requested the feature then went ahead and
| implemented the feature in a weekend.
|
| Something like a year later, Microsoft did actually
| improve the behavior and never credited the guy who
| proved it was possible.
| noch wrote:
| > The guy who requested the feature then went ahead and
| implemented the feature in a weekend. Something like a
| year later, Microsoft did actually improve the behavior
| and never credited the guy who proved it was possible.
|
| Thanks for telling me about that development. I'm ...
| speechless.
| venusenvy47 wrote:
| I've used VLC forever and I had no idea there is anything
| more to it than playing media. It always seems to have
| the most recent codecs, so it doesn't seem crusty to me.
| lxgr wrote:
| Even when just opening a single video file it tries to do
| way too much at once.
|
| Why is there a playlist by default? What are these dozens
| of obscure options at the first level under every main
| dropdown in the title/menu bar?
|
| I vaguely remember recently trying mpv and being
| pleasantly surprised, but I mostly use QuickTime or IINA
| on macOS. mpv seems to be available cross-platform
| though; maybe the Windows port is usable?
| wruza wrote:
| It feels like GIMP was _designed_ with user-hostility in
| mind. There's no Paint.net for Linux, so I have to use
| GIMP from time to time for my gui server job needs. And
| gosh, I hate the damn thing. Every simple step in it is
| as hard as you can't bear.
|
| (No I can't use Krita for specific reasons and it isn't
| much easier anyway)
| amlib wrote:
| If Krita isn't easy enough, then Photoshop isn't gonna be
| any easier. (assuming we are talking about simple/common
| stuff...)
| asveikau wrote:
| I don't think GIMP is a fair comparison to any of your
| other examples. VLC, KDE, and LibreOffice are all more
| intuitive than the GIMP.
| DCH3416 wrote:
| You critics stay away from VLC. I swear if I have to deal
| with another "modern" UI implementation.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I agree. I too am a VLC hater. It's not just crusty, but
| often buggy and worse[1] than alternatives (I use Media
| Player Classic Home Cinema myself, despite it being dead
| for almost a decade). VLC is also ugly in a non-platform
| specific way. It's like a web app developed before web
| apps were a thing and doesn't feel at home in either
| Windows, MacOS, _or_ Linux.
|
| Having said that, VLC is still my last resort when
| nothing else can play a file.
|
| [1] One example is subtitle rendering. Last I checked VLC
| was just plain uglier than MPC-HC.
| vengefulduck wrote:
| Have you used VLC on MacOS tho? Full screen video looks
| very slick and is tough to differentiate from native
| quicktime other than having support for more codecs and
| features.
|
| The non full screen UI is a little more crusty but still
| looks better than the windows version imo.
| jpalomaki wrote:
| I have always thought the decision to keep Notepad and
| Paint as they are is a nod towards the developer community.
| Thanks to this, there's a large market for affordable and
| better alternatives.
| jamincan wrote:
| We've run into an issue with the new versions of notepad saving
| your edits to a temp file in the background so that you can
| continue where you left off without losing changes if you close
| notepad before saving.
|
| The problem is that this can make it ambiguous whether edits
| have been saved to the file or not and even someone reopening
| the file to verify that they remembered to save the information
| will be fooled into thinking its there.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I absolutely hate this feature. It can be effectively
| disabled, though. I still haven't figured out how to disable
| the tabs, unfortunately.
| sfjailbird wrote:
| Sounds like a potential compliance issue too, if you work
| with sensitive data.
| optymizer wrote:
| Software companies want to shove AI everywhere because it's the
| shiny new thing. Hardware companies love it because they can
| finally have a way to fight the "it's good enough for email and
| browsing" argument to sell us more hardware.
| ActionHank wrote:
| And yet, weirdly, MS have chosen to just make it their entire
| personality at this point.
|
| There has, for a number of years, been a move away from Windows
| to macOS and Linux for devs. I suspect this will start to
| accelerate because people don't want tools that are obnoxiously
| omnipresent.
|
| Carpenters have various ways to keep their most used tools at
| hand, but you don't see them wearing a charm bracelet of every
| tool they need.
| sebazzz wrote:
| It seems like every product manager (or program manager) or
| maybe all the way down to staff have got "incorporating AI"
| as some kind of KPI - on which your performance is measured.
| ausbah wrote:
| i heard through the grapevine msft had laid off a number of
| PMs due to anticipating copilot increasing their daily
| productivity
| ActionHank wrote:
| There is a hoard of people who "work in tech" that don't
| work in tech.
|
| These are people who are missing valuable business insights
| or who are working on novel solutions and include many
| developers. Those are the ones who will struggle with
| relevance going forward.
|
| Equally, large corporations are at significant risk if the
| productivity of a single person increases further. If you
| look at the game industry, indie games are running circles
| around the AAA games, but this is limited to exceptional
| individuals or teams. Make more people individually
| exceptional and it's going to be real hard for big
| companies to eat.
| disqard wrote:
| I love this visual -- carpenters carrying all of their tools
| around everywhere, gratuitously, obnoxiously, continuously :D
| joblemblem wrote:
| > because it's the shiny new thing
|
| I wish it were that simple, but I feel for this to be true then
| consumers would need to want it.
|
| In reality it gives them plausible deniability for increased
| surveillance, control, and extracting more value from customers
| without their consent.
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| I thought it was more about the share price and showing how
| you were staying relevant
| chongli wrote:
| It's all of the above plus the faint hope that people will
| actually use the AI features and come to depend on them for
| some reason!
| aplusbi wrote:
| Remember, the product is the stock and the customers are the
| shareholders. And oh boy do the customers want AI.
| Nickersf wrote:
| A shiny new tool to extract data from users and convert that
| into $
| llm_nerd wrote:
| They're shoving AI everywhere because it's extraordinarily
| powerful and truly differentiating. Being jaded and cynical
| about it doesn't change that reality.
|
| Obviously there will be winners and losers and it will shake
| out -- personally I can't imagine using notepad for more than
| pasting arbitrary text and it seems like the least features is
| the best -- but bonafide text tools without AI in 2024 are
| crippling.
| NamTaf wrote:
| You're right that it is certainly differentiating for me, but
| not in a good way.
| croes wrote:
| If AI is so powerful why don't we see a massive productivity
| spike around the globe?
|
| It may be convenient but more than once just replaced the
| time I needed to write my code by time fine tuning the prompt
| because the AI didn't quite got what I wanted.
|
| On top of that I must review foreign code. That's harder than
| code I already know.
|
| And on top of that the end result lacks the feeling of
| accomplishment in solving a problem because it wasn't me who
| wrote it.
|
| I'm degraded to some kind customer of the AI.
|
| Assembly line workers are said to be alienated from the
| product they produce, I guess the same will happen for AI
| users.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| >If AI is so powerful why don't we see a massive
| productivity spike around the globe?
|
| We overestimate the short term effects and underestimate
| the long term effects (Amara's law). We're currently in the
| trough of disillusionment where people are running around
| saying that AI failed, was overblown, etc, while people
| like me are working with corporations to completely change
| how they operate, to an outrageous efficiency boost. Our
| world is going to look very different in a decade.
|
| >It may be convenient but more than once just replaced the
| time I needed to write my code by time fine tuning the
| prompt because the AI didn't quite got what I wanted
|
| Most software developers spend very little of their time
| actually "coding", and most of their time investigating,
| understanding, comparing, and so on. I have never used AI
| for "production" code -- I never copy/paste something into
| my code -- but dozens of times a day I do use it to get
| rough outlines, investigate libraries and their use, and
| most importantly to get heuristics on paths to take in the
| code I do write. It has proven absolutely invaluable to me
| and I can't imagine not having it as an accelerator now.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Our world is going to look very different in a decade.
|
| I agree with this. I just seriously doubt that it's going
| to look better because of it. I suspect the opposite.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > They're shoving AI everywhere because it's extraordinarily
| powerful and truly differentiating.
|
| Differentiating, sure. Extraordinarily powerful? I disagree
| (outside of certain specific niches).
| autoexec wrote:
| > They're shoving AI everywhere because it's extraordinarily
| powerful and truly differentiating.
|
| How does this explain the fact that people don't want AI.
| Just having AI in your product description makes people hate
| your product (https://www.techspot.com/news/104122-study-
| finds-including-a...)
|
| As soon as AI is added to anything people immediately start
| googling how to disable it (including when google added AI)
| llm_nerd wrote:
| >Just having AI in your product description makes people
| hate your product
|
| They compare "AI" to "New Technology", and there was a mild
| preference for the phrase "New Technology". Casting that as
| "hating" it is a bit of a misrepresentation. Further "AI"
| as a general term is mysterious and unknown. One of their
| examples was an "AI-Powered TV"...like, what does that even
| mean? Or an "AI-powered financial service". They sound
| terrible.
|
| >As soon as AI is added to anything people immediately
| start googling how to disable it
|
| Okay? Some people dislike almost everything new or
| different. Most people don't. If every major company is
| busy trying to get in front of AI, _maybe_ it isn 't quite
| the big "makes everyone hate it!" thing you imagine it is,
| no?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's a 15% reduction on intention to buy (on the TV case,
| 20% on the car) just by putting AI there on the name is a
| really big deal. That's about half of the deviation on
| the data.
|
| The ugly is that it's a self-reported poll, but it's a
| well run self-reported poll, with a large effect, and
| good statistical relevance.
|
| The actual article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/
| 10.1080/19368623.2024.2...
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Ooof, boy is Apple in for a disaster with their iPhone
| and Mac products! Has someone told them? Google,
| Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, and all of the other big
| companies as well! They're doomed!
|
| Putting an amorphous "AI-powered" on an imaginary product
| is nonsensical, and doesn't carry over to the conclusion
| that "people hate AI". Yes, I would be wary of a "AI-
| powered coffee maker" or an "AI-powered toothbrush"
| because that just sounds like nonsense. But there are a
| lot of places where people already understand the value
| proposition, and the more people experience it, the more
| they demand it and it becomes entry stakes.
|
| Just the most trivial example: one of my children has a
| habit of sending thoughts as a long series of texts. One
| thought split over a dozen texts. The "AI-powered"
| summarization of notifications in iOS 18.2 is absolutely
| brilliant for those times I can only glance, looking at
| it in detail when the situation avails. Thus far it has
| been 100% accurate and profoundly useful. That's the most
| tosser, simplistic example of many, many ways AI has
| added to my life.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Funny, people are talking about how Apple is having
| issues with their newest models. I didn't bother to find
| the data, though.
| autoexec wrote:
| > Ooof, boy is Apple in for a disaster with their iPhone
| and Mac products!
|
| Considering how fanatical Apple users can be about
| literally anything Apple throws at them they were not
| excited about AI
|
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/25-of-smartphone-owners-
| don...
|
| > Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, and all of the other
| big companies as well! They're doomed!
|
| Many of them are certainly in a bit of trouble because
| they've poured obscene amounts of money into AI and it
| really hasn't turned into anything people really want.
| They keep forcing AI at people in every product they can
| because they're hoping that eventually something will
| stick and people will fawn over it, but so far people
| just haven't found AI to be all that useful, they don't
| trust it
| (https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2023/06/05/in-
| ai-w...) and they have privacy concerns (with good
| reason).
|
| It's great that you've found it useful. I know a few
| people who get some value out of it, even if only as a
| toy, but there's no killer app for AI certainly nothing
| that justifies the insane costs that went into it. Most
| of the time it's just getting in people's way and it's
| largely been ignored by the public
| (https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/artificial-
| inte...)
| llm_nerd wrote:
| >Considering how fanatical Apple users can be about
| literally anything Apple throws at them they were not
| excited about AI
|
| No True Scotsman all over here. Where people embrace and
| adopt AI, it isn't real. But a million incredibly dumb
| sociology surveys of nebulous, imaginary things are super
| convincing.
|
| >Many of them are certainly in a bit of trouble
|
| Literally none of them are "in trouble". I mean, Google
| has kind of underperformed and is behind the ball, but
| absolutely none of them have retreated at all.
|
| Seriously, this whole discussion is hilarious. Every
| single major company is dumping enormous efforts into AI,
| redoubling and redoubling again their commitment based
| upon market analysis and what they've seen. If you
| counter this by pointing at some asinine college survey
| of fantasy products with absurd titles, you might be
| deluding yourself.
| autoexec wrote:
| > Seriously, this whole discussion is hilarious. Every
| single major company is dumping enormous efforts into AI,
| redoubling and redoubling again their commitment based
| upon market analysis and what they've seen. If you
| counter this by pointing at some asinine college survey
| of fantasy products with absurd titles, you might be
| deluding yourself.
|
| I also know what I see around me. Every time a search
| engine or social media site or OS pushes an AI feature I
| see people coming to me asking if I know how to turn it
| off. Tips like adding -"ai" -"stable diffusion"
| -"midjourney" -"prompt hunt" -"open art" to searches have
| spread to everyone I know.
|
| You're right that Google and Microsoft would have better
| numbers than I do and maybe it's better to trust the
| hype-train fed to us by the multi-billion dollar
| corporations who have massive sunk costs to justify to
| their shareholders, over glorified internet surveys. I'm
| not even saying that AI can't ever become wildly popular,
| but I know that nobody around me is impressed or even
| optimistic about AI, most everyone wants to get away from
| it, and that includes the stereotypical grandmother types
| who genuinely want the tech they interact with to be
| easier to use and the the stereotypical tech/nerd types
| who want it to be more powerful. That's not a very good
| sign.
|
| Also, let's not pretend that those "fantasy products with
| absurd titles" aren't representative of the kind of
| absurd products we've all seen "AI" slapped onto.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Have you not seen market hype cycles before? They don't
| necessarily correlate with success, and when they do it's
| not necessarily with the ones who sunk the most money in.
| see: .com bubble (which did eventually turn out to be
| huge, just not for most of the companies in the first
| wave), 3D TVs (which didn't, now dead), VR (still a bit
| in limbo, but the hype has died down from where it was, a
| lot of companies haven't recouped their investments).
| "Lots of companies are putting lots of money into it"
| does not mean it's actually a good idea.
|
| (and honestly, I think the only data most people in the
| market are basing their decision off is 'chatGPT got a
| million users in 5 days'. But then, their monthly site
| visits are now down more than 90% from their peak. I
| think there is value in AI in general, but it's very
| over-hyped and there's a lot of quite frankly crap
| integrations which provide little to negative value)
| RajT88 wrote:
| My favorite use of notepad is cleaning my clipboard of
| formatted data.
|
| Yes, you can use Ctrl+alt+v but not all applications support
| it, and not all applications that do consistently respect it.
|
| The windows clipboard is a functional mess and getting worse.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| 100%. Notepad has always been just a simple ASCII text
| tool, with Wordpad being the discount word processor.
| Microsoft's insistence in shoving word processing features
| into Notepad has never made sense.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Replying to myself here-
|
| whtsthmttrmn left the following comment, but then deleted it-
|
| "I know this is rude to say, but I feel you weren't too
| skilled before LLMs became a household term."
|
| This is such a howler that I am going to indirectly reply to
| them here because this is a position that comes up constantly
| as some sort of rather strange defensive posture: A Luddist
| "If you aren't dismissive of them, clearly you must be
| mediocre. Look at my world-weary cynicism that makes me
| elite"
|
| I've worked in software development for just shy of three
| decades. I have been a lead engineer or organization-wide
| architect for multiple medium to large organizations. I was a
| "senior engineer" at 23 for an industrial controls company. I
| have always been _the_ guy when it comes to coding challenges
| or choices at every single organization I 've worked at. I've
| done embedded development, did interactive web applications
| before almost anyone, have published papers and magazine
| articles, and have an extremely rich resume across many
| languages and platforms, with a long history of wins.
|
| Yeah, I'm pretty good at this stuff. And I find "AI"
| extremely useful to my life. I have subscriptions across
| multiple products, and at this moment am building a Jina v3
| embedding system for an insurance company.
|
| Sneering and acting dismissive isn't going to make it not the
| game changer that it is. It's coming and you can't stuff your
| head into sand. Well...you can, but you're just assuring your
| upcoming unemployment.
|
| In fact let me turn this completely around and say that only
| the truly mediocre are riding this Luddism train. In an
| average day I'm working across a half dozen different
| programming languages, multiple platforms, many endpoints and
| toolings, and operations and mathematics that I constantly
| have to refresh myself on. If I was doing copy/pasta template
| code all day in a tiny little niche I probably wouldn't find
| LLMs useful. But I don't, so I do.
| optymizer wrote:
| I've been through quite a few hype cycles in my time on this
| Earth. What you call "reality," I call "been there, done
| that". Enjoy the ride.
| dotty- wrote:
| I just wish Microsoft had a simpler mindset for their OS. Simple,
| privacy-first, consumer-first defaults and optional upgrades to
| more enhanced tools via their App Store.
|
| Imagine if instead of Windows Recall being installed and
| available automatically on machines, they just added Recall as an
| optional downloadable add-on via the App Store... I don't think
| it would have received nearly as much backlash.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| > Simple, privacy-first, consumer-first defaults and optional
| upgrades to more enhanced tools via their App Store.
|
| Why would anyone use this over Ubuntu? They need _something_ to
| differentiate themselves from the inexorable creep of free
| software.
| dotty- wrote:
| I don't think creating a separate tier of enhanced OS
| upgrades would benefit Ubuntu. Ubuntu isn't connected to a
| multi-billion dollar corporation. Canonical has no resources
| to offer a free AI-powered Notepad editor. Microsoft is
| connected to OpenAI, Microsoft has AI-hardware partners, and
| Microsoft has the in-house resources to create new drivers
| for new hardware/software compatibility issues.
|
| There will always be valid reasons to use Windows over
| Ubuntu.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| You seem to mostly be listing ways in which using windows
| is an active liability rather than anything consumers asked
| for.
|
| Granted, the drivers point is a good one.
| gradientsrneat wrote:
| > Ubuntu isn't connected to a multi-billion dollar
| corporation
|
| Technically correct but misleading. It's connected to
| Canonical, a multi-billion dollar private company limited
| by shares.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Just nope.
|
| The value of notepad and paint to me are that they are simple and
| reasonably minimalistic. Adding features makes those sorts of
| programs less useful to me.
|
| Also, I can't trust any software that incorporates AI because I
| can't trust that my usage of that software won't be used to train
| AI.
|
| So this move means that I won't be using these tools anymore. Not
| that it matters to anyone aside from myself, of course. It's also
| not a huge deal to me -- I'll just start using different tools
| that still meet my needs.
| skeledrew wrote:
| Coming soon: "To ensure users have the best experience, we will
| require that AI features be active by default, which requires a
| continuous internet connection, a logged in Microsoft account,
| and enabled telemetry."
| koolba wrote:
| Before that you have to have the one where they have the
| "Disable" flag, but they "accidentally" ignored it.
| michaelt wrote:
| Disable flag?
|
| No no, the choices are "Enable" and "Maybe later"
| LoveMortuus wrote:
| I think it would be much easier and faster to just give the
| users one option. That way, they don't need to think about
| what they want and can focus on their work. (satire)
| reginald78 wrote:
| We A/B tested this and found the acceptance numbers
| really went up.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Some people thrive with more options. For those a [Ok]
| [Hell Yeah!] [Definitively!!!!1!!] set is the perfect
| fit.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| With "maybe later" prompting to enable every few minutes,
| of course only "accidentally". :-)
| tartoran wrote:
| More like "Enable" and "Enable in 8 hours"
| meowface wrote:
| Please give Clippy your consent for his neural interface
| integration. All advertising preference signals are masked
| before being sent.
| otwall wrote:
| I am willing to get into the pod of goo if it means Clippy
| comes back
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Clippy couldn't even have been launched in 1997 unless there
| was already hype about upcoming neural networks in the years
| before.
| mhuffman wrote:
| "Now that you are having the best experience, to ensure safety
| we will require acknowledgement that we might monitor what you
| type and may have to ability to disable your required account
| if we detect unsafe words or searches. This can mean that you
| will not be able to log back in to your computer. If you
| experience this issue simply log into your account and contact
| our automated support system."
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Source: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2024/11/06/new-
| ai-...
| jl6 wrote:
| Microsoft's neglect of Notepad paved the way for Notepad++.
|
| Now they're uplifting Notepad.
|
| Perhaps this will create room for a Notepad--.
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| Genuinely agree! Can't my computer just refrain from sending
| everything I do to the Internet??
| fhfjfk wrote:
| It's Microsoft's computer, not yours.
| inversetelecine wrote:
| "My PC" renamed to "This PC" awhile ago, afterall.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| It used to be "My Computer"
| biofox wrote:
| Didn't even notice that change until you pointed it out.
| I hate it.
| amelius wrote:
| Maybe we'll see more people moving to Linux.
| dagmx wrote:
| It's disappointing that this isn't just a system wide
| functionality for text boxes like it is on macOS, and that it
| requires signing in at all.
|
| Having it be just inside notepad or specific apps means you also
| need to train people to change their workflows or context switch
| to use it.
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| Soon there won't be any safe place on Windows to copy and paste
| some random text/password/key that I don't want to get uploaded
| to some cloud service, or screenshotted and "analysed".
| nicce wrote:
| Soon it is not safe to boot Windows unless you are prepared to
| exterminate all the used hardware.
| dormento wrote:
| Its so sad, windows used to be a production ready system in
| the early 2000s.
| bityard wrote:
| Since Windows is closed source, you have no way of knowing that
| this isn't happening today.
| nicce wrote:
| You can since you can still inspect the traffic. However, it
| is like finding needle in a haystack since there is quite
| much of traffic.
| pantulis wrote:
| Also traffic could be encrypted
| nicce wrote:
| Yes, it is TLS encrypted, but you can decrypt that. As
| far as I know, there isn't other encryption.
| fsflover wrote:
| I never saw anybody able to decrypt Windows telemetry
| traffic.
| seanw444 wrote:
| As I always say, never use Windows without a condom (VM), and
| only sparingly.
| maxsilver wrote:
| "Introducing Windows 365 Universal Clipboard, ensure all of
| your random text/password/keys get uploaded to a cloud service,
| and your clipboard history preserved forever. Search your
| Windows clipboard history from your PC, phone or even
| television, anytime"
| currysausage wrote:
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/tips/clipboard-
| histo...
| blibble wrote:
| recall's going to take a screenshot of your entire desktop
| every 5 seconds and "AI" it so you can search...
| osigurdson wrote:
| It is hilarious how Microsoft suddenly re-discovered Notepad
| after 20+ years.
| qwerpy wrote:
| A long time ago (in the 2000s) I was interviewed by a guy who
| was the maintainer for notepad. It was a part time job. Now I'm
| sure there's a whole team around it with multiple devs, a
| designer, a product manager, a program manager, and now with
| AI, legal has got to be involved.
| glouwbug wrote:
| I like how currently on LinkedIn there's a feature to use AI
| writing assistance to help land your next job. Like if I can't
| write how am I ever going to work a job
| shermantanktop wrote:
| With AI, of course!
| userbinator wrote:
| ....and then the AI will be good enough to do your job for
| you.
| caseymarquis wrote:
| I recently used ChatGPT canvas to improve a friend's resume. I
| had managed him in the past, and he is great to work with.
| However, from his resume you would never know it. I did 3 hours
| worth of editing and improvement in 5 minutes. I gave rambling
| descriptions of what he had done when working for me and why it
| was impressive, and GPT translated this into resume speak
| almost instantly. I then gave some vague suggestions for
| improvement, made a couple minor edits to buff off the AI
| veneer, and viola, he had a professional resume that will help
| him do great work in his next position.
| tartoran wrote:
| Seriously, a use case where LLMs really shine: bullshit
| padding. It's quite amazing to be able to turn ramble into
| coherent text. The less obvious tax is that if you don't put
| effort you will never be able to learn how to write and that
| will most likely affect thinking too. Writing will remain a
| valuable tool for improving thinking though, but likely for a
| lot fewer people.
| Terr_ wrote:
| I suspect we'll start to see people asking for more raw
| bullet-points for certain communications, because all the
| text they used to use to guess
| engagement/thought/investment/care is debased from easy
| counterfeiting.
|
| In some cases that'll remove something that was always a
| questionable waste of time, and in other cases it'll
| represent a real loss of information.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Did you consider that the AI screeners would have liked the
| AI veneer? That CV will be "read" more times by a machine
| than it will be by humans. Someone should publish an RFC for
| a machine-to-machine resume spec so we can ditch the
| inconvenience of using human language as the transport
| anothername12 wrote:
| I'm surprised Windows isn't given away for free at this point.
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| And they added image gen to paint.
|
| Neat, but there a bunch of really basic operations they could of
| added to make it an actual daily driver.
| elzbardico wrote:
| It is getting AI. Text Editing is something Notepad will get in a
| future release, around 2065.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Genuine question, what are these companies hoping for in return
| of giving this for free? Not just giving it, in fact pushing it
| hard. Do they want users to get addicted now and start charging
| them later? Do they want to increase Windows retention? Will they
| push subtle ads?
| AlienRobot wrote:
| You laugh, but there is nothing as good as old Notepad on Linux.
|
| Every single built-in "basic" text editor of every single distro
| comes with syntax highlighting, line numbers, tabs, etc.
|
| I just want a rectangle to type text into.
|
| Notepad is turning into what Linux text editors already are: too
| complicated.
| skydhash wrote:
| What about Ed, the standard text editor?
| revskill wrote:
| So when will mspaint ? Copy a text then paste as an image
| jimt1234 wrote:
| _Et tu, Notepad?_
|
| Seriously, no one _writes_ with Notepad. It 's just for quick
| copy-paste text manipulation. That's it. No need for gen-AI.
|
| I used Notepad to make simple HTML pages back in 1995 - maybe,
| two dozen lines of "<h1>" and "<blink>". That's the most text
| I've ever _written_ in Notepad.
| terminalbraid wrote:
| I assure you there are still many devs that use notepad
| regularly to write horrible code.
| floren wrote:
| I was assigned a partner in my robotics class that used
| _Wordpad_ to write Java code.
| autoexec wrote:
| Smart devs write their horrible code in Notepad++
| hnrodey wrote:
| As much as I'd like to believe this isn't true...
| metalliqaz wrote:
| "need" has nothing to do with it
| RajT88 wrote:
| I write with Notepad. No distractions, no temptation to add
| anything but text.
|
| I write musings, short stories, song lyrics, etc. and keep an
| archive of all these text files to reflect on later. Sometimes
| I write notes and letters to my future self.
|
| All notepad.
| mbg721 wrote:
| I use Notepad to stop Excel from thinking it's smarter than me.
| "Yes, those leading zeroes are important." This is something of a
| step backward.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Where's my open-source vim plugin for this purpose? Anyone know?
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I guess MSFT sees everyone eating lunch with ChatGPT and other AI
| apis and think: "I can do it too!".
| bn-l wrote:
| > It's worth noting that you'll have to sign in to your Microsoft
| account to use Rewrite, as it's "powered by a cloud-based service
| that requires authentication and authorization."
|
| They are truly data leeches trying to lap at any cut you might
| have for a bit of tasty data.
| stewx wrote:
| I presume this is for applying rate-limiting, so their API
| doesn't get utterly abused
| rendaw wrote:
| And for vacuuming up personal data, because why not both.
| ruszki wrote:
| It's pretty obvious after their data grab with the new
| Outlook. They destroyed the built-in app which I used all
| the time just to try to get all of my emails.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| > It's pretty obvious after their data grab with the new
| Outlook.
|
| What did they do this time?
| kotaKat wrote:
| The New Outlook(tm) is an Edge Webview to the cloud.
|
| In the stupidest twist of fate, you cannot open Outlook
| offline, at all. There is no concept of "offline" in the
| New Outlook. I assume this is Microsoft forcing away the
| issues of the past of 50+GB OST files by making Outlook a
| glorified webmail client instead.
|
| Oh, and Microsoft Teams? You can open that offline and
| it's got a full cached experience. Innovation at its
| finest!
| password4321 wrote:
| 20231128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38441710
| New Outlook is good, both for yourself and 766 third
| parties
|
| 20231110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38217457
| Microsoft steals access data: Beware of the new Outlook
| (German) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38219568
| dupe/English)
|
| 20231109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38212453
| Windows 11 Update 23H2 is stealing users' IMAP
| credentials
|
| > _the new Outlook is a thin wrapper around the cloud
| version, so the IMAP sync happens in the cloud, not
| locally_
| RajT88 wrote:
| They can do that other ways...your system already has a bunch
| of unique identifiers built into it they could use.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| This is just so sad. It's not bad, it's to be such a great
| application and something which had endured the whole Microsoft
| enshittification. But I guess even that falls.
| petabyt wrote:
| At the rate that windows is getting worse and Linux is getting
| better, I wonder when the tipping point will be.
| verytrivial wrote:
| I'm not even complaining anymore. I'm just ceasing to use this Ai
| garbage and ceasing to deal with people who spruik it. And if
| you're wondering what "spruik" means, Google will give you an Ai
| summary which is subtly wrong and contradicted by the first
| actual search result it list directly below it.
| pornel wrote:
| We haven't had such FOMO-induced self-destruction since Google+.
| busymom0 wrote:
| What destroyed Google+? Curious.
| pornel wrote:
| When "social" was a hot new thing, Google suddenly wanted to
| be Facebook, and started making all of their products part of
| Google+, whether it made sense or not.
|
| Google+ required having a public profile with a real name.
| Gmail/calendar/docs users who were tricked into activating
| plus, but didn't comply, got banned or forced to make a real
| name profile. Merging of Hangouts, Orkut, Blogger, YouTube
| comments, and Play Store reviews into the same "social
| network" made no sense. It was a blatant move to inflate user
| numbers, at cost of annoying users of the other services, who
| didn't sign up for a me-too Facebook. That was the first time
| when Google became _uncool_.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Well, at least now it will have a semi-valid reason to connect to
| the internet. It is still bonkers, but a different kind of more
| acceptable kind of bonkers.
| ramassnel1 wrote:
| I don't know but adding A.I to notepad makes me wanna use VIM
| more
| rqtwteye wrote:
| This seems to be a common trend everywhere. Instead of improving
| core functionality they add the latest buzzword tech, no matter
| it make sense or not. I am user of GaiaGPS to plan outdoors
| trips. Same there: the app is good but has some problems. Instead
| of fixing the problems they added social functionality which
| nobody really wants.
| brianjlogan wrote:
| This is your tried and true. C level read a magazine, mandatory
| implementation order, engineer ticks the checkbox and waits for
| hype to pass so they can remove it.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _C level read a magazine, mandatory implementation order_
|
| A magazine would be an improvement. I worked in a place where
| the owners were very susceptible to airport billboard ads.
|
| Every time they came back from a trip, we would brace for
| change.
| JohnFen wrote:
| A scary version of this is driven home to me when I go to
| Washington DC and see all of the very expensive billboards
| at commuter stations near the Pentagon advertising fighter
| jets and other military equipment.
|
| It scares me every time because they wouldn't be splashing
| out the big bucks for those billboards if they weren't
| effective, and I absolutely don't want the military (or any
| other entity engaging in major expenditures) to be making
| those decisions based on billboards.
| zh3 wrote:
| AKA the Beltway Bandits [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltway_bandit
| bombcar wrote:
| > I worked in a place where the owners were very
| susceptible to airport billboard ads.
|
| This explains why airports are entirely covered in ads that
| seem to be aimed at C-level execs _only_ (nobody else gives
| a shit).
| dfxm12 wrote:
| This is why I shudder whenever I see a Workday ad during a
| football game.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| I guess it's a good signal for when a niche is opening for
| someone to develop a better product. That's probably a reason
| why competitors like onX have sprung up recently. (Although I
| haven't used onX so I don't know if it's actually better or
| not.)
|
| Also with Gaia it feels like very single year they just have to
| tweak and change the interface to the point where nothing is
| easy or intuitive anymore. It's like designers need to justify
| their jobs so they just keep making change on top of change and
| departing from what made sense, just to make changes, just to
| be doing something.
| hulitu wrote:
| > I guess it's a good signal for when a niche is opening for
| someone to develop a better product
|
| better is the enemy of good. /s
| rqtwteye wrote:
| I have tried OnX and Caltopo and I think for Gaia is still
| the best. If they just fixed their folder management. It
| makes me angry every time I have to use it.
| snarfy wrote:
| Nobody got promoted for improving core functionality.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| People get promoted for improving key metrics. Like Revenue
| or Retention or Installs or whatever. Metrics can be abused
| and gamed ... but you can do a better job aligning them to
| improvement than the de-facto metrics of "number buzzwords in
| a new shiny toy"
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Nobody got promoted for improving core functionality._
|
| It depends on the company.
|
| If you work for a hyper-scale tech company that only cares
| about money money money, then yeah -- nobody's getting
| promoted for improving core functionality.
|
| But I've worked at several companies where that sort of thing
| is not only rewarded, but celebrated. One was a factory.
| Another was healthcare. Tech is the aberation, but on HN we
| pretend that it's normal and good.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Hang on - notepad is the perfect place for a "rewrite my text"
| feature. And clearly its a useful too in a writing app that
| users would like.
|
| I get your complaint in general, but it does not seem like this
| is a good example of throwing random unrelated stuff in.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Last I saw, notepad didn't even have a spell checker. LLM
| integration seems very out of place in such an otherwise
| minimal editor.
| kgeist wrote:
| An LLM can technically fix spelling
| dangerwill wrote:
| ChatGPT still thinks Mississippi has an R in it
| sometimes.
| croisillon wrote:
| that used to be so hard to spell, it used to make me cry,
| but since I've studied spelling it's just like pumpkin
| pie
| hulitu wrote:
| It depends how you look at it. /s
| gnabgib wrote:
| It recently gained a spellcheck (4 months ago)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40907284
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| I love it, very unobtrusive
| rstat1 wrote:
| No Notepad is a perfect example of this. It doesn't need any
| sort of "AI" BS.
| McNutty wrote:
| Couldn't disagree more. Notepad is a place to dump snippets
| of unformatted text, for a temporary duration unless I
| explicity save the file. I already didn't like that they
| added the tabs feature and autosave recently.
|
| If I want to do writing I'll use one of the 6 tools on my PC
| more suited to that task.
| evilduck wrote:
| As a counterpoint, I'm on macOS where their latest AI
| writing tools are now implemented system wide. I also use
| TextEdit (approximately equivalent to Windows Notepad) and
| the Stickies app for similar text dumping ground behavior
| and yet, having the AI writing tools available on those two
| apps is incredibly useful. I often don't use it at all, but
| there are things I want to run through it and not having to
| move the text yet again to another app is nice.
|
| It's _also_ useful in my apps dedicated to writing and even
| the text areas of browsers. I think it's all about
| implementation though, Apple's writing tools are quietly
| buried in the context menu for most text inputs. Microsoft
| has a tendency to be pushy and in your face about their
| latest AI offerings like shoving it into the Start Menu, or
| making it a prominent and visible element of their UI
| (Copilot in VSCode, even when you're not a subscriber) and
| the Verge's screenshot isn't enough for me to judge this
| by.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Apple's AI is way less intrusive.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The program that's roughly equivalent to TextEdit is
| WordPad, and Microsoft is in the middle of removing it.
|
| WordPad would be a much better place to shove in a
| complex feature like AI.
| lxgr wrote:
| So many people aren't even _aware_ that other tools exist,
| can 't install them for corporate policy reasons etc.
|
| In these cases, the best tool is the one you've already
| got.
| threetonesun wrote:
| Word is the perfect place for it? Or OneNote. This would be
| like if Apple added AI rewrite to TextEdit instead of Apple
| Notes. Notepad's only job is to open text files as fast as
| possible.
| evilduck wrote:
| Apple's AI Writing Tools is available in TextEdit.
| hulitu wrote:
| One note is a shitshow. The idea is good, the
| implementation is a disaster.
| sahmeepee wrote:
| OneNote has some predictive text gubbins now.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Hang on - notepad is the perfect place for a "rewrite my
| text" feature. And clearly its a useful too in a writing app
| that users would like.
|
| I use notepad to write quick notes or to strip formating from
| text.
|
| (and i hate with a passion when a program tries to be "smart"
| - hello clippy)
| akira2501 wrote:
| > And clearly its a useful too in a writing app that users
| would like
|
| I don't believe it's useful. I don't think Notepad is a
| "writing app." And I'm fairly certain not a single user in
| the history of ever has asked for this.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| whiplash response, imo. Text editors have had how long again to
| work on improving core functionality?
| croisillon wrote:
| oooo social functionality in notepad! good idea!
| 0xf00ff00f wrote:
| Same as Strava, now it has a completely pointless AI assistant.
| mikercampbell wrote:
| I've loved/hated it taking over IDEs. The refactor lightbulb
| icon popover slowly losing features to "fix with copilot" has
| been draining
| evilduck wrote:
| Why not just spend the one time cost of the approximately
| four seconds it takes to remove Copilot and save yourself
| from feeling drained if it's that upsetting? This is right
| below the level of effort involved in changing the theme and
| setting the font in your IDE.
| jjcm wrote:
| > Instead of improving core functionality
|
| Maybe taking a step back here, what core functionality is
| missing from notepad? I see this as a fairly feature complete
| tool for a core set of behaviors already.
| hulitu wrote:
| Telemetry ? Hamburger menu ? No scrollbars ? /s
|
| The possibilities are infinite.
| trentnix wrote:
| "But our keylogger is a feature!", they explained.
| gigel82 wrote:
| Why cloud? Rewriting some text is definitely something a local
| LLM can do; they have NPUs on the Copilot PCs so why not use
| that?
|
| So far the only feature I've seen them talking about for the NPUs
| on the Copilot PCs is image generation in Paint. Something feels
| off here.
| indulona wrote:
| people already forgot that microsoft said years ago that they
| will make windows into a service and there will be no new
| version, just constant updates. this is what it looks like. ZERO
| privacy. you'll own nothing and be happy.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| this sounds like a terrible idea, simple products should remain
| simple
| christosjesus wrote:
| We forget how to speak. AI creates a real Tower of Babel.
| daemin wrote:
| It seems not enough people are using AI features and therefore it
| is being put everywhere so that people can't help but use AI
| features.
|
| Instead of realising that people don't want these features and
| actively disable or avoid them, they've come to the conclusion
| that they're not being used because they're prominent enough, so
| they are being put everywhere so they cannot be missed.
|
| Windows is no longer a Personal Computer Operating System that
| you can just use.
| akira2501 wrote:
| They spent all this money on training. Massive amounts of one
| time and recurring costs. They have no idea how to write it all
| down. They never planned that they might have to.
|
| And people wonder why some of us were so insistent on not
| allowing this garbage pile of technologies to be open labeled
| 'AI.'
| TheCleric wrote:
| Stuff like this is why I refuse to use Windows anymore.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| I don't blame Satya, I blame the foaming at the mouth AI-frenzied
| investor class. If these folks thought a second about this tech
| and tried to use it in a number of domains, they would not be
| clamoring to AI all the things.
| bigs wrote:
| So, with all the ads, AI, "telemetry" etc when does someone fork
| Win XP, bring it up to 2024 level security and we all move to
| that?
| ngneer wrote:
| Well, they already lost me as a user when they transitioned to an
| MDI interface. My only use for notepad.exe these days is to
| demonstrate exploits.
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