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As someone who appreciates machine learning, the main dissonance I have with interacting with Microsoft's implementation of AI feels like "don't worry, we will do the thinking for you". This appears everywhere, with every tool trying to autocomplete every sentence and action, creating a very clunky ecosystem where I am constantly pressing 'escape' and 'backspace' to undo some action that is trying to rewrite what I a…
Meanwhile, they believed the market was already theirs—so their logic became: fire the engineers, buy more GPUs.
I have mixed feelings about this. I've interviewed several people who were affected by these layoffs, and honestly, many of them were mediocre engineers by most measures. But that still doesn't make this a path to success.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought we pretty explicitly bailed out most of the incumbents. A few were allowed to be sacrificed, but most of the risk wasn't realized, and instead rolled into new positions that diffused it across the economy. 2008's "correction" should have seen the end of most of our investment banks and auto manufacturers. Say what you want to about them (and I have no particular love for either), but Tesla and Bitcoin are g…
> A few were allowed to be sacrificed, but most of the risk wasn't realized, and instead rolled into new positions that diffused it across the economy. Yeah that's a more accurate framing, basically just saying that in '08 we put out the fire and rehabbed the old growth rather than seeding the fresh ground. > Tesla and Bitcoin are ghosts of the timeline where those two sectors had to rebuild themselves from scratch I…
In our hypothetical alternate timeline, I imagine that there would have still been capital eager to fill the hole left by GM, and possibly Ford. Perhaps Tesla would have thrived in that vacuum, alongside the likes of Fisker, Mullen, and others, who instead faced incumbent headwinds that sunk their ventures.
Bitcoin, likewise, was warped by the survival of incumbents. IIUC, those interests influenced governance in the early 2010s, resulting in a fork of the project's original intent from a transactional medium that would scale as its use grew, to a store of value, as controlled by them as traditional currencies. In our hypothetical, traditional banks collapsed, and even survivors lost all trust. The trustless nature of Bitcoin, or some other cryptocurrency, maybe would have allowed it to supercede them. Deprived of both retail and institutional deposits, they simply did not have the capital to warp the crypto space as they did in the actual 2010s.
I call them "ghosts" because, yes, whatever they might have been, they're clearly now just further extensions of that pre-2008 world, enabled by the our post-2008 environment (including ZIRP).
As someone who appreciates machine learning, the main dissonance I have with interacting with Microsoft's implementation of AI feels like "don't worry, we will do the thinking for you". This appears everywhere, with every tool trying to autocomplete every sentence and action, creating a very clunky ecosystem where I am constantly pressing 'escape' and 'backspace' to undo some action that is trying to rewrite what I a…
I broadly agree. They package "copilot" in a way that constantly gets in your way. The one time I thought it could be useful, in diagnosing why two Azure services seemingly couldn't talk to each other, it was completely useless. I had more success describing the problem in vague terms to a different LLM, than an AI supposedly plugged into the Azure organisation that could supposedly directly query information.
The goal is AI everywhere, so this means top-down everyone will implement it and will be rewarded for doing so, so thrre are incentives for each team to do it - money, promotions, budget.
100 teams? 100 AI integrations or more. It's not 10 entry points as it should be (maybe).
This means for a year or more, a lot of AI everywhere, impossible to avoid, will make usability sink.
Now, if this was only done by Microsoft, I would not mind. The issue is that this behavior is getting widespread.
Things are becoming increasingly unusable.
My point is, outside of co-pilot, very few consider Microsoft when they are looking for AI solutions, and if you're not already using Azure, why would you even bother check what they offer. At this point, their biggest ticket is their OpenAI stake.
With that being said, I should give them some credit. They do some interesting research and have some useful open source libraries they release and maintain in the AI space. But that's very different than building AI products and solutions for customers.
As someone who appreciates machine learning, the main dissonance I have with interacting with Microsoft's implementation of AI feels like "don't worry, we will do the thinking for you". This appears everywhere, with every tool trying to autocomplete every sentence and action, creating a very clunky ecosystem where I am constantly pressing 'escape' and 'backspace' to undo some action that is trying to rewrite what I a…
I've worked in tech and lived in SF for ~20 years and there's always been something I couldn't quite put my finger on. Tech has always had a culture of aiming for "frictionless" experiences, but friction is necessary if we want to maneuver and get feedback from the environment. A car can't drive if there's no friction between the tires and the road, despite being helped when there's no friction between the chassis an…
And - for myself, it was friction that kickstarted my interest in "tech" - I bought a janky modem, and it had IRQ conflicts with my Windows 3 mouse at the time - so, without internet (or BBS's at that time), I had to troubleshot and test different settings with the 2-page technical manual that came with it.
It was friction that made me learn how to program and read manuals/syntax/language/framework/API references to accomplish things for hobby projects - which then led to paying work. It was friction not having my "own" TV and access to all the visual media I could consume "on-demand" as a child, therefore I had to entertain myself by reading books.
Friction is good.
Not only that but the headline and story changed by the time Ars went to print:
Microsoft denies report of lowering targets for AI software sales growth
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I broadly agree. They package "copilot" in a way that constantly gets in your way. The one time I thought it could be useful, in diagnosing why two Azure services seemingly couldn't talk to each other, it was completely useless. I had more success describing the problem in vague terms to a different LLM, than an AI supposedly plugged into the Azure organisation that could supposedly directly query information.
I had a WTF moment last week, i was writing SQL, and there was no autocomplete at all. Then a chunk of autocomplete code appeared, what looked like an SQL injection attack, with some "drop table" mixed in. The code would have not worked, it was syntactically rubbish, but still looked spooky, should have made a screenshot of it.
```{{ .default .Values.whatever 10 }}``` instead of the correct ```{{ default 10 .Values.whatever }}```.
Pure garbage which should be solved by now. I don't understand how it can make such a mistake.
As someone who appreciates machine learning, the main dissonance I have with interacting with Microsoft's implementation of AI feels like "don't worry, we will do the thinking for you". This appears everywhere, with every tool trying to autocomplete every sentence and action, creating a very clunky ecosystem where I am constantly pressing 'escape' and 'backspace' to undo some action that is trying to rewrite what I a…
I broadly agree. They package "copilot" in a way that constantly gets in your way. The one time I thought it could be useful, in diagnosing why two Azure services seemingly couldn't talk to each other, it was completely useless. I had more success describing the problem in vague terms to a different LLM, than an AI supposedly plugged into the Azure organisation that could supposedly directly query information.
“I am going to give you the problem I have. I want you to help me work backwards step by step and give me the AWS cli commands to help you troubleshoot. I will give you the output of the command”.
It’s a combination of advice that ChatGPT gives me and my own rubberducking.