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Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now

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Re: Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now

#271

Post by llm_nerd »

croes wrote: post #235
llm_nerd wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 pr…

>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.

Re: Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now

#272

Post by RajT88 »

jimt1234 wrote: post #184

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 " " and " ". That's the most text I've ever written in Notepad.

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.

Re: Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now

#273

Post by bruce511 »

rqtwteye wrote: post #236

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.

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.

Re: Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now

#274

Post by [deleted] »

llm_nerd wrote: post #226
optymizer wrote: post #74

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.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now

#275

Post by theanonymousone »

worldsayshi wrote: post #99
alsetmusic wrote: post #73

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.

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.

What is lead dev? Is that an official scrum role somewhere?

Re: Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now

#276

Post by fuzzfactor »

meowface wrote: post #110
skeledrew wrote: post #86

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."

Please give Clippy your consent for his neural interface integration. All advertising preference signals are masked before being sent.

Clippy couldn't even have been launched in 1997 unless there was already hype about upcoming neural networks in the years before.

Re: Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now

#277

Post by sfjailbird »

jamincan wrote: post #194
alsetmusic wrote: post #73

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.

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 th…

Sounds like a potential compliance issue too, if you work with sensitive data.

Re: Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now

#278

Post by ActionHank »

ausbah wrote: post #207
ActionHank wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

i heard through the grapevine msft had laid off a number of PMs due to anticipating copilot increasing their daily productivity

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.

Re: Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now

#279

Post by llm_nerd »

llm_nerd wrote: post #226
optymizer wrote: post #74

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.

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.

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.

Re: Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now

#280

Post by jcotton42 »

vundercind wrote: post #107
alsetmusic wrote: post #73

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.

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.

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.

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