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Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

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Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#291

Post by johnnyanmac »

poopooracoocoo wrote: post #276
addaon wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You become accustomed to blindly hitting "Yes" every time you've accidentally typed something into the text box, and then that time when you actually put a lot of effort into something... Boom. Its gone. Wouldn't you just hit undo? Yeah, it's a bit obnoxious that Chrome for example uses cmd-shift-T to undo in this case instead of the application-wide undo stack, but I feel like the focus for improving software resi…

Now y'all are just analysing the UX of YouTube and Chrome. The problem is that by agreeing to close the tab, you're agreeing to discard the comment. There's currently no way to bring it back. There's no way to undo. AI can't fix that. There is Microsoft's "snapshot" thing but it's really just a waste of storage space.

I mean, it can. But so can a task runner that periodically saves writing to a clipboard history. The value is questionable, but throwing an LLM at it does feel overkill on terms of overhead.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#292

Post by johnnyanmac »

reactordev wrote: post #131
fragmede wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Claude Code doing the implementing now, we'll have to see who gets which slice of pizza!

Difference is now, that person with an idea, doesn’t need a programmer or anyone to share the pizza with. They are free to gorge on all 18” of it.

Well, until the other 10 people with that idea get a slice in. Likely speaking that 2 people get 7 slices of the 8 slice pizza, and the other 8 people fight over the last piece.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#293

Post by yeasku »

jimbokun wrote: post #174
neilsimp1 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, and I don't want anything related to the current AI craze in my life, at all. But when I come on HN and see people posting about AI IDEs and vibe coding and everything, I'm led to believe that there are developers that like this sort of thing. I cannot explain this.

If you develop software you can’t be as productive without an LLM as a competitor or coworker can be with one.

I am the most productive in my team, by far, 2 promotions in 1 year.

I never use LLMs

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#294

Post by johnnyanmac »

mjfisher wrote: post #137
ericmcer wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But... A lot of stuff you rely on now was probably once distracting and unpredictable. There are a ton of subtle UX behaviors a modern computer is doing that you don't notice, but if they all disappeared and you had to use windows 95 for a week you would miss. That is more what I am advocating for, subtle background UX improvements based on an LLMs ability to interpret a users intent. We had limited abilities to look…

Serious question: what are those things from windows 95/98 I might miss? Rose tinted glasses perhaps, but I remember it as a very straightforward and consistent UI that provided great feedback, was snappy and did everything I needed. Up to and including little hints for power users like underlining shortcut letters for the & key.

I miss my search bar actually being a dumb grep of my indexed files. It's still frustrating typing 3 characters, seeing the result pop up in the 2nd key stroke, but having it transform into something else by the time I process the result.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#295

Post by yeasku »

kevinh wrote: post #93
CamperBob2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot explain this. That usually means you're missing something, not that everyone else is.

Sometimes, but I didn't get sucked into the crypto/blockchain/NFT hype and feel like that was the right call in hindsight.

HN had many phases, crypto, js frameworks, the cloud...

The guy coding in C++ still has a great job, he didnt miss anything, is all fucking FOMO.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#296

Post by Dylan16807 »

hacker_homie wrote: post #209
pseudosavant wrote: post #133

I don't know how many others here have a CoPilot+ PC but the NPU on it is basically useless. There isn't any meaningful feature I get by having that NPU. They are far too limited to ever do any meaningful local LLM inference, image processing or generation. It handles stuff like video chat background blurring, but users' PC's have been doing that for years now without an NPU.

Yeah, that's because the original npus were a rush job, the amd AI Max is the only one that's worth anything in my opinion.

Is that because of the actual processing unit or because they doubled the width of the memory bus?

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#297

Post by dworks »

pseudosavant wrote: post #133

I don't know how many others here have a CoPilot+ PC but the NPU on it is basically useless. There isn't any meaningful feature I get by having that NPU. They are far too limited to ever do any meaningful local LLM inference, image processing or generation. It handles stuff like video chat background blurring, but users' PC's have been doing that for years now without an NPU.

What we want as developers: To be able to implement functionality that utilizes a model for tasks like OCR, visual input and analysis, search or re-ranking etc, without having to implement an LLM API and pay for it. Instead we'd like to offer the functionality to users, possibly at no cost, and use their edge computing capacity to achieve it, by calling local protocols and models.

What we want as users: To have advanced functionality without having to pay for a model or API and having to auth it with every app we're using. We also want to keep data on our devices.

What trainers of small models want: A way for users to get their models on their devices, and potentially pay for advanced, specialized and highly performant on-device models, instead of APIs.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#298

Post by 9rx »

fckgw wrote: post #212
9rx wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't so much the five seconds, it is the muscle memory. You become accustomed to blindly hitting "Yes" every time you've accidentally typed something into the text box, and then that time when you actually put a lot of effort into something... Boom. Its gone. I have been bitten before. Something like the parent described would be a huge improvement. Granted, it seems the even better UX is to save what th…

Which is fine! That's me making the explicit choice that yes, I want to close this box and yes, I want to lose this data. I don't need an AI evaluating how important it thinks I am and second guessing my judgement call. I tell the computer what to do, not the other way around.

You do, however, need to be able to tell the computer that you want to opt in (or out, I suppose) of being able to using AI to evaluate how important it thinks your work is. If you don’t have that option, it is, in fact, the computer telling you what to do. And why would you want the computer to tell you what to do?

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#299

Post by [deleted] »

hacker_homie wrote: post #209
pseudosavant wrote: post #133

I don't know how many others here have a CoPilot+ PC but the NPU on it is basically useless. There isn't any meaningful feature I get by having that NPU. They are far too limited to ever do any meaningful local LLM inference, image processing or generation. It handles stuff like video chat background blurring, but users' PC's have been doing that for years now without an NPU.

Yeah, that's because the original npus were a rush job, the amd AI Max is the only one that's worth anything in my opinion.

[deleted]

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#300

Post by aleph_minus_one »

janalsncm wrote: post #198
pseudosavant wrote: post #133

I don't know how many others here have a CoPilot+ PC but the NPU on it is basically useless. There isn't any meaningful feature I get by having that NPU. They are far too limited to ever do any meaningful local LLM inference, image processing or generation. It handles stuff like video chat background blurring, but users' PC's have been doing that for years now without an NPU.

If I had to steelman Dell, they probably made a bet a while ago that the software side would have something for the NPU, and if so they wanted to have a device to cash in on it. The turnaround time for new hardware was probably on the order of years (I could be wrong about this). It turned out to be an incorrect gamble but maybe it wasn’t a crazy one to make at the time. There is also a chicken and egg problem of sof…

> There is also a chicken and egg problem of software being dependent on hardware, and hardware only being useful if there is software to take advantage of its features.

In the 90s, as a developer you couldn't depend on that a user's computer had a 3D accelerator (or 3D graphics) card. So 3D video games used multiple renderers (software rendering, hardware-accelerated rendering (sometimes with different backends like Glide, OpenGL, Direct3D)).

Couldn't you simply write some "killer application" for local AI that everybody "wants", but which might be slow (even using a highly optimized CPU or GPU backend) if you don't have an NPU. Since it is a "killer application", very many people will still want to run it, even if the experience is slow.

Then as a hardware vendor, you can make the big "show-off" how much better the experience is with an NPU (AI PC) - and people will immediately want one.

Exactly the same story as for 3D accelerators and 3D graphics card where Quake and Quake II were such killer applications.

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