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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

#361

Post by neonsunset »

joseda-hg wrote: post #206
flohofwoe wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

Re: Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now

#362

Post by Terr_ »

tartoran wrote: post #192
caseymarquis wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suggesti…

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.

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.

Re: Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now

#363

Post by sahmeepee »

threetonesun wrote: post #316
bruce511 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

OneNote has some predictive text gubbins now.

Re: Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now

#365

Post by lxgr »

venusenvy47 wrote: post #301
dmurray wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hand…

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.

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?

Re: Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now

#366

Post by autoexec »

llm_nerd wrote: post #358
autoexec wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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…

> 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.

Re: Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now

#367

Post by noch »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #307
noch wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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]. A…

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.

> 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.

Re: Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now

#368

Post by rqtwteye »

thegrim33 wrote: post #243
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.

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…

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.

Re: Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now

#369

Post by pornel »

busymom0 wrote: post #214
pornel wrote: post #203

We haven't had such FOMO-induced self-destruction since Google+.

What destroyed Google+? Curious.

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.

Re: Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now

#370

Post by bigs »

quyleanh wrote: post #13
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #3

Sends everything you write to Microsoft.

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?

A notes app? Clearly the words are private until I choose to share them with specific people.
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