It’s comical that Microsoft inserted Copilot buttons throughout all of their productivity suite, and none of them are able to do the bare minimum that you would hope for.
“Oh cool, copilot is in excel! I’m going to ask it a question about the data in the spreadsheet that it’s literally appearing beside natively in-app, or for help with a formula!”
“Wait what, it’s saying it can’t see anything or read from the currently displayed worksheet? Why is it inside the application then? Why would I want an outdated version of ChatGPT with no useful context or ability to read/do anything inside all my Office applications?”
Meta's AI can't search posts on Meta's properties (or at least couldn't a few months ago). I'm not really sure what it's point is unless it's meant as a kind of help desk for the site (which they already also have).
I was looking at Dell's website earlier trying to find out what hardware is inside a specific model (the list of hardware doesn't say, just a bunch of post numbers with cryptic descriptions), and there's a video at the bottom of the page on how to use their AI assistant. I didn't see any links to an assistant.
Mentioning AI in an earnings call means fuck all when what they’re actually referring to is toggling on the permissions for borderline useless copilot features across their enterprise 365 deployments or being convinced to buy some tool that’s actually just a wrapper around API calls to a cheap/outdated OpenAI model with a hidden system prompt.
Yeah, if your Fortune 500 workplace is claiming to be leveraging AI because it has a few dozen relatively tech illiterate employees using it to write their em dash/emoji riddled emails about wellness sessions and teams invites for trivia events… there’s not going to be a noticeable uptick in productivity.
The real productivity comes from tooling that no sufficiently risk adverse pubco IS department is going to let their employees use, because when all of their incentives point to saying no to installing anything ever, the idea of giving the permissions required for agentic AI to do anything useful is a non-starter.
Exactly. You make it more attractive to do business with someone domestically by increasing the cost of doing business with nations that subsidize their exports or undercut your companies with slave labour or lax environmental regulations. Over the long term, domestic capacity either grows or emerges to take advantage of business models that were unprofitable due to impossibly cheap imports before.
The problem is, as the end consumer, it doesn't _feel_ like the domestic options are suddenly the cheap or desirable option. I am just paying more for the thing I was already buying. Similar to, eg, custom PCBs I ordered from China that were more expensive due to the end of the de minimus exemption, where there really isn't a good domestic option. Will an American Shenzhen ever pop up to provide that capacity? I'm very doubtful. Also similar to the Chinese drone ban. Domestically produced drones are both more expensive and there are fewer options in the consumer market. Again, I'm extremely skeptical that we will see an emergence of a competitive domestic UAV industry oriented towards consumers.
In short, it remains to be seen if tariffs have the desired effect in the long term. Their current implementation is merely a tax on consumers without driving them to domestic brands because they weren't introduced gradually but all at once.
> by increasing the cost of doing business with nations that subsidize their exports or undercut your companies with slave labour or lax environmental regulations
This is why the ”overregulated” EU got hit with a 30% tariff?
That was symbolic. Europe hasn’t produced anything except regulations, the fumes of mismanaged luxury brands, and cured meats for nearly 30 years. Nobody on either side was actually impacted.
You also lower the profits from the exporting country (China) through reduced volumes. China has been on a massive productivity growth agenda that is only sustained through open trade and exports.
As it stands you only need a few friends or likeminded journalists at a few major publications to repeat the same falsehood, and it becomes a properly cited fact on Wikipedia and in the public eye for as long as you need it to be. If it’s later proven to be a falsehood and the underlying sources quietly issue retractions it doesn’t matter.
How many people out there still believe the Hunter Biden laptop story, and all the politically damaging material on it was Russian misinformation?
How what vanished? The concerted effort to censor it on social media and dismiss it everywhere else as a hoax? 51 individuals in the “intelligence community” put their names to a letter saying it was Russian disinformation, which was used as evidence that it should be suppressed.
If you don’t realize now that you were lied to even though it’s trivial to confirm now that all the institutions that lied to you have since quietly issued retractions, corrections, or since wrote that they were misled…
Russia had 0 involvement. The laptop and all the controversial material and evidence of corruption on it were legitimate. Wanting to believe otherwise is doing yourself a disservice, even if it means conceding that those you disagree with aren’t always lying.
I suspect the vast number of individuals in developing countries currently spamming LLM commits to every open source project on earth, and often speak neither the project or programming language are not going to pay much attention to this policy. It’s become a numbers game of automation blasting “contributions” at projects with name recognition and hoping you sneak one in for your resume/portfolio.
They didn’t even have a proper primary with Hillary. She was anointed by the DNC to start and the party itself worked against other candidates any way it could to make sure she “won”. Completely ignoring the fact that she was the opposite of any candidate that might snag a single vote from the republicans, and unlikable among most dem voters themselves. Throw in the fact that they were so convinced of a victory that Trump flipped blue states by virtue of showing up versus ignoring them on the basis of “who cares, they’ll vote for me anyway”, and it was a recipe for disaster.
Had the DNC allowed Bernie Sanders to win, or had Biden not picked his running mate on the basis of a Berkeley focus group where the participants were trying to out-virtue each other, we would live in a very different world.
I don't really disagree with this but my opinion is that basically no one is capable of winning a US presidential campaign in the modern era in a matter of ~100 days. The fact Harris was a uniquely bad candidate that weirdly refused to differentiate herself from Biden, just exacerbated that problem.
If Biden and his administration had not been so hellbent on hiding his decline and allowed a robust primary process to start a year earlier, we'd also probably be living in a very different world. There was an extraordinary amount of hubris involved. Hell, even the amount of time between the debate and Biden stepping down (and then initially refusing to endorse Harris) took an absurdly long time. Felt like the lesson with Hillary's campaign was not learned - they expected people to vote for Harris by virtue she was not Trump. Clearly that has not been working.
That’s a good point. The fact that the administration and media spent nearly 6 months telling the world not to believe our own eyes did that campaign no favors.
Especially when it became so untenable to continue the lie that they had to implicitly admit to it along with falsely accusing everyone else of misinformation.
Letting someone make free life choices is good. Disincentivizing not working isn't. It's a reasonable choice for one adult in a family to not work, especially if their earnings don't exceed the costs incurred by having both adults at work. We shouldn't set up our societies in a way to forces people to work even if it makes no financial sense.
“Oh cool, copilot is in excel! I’m going to ask it a question about the data in the spreadsheet that it’s literally appearing beside natively in-app, or for help with a formula!”
“Wait what, it’s saying it can’t see anything or read from the currently displayed worksheet? Why is it inside the application then? Why would I want an outdated version of ChatGPT with no useful context or ability to read/do anything inside all my Office applications?”
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