6 ms·

I'm drowning in AI features I never asked for and I hate it

348 points by gnabgib 1y ago

anigbrowl 1y ago
This is one of those areas that validate the use of a meme to halt any further discussion until something changes: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1404116417142065/posts/1588274282059610/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/1404116417142065/posts/15882... It's not that I hate all AI, I think it has a lot of great use cases - none of which justify unilaterally imposing it on everyone.
- righthand 1y ago
  Hilarious your link has an autogenerated AI summary of the meme above the image. That pushes the content down the page.
grebc 1y ago
I changed my home setup to MX Linux a couple of months ago. The PC is so damn snappy compared to Win10 with all the garbage updates. I don’t want widgets on my Lock Screen. I don’t want to know about Candy Crush when I open the Start Menu. And I definitely do not want to use Edge, Firefox is fine thanks. Let alone the AI BS set for Win11.
- frontfor 1y ago
  Same here. I’ve recently switched back to Fedora after a long time on Windows. There are so much less distractions on Fedora and I really hope that it stays this way forever.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  I don't know about Windows 10 but in Windows 11 all of that, like the other stuff people complain about, can be easily disabled.
  - Insanity 1y ago
    Yeah but the “out of the box” experience tells you a lot about a product imo. I use windows only when I play a game, and wouldn’t touch it otherwise
    - chasing0entropy 1y ago
      Investigate ARM / Android gaming scene - it's not your dad's clunky stuff any more - most ARM native games are faster, lightweight, and optimized for touch/vr. ARM console emulation is also on point.
      - Insanity 1y ago
        That’s not really close to playing BF6 and other AAA games though
    - gdulli 1y ago
      It took me longer to figure out how to disable the Ubuntu motd ads than the ones in Windows but I didn't get outraged about it, I just set it up the way I wanted and moved on.
      - quamserena 1y ago
        Or, you can use Linux Mint and get all of the compatibility of Ubuntu with none of Canonical's bullshit.
        gdulli 1y ago
        The point is not to let a trivial thing bother me and make my decisions for me.
      - ekianjo 1y ago
        The good thing with Linux is that you are not married to Ubuntu. So many options out there.
      - 1y ago
- tombert 1y ago
  I have been trying for about a month to get my parents to move to Linux, after my mom got an automatic update that bricked her computer [1]. I've tried very hard to explain to them that their computers would likely run faster if they moved to Linux Mint or something, with the added bonus that you won't have stuff constantly monitoring everything you're doing and and spitting ads at you. Sadly, this has been in vain; my parents are convinced that it will be "too hard" and I guess that having to call me and have me walk them through wiping their hard drive whenever Windows Update [2] decides that they'd prefer my mom buy a new laptop is somehow "easier". A part of me wants to create an ultimatum and say "I will not play tech support anymore unless you move to Linux or macOS", but I know they would call my bluff and ultimately I would end up caving. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45601144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45601144 [2] If anyone here works on Windows Update, please consider a career in literally anything else. Software development clearly isn't for you. There are many other positions out there and I suspect you'd be better at nearly any of them than you are at writing software.
  - NicoJuicy 1y ago
    I always try to convince people that by staying in the same thing for longer, eventually they will need to switch and everything will be much harder. The brain needs to stay flexible. Good luck
  - quamserena 1y ago
    Meh, Linux Mint has some serious rough edges from my experience. Suspend doesn’t work if multiple users are logged in, save-as dialog windows open under the current window (a 7-year old bug!!!) [0], audio devices are not shared between users, some drives don't mount on boot, etc. These problems are probably fixable if you have the know-how but it isn't great for the tech illiterate. That being said, I have never had kernel panics or opened my computer to find a corrupted OS after a bad update (unlike Windows), so there's that. [0] https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk/issues/137 https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk/issues/137
    - ekianjo 1y ago
- ProllyInfamous 1y ago
  I prepared for EoLwin10 by installing Ubuntu on my older dual Xeon / VEGA64 tower. First time Linux user. This computer is fast again. I went with Ubuntu because it has one-click GPT support, even for an old blue-collar novice like me I can do it. So can you. Next it'll be time to retire the fantastic'est Core2Duo Windows 7 Pro 64-bit -computer you ever did see... but only when it dies of natural causes.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    And realize that Ubuntu is one of the more bloated distros.
- Derbasti 1y ago
  On a related note, I used to have a gaming PC. I don't game much any more, so every time I booted up the darn thing, I had to wade through a thick bramble of notifications, updates, ads. It got so bad that lost my will to game altogether. Enough was enough, I sold the PC, and replaced it with a Steam Deck. What a breath of fresh air! No notifications, no OneDrive, no would-you-like-to-use-Edge, no Copilot, no Windows Updates, Windows Store Updates, Driver Updates, Firmware Updates, Browser Updates, let-me-show-you-what's-new-popovers.
- nacozarina 1y ago
  running mx on my daily drivers for +5 years, no regrets
dangus 1y ago
While I agree with the author, I don’t find it nearly as difficult to escape AI. AI on the iPhone is basically a global toggle, one switch turns it all off. The author used a weird third party browser but if they were just using Firefox or Chrome there really wouldn’t be any AI that couldn’t be turned off/ignored. Same deal with Windows, there’s no AI features doing anything on my windows 11 PC. Everything on offer has a toggle or uninstall option and the level of nag is far less than the Windows 10 OneDrive days. The main thing you can’t escape is AI making the internet worse. Then again I do find AI searching to often be way more useful than the pre-AI search that’s clogged with results that don’t match the meaning of what you’re asking for and SEO spam that AI queries can more easily defeat.
- andy99 1y ago
  When I use google docs now, every time I pause to think my focus is destroyed by a pop up inviting me to “help me write with AI”. I have to constantly dismiss similar “features” (ads) in most tools I use now. I wish there was a global toggle. I actually use LLMs regularly as part of my work, but never for the dumb stuff these PMs are trying to ram down my throat. And it pretty obvious the applications that annoy people are useless, otherwise they wouldn’t need to harass you with them.
- Insanity 1y ago
  “Third party browser”… I mean, unless you use Safari or Edge, you’re using a third party browser. I think you mean “not mainstream”, but even so I believe Arc is based on an existing browser engine like Gecko or Chromium?
- Ylpertnodi 1y ago
  > AI on the iPhone is basically a global toggle, one switch turns it all off. > ...my windows 11 PC. Everything on offer has a toggle or uninstall option and the level of nag is far less than the Windows 10 OneDrive days. Opt-out toggles are a nice option, but they can be set to opt-in 'by accident', by the OS owner. I fear this is the near future, and not so long after, there'll be no toggles. Politicians and .gov's will be exempt, of course.
- nunez 1y ago
add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
On the Target web site tonight I was looking at a monitor stand and the Q&A section has some questions written and answered by Target's AI so as to seed the section with content. One of the AI questions is, "What is the weight capacity of the monitor stand?" and the answer is, "The monitor stand is designed to support and elevate a computer monitor, ensuring stability." What are we even doing here? Will anyone ever be accountable for all this stupidity that all of us see every day?
- BobbyTables2 1y ago
  Well, the developer implementing it got to meet some goals and be eligible for a piece of bonus. The manager can announce his team developed the requested feature… The executive can proclaim how they’ve embraced AI and the digital transformation… And now the paper towel companies can prosper from all the extra vomiting…
  - Fade_Dance 1y ago
    Target literally just let 1800 people go, so they probably have an internal initiative to fill the gap with... That.
- smcin 1y ago
  Sure, but in my experience of online shopping, even garbage pretend-customer Q&A as opposed to no Q&A make it look like the product is getting more views, purchases reviews and comments. These days a product with no Q&A at all looks dubious.
- malfist 1y ago
  Amazon ripped out the Q&A for products to replace with AI. I don't know where they think they're going to get answers for new products from, because you can't ask or answer questions anymore. Only get vague, possible hallucinated summaries from historical Q&A or reviews. I asked it what the difference between the standard and the pro version of a dehydrator was and it told me about the pixel counts and refresh rates. The pro dehydrator was apparently for gamers. The actual differences were the door hinge and the tray material (chromed steel vs stainless steel)
blt 1y ago
Yes. Generative AI is bad. Most of the general population already realizes it. Only the tech and computer science bubble remains optimistic.
- Insanity 1y ago
  What do you mean by tech and compsci bubble? Many of the software engineers I interact with don’t seem all that optimistic or positive about the AI tools. There are bubbles for either side I think. But I’m one of those who hasn’t had great experiences using them for anything beyond toy projects.. so maybe my bubble falls more on the AI skeptic side.
  - netsharc 1y ago
    I think it's the money-generating part of "tech".. they see this "glorified spellcheck", assume endless possibilities that everyone will want to buy, and are busy placing "buy AI now" buttons everywhere.. (well, more like "Try it, try it, you'll be amazed, and if you give us money for the premium version you'll be even more amazed!" buttons)
- jordanb 1y ago
  Literally every conversation that I am in or hear about AI outside of tech circles (and most of them inside) are negative. Is there any technology in recent memory where the greator public has turned so universally against it?
  - Gigachad 1y ago
    I don't think any tech has ever been pushed so hard in front of people so fast. People hated facebook for ages but you could just not use it. While these AI features are shoved in front of your face constantly. Google sticks them at the top of every search, reddit sticks generated slop on every page, every SaaS has rebranded themselves as an AI tool with constant popups telling you to use the new AI feature. Most other crappy tech you could just choose to not use.
wilg 1y ago
How many times can we read the same article and have the same discussion? If AI is not useful, people will not use the product or feature and it will die. If it is useful, people will use it.
- crote 1y ago
  You're missing the possibility of AI having gotten too big to fail. If too many careers are tied to AI succeeding, accepting its failure is no longer an option for the company. It if far more attractive to keep shoveling it into more and more places in a desperate attempt to find a use case than to accept you've wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on a hype. Combine this with AI being used in places where quality is highly subjective and not directly tied to the KPIs business people care about (like Google Search summaries, where the actual product is eyeballs on ads), and we might be stuck with it despite a lack of usefulness.
  - wilg 1y ago
    If AI features are costing hundreds of millions of dollars and not providing any value, then it is a great opportunity to begin a competing company and sell a cleaner, cheaper, better product.
    - tartoran 1y ago
      >then it is a great opportunity to begin a competing company and sell a cleaner, cheaper, better product. Ironically AI can be leveraged to do just that. Hope to see some efforts on this front
- chasing0entropy 1y ago
  AI is currently in a bubble being propped up by a snake eating itself in funding - the market has no control until the bubble pops. Bagholders beware my 2026 puts are getting warm.
  - wilg 1y ago
BewareTheYiga 1y ago
http://archive.today/74kzf http://archive.today/74kzf
- superultra 1y ago
  Thank you. Had to turn off my blocker for that site, I was drowning in pop-ups
  - quantummagic 1y ago
    If you happen to use Firefox, check out "Reader View" (it's a button that appears at the end of the address bar). It works brilliantly to strip away everything except the main text of the article; and present it in a font, at a point size, and with margins, of your choosing.
  - webdevver 1y ago
    kind of funny that an article bashing on "drowning in AI" is itself drowning in the far more insidious web affliction of ads and popups
tqi 1y ago
> Forums and communities are losing authentic voices... The comments under most tweets follow the same robotic tone, and it's obvious that a lot of them exist only to farm engagement. AI isn't making it better, but tbh most of the author's complaints have been a problem since well before LLMs. Engagement bait is profitable, and an internet that connects 8 billion people will always trend toward monoculture.
- Gigachad 1y ago
  Making a problem 100x worse is still quite notable even if social media was always slop. Half of reddit posts these days are ChatGPT written where OP replies to nothing.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  Sure, spam’s always been a thing, but making spam too cheap to meter does amount to making things worse.
tombert 1y ago
> > Forums and communities are losing authentic voices... The comments under most tweets follow the same robotic tone, and it's obvious that a lot of them exist only to farm engagement. I've mentioned this before, but I still think that part of the reason Something Awful was and is still fun really boils down to the fact that it cost money to join. It's not a lot of money, but enough to where it keeps bot traffic pretty low (since it would quickly get expensive to keep buying accounts as they get banned). This, in combination with the fact that there's not really a huge benefit to getting engagement other than "it's fun to be funny", and the moderators willingness to ban/probe people who make the forum un-fun, and it's become basically the only social media that I use. I'm not quite a total boomer, I do understand the appeal of social networks like Twitter or Instagram, but I kind of think that ML recommendation systems are sort of by definition antithetical to anything good. It's not like anything a YouTube or TikTok recommendation gives me is going to meaningfully improve my life, and if these systems work as intended then all they do is make me waste more time than I would normally.
- cal_dent 1y ago
  Agreed. It seems inevitable to me that the only valid social networks (social media or forum) will be some sort of semi-locked/curated kingdoms. As bot traffic and engagement increases on the Web the appeal surely starts to decline? Especially as users become better as spotting the less sophisticated bots seem to increasingly dominate a lot of activity. Is the Internet still fun/addictive if you're not actually engaging with people anymore?
  - tombert 1y ago
    Yeah, there's a bit of brilliance in the $10 fee for SA. It's not really enough to "exclude" anyone; virtually anyone can afford to pay a one-time fee, but if they keep getting banned and having to buy accounts, then it becomes untenable to create spam. The genius is that this didn't require teams of PhDs coming up with an elaborate Machine Learning system, it exploited the most basic of human instincts: loss aversion. SA is just about perfect for me, since it has enough users to avoid the "dead mall" vibe, but it's still a relatively small community.
bongodongobob 1y ago
I don't know where you guys are seeing all this AI stuff. I feel like you're going out of your way to complain about new features. Just don't fuckin use it. Even Facebook, Snapchat, insta etc, it's not in your face. You have to be very intentional to use and find it. Edit: even on my PIXEL phone, I honestly don't know how to pull up Gemini. I also think it's ironic that on a forum for companies who are sucking on the AI teet that y'all are complaining about the world you created. Lol awwww, AI bros are mad.
edoceo 1y ago
My biggest frustration is that these widgets keep wiggling the UI. Lots of the JS side logic has this issue but, the latency on the AI widget that loads and then reflows my UI and move what I was just about to click on! Then a mis-click that is a rabbit hole
- tomnipotent 1y ago
  Google Sheets now has an intrusive Gemini pop-up that obscures other cells and UI when you try to do things like edit a formula, it's beyond infuriating and I can feel my blood pressure rise just thinking about it.
  - rapind 1y ago
    Clippy!
    - 6510 1y ago
      Ask Jeeves? Oh, no wait! Google answers?
    - tomnipotent 1y ago
      Clippy at least had the courtesy of only blocking the bottom right of the window, these ridiculous Gemini pop-ups appear next to whatever cell you have selected and block things like column headers or values that you actually want to look at while editing the formula/value. It's insane to me that this was ever allowed to get deployed without a rational human being calling out the obvious issue.
  - quamserena 1y ago
    I blocked that with uBlock origin the moment I first saw it. So annoying! Someone should make a filter for all of these AI widgets.
    - bravetraveler 1y ago
      We can go for a first release, together. You have these, I have about 8 things filtered out of Atlassian products. If I remember on Monday, I'll reply with my portion. Don't own nearly enough to go near radiation on my weekend.
nowittyusername 1y ago
People will not get true benefits of these technologies until they own the hardware that the LLMS and its other various systems run on. Also until they are the ones to actually build the AI system or at the least had a community verify it thoroughly. Corporations are only interested in monetizing their products swaying the public and reducing litigation. You will not get a useful AI system from them, you will get corporate slop that is lobotomized and is neutered in every useful way. That's why I started working on my own fully uncensored no bullshit AI system that has the ability to use other AI systems. The regular folk will be in a HUGE disadvantage using the corporate owned AI systems compared to people who have fully capable systems that are not restricted in any of their intellectual thought traces or abilities. If you don't want to be the one left behind I strongly recommend you start thinking on how to either build such a system yourself or get something like that from an open source project.
- hucklebuckle 1y ago
  Any open source projects you recommend?
mimikatz 1y ago
My nest to Google Home got "updated". I just to ask hey google what is the thermostat set to and it would tell me 70-whatever degrees. Now after the update it tells me it is set to cool. Not that helpful, I have to ask, hey google what temperature is the thermostat set to, which is longer and I find annoying specific
- netsharc 1y ago
  It's "AI" but really not a lot of I.. on the new Pixel phones there are overlays, if it sees a foreign language one appears "This text is in French (etc). Do you want to translate?". The Google geniuses made sure that when you ignore or dismiss the prompt, if you leave that screen and come back multiple times, even within a few seconds, it will ask every time "Do you want to translate this text?".
  - com2kid 1y ago
    Counter point - the on screen translation stuff is way better than before, it can now translate text in pictures which is a huge benefit on many East Asian websites.
    - netsharc 1y ago
      Sure it might work well... but some genius thinks it's great UX to prompt someone 10 times within 5 seconds because it thinks "Oh, the user is in a new screen, and there's foreign language in it!"... it's almost as bad as the 90's website doing a loop of window.open()'s before the browsers thought of blocking that Javascript function...
drivingmenuts 1y ago
I managed to get things done without AI and now I find myself more worried about making sure the AI doesn't f** up the thing I'm trying to do. I half suspect that most people who claim to be successful with AI are just getting something that sort of works and then saying "I meant to do that!"
KPGv2 1y ago
Yeah and every freaking Github repo suggestion the Android news algorithm makes on my phone is to agent/AI crap. I don't care about that. Show me data structures repos and stuff. I want to see cool things, not more AI slop producers.
pogue 1y ago
I loathe the loss of human customer service and moderation (of social media, online gaming, etc) to AI. I constantly hear reports of AI misidentifying speech in in-game chat that results in people getting banned. As well as getting randomly banned/flagged on social media for "community guidelines" or some other esoteric nonsense. Then, of course, when you attempt to contact said company's customer service, there is none to be had. Only chat bots that not only cannot solve your issue, but can give you inaccurate information. So, what do you do then? There's nothing to be done, you're stuck in an indefinite limbo of customer service purgatory, only being able to guess at what to do. I, myself, was banned off Instagram. I had a private account, so all I did was view other people's posts and occasionally left comments on their posts, never anything obnoxious or rude. Out of the blue, I received an email telling me my account was suspended and I needed to verify myself by giving them my phone number to get an SMS, check a reCAPTCHA box, and send a selfie to show I was human. I did that and it said I would be unsuspended within an hour, but I got an email stating "We reviewed your account and found that it still doesn’t follow our Community Standards. As a result, your account has been permanently disabled." Of course, there's no one to follow up with and I'm left racking my brain trying to figure out what I could have done to cause this. Did I reply to someone inappropriately? Was it because I was using a VPN? What could I have possibly done? We've seen that some people who have been banned on social media find that, essentially the only way to get unbanned was to know someone at Meta [1] or get your story published in the media to get their attention [2] or even resort to SLEEPING with Meta employee(s) to get your account issues resolved [3]. Alternately, some Meta employees have turned unbanning people into a side gig [4] [5] as they know that there is no legitimate way to get your account back. When I inquired about this on Reddit, I was pointed to a site that showed offers of resolution to these problems cost in the $1000-5000 range. It has gotten to a point that the use of AI has turned life into a literal Kafkaesque nightmare. How soon will AI take the place of customer service for actual necessary services like calling your local DMV to make an appointment or even taking over 911 services? The promises made by AI companies about this software making our lives easier has merely become a drive to implement AI into every possible facet of life, not to benefit anyone, but to drive up profits. This is rent seeking* by it's purest definition. * [Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth.] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking [1] When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of “Content Jail” https://www.eff.org/pages/when-knowing-someone-meta-only-way-break-out-content-jail https://www.eff.org/pages/when-knowing-someone-meta-only-way... [2] Meta suspended his business's social accounts — it took him a month to reach a human https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/funktasy-meta-ban-9.6932525 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/funktasy-meta-ban-9.6932525 [3] OnlyFans Star Says She Slept With Meta Employees to Get Instagram Unbanned https://www.newsweek.com/onlyfans-star-slept-meta-employees-instagram-unbanned-1708744 https://www.newsweek.com/onlyfans-star-slept-meta-employees-... [4] Inside job: When an account gets hacked, social media giant Meta offers little support, spawning a shadowy network of brokers and Meta employees who profit from helping users get back online https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-instagram-facebook-account-hacked-brokers-customer-support/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-instagram-fac... [5] Meta reportedly punished dozens of employees for offering an inside line to account recovery https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/17/23464297/meta-allegedly-fired-contractors-employees-oops-account-recovery-abuse https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/17/23464297/meta-allegedly-...
isaacremuant 1y ago
Someone's getting promoted out of it and the investment money loves it. So it doesn't matter. The hype outpaces the actual value in many cases and that's why we get the shit we get. A good example are YouTube's unavoidable auto translations. No one bilingual user wants that. It would be extremely easy to make it optional but it won't boost the numbers of the BS metric being pushed internally.
ronbenton 1y ago
Cram it in everything, make a press release for the stockholders, and see what sticks. Microsoft is a particularly bad offender with copilot nonsense popping up all over the place. But hoo boy look at that stock price
PeterHolzwarth 1y ago
I will grudgingly admit that some AI features I encounter are kind of useful. At work, we of course are all-in on a large wiki (Confluence). It has a feature irritatingly overlayed that treats searches as AI questions the provided LLM will answer. I have to admit it often does a good job answering my effective question directly, vs me going through many semi-related pages trying to find out how to do something. Ours is a Windows shop, and I find I am using Copilot somewhat more frequently instead of web searches to find answers to "how do I ..." questions related to the commercial tools we use. While the responses are not always perfect, they are often-enough accurate enough to be useful. And, it saves me a lot of time vs digging through, ironically enough, AI-generated slop pages of how to's that take ten feet of page to answer a simple damned question.
aetherspawn 1y ago
AI (checks list) Yep, another greed machine that nobody wanted, driven by a wealthy minority and (checks notes) yet again dressed up as the savior of humankind. Let’s see here.. above SaaS and below Insistence That Green Energy Is A Scam.
- aetherspawn 1y ago
  I’m further convinced in recent times that there is a general rule that always holds true: More distributed = less corruption = more utopia. So for example, fiat currency = bad. Gold trade = good. Blockchain = good. Single network = bad. On device AI = good. Open source AI and datasets = good. OpenAI and closed datasets = bad. Electric cars charged at home = good. Electricity generated at home = good. A monopoly on electricity = bad. Small forums = good. Reddit = bad. Social media giants = bad. A local sheriff = good. An army = bad.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - walleeee 1y ago
    "Decentralize it" isn't a bad instinct in many contexts but I am sure you are capable of conjuring a counterexample to every one of the cases you mention with a modicum of effort/imagination.
  - com2kid 1y ago
    > Gold trade = good. Look up the atrocities committed on the name of countries gaining more gold sometime then get back to us on that one. > Blockchain = good. Single network = bad. The CC networks have much lower fraud rates than the block chain does. > Small forums = good. Reddit = bad. Social media giants = bad. This forum is 100% a benevolent dictatorship and it works really well. > A local sheriff = good. An army = bad. Plenty of very corrupt local sheriffs. Horribly corrupt for that matter. > On device AI = good. Open source AI and datasets = good. OpenAI and closed datasets = bad. Agreed!
    - 1y ago
dcre 1y ago
On the first section, this is sort of funny. This guy is complaining about Android and Windows. Meanwhile, Mark Gurman is reporting every week how behind Apple is on their LLM integration. So here I am on iOS and macOS and I don't have any of these problems because Apple can't get their shit together to mess up my experience.
- bombcar 1y ago
  They somehow got just enough "machine learning" cum "AI" into Siri that it has regressed and is now LESS useful than it used to be. I don't know how they accomplished that.
  - insane_dreamer 1y ago
    We use Siri extensively in our household (my kids use it with a HomePod a lot) and find that it works better than before (better able to understand them), and _much_ better at answering questions than it used to be (where it would often just say "I've sent some results to your phone"). I like how it provides the source of whatever answer it gives.
    - bombcar 1y ago
      It uses to reliably “know” everyone’s name; now it makes up random phrases instead of names. I’ve tried the “addressbook tricks” and none of it works.
- delis-thumbs-7e 1y ago
  My experience is similar, the new 26 os is great, and since I only use Apple and linux, I don’t really experience any of this. I do use LLM’s, but it is in its own app as it should be. I think I can kinda see what they are tryingto do it with Apple Intelligence. It is pretty useless now, but given time maybe it could grow into actually having powerful features now when developers have an access to its API, as in incorporating applications into seamless workflows. Shoving an AI chatbot into every nook and cranny of your application is just dumb. LLM’s should be unobtrusive, learning ways you want to interact with the larger ecosystem and only show up when called. Reason why MS and G and shoving it everywhere is that they have no idea how to actually use this technology yet, but they already invested billions to it. I don’t see how that is going to end well.
insin 1y ago
How long did it take to get the OS-level settings for reduced motion and preferred theme (light/dark) which provide hints to apps? Is there time for a new "user isn't interested in your shitty AI^wLLM features" one before the bubble bursts?
- toast0 1y ago
  > How long did it take to get the OS-level settings for reduced motion and preferred theme (light/dark) which provide hints to apps? Windows 3 was fully themable. Windows 95 you could set the colors and the plus pack added themes. Ignoring system colors is an innovation.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    To be fair, there was no shortage of apps (especially in Win9x era) that did ignore system colors. Which actually took some effort to do, and almost invariably the result would be a gaudy eyesore, but the "it's branding!" people were already around, albeit not as prevalent. Anyway, the last version of Windows that still maintained this functionality (in "Classic" theme) was Win7; Win8 no longer had the ability to disable Aero.
perplex3d 1y ago
I generally agree with the sentiments of the author when it comes to AI being shoved down everyone’s throat. When I don’t directly seek out AI intervention on a problem, I generally find that some form of it is in my way, slowing me down, and giving me incorrect information. I am often able to avoid it on my own systems, but whenever I need to interact with a company in some way, I am almost guaranteed to have to deal with their clanker in some form and then, if I am lucky, I get to repeat the same information to a human. As it exists right now, it significantly slows down many simply tasks.
bix6 1y ago
The psychology profiles they are generating on us scare me tremendously.
louison11 1y ago
This article is like people in the early days of GUIs complaining that graphical interfaces make using a computer so much slower versus just typing the right command in console right away. That was true at first… until it wasn’t. AI is still in its infancy and a lot of the noise discussed in the article is real. But it will eventually create an Internet/OS interface we can barely fathom. Just project yourself 50 years from now: our current web pages will look archaic. Everything will be conversational, using language, vision, the whole spectrum.
- smt88 1y ago
  We heard this exact thing about blockchain and "Web3" from ~2015-2022. Has it revolutionized some use cases and some lives? Yes! Was it applicable to 95% of the things they promised it would be, like supply chain logistics, gaming, or social media? Absolutely not.
- klardotsh 1y ago
  And yet some of us never asked for that. I didn't ask to come to a page and have a conversation about the data on it, I came to the page to read whatever that data was. I didn't ask to come to a page and have a conversation about filling in spreadsheet headers, I wanted to write out the dang headers and start populating my data. I never asked to downgrade to a lossy interpretation of human natural language, I already know how to get computers to do my bidding quite well, and quite quickly, if they stay out of my way.
- exsomet 1y ago
  > Just project yourself 50 years from now: our current web pages will look archaic. Everything will be conversational, using language, vision, the whole spectrum. To what end? We’ve interacted with the internet using the same text-oriented protocols, the same markup languages, and even the same layout elements for 36 years. What profit motive exists to upend that and standardize on a new format like conversational language? And, based on the development trends of the internet over its entire history, what suggests that if the world were to commit to some radical shift in the foundational technology underpinning the web, it would move towards voice, or vision (what does this mean?) based interfaces. I get that AI is cool, and it has legitimate use cases, but is it possible that we as technologists might be falling into that age-old trap of having a solution in search of a problem?
Uptrenda 1y ago
[flagged]
- nntbukxnbtu1 1y ago
  [dead]
synapsomorphy 1y ago
As an extreme believer in AI (to the point of being a doomer and expecting+fearing ASI) I have to agree with this wholeheartedly. We have to be careful to avoid blaming AI as a technology for the incredibly hamfisted way it’s being implemented in most products, and affecting online spaces. Maybe there will be a bubble burst. That doesn’t mean AI won’t eventually transform the world. It’s hard to believe in nuance but also very important.
iblaine 1y ago
Remind me in 5 years. AI tools don’t hide the fact that the output needs to improve. Calling out the obvious problems is a lazy take.
- zeroCalories 1y ago
  It might be lazy, but it's true, and should be repeated until people feel just as embarrassed about AI slop as they would feel about crypto.
dheatov 1y ago
Position brought in to do "AI transformation" needs to deliver, and they have no way other than keep shoving it harder and harder. It's so much worse with decade old brands as most of us cant just not use it, and these min-maxxer AI people are definitely taking advantages of it.
noodletheworld 1y ago
Hot take: it’s not just “me too! Valuation pls”. Tokens are fine grained billable attribute that lets you add micro transactions to your service. Not in all cases, but in many we exist in a complicated world of enshitifcation + inflation. Inflation means you need to somehow make more money. You can either: raise prices (unpopular), make your product cheaper (unpopular) or add new features and rise the price on the basis of “new value!”. You see major organisations doing this: same product, but now with ai! …and it’s more expensive. Or it’s a mandatory bundle. Or it’s “premium”. Long storm short, a lot of companies see the way that cloud providers do billing (usage based billing, no caps, you get the bill after using it) as the ideal end state. Token based billing moves towards that world; which isn’t just “profit!” …it’s companies trying to deal with the reality of a complicated market place that will punish them for raising prices. …and it is bad. I’m just saying that it’s kind of naive to think so many companies are doing this just as a “me tooooo!”. Come on; even if you’re hunting a funding round, the people running these companies are (mostly) not complete idiots. No one is adding AI features because it’s fun, or they’re bored. … …ok, there are some idiots. Most people have a bigger vision for these features than just annoying their users.
falldrown 1y ago
I'm drowning in annoying popup "We noticed that ads aren't being displayed." I never asked for and I hate it.
yaro330 1y ago
I hate AI as much as the next guy but to pretend that Google assistant was in any way better than Gemini is insane. I went for 10 years giving the assistant a try every time I got a new phone and it always straight up sucked. Forgot the exact name of the lamp? Good luck, I'm not changing its color. Wanna hold a conversation that isn't just "tell a joke"? Forget it. Asking it to convert one measurement into another was also a complete lottery. Gemini is a lot better at it, and while yes, it makes typical LLM mistakes, I can't wait for the day when we're able to use a locally running model for it.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
> At this point, AI isn't even about improving products anymore. It's a marketing checkbox companies use to convince shareholders they're staying ahead in this artificial race. Whether it's a feature nobody asked for or a chatbot no one uses, it's all about being able to say "we have AI too." And every company's website is now about "AI", whether they're actually doing anything with LLMs or not. They might be using the same SVM they've been using for the past 10 years, but now their business is "AI-driven".
ghtbircshotbe 1y ago
Google finance recently added an AI search box to the bottom of the page. If you accidentally scroll up from there bottom of the screen it opens an annoying AI summary of current events. If I ask the search bar how to remove the search bar it unsurprisingly has technical difficulties and doesn't answer.
TX22cts 1y ago
I agree with you 100%. Do we have any say in AI features especially when they do things that I never gave it permission to do? Or is this the new future and we should just accept it like everything else?
btfo 1y ago
You deserve to be disrespected and frustrated like that. You have freely chosen to use proprietary software and give up your freedom to do something about it. You did it to yourself and you do not deserve sympathy.
charlypacman 1y ago
how to unblock pacman?????

348 points by gnabgib 1y ago

This is one of those areas that validate the use of a meme to halt any further discussion until something changes: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1404116417142065/posts/1588274282059610/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/1404116417142065/posts/15882... It's not that I hate all AI, I think it has a lot of great use cases - none of which justify unilaterally imposing it on everyone.

righthand 1y ago
Hilarious your link has an autogenerated AI summary of the meme above the image. That pushes the content down the page.

grebc 1y ago

I changed my home setup to MX Linux a couple of months ago. The PC is so damn snappy compared to Win10 with all the garbage updates. I don’t want widgets on my Lock Screen. I don’t want to know about Candy Crush when I open the Start Menu. And I definitely do not want to use Edge, Firefox is fine thanks. Let alone the AI BS set for Win11.

frontfor 1y ago
Same here. I’ve recently switched back to Fedora after a long time on Windows. There are so much less distractions on Fedora and I really hope that it stays this way forever.
add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
I don't know about Windows 10 but in Windows 11 all of that, like the other stuff people complain about, can be easily disabled.
- Insanity 1y ago
  Yeah but the “out of the box” experience tells you a lot about a product imo. I use windows only when I play a game, and wouldn’t touch it otherwise
  - chasing0entropy 1y ago
    Investigate ARM / Android gaming scene - it's not your dad's clunky stuff any more - most ARM native games are faster, lightweight, and optimized for touch/vr. ARM console emulation is also on point.
    - Insanity 1y ago
      That’s not really close to playing BF6 and other AAA games though
  - gdulli 1y ago
    It took me longer to figure out how to disable the Ubuntu motd ads than the ones in Windows but I didn't get outraged about it, I just set it up the way I wanted and moved on.
    - quamserena 1y ago
      Or, you can use Linux Mint and get all of the compatibility of Ubuntu with none of Canonical's bullshit.
      - gdulli 1y ago
        The point is not to let a trivial thing bother me and make my decisions for me.
    - ekianjo 1y ago
      The good thing with Linux is that you are not married to Ubuntu. So many options out there.
    - 1y ago
tombert 1y ago
I have been trying for about a month to get my parents to move to Linux, after my mom got an automatic update that bricked her computer [1]. I've tried very hard to explain to them that their computers would likely run faster if they moved to Linux Mint or something, with the added bonus that you won't have stuff constantly monitoring everything you're doing and and spitting ads at you. Sadly, this has been in vain; my parents are convinced that it will be "too hard" and I guess that having to call me and have me walk them through wiping their hard drive whenever Windows Update [2] decides that they'd prefer my mom buy a new laptop is somehow "easier". A part of me wants to create an ultimatum and say "I will not play tech support anymore unless you move to Linux or macOS", but I know they would call my bluff and ultimately I would end up caving. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45601144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45601144 [2] If anyone here works on Windows Update, please consider a career in literally anything else. Software development clearly isn't for you. There are many other positions out there and I suspect you'd be better at nearly any of them than you are at writing software.
- NicoJuicy 1y ago
  I always try to convince people that by staying in the same thing for longer, eventually they will need to switch and everything will be much harder. The brain needs to stay flexible. Good luck
- quamserena 1y ago
  Meh, Linux Mint has some serious rough edges from my experience. Suspend doesn’t work if multiple users are logged in, save-as dialog windows open under the current window (a 7-year old bug!!!) [0], audio devices are not shared between users, some drives don't mount on boot, etc. These problems are probably fixable if you have the know-how but it isn't great for the tech illiterate. That being said, I have never had kernel panics or opened my computer to find a corrupted OS after a bad update (unlike Windows), so there's that. [0] https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk/issues/137 https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk/issues/137
  - ekianjo 1y ago
ProllyInfamous 1y ago
I prepared for EoLwin10 by installing Ubuntu on my older dual Xeon / VEGA64 tower. First time Linux user. This computer is fast again. I went with Ubuntu because it has one-click GPT support, even for an old blue-collar novice like me I can do it. So can you. Next it'll be time to retire the fantastic'est Core2Duo Windows 7 Pro 64-bit -computer you ever did see... but only when it dies of natural causes.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  And realize that Ubuntu is one of the more bloated distros.
Derbasti 1y ago
On a related note, I used to have a gaming PC. I don't game much any more, so every time I booted up the darn thing, I had to wade through a thick bramble of notifications, updates, ads. It got so bad that lost my will to game altogether. Enough was enough, I sold the PC, and replaced it with a Steam Deck. What a breath of fresh air! No notifications, no OneDrive, no would-you-like-to-use-Edge, no Copilot, no Windows Updates, Windows Store Updates, Driver Updates, Firmware Updates, Browser Updates, let-me-show-you-what's-new-popovers.
nacozarina 1y ago
running mx on my daily drivers for +5 years, no regrets

dangus 1y ago

While I agree with the author, I don’t find it nearly as difficult to escape AI. AI on the iPhone is basically a global toggle, one switch turns it all off. The author used a weird third party browser but if they were just using Firefox or Chrome there really wouldn’t be any AI that couldn’t be turned off/ignored. Same deal with Windows, there’s no AI features doing anything on my windows 11 PC. Everything on offer has a toggle or uninstall option and the level of nag is far less than the Windows 10 OneDrive days. The main thing you can’t escape is AI making the internet worse. Then again I do find AI searching to often be way more useful than the pre-AI search that’s clogged with results that don’t match the meaning of what you’re asking for and SEO spam that AI queries can more easily defeat.

andy99 1y ago
When I use google docs now, every time I pause to think my focus is destroyed by a pop up inviting me to “help me write with AI”. I have to constantly dismiss similar “features” (ads) in most tools I use now. I wish there was a global toggle. I actually use LLMs regularly as part of my work, but never for the dumb stuff these PMs are trying to ram down my throat. And it pretty obvious the applications that annoy people are useless, otherwise they wouldn’t need to harass you with them.
Insanity 1y ago
“Third party browser”… I mean, unless you use Safari or Edge, you’re using a third party browser. I think you mean “not mainstream”, but even so I believe Arc is based on an existing browser engine like Gecko or Chromium?
Ylpertnodi 1y ago
> AI on the iPhone is basically a global toggle, one switch turns it all off. > ...my windows 11 PC. Everything on offer has a toggle or uninstall option and the level of nag is far less than the Windows 10 OneDrive days. Opt-out toggles are a nice option, but they can be set to opt-in 'by accident', by the OS owner. I fear this is the near future, and not so long after, there'll be no toggles. Politicians and .gov's will be exempt, of course.
nunez 1y ago

add-sub-mul-div 1y ago

On the Target web site tonight I was looking at a monitor stand and the Q&A section has some questions written and answered by Target's AI so as to seed the section with content. One of the AI questions is, "What is the weight capacity of the monitor stand?" and the answer is, "The monitor stand is designed to support and elevate a computer monitor, ensuring stability." What are we even doing here? Will anyone ever be accountable for all this stupidity that all of us see every day?

BobbyTables2 1y ago
Well, the developer implementing it got to meet some goals and be eligible for a piece of bonus. The manager can announce his team developed the requested feature… The executive can proclaim how they’ve embraced AI and the digital transformation… And now the paper towel companies can prosper from all the extra vomiting…
- Fade_Dance 1y ago
  Target literally just let 1800 people go, so they probably have an internal initiative to fill the gap with... That.
smcin 1y ago
Sure, but in my experience of online shopping, even garbage pretend-customer Q&A as opposed to no Q&A make it look like the product is getting more views, purchases reviews and comments. These days a product with no Q&A at all looks dubious.
malfist 1y ago
Amazon ripped out the Q&A for products to replace with AI. I don't know where they think they're going to get answers for new products from, because you can't ask or answer questions anymore. Only get vague, possible hallucinated summaries from historical Q&A or reviews. I asked it what the difference between the standard and the pro version of a dehydrator was and it told me about the pixel counts and refresh rates. The pro dehydrator was apparently for gamers. The actual differences were the door hinge and the tray material (chromed steel vs stainless steel)

blt 1y ago

Yes. Generative AI is bad. Most of the general population already realizes it. Only the tech and computer science bubble remains optimistic.

Insanity 1y ago
What do you mean by tech and compsci bubble? Many of the software engineers I interact with don’t seem all that optimistic or positive about the AI tools. There are bubbles for either side I think. But I’m one of those who hasn’t had great experiences using them for anything beyond toy projects.. so maybe my bubble falls more on the AI skeptic side.
- netsharc 1y ago
  I think it's the money-generating part of "tech".. they see this "glorified spellcheck", assume endless possibilities that everyone will want to buy, and are busy placing "buy AI now" buttons everywhere.. (well, more like "Try it, try it, you'll be amazed, and if you give us money for the premium version you'll be even more amazed!" buttons)
jordanb 1y ago
Literally every conversation that I am in or hear about AI outside of tech circles (and most of them inside) are negative. Is there any technology in recent memory where the greator public has turned so universally against it?
- Gigachad 1y ago
  I don't think any tech has ever been pushed so hard in front of people so fast. People hated facebook for ages but you could just not use it. While these AI features are shoved in front of your face constantly. Google sticks them at the top of every search, reddit sticks generated slop on every page, every SaaS has rebranded themselves as an AI tool with constant popups telling you to use the new AI feature. Most other crappy tech you could just choose to not use.

wilg 1y ago

How many times can we read the same article and have the same discussion? If AI is not useful, people will not use the product or feature and it will die. If it is useful, people will use it.

crote 1y ago
You're missing the possibility of AI having gotten too big to fail. If too many careers are tied to AI succeeding, accepting its failure is no longer an option for the company. It if far more attractive to keep shoveling it into more and more places in a desperate attempt to find a use case than to accept you've wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on a hype. Combine this with AI being used in places where quality is highly subjective and not directly tied to the KPIs business people care about (like Google Search summaries, where the actual product is eyeballs on ads), and we might be stuck with it despite a lack of usefulness.
- wilg 1y ago
  If AI features are costing hundreds of millions of dollars and not providing any value, then it is a great opportunity to begin a competing company and sell a cleaner, cheaper, better product.
  - tartoran 1y ago
    >then it is a great opportunity to begin a competing company and sell a cleaner, cheaper, better product. Ironically AI can be leveraged to do just that. Hope to see some efforts on this front
chasing0entropy 1y ago
AI is currently in a bubble being propped up by a snake eating itself in funding - the market has no control until the bubble pops. Bagholders beware my 2026 puts are getting warm.
- wilg 1y ago

BewareTheYiga 1y ago

http://archive.today/74kzf http://archive.today/74kzf

superultra 1y ago
Thank you. Had to turn off my blocker for that site, I was drowning in pop-ups
- quantummagic 1y ago
  If you happen to use Firefox, check out "Reader View" (it's a button that appears at the end of the address bar). It works brilliantly to strip away everything except the main text of the article; and present it in a font, at a point size, and with margins, of your choosing.
- webdevver 1y ago
  kind of funny that an article bashing on "drowning in AI" is itself drowning in the far more insidious web affliction of ads and popups

tqi 1y ago

> Forums and communities are losing authentic voices... The comments under most tweets follow the same robotic tone, and it's obvious that a lot of them exist only to farm engagement. AI isn't making it better, but tbh most of the author's complaints have been a problem since well before LLMs. Engagement bait is profitable, and an internet that connects 8 billion people will always trend toward monoculture.

Gigachad 1y ago
Making a problem 100x worse is still quite notable even if social media was always slop. Half of reddit posts these days are ChatGPT written where OP replies to nothing.
rsynnott 1y ago
Sure, spam’s always been a thing, but making spam too cheap to meter does amount to making things worse.

tombert 1y ago

> > Forums and communities are losing authentic voices... The comments under most tweets follow the same robotic tone, and it's obvious that a lot of them exist only to farm engagement. I've mentioned this before, but I still think that part of the reason Something Awful was and is still fun really boils down to the fact that it cost money to join. It's not a lot of money, but enough to where it keeps bot traffic pretty low (since it would quickly get expensive to keep buying accounts as they get banned). This, in combination with the fact that there's not really a huge benefit to getting engagement other than "it's fun to be funny", and the moderators willingness to ban/probe people who make the forum un-fun, and it's become basically the only social media that I use. I'm not quite a total boomer, I do understand the appeal of social networks like Twitter or Instagram, but I kind of think that ML recommendation systems are sort of by definition antithetical to anything good. It's not like anything a YouTube or TikTok recommendation gives me is going to meaningfully improve my life, and if these systems work as intended then all they do is make me waste more time than I would normally.

cal_dent 1y ago
Agreed. It seems inevitable to me that the only valid social networks (social media or forum) will be some sort of semi-locked/curated kingdoms. As bot traffic and engagement increases on the Web the appeal surely starts to decline? Especially as users become better as spotting the less sophisticated bots seem to increasingly dominate a lot of activity. Is the Internet still fun/addictive if you're not actually engaging with people anymore?
- tombert 1y ago
  Yeah, there's a bit of brilliance in the $10 fee for SA. It's not really enough to "exclude" anyone; virtually anyone can afford to pay a one-time fee, but if they keep getting banned and having to buy accounts, then it becomes untenable to create spam. The genius is that this didn't require teams of PhDs coming up with an elaborate Machine Learning system, it exploited the most basic of human instincts: loss aversion. SA is just about perfect for me, since it has enough users to avoid the "dead mall" vibe, but it's still a relatively small community.

bongodongobob 1y ago

I don't know where you guys are seeing all this AI stuff. I feel like you're going out of your way to complain about new features. Just don't fuckin use it. Even Facebook, Snapchat, insta etc, it's not in your face. You have to be very intentional to use and find it. Edit: even on my PIXEL phone, I honestly don't know how to pull up Gemini. I also think it's ironic that on a forum for companies who are sucking on the AI teet that y'all are complaining about the world you created. Lol awwww, AI bros are mad.

edoceo 1y ago

My biggest frustration is that these widgets keep wiggling the UI. Lots of the JS side logic has this issue but, the latency on the AI widget that loads and then reflows my UI and move what I was just about to click on! Then a mis-click that is a rabbit hole

tomnipotent 1y ago
Google Sheets now has an intrusive Gemini pop-up that obscures other cells and UI when you try to do things like edit a formula, it's beyond infuriating and I can feel my blood pressure rise just thinking about it.
- rapind 1y ago
  Clippy!
  - 6510 1y ago
    Ask Jeeves? Oh, no wait! Google answers?
  - tomnipotent 1y ago
    Clippy at least had the courtesy of only blocking the bottom right of the window, these ridiculous Gemini pop-ups appear next to whatever cell you have selected and block things like column headers or values that you actually want to look at while editing the formula/value. It's insane to me that this was ever allowed to get deployed without a rational human being calling out the obvious issue.
- quamserena 1y ago
  I blocked that with uBlock origin the moment I first saw it. So annoying! Someone should make a filter for all of these AI widgets.
  - bravetraveler 1y ago
    We can go for a first release, together. You have these, I have about 8 things filtered out of Atlassian products. If I remember on Monday, I'll reply with my portion. Don't own nearly enough to go near radiation on my weekend.

nowittyusername 1y ago

People will not get true benefits of these technologies until they own the hardware that the LLMS and its other various systems run on. Also until they are the ones to actually build the AI system or at the least had a community verify it thoroughly. Corporations are only interested in monetizing their products swaying the public and reducing litigation. You will not get a useful AI system from them, you will get corporate slop that is lobotomized and is neutered in every useful way. That's why I started working on my own fully uncensored no bullshit AI system that has the ability to use other AI systems. The regular folk will be in a HUGE disadvantage using the corporate owned AI systems compared to people who have fully capable systems that are not restricted in any of their intellectual thought traces or abilities. If you don't want to be the one left behind I strongly recommend you start thinking on how to either build such a system yourself or get something like that from an open source project.

hucklebuckle 1y ago
Any open source projects you recommend?

mimikatz 1y ago

My nest to Google Home got "updated". I just to ask hey google what is the thermostat set to and it would tell me 70-whatever degrees. Now after the update it tells me it is set to cool. Not that helpful, I have to ask, hey google what temperature is the thermostat set to, which is longer and I find annoying specific

netsharc 1y ago
It's "AI" but really not a lot of I.. on the new Pixel phones there are overlays, if it sees a foreign language one appears "This text is in French (etc). Do you want to translate?". The Google geniuses made sure that when you ignore or dismiss the prompt, if you leave that screen and come back multiple times, even within a few seconds, it will ask every time "Do you want to translate this text?".
- com2kid 1y ago
  Counter point - the on screen translation stuff is way better than before, it can now translate text in pictures which is a huge benefit on many East Asian websites.
  - netsharc 1y ago
    Sure it might work well... but some genius thinks it's great UX to prompt someone 10 times within 5 seconds because it thinks "Oh, the user is in a new screen, and there's foreign language in it!"... it's almost as bad as the 90's website doing a loop of window.open()'s before the browsers thought of blocking that Javascript function...

drivingmenuts 1y ago

I managed to get things done without AI and now I find myself more worried about making sure the AI doesn't f** up the thing I'm trying to do. I half suspect that most people who claim to be successful with AI are just getting something that sort of works and then saying "I meant to do that!"

KPGv2 1y ago

Yeah and every freaking Github repo suggestion the Android news algorithm makes on my phone is to agent/AI crap. I don't care about that. Show me data structures repos and stuff. I want to see cool things, not more AI slop producers.

pogue 1y ago

I loathe the loss of human customer service and moderation (of social media, online gaming, etc) to AI. I constantly hear reports of AI misidentifying speech in in-game chat that results in people getting banned. As well as getting randomly banned/flagged on social media for "community guidelines" or some other esoteric nonsense. Then, of course, when you attempt to contact said company's customer service, there is none to be had. Only chat bots that not only cannot solve your issue, but can give you inaccurate information. So, what do you do then? There's nothing to be done, you're stuck in an indefinite limbo of customer service purgatory, only being able to guess at what to do. I, myself, was banned off Instagram. I had a private account, so all I did was view other people's posts and occasionally left comments on their posts, never anything obnoxious or rude. Out of the blue, I received an email telling me my account was suspended and I needed to verify myself by giving them my phone number to get an SMS, check a reCAPTCHA box, and send a selfie to show I was human. I did that and it said I would be unsuspended within an hour, but I got an email stating "We reviewed your account and found that it still doesn’t follow our Community Standards. As a result, your account has been permanently disabled." Of course, there's no one to follow up with and I'm left racking my brain trying to figure out what I could have done to cause this. Did I reply to someone inappropriately? Was it because I was using a VPN? What could I have possibly done? We've seen that some people who have been banned on social media find that, essentially the only way to get unbanned was to know someone at Meta [1] or get your story published in the media to get their attention [2] or even resort to SLEEPING with Meta employee(s) to get your account issues resolved [3]. Alternately, some Meta employees have turned unbanning people into a side gig [4] [5] as they know that there is no legitimate way to get your account back. When I inquired about this on Reddit, I was pointed to a site that showed offers of resolution to these problems cost in the $1000-5000 range. It has gotten to a point that the use of AI has turned life into a literal Kafkaesque nightmare. How soon will AI take the place of customer service for actual necessary services like calling your local DMV to make an appointment or even taking over 911 services? The promises made by AI companies about this software making our lives easier has merely become a drive to implement AI into every possible facet of life, not to benefit anyone, but to drive up profits. This is rent seeking* by it's purest definition. * [Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth.] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking [1] When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of “Content Jail” https://www.eff.org/pages/when-knowing-someone-meta-only-way-break-out-content-jail https://www.eff.org/pages/when-knowing-someone-meta-only-way... [2] Meta suspended his business's social accounts — it took him a month to reach a human https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/funktasy-meta-ban-9.6932525 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/funktasy-meta-ban-9.6932525 [3] OnlyFans Star Says She Slept With Meta Employees to Get Instagram Unbanned https://www.newsweek.com/onlyfans-star-slept-meta-employees-instagram-unbanned-1708744 https://www.newsweek.com/onlyfans-star-slept-meta-employees-... [4] Inside job: When an account gets hacked, social media giant Meta offers little support, spawning a shadowy network of brokers and Meta employees who profit from helping users get back online https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-instagram-facebook-account-hacked-brokers-customer-support/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-instagram-fac... [5] Meta reportedly punished dozens of employees for offering an inside line to account recovery https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/17/23464297/meta-allegedly-fired-contractors-employees-oops-account-recovery-abuse https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/17/23464297/meta-allegedly-...

isaacremuant 1y ago

Someone's getting promoted out of it and the investment money loves it. So it doesn't matter. The hype outpaces the actual value in many cases and that's why we get the shit we get. A good example are YouTube's unavoidable auto translations. No one bilingual user wants that. It would be extremely easy to make it optional but it won't boost the numbers of the BS metric being pushed internally.

ronbenton 1y ago

Cram it in everything, make a press release for the stockholders, and see what sticks. Microsoft is a particularly bad offender with copilot nonsense popping up all over the place. But hoo boy look at that stock price

PeterHolzwarth 1y ago

I will grudgingly admit that some AI features I encounter are kind of useful. At work, we of course are all-in on a large wiki (Confluence). It has a feature irritatingly overlayed that treats searches as AI questions the provided LLM will answer. I have to admit it often does a good job answering my effective question directly, vs me going through many semi-related pages trying to find out how to do something. Ours is a Windows shop, and I find I am using Copilot somewhat more frequently instead of web searches to find answers to "how do I ..." questions related to the commercial tools we use. While the responses are not always perfect, they are often-enough accurate enough to be useful. And, it saves me a lot of time vs digging through, ironically enough, AI-generated slop pages of how to's that take ten feet of page to answer a simple damned question.

aetherspawn 1y ago

AI (checks list) Yep, another greed machine that nobody wanted, driven by a wealthy minority and (checks notes) yet again dressed up as the savior of humankind. Let’s see here.. above SaaS and below Insistence That Green Energy Is A Scam.

aetherspawn 1y ago
I’m further convinced in recent times that there is a general rule that always holds true: More distributed = less corruption = more utopia. So for example, fiat currency = bad. Gold trade = good. Blockchain = good. Single network = bad. On device AI = good. Open source AI and datasets = good. OpenAI and closed datasets = bad. Electric cars charged at home = good. Electricity generated at home = good. A monopoly on electricity = bad. Small forums = good. Reddit = bad. Social media giants = bad. A local sheriff = good. An army = bad.
- deleted 1y ago
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- walleeee 1y ago
  "Decentralize it" isn't a bad instinct in many contexts but I am sure you are capable of conjuring a counterexample to every one of the cases you mention with a modicum of effort/imagination.
- com2kid 1y ago
  > Gold trade = good. Look up the atrocities committed on the name of countries gaining more gold sometime then get back to us on that one. > Blockchain = good. Single network = bad. The CC networks have much lower fraud rates than the block chain does. > Small forums = good. Reddit = bad. Social media giants = bad. This forum is 100% a benevolent dictatorship and it works really well. > A local sheriff = good. An army = bad. Plenty of very corrupt local sheriffs. Horribly corrupt for that matter. > On device AI = good. Open source AI and datasets = good. OpenAI and closed datasets = bad. Agreed!
  - 1y ago

dcre 1y ago

On the first section, this is sort of funny. This guy is complaining about Android and Windows. Meanwhile, Mark Gurman is reporting every week how behind Apple is on their LLM integration. So here I am on iOS and macOS and I don't have any of these problems because Apple can't get their shit together to mess up my experience.

bombcar 1y ago
They somehow got just enough "machine learning" cum "AI" into Siri that it has regressed and is now LESS useful than it used to be. I don't know how they accomplished that.
- insane_dreamer 1y ago
  We use Siri extensively in our household (my kids use it with a HomePod a lot) and find that it works better than before (better able to understand them), and _much_ better at answering questions than it used to be (where it would often just say "I've sent some results to your phone"). I like how it provides the source of whatever answer it gives.
  - bombcar 1y ago
    It uses to reliably “know” everyone’s name; now it makes up random phrases instead of names. I’ve tried the “addressbook tricks” and none of it works.
delis-thumbs-7e 1y ago
My experience is similar, the new 26 os is great, and since I only use Apple and linux, I don’t really experience any of this. I do use LLM’s, but it is in its own app as it should be. I think I can kinda see what they are tryingto do it with Apple Intelligence. It is pretty useless now, but given time maybe it could grow into actually having powerful features now when developers have an access to its API, as in incorporating applications into seamless workflows. Shoving an AI chatbot into every nook and cranny of your application is just dumb. LLM’s should be unobtrusive, learning ways you want to interact with the larger ecosystem and only show up when called. Reason why MS and G and shoving it everywhere is that they have no idea how to actually use this technology yet, but they already invested billions to it. I don’t see how that is going to end well.

insin 1y ago

How long did it take to get the OS-level settings for reduced motion and preferred theme (light/dark) which provide hints to apps? Is there time for a new "user isn't interested in your shitty AI^wLLM features" one before the bubble bursts?

toast0 1y ago
> How long did it take to get the OS-level settings for reduced motion and preferred theme (light/dark) which provide hints to apps? Windows 3 was fully themable. Windows 95 you could set the colors and the plus pack added themes. Ignoring system colors is an innovation.
- int_19h 1y ago
  To be fair, there was no shortage of apps (especially in Win9x era) that did ignore system colors. Which actually took some effort to do, and almost invariably the result would be a gaudy eyesore, but the "it's branding!" people were already around, albeit not as prevalent. Anyway, the last version of Windows that still maintained this functionality (in "Classic" theme) was Win7; Win8 no longer had the ability to disable Aero.

perplex3d 1y ago

I generally agree with the sentiments of the author when it comes to AI being shoved down everyone’s throat. When I don’t directly seek out AI intervention on a problem, I generally find that some form of it is in my way, slowing me down, and giving me incorrect information. I am often able to avoid it on my own systems, but whenever I need to interact with a company in some way, I am almost guaranteed to have to deal with their clanker in some form and then, if I am lucky, I get to repeat the same information to a human. As it exists right now, it significantly slows down many simply tasks.

bix6 1y ago

The psychology profiles they are generating on us scare me tremendously.

louison11 1y ago

This article is like people in the early days of GUIs complaining that graphical interfaces make using a computer so much slower versus just typing the right command in console right away. That was true at first… until it wasn’t. AI is still in its infancy and a lot of the noise discussed in the article is real. But it will eventually create an Internet/OS interface we can barely fathom. Just project yourself 50 years from now: our current web pages will look archaic. Everything will be conversational, using language, vision, the whole spectrum.

smt88 1y ago
We heard this exact thing about blockchain and "Web3" from ~2015-2022. Has it revolutionized some use cases and some lives? Yes! Was it applicable to 95% of the things they promised it would be, like supply chain logistics, gaming, or social media? Absolutely not.
klardotsh 1y ago
And yet some of us never asked for that. I didn't ask to come to a page and have a conversation about the data on it, I came to the page to read whatever that data was. I didn't ask to come to a page and have a conversation about filling in spreadsheet headers, I wanted to write out the dang headers and start populating my data. I never asked to downgrade to a lossy interpretation of human natural language, I already know how to get computers to do my bidding quite well, and quite quickly, if they stay out of my way.
exsomet 1y ago
> Just project yourself 50 years from now: our current web pages will look archaic. Everything will be conversational, using language, vision, the whole spectrum. To what end? We’ve interacted with the internet using the same text-oriented protocols, the same markup languages, and even the same layout elements for 36 years. What profit motive exists to upend that and standardize on a new format like conversational language? And, based on the development trends of the internet over its entire history, what suggests that if the world were to commit to some radical shift in the foundational technology underpinning the web, it would move towards voice, or vision (what does this mean?) based interfaces. I get that AI is cool, and it has legitimate use cases, but is it possible that we as technologists might be falling into that age-old trap of having a solution in search of a problem?

Uptrenda 1y ago

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nntbukxnbtu1 1y ago
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synapsomorphy 1y ago

As an extreme believer in AI (to the point of being a doomer and expecting+fearing ASI) I have to agree with this wholeheartedly. We have to be careful to avoid blaming AI as a technology for the incredibly hamfisted way it’s being implemented in most products, and affecting online spaces. Maybe there will be a bubble burst. That doesn’t mean AI won’t eventually transform the world. It’s hard to believe in nuance but also very important.

iblaine 1y ago

Remind me in 5 years. AI tools don’t hide the fact that the output needs to improve. Calling out the obvious problems is a lazy take.

zeroCalories 1y ago
It might be lazy, but it's true, and should be repeated until people feel just as embarrassed about AI slop as they would feel about crypto.

dheatov 1y ago

Position brought in to do "AI transformation" needs to deliver, and they have no way other than keep shoving it harder and harder. It's so much worse with decade old brands as most of us cant just not use it, and these min-maxxer AI people are definitely taking advantages of it.

noodletheworld 1y ago

Hot take: it’s not just “me too! Valuation pls”. Tokens are fine grained billable attribute that lets you add micro transactions to your service. Not in all cases, but in many we exist in a complicated world of enshitifcation + inflation. Inflation means you need to somehow make more money. You can either: raise prices (unpopular), make your product cheaper (unpopular) or add new features and rise the price on the basis of “new value!”. You see major organisations doing this: same product, but now with ai! …and it’s more expensive. Or it’s a mandatory bundle. Or it’s “premium”. Long storm short, a lot of companies see the way that cloud providers do billing (usage based billing, no caps, you get the bill after using it) as the ideal end state. Token based billing moves towards that world; which isn’t just “profit!” …it’s companies trying to deal with the reality of a complicated market place that will punish them for raising prices. …and it is bad. I’m just saying that it’s kind of naive to think so many companies are doing this just as a “me tooooo!”. Come on; even if you’re hunting a funding round, the people running these companies are (mostly) not complete idiots. No one is adding AI features because it’s fun, or they’re bored. … …ok, there are some idiots. Most people have a bigger vision for these features than just annoying their users.

falldrown 1y ago

I'm drowning in annoying popup "We noticed that ads aren't being displayed." I never asked for and I hate it.

yaro330 1y ago

I hate AI as much as the next guy but to pretend that Google assistant was in any way better than Gemini is insane. I went for 10 years giving the assistant a try every time I got a new phone and it always straight up sucked. Forgot the exact name of the lamp? Good luck, I'm not changing its color. Wanna hold a conversation that isn't just "tell a joke"? Forget it. Asking it to convert one measurement into another was also a complete lottery. Gemini is a lot better at it, and while yes, it makes typical LLM mistakes, I can't wait for the day when we're able to use a locally running model for it.

insane_dreamer 1y ago

> At this point, AI isn't even about improving products anymore. It's a marketing checkbox companies use to convince shareholders they're staying ahead in this artificial race. Whether it's a feature nobody asked for or a chatbot no one uses, it's all about being able to say "we have AI too." And every company's website is now about "AI", whether they're actually doing anything with LLMs or not. They might be using the same SVM they've been using for the past 10 years, but now their business is "AI-driven".

ghtbircshotbe 1y ago

Google finance recently added an AI search box to the bottom of the page. If you accidentally scroll up from there bottom of the screen it opens an annoying AI summary of current events. If I ask the search bar how to remove the search bar it unsurprisingly has technical difficulties and doesn't answer.

TX22cts 1y ago

I agree with you 100%. Do we have any say in AI features especially when they do things that I never gave it permission to do? Or is this the new future and we should just accept it like everything else?

btfo 1y ago

You deserve to be disrespected and frustrated like that. You have freely chosen to use proprietary software and give up your freedom to do something about it. You did it to yourself and you do not deserve sympathy.

charlypacman 1y ago

how to unblock pacman?????