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
The underlying problem here is that a click or tap should always refer to whatever _was_ on the screen a few (100?) milliseconds ago. It’s a long-standing bug on all platforms.
The reason they do it, of course, is that some subset of the company has AI-related metrics they want to hit, and getting you to click that button is how they do that.
Which is so backwards. Of course, in the first place, a lot of these are free products, so it's not surprising that changes in the product benefit the company instead of you. But there is still supposed to be a modicum of respect: features should be there for you to use if you need them, not trying to get your addition and screaming "use me!". The stupid AI metric they're trying to hit isn't even real or beneficial to them; it's fake wallstreet crap because all the management lives in the same AI bubble and it looks good to say your feature got adopted. But the stupid feature isn't even useful or good. Probably decent documentation would be far better. And you just know the button wiggles on the paid version too, they don't give a shit.
This whole industry is conveniently abstracted away from its users by an app or a website, or whatever, so it manages to get away with treating the users like statistics instead of people. It's so disgusting, that the whole world is being taken over by this. Working at a company that does this should be a source of shame. "Manipulating your users" is a vile bottom-of-the-barrel business model. Fortunately everyone also sucks at it so it's still possible, for the most part, to ignore them (social media feeds being the notable counterexample). But it's just such a shitty world to live in.
If a real person did this stuff to your face--selling you something and then wiggling useless features at you out of the corner of your eye forever--you'd curse them out and try to never do business with them again. That's how it should be when a tech company does it, too.
edit: and don't get me started on those stupid little stars. Where did those even come from? Is there anybody who sees that icon and thinks "I should click that"? I'm glad that all the companies use the same icon for their dogshit features, but still, you would think they'd mix it up or something.
But all governments, or at least all the ones I deal with on a regular basis, are switching to AI for essentially everything as well. The issue I already see coming more and more is that they just don't have an escape hatch (whereas your bank's helpdesk, which no doubt is doing the same does have an escape hatch to talk to a real human ... usually after waiting 10 hours to one song). Your passport renewal gets denied? "Please try again" and back into the app + AI recognition you go!
I don't really care if someone uses AI for something that it's useful for. But that's not why random bullshit websites are doing it. They're trying to get you use it for some other reason--either a (likely false) hypothesis that "AI feature users = more engaged = more likely to pay" or "AI feature users = an audience that's set up to be advertised to = investors are happy to hear about this" or something.
That, or the <18 and >50 users are all addicted to the AI mode and I have no idea because I'm not in either of those buckets, or something. But it's still disrespectful, even if some people are clicking on it.
I must be blanking, because I can't remember any major shuffles on the (Linux) desktop. Either you've noticed and I haven't, or it's stripped out / disabled by default by the maintainers.
The menu item often appears after the rest of the context menu. Since it appears in the middle of the menu it causes a bunch of items to shift and and leads to misclicks.
It would be less of an annoyance if it appeared straightaway but was disabled, and then enabled once it was ready to use, because then it would avoid moving already visible UI elements.
In general I don’t like visible UI elements to change position unless it’s in response to a direct user action (e.g., expanding or collapsing a group). It’s the sort of thing that trashy news website do to ensure they get at least some ad clicks, and it always feels janky and causes frustration.
Even though I don't use Gemini, I have a permanent Gemini 'FAB' located above the 'Start Chat' FAB in Android / Google Messages and I can't seem to get rid of it.
Material 3 guidelines say "Don't display multiple FABs on a single screen":
Kagi, who up to now have been respectful of their users, have just introduced a floating 'Quick Answers' AI summariser button in the bottom right of their search results page on mobile - precisely where one would place one's thumb to scroll the page.
I've already inadvertently clicked on it once.
Very disappointing and they don't provide any toggle to remove it.
I was wondering why I don't see what you see, but I realize I use Google Chat (which used to be XMPP, current status I don't know) and not Google Messages. What do you use this app for? RCS messaging?
Ah, the benefit of using the messaging app Google's neglected is the lack of this Gemini button...
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.
The way Gemini (which is incredible) has been haphazardly shoved into gsuite products seems devoid of any kind of common sense. Even very basic obvious things via Gemini in Gmail fail. It’s ironic because it’s the one place I’d love a decent model.
Incredible at some things maybe, but for the average user Gemini is what broke Google Assistant (the article touches on that). Most people use Google Assistant to "do things" like play music, interact with smart switches, etc. Rolling out Gemini as a replacement before it could do these things was always going to be viewed as a regression.
People don't care if it can answer questions with more nuance when the smart stuff they paid hundreds or thousands for no longer works.
I use Assistant to add reminders or stuff to my calendar (saying "Add appointment for 22nd of December at 2pm take sleigh out of garage" is a lot faster than clicking around the calendar UI), a few months ago Gemini couldn't do these things, yesterday it offers to do so after I connect it to the Workspace apps (I'm using civilian Google). But asking it to list my reminders gives me a textual listing in its UI instead of loading the Tasks UI...
Getting a response to "Set alarm for 8am" is still a lot quicker in Assistant than in Gemini.
I used Google Assistant to call my wife whem I was driving.
Previously it just called her, Gemini asks which one of the numbers I have saved should it call, but not as a continued conversation. It comes up with an onscreen list, which I'm not pressing whilst driving, and trying to tell it which one ends with Gemini getting very confused.
Reverted to Google Assistant which still works and will actually call her.
The weird thing is that other AI systems can route commands to different models. Google should be able to send questions to Gemini and commands to Google Assistant.
Reminds me of when Google Plus got “integrated” everywhere, but even worse.
If we take the thing nobody asked for and shove it in users faces as often as possible, this will get lots of happy customers and the product will take off!
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.
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.
[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.
> but I know they would call my bluff and ultimately I would end up caving
Don't bluff then!
I'd been trying to recommend Linux to my family for many years with no success. I stopped, perhaps a decade ago.
Some two years ago or so, my father decided he was done with Windows (updates, always trying to sell you something or another, etc) and switched to Linux. Now he keeps telling me how much better the Linux experience is. I'm rather amused by that, but also proud of him for having made the jump all by himself.
(He's into astro photography, so he spent a lot of time with raspberry pi's and learned some Linux along the way. I guess that made his desktop switch easier.)
I used to be Windows tech support for my family. But I have been on Linux so long now I genuinely don't know how to help them. So that burden has passed.
I have enough problems with the Windows my son has that I can't fix. Hardware randomly working one day and not the next (but works fine on the Linux system). Having to reinstall when updates break the system. Strange blue screen error codes where there's really no useful info online on how to resolve.
I've been making the case for him to switch to Linux now that win 10 is not supported and all his games will run on Steam on Linux anyway now.
Easier said than done. I love my parents and ultimately I do want to help them when they’re stuck with stuff, and I know if I the situation were reversed they’d do the same for me.
Are you actually good at Windows 11? Are you really helping them as much as you could be that way?
I don’t think I could help somebody set up modern Windows. If I help someone with a computer, I’m telling them I’ve got it into a reasonably usable and safe state. With all the spyware built into a modern Windows system, I don’t think I could be confident there.
I mean, I'm not "good" at it exactly, but a lot of the old Windows XP terminology still applies (e.g. "run", "dxdiag", "device manager"), and I have a bit more intuition about computers than they do, so I can usually brute force a solution to their problems. I don't have any non-virtualized Windows computers in my house, so it is always me figuring it out, but I generally am able to figure stuff out quicker than they can.
I agree with your point though, and I've tried explaining that to them; if something is broken on your Linux box I can get you to send me a tmate URL and I can likely fix any problem you have quickly just because I am much more used to it. At some point I probably should try doing the ultimatum.
My little imaginary quote had a “good luck” at the end which made it look really flip. But, really, I think “I’m getting less and less familiar with Windows as time goes by” is more of a… gentler… way of putting the ultimatum.
I genuinely do not think they are doing it deliberately, at least not at any conscious level. I guess I don't know their inner psyche but I genuinely think that when they ask for help it's because they feel like they need help.
I mean, it is my comment; I wouldn’t have made it if I thought there was anything wrong with it. But, I’m really struggling to see anything objectionable in it at all.
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.
I am not sure my parents have ever had multiple accounts on any of their computers, so I don’t think that particular suspend bug would be an issue, and I haven’t encountered the save as dialog bug, though I don’t dispute that it happens (I just don’t run Gnome or Cinnamon anymore).
Even still, even if it does require a tech-literate person to fix, they have access to that by me, and I can likely fix it for them in a few minutes with tmate or something, as opposed to Windows Update bricking the computer, which required basically an entire day from me to fix.
Oh, and if an update does cause an issue, Linux has competent snapshotting tools because they have filesystems that didn’t coexist with dinosaurs and as such if something breaks a fix is a reboot (and probably a twenty minute phone call with me) away. On Ubuntu if you install ZFS on root you can configure it to take an auto snapshot before updates, for example.
I've seen this same behaviour in Wine (of all things): Installshield messageboxes regularly appear below the install progress window, making it appear stuck. It's so common that the first thing I do when installing anything is to move the progress window away from the center of the screen.
I couldn't get my spouse to try till her computer died, I installed it and said try for a day, I had to use linux to fix the computer (not a lie). See how it goes. She's a gimp wizard now (odd sentence). And very flexible on oses. The only killer app for her is excel on windows. "mac excel is crap". yes honey, yes it is.
The browser version is limited in the ways you’d expect. The Mac OS native version is limited in ways you can’t comprehend. Until you realize they’re fighting apple for enterprise contracts.
yes, it's not excel for windows. it's different. if she's hitting those differences she might as well a) run excel in a vm or b) learn another tool like sheets that's more acessible/sharable, or python.
it also doesn't work with some of her old workbooks or with her mom's copy of excel
Have you tried LibreOffice Calc? It’s so quirky and different from proper Excel. I would never recommend this to a family member, no matter how much better Linux is to Windows. In fact, the office suite is probably the only reason I might consider not recommending Linux.
I mean, it gets the job done but nothing is convenient. The UI looks like a Christmas tree and still everything you need to do is found several sub-menus down in confusing dialogs, like in Excel pre-ribbon times. And for the love of god, please don’t say that ribbon spoiled everything, that discussion was boring even 10 years ago. Since then, state of the art has evolved beyond that.
For small scale household data, the web version of excel is good enough and has an easier UI. For larger scale, duckdb and some python.
If their use is mostly web-centric, get them a second device with Linux on that. Then when Windows has problems again, the value proposition starts to become clear and it's sitting right there ready to use.
> [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.
I started the switch from Windows to Linux in 1999, so have no up-to-date firsthand experience. But, do you think the issues with Windows Update go much beyond the problems with updating arbitrary hardware running software that's in an arbitrary state due to how users have used it?
What I'd say to those Windows Update developers is they should go to Apple, where they can rely on a much more standardized hardware environment and a much more locked-down software environment, which makes that job a lot easier.
I don't think that the god-awfulness of Windows Update is in any way related to the hardware you're running when anything else on the market designed for the same purpose outperforms it.
Updates take ages to download and even longer to install. There is no verbosity option, only a progress bar that likes to get stuck. Did an error occur? Here's an unhelpful 0x%RANDOM% code, where the only mention of it online comes from those who also suffer from it.
How come apt, dnf, pacman or other open source utilities, that are often maintained by an individual, just work, when something with a development team sucks at it so much? While there are an under-the-hood differences between Windows and Linux, replacing system components and libraries should be the same everywhere.
To be clear, this wasn't some custom hack job computer or anything. This was a relatively cheap HP laptop that was just using OEM Windows 10. The hardware is about as vanilla as you get for a laptop.
Linux has the same or even greater hardware diversity, and I have never had a Linux update so thoroughly break my computer as Windows Update did for my mom's computer recently. I run NixOS unstable, I run a system update daily, and while I have had packages break, it still boots after the update. I can say similar things about Arch as well, and I think Ubuntu LTS would be even more reliable.
Windows Update is worse though, because since Windows doesn't have snapshotting in the same way that Linux can have with btrfs or ZFS or bcachefs, an update can fully just break the computer. If you install ZFS on root in Ubuntu it will take a snapshot after each update or even every `sudo apt install`, so even if I did have something break because of an update I'm generally able to get the computer into a usable state by rebooting an choosing something earlier.
But even worse, Windows updates aren't really "opt-in" like they are with Mac and Linux. Windows Updates will happen accidentally or just in the background, as was the case with my mom a few weeks ago. As far as she is aware, she didn't choose the update, it just happened and then her computer was bricked.
Importantly, Windows Update really only has one job, which is to not brick the computer it's updating, or at the very least provide an easy way to roll back if they do. Updates are important, we want security vulnerabilities patched ASAP, but if users are afraid to update out of fear of their computer being bricked and actively do hacks to disable them, then they have utterly failed at their job.
I stand by what I said. Whomever works on it should be ashamed of themselves, and they should stop being software engineers because they are very bad at it. I have never used a piece of software that has more consistently caused headaches than Windows Update; I'm sure I've used software that was more crappily written, but a system update tool IS NOT ALLOWED TO BE SHITTY.
You don't need to get their permission. Just install Linux (mint or any other flavor) and they will get used to it. Did this for a bunch of family members and after a few weeks of transition nobody ever complained after
I live several states away from them, so unless I manage to sneak in some elaborate KVM switch and abuse it in the rare time my mom is plugged into her desk, I don’t think that’s viable.
I suppose I could do it when I come down and visit when they’re not looking, though I think they would be pretty pissed if I did that.
In fairness, there have been plenty of times I have had to message my mom (an attorney) for legal advice, and messaged my dad (an aerospace engineer) for help with math or any kind of non-software engineering, so it's not like they're terribly selfish; if the shoe were on the other foot they'd do the same for me.
While I do find it really irritating that they refuse to leave Windows and I do find their unwillingness to learn new stuff about computers infuriating, I do get it.
Linux has gotten a lot better and easier to use now, but historically there's a reason that it has been associated as a "nerd operating system". Prior to about ~10 years ago, desktop Linux was decidedly unpolished and difficult to use. Getting video and audio drivers working used to be a long and difficult ordeal, package managers were non-intuitive, and we hadn't fully gotten the "web apps have taken over the world" state that we're in now. I've been running Linux for like the last fifteen years and for quite awhile Linux had a well-earned reputation of being hard to use, and I think my parents are afraid of that.
It's gotten much better now, and I think a lot of people could pretty easily migrate without too much issue, but I can't completely blame people for still thinking about how crappy it used to be.
Agreed. Find a distro that most looks like their current setup (maybe Zorin OS?), customize it so it has all the app icons and bookmarks etc in the same position as their Windows set up, and just leave them to it.
If you don't want to be sneaky about it, just install it next time Windows craps itself.
The problem is that even if i did manage to install it on their computer, I don’t think they would just get used to it, they would bitch at me and then just go to Best Buy and purchase a new computer.
I would make a back up of their Windows. Force onto Linux, train them. Make all the icons obvious and look like Windows. Pin their most used applications. Let them run for a bit and see if they request Windows. You have the backup so they can always go back. I bet she never buys a computer.
I'm not going to lie to them, I think that would be wrong and try and tell them it's actually Windows, though if I were upfront and just made the icons look like Windows that would be ok. Even with the default Cinnamon icon styling, if I put Chrome on the desktop they'd figure it out, but even if I were to somehow objectively prove that OnlyOffice or LibreOffice or Calligra or <insert Linux office application here> are better than Microsoft Office, unless I can get the desktop version of Microsoft Office working on there I'm pretty confident that they won't go for it.
I recently tried to get my mom to use the PWA of Word online, and she said it was "worse" than the desktop version but refused to elaborate as to why.
I know I sound like I'm being harsh on my parents, but it's not like they're stupid or anything. They have spent the last 30+ years using Windows and Microsoft Office, I don't blame them for relying on the tools that they have spent the last three decades learning; I use command line tools that have existed longer than I have [1]. I do understand the stubbornness even if it does drive me a little crazy.
[1] Yes I know that GCC and Emacs and tar and grep have gotten updates since they've been released, but so has Windows.
This may or may not help, but have a look at ZorinOS. The latest release and it's announcement is targeted towards those wanting to jump ship from Windows -> Linux. They've tried to account for the adjustment with built-in tips/prompts and the UI looks closer to Windows also.
I've actually played with Zorin a bit in a virtual machine. It seemed cool enough, and I tried showing my parents screenshots of it to show them how Linux isn't that different than Windows, but they were unconvinced.
I managed to get Winboat working on my NixOS laptop, so it's possible that if I set that up they could deal with it.
I actually tell people to avoid Arch-based distros for beginners. They can break really easily with the rolling release. Something LTS would be better.
I never suggested you to lie to them, I suggested you set the UI so it’s familiar…because that’s really easy to do. Still inform them it’s Linux but make it useable like Windows.
Seems like you have it all figured out though, I think I’ve shared enough help good luck.
The laptop that caused all this shit was from 2019. Not "ancient" but not exactly "new" either, and the issue was because Windows Update did an auto-update to Windows 11 and decided my mom didn't need her computer to boot anymore. When I walked them through flashing Windows 11 onto a flash drive (using a stock Windows 11 image using Microsoft's own flashing tools) and installing it manually it worked fine, so it was specifically Windows Update that broke things, not Windows 11 itself.
I've had updates break Linux and cause things to not boot anymore, and those aren't fun, but generally fixing it boils down to rebooting to a previous snapshot [1], or logging in with the command line running like three commands.
I did try fixing the computer before we nuked it. I tried walking them through the Windows auto repair, which didn't do anything (but at least it took a long time), and I tried booting into safe mode, but it wouldn't get any farther than the regular boot did. Apparently there is a way to get into a Powershell live-boot (though I didn't know this at the time), so maybe I could have fixed it with that, anything is possible, but ultimately my solution was getting the to flash a live USB of Ubuntu, and I then mounted the drive and rsync'd everything to my server.
[1] Because Microsoft still doesn't have Copy on Write (despite being a proven and more than 20 year old bit of tech) and so they can't do good snapshotting.
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.
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.
Half these "disable junk" settings auto revert after every update .
And then you have people regularly showing up in threads saying they ran a "debloat" script and now its impossible to run teams and the fix is "rebuild the os". None of this is as simple or risk free as it could be.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The whole point of Apple intelligence is that it shouldn’t feel like you’re talking with an LLM, it’s that it fades into the OS but delivers new features that make the OS more intelligent. I’m actually very bullish on it
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.
Yeah I'm on ios/mac and was puzzled. I do find the AI slop on youtube a bit annoying - you don't know a link is AI stuff till it's played for a few seconds.
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
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?".
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.
> This forum is 100% a benevolent dictatorship and it works really well.
Part of the reason why it does is because there are so many other places to go to. But that is exactly the decentralized model in practice - it's not really anarchy so much so as a lot of small dictatorships, benevolent or otherwise (but you're free to vote with your feet).
"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.
The (non-tech) industry I am in generates an enormous amount of text that it's fairly certain nobody reads past the executive summary.
My workmates love it. Amongst the tech community, I see a divide very similar to the crypto one - everybody who has a stake in it succeeding is very optimistic. Everybody working in other areas seems dubious at best.
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.
I don't think that this is tree. I'm a high school student, and I've overheard quite a few conversations between our admin about whether they prefer Microsoft Copilot or ChatGPT.
That may not be because they like it but because they're required to use it. The teachers in my area, at least, are mandated to use AI themselves and integrate it into their curriculum.
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> > 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.
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?
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.
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?
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)
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.
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
[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 onlinehttps://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-instagram-fac...
the customer service was not "lost" to AI. it was never there to begin with, and never going to be there either. sadly, there is zero financial motivation for meta or google to help you recover your account.
and in cases when they did have humans... AI customer service is much better than the offshore lowest-cost non-english-speaking tech support that businesses would inevitably go for. atleast now the communication is comprehensible, even if i'm talking to a computer.
I can't speak for Meta/Facebook specifically, but other major services like Google & Microsoft absolutely previously had human customer service.
I used to do over the phone technical support for a major PC vendor in the early/mid 2000s and the goal was to solve every customer's problem (in the shortest amount of time, ofc). But that type of stuff is gone in the US. Even with major ISPs/phone companies/banks you are routed to an AI TTS chatbot to try to solve your problem or route you around in confusion until you get lost/fed up and just quit.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can't opt out. Or when you can it's increasingly difficult. The AI features on most products activate themselves automatically and shove themselves on the screen. AI slop books, art, and music are flooding platforms making it incredibly difficult to filter out. There was a case where a physical book on mushroom identification was AI generated and filled with hallucinated highly dangerous advice.
A lot of these tools are also profitable for the user while being a net negative to society. Flooding platforms with slop can make you a quick dollar while ruining the platform for everyone else.
Oh, please. The market for email apps and social media or whatever people are worried about is adding is more than sufficiently free to allow people to switch to non-AI apps.
Social media is some of the least free of all markets, because the whole point of it is to be where the people you want to interact with are.
If your entire family is on Facebook, unless you want to deliberately cut yourself off from them, you're going to be on Facebook.
If we had a dozen different fully interoperable social networks (using atproto or some other federating protocol), then you might have a point. But that is not remotely the world we live in.
And if Google is putting LLM features in Gmail...they're not just the "email app" you use, they hold your email address. You'd need to completely change over your email address with everyone who uses it in order to fully get away from them. (Similarly with Microsoft's email...I don't know if they're putting LLM features in it yet, but if not I'd bet they will soon...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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
The underlying problem here is that a click or tap should always refer to whatever _was_ on the screen a few (100?) milliseconds ago. It’s a long-standing bug on all platforms.
It's just so... disrespectful.
The reason they do it, of course, is that some subset of the company has AI-related metrics they want to hit, and getting you to click that button is how they do that.
Which is so backwards. Of course, in the first place, a lot of these are free products, so it's not surprising that changes in the product benefit the company instead of you. But there is still supposed to be a modicum of respect: features should be there for you to use if you need them, not trying to get your addition and screaming "use me!". The stupid AI metric they're trying to hit isn't even real or beneficial to them; it's fake wallstreet crap because all the management lives in the same AI bubble and it looks good to say your feature got adopted. But the stupid feature isn't even useful or good. Probably decent documentation would be far better. And you just know the button wiggles on the paid version too, they don't give a shit.
This whole industry is conveniently abstracted away from its users by an app or a website, or whatever, so it manages to get away with treating the users like statistics instead of people. It's so disgusting, that the whole world is being taken over by this. Working at a company that does this should be a source of shame. "Manipulating your users" is a vile bottom-of-the-barrel business model. Fortunately everyone also sucks at it so it's still possible, for the most part, to ignore them (social media feeds being the notable counterexample). But it's just such a shitty world to live in.
If a real person did this stuff to your face--selling you something and then wiggling useless features at you out of the corner of your eye forever--you'd curse them out and try to never do business with them again. That's how it should be when a tech company does it, too.
edit: and don't get me started on those stupid little stars. Where did those even come from? Is there anybody who sees that icon and thinks "I should click that"? I'm glad that all the companies use the same icon for their dogshit features, but still, you would think they'd mix it up or something.
But all governments, or at least all the ones I deal with on a regular basis, are switching to AI for essentially everything as well. The issue I already see coming more and more is that they just don't have an escape hatch (whereas your bank's helpdesk, which no doubt is doing the same does have an escape hatch to talk to a real human ... usually after waiting 10 hours to one song). Your passport renewal gets denied? "Please try again" and back into the app + AI recognition you go!
I don't really care if someone uses AI for something that it's useful for. But that's not why random bullshit websites are doing it. They're trying to get you use it for some other reason--either a (likely false) hypothesis that "AI feature users = more engaged = more likely to pay" or "AI feature users = an audience that's set up to be advertised to = investors are happy to hear about this" or something.
That, or the <18 and >50 users are all addicted to the AI mode and I have no idea because I'm not in either of those buckets, or something. But it's still disrespectful, even if some people are clicking on it.
I recall that Amazon Q bubble at top right really gets my goat at work.
I just checked on my private account and it does not look so bad. Must be a combination of things leading to the bad behaviour at work.
The Firefox right-click context menu is awful for this.
Incredibly annoying.
I just tried right clicking on Firefox and got 15 lines of text of which one is "Ask an AI chatbot". Is that it?
Yeah, that’s it, but that item often appears after the rest of the menu for me, causing items below it to shift down one place, leading to misclicks.
I don’t mind that the item exists: I mind that it makes other menu items move after they’ve already appeared.
I just checked and if you mouse over it it has an option "remove ai chatbot" which works immediately, so at least there's that.
I must be blanking, because I can't remember any major shuffles on the (Linux) desktop. Either you've noticed and I haven't, or it's stripped out / disabled by default by the maintainers.
Do you mind elaborating on what I've missed?
I’m using macOS.
The menu item often appears after the rest of the context menu. Since it appears in the middle of the menu it causes a bunch of items to shift and and leads to misclicks.
It would be less of an annoyance if it appeared straightaway but was disabled, and then enabled once it was ready to use, because then it would avoid moving already visible UI elements.
In general I don’t like visible UI elements to change position unless it’s in response to a direct user action (e.g., expanding or collapsing a group). It’s the sort of thing that trashy news website do to ensure they get at least some ad clicks, and it always feels janky and causes frustration.
Even though I don't use Gemini, I have a permanent Gemini 'FAB' located above the 'Start Chat' FAB in Android / Google Messages and I can't seem to get rid of it.
Material 3 guidelines say "Don't display multiple FABs on a single screen":
https://m3.material.io/components/floating-action-button/gui...
For those like me who didn't know what a FAB is, it stands for "Floating Action Button", which is intended to be the primary action for a page
Kagi, who up to now have been respectful of their users, have just introduced a floating 'Quick Answers' AI summariser button in the bottom right of their search results page on mobile - precisely where one would place one's thumb to scroll the page.
I've already inadvertently clicked on it once.
Very disappointing and they don't provide any toggle to remove it.
I was wondering why I don't see what you see, but I realize I use Google Chat (which used to be XMPP, current status I don't know) and not Google Messages. What do you use this app for? RCS messaging?
Ah, the benefit of using the messaging app Google's neglected is the lack of this Gemini button...
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.
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.
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.
The way Gemini (which is incredible) has been haphazardly shoved into gsuite products seems devoid of any kind of common sense. Even very basic obvious things via Gemini in Gmail fail. It’s ironic because it’s the one place I’d love a decent model.
Incredible at some things maybe, but for the average user Gemini is what broke Google Assistant (the article touches on that). Most people use Google Assistant to "do things" like play music, interact with smart switches, etc. Rolling out Gemini as a replacement before it could do these things was always going to be viewed as a regression.
People don't care if it can answer questions with more nuance when the smart stuff they paid hundreds or thousands for no longer works.
I use Assistant to add reminders or stuff to my calendar (saying "Add appointment for 22nd of December at 2pm take sleigh out of garage" is a lot faster than clicking around the calendar UI), a few months ago Gemini couldn't do these things, yesterday it offers to do so after I connect it to the Workspace apps (I'm using civilian Google). But asking it to list my reminders gives me a textual listing in its UI instead of loading the Tasks UI...
Getting a response to "Set alarm for 8am" is still a lot quicker in Assistant than in Gemini.
I used Google Assistant to call my wife whem I was driving.
Previously it just called her, Gemini asks which one of the numbers I have saved should it call, but not as a continued conversation. It comes up with an onscreen list, which I'm not pressing whilst driving, and trying to tell it which one ends with Gemini getting very confused.
Reverted to Google Assistant which still works and will actually call her.
The weird thing is that other AI systems can route commands to different models. Google should be able to send questions to Gemini and commands to Google Assistant.
Reminds me of when Google Plus got “integrated” everywhere, but even worse.
If we take the thing nobody asked for and shove it in users faces as often as possible, this will get lots of happy customers and the product will take off!
The number of random buttons in Google products that have been replaced with Gemini features to juice engagement numbers is insane.
Everything from picking an image in Slides now activating image gen to returning to your main search results now being taken up by AI Mode
You wonder if people are really clearing performance reviews off these metrics without anyone digging deeper
Clippy!
Ask Jeeves?
Oh, no wait! Google answers?
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.
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
[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.
> but I know they would call my bluff and ultimately I would end up caving
Don't bluff then!
I'd been trying to recommend Linux to my family for many years with no success. I stopped, perhaps a decade ago.
Some two years ago or so, my father decided he was done with Windows (updates, always trying to sell you something or another, etc) and switched to Linux. Now he keeps telling me how much better the Linux experience is. I'm rather amused by that, but also proud of him for having made the jump all by himself.
(He's into astro photography, so he spent a lot of time with raspberry pi's and learned some Linux along the way. I guess that made his desktop switch easier.)
I used to be Windows tech support for my family. But I have been on Linux so long now I genuinely don't know how to help them. So that burden has passed.
I have enough problems with the Windows my son has that I can't fix. Hardware randomly working one day and not the next (but works fine on the Linux system). Having to reinstall when updates break the system. Strange blue screen error codes where there's really no useful info online on how to resolve.
I've been making the case for him to switch to Linux now that win 10 is not supported and all his games will run on Steam on Linux anyway now.
can you set them up with dual boot to try it out? maybe they won't miss it once you get it setup for you them and then you can just 86 windows
We gave our parents an iPad for Christmas. Now they have two and never turn on their computer.
I could probably convince my mom on that. My dad still writes a fair bit of code (GNU Octave, mostly), and so an iPad would be a decided downgrade.
MacBook Air then
Yeah, I think I'd be more successful with trying to convince them to move to a Mac.
“I switched to Linux years ago, and don’t really know Windows 11. Good luck!”
Your parents are adults, they can make their own decisions and deal with the outcomes.
Easier said than done. I love my parents and ultimately I do want to help them when they’re stuck with stuff, and I know if I the situation were reversed they’d do the same for me.
Are you actually good at Windows 11? Are you really helping them as much as you could be that way?
I don’t think I could help somebody set up modern Windows. If I help someone with a computer, I’m telling them I’ve got it into a reasonably usable and safe state. With all the spyware built into a modern Windows system, I don’t think I could be confident there.
I mean, I'm not "good" at it exactly, but a lot of the old Windows XP terminology still applies (e.g. "run", "dxdiag", "device manager"), and I have a bit more intuition about computers than they do, so I can usually brute force a solution to their problems. I don't have any non-virtualized Windows computers in my house, so it is always me figuring it out, but I generally am able to figure stuff out quicker than they can.
I agree with your point though, and I've tried explaining that to them; if something is broken on your Linux box I can get you to send me a tmate URL and I can likely fix any problem you have quickly just because I am much more used to it. At some point I probably should try doing the ultimatum.
My little imaginary quote had a “good luck” at the end which made it look really flip. But, really, I think “I’m getting less and less familiar with Windows as time goes by” is more of a… gentler… way of putting the ultimatum.
You are assuming they're not doing it deliberately.
A lot of old people have figured out that you can get other people do do stuff for you by pretending you don't understand it yourself.
I genuinely do not think they are doing it deliberately, at least not at any conscious level. I guess I don't know their inner psyche but I genuinely think that when they ask for help it's because they feel like they need help.
It might not be the case for you, but people generally like to help their close family members.
It seems like they actually are having trouble supporting their parents on Windows, based on their other comments.
I mean this is basically the ultimatum idea, but presenting it as an unavoidable limitation rather than an arbitrary unwillingness to help.
Comments like these are unwarranted.
While the parent comment indicates that a child is possibly overstepping, your comment is a greater overstep.
I didn't think it was so bad. It's a valid response.
I mean, it is my comment; I wouldn’t have made it if I thought there was anything wrong with it. But, I’m really struggling to see anything objectionable in it at all.
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
I am not sure my parents have ever had multiple accounts on any of their computers, so I don’t think that particular suspend bug would be an issue, and I haven’t encountered the save as dialog bug, though I don’t dispute that it happens (I just don’t run Gnome or Cinnamon anymore).
Even still, even if it does require a tech-literate person to fix, they have access to that by me, and I can likely fix it for them in a few minutes with tmate or something, as opposed to Windows Update bricking the computer, which required basically an entire day from me to fix.
Oh, and if an update does cause an issue, Linux has competent snapshotting tools because they have filesystems that didn’t coexist with dinosaurs and as such if something breaks a fix is a reboot (and probably a twenty minute phone call with me) away. On Ubuntu if you install ZFS on root you can configure it to take an auto snapshot before updates, for example.
> save-as dialog windows open under the current window (a 7-year old bug!!!)
This probably does not affect everyone because I have never seen this issue in Mint
I've seen this same behaviour in Wine (of all things): Installshield messageboxes regularly appear below the install progress window, making it appear stuck. It's so common that the first thing I do when installing anything is to move the progress window away from the center of the screen.
Not using Mint though.
I couldn't get my spouse to try till her computer died, I installed it and said try for a day, I had to use linux to fix the computer (not a lie). See how it goes. She's a gimp wizard now (odd sentence). And very flexible on oses. The only killer app for her is excel on windows. "mac excel is crap". yes honey, yes it is.
I don’t know enough about the advanced parts of Excel so I am a little curious; is the browser version of Excel crappy?
The browser version is limited in the ways you’d expect. The Mac OS native version is limited in ways you can’t comprehend. Until you realize they’re fighting apple for enterprise contracts.
yeah there are big limitations on the browser version compared to desktop excel, but mostly in power user areas.
Has she tried LibreOffice Calc?
yes, it's not excel for windows. it's different. if she's hitting those differences she might as well a) run excel in a vm or b) learn another tool like sheets that's more acessible/sharable, or python.
it also doesn't work with some of her old workbooks or with her mom's copy of excel
Have you tried LibreOffice Calc? It’s so quirky and different from proper Excel. I would never recommend this to a family member, no matter how much better Linux is to Windows. In fact, the office suite is probably the only reason I might consider not recommending Linux.
I mean, it gets the job done but nothing is convenient. The UI looks like a Christmas tree and still everything you need to do is found several sub-menus down in confusing dialogs, like in Excel pre-ribbon times. And for the love of god, please don’t say that ribbon spoiled everything, that discussion was boring even 10 years ago. Since then, state of the art has evolved beyond that.
For small scale household data, the web version of excel is good enough and has an easier UI. For larger scale, duckdb and some python.
> Have you tried LibreOffice Calc?
It's my daily driver ever since...
> ribbon spoiled everything
You can find a story that sells it
If their use is mostly web-centric, get them a second device with Linux on that. Then when Windows has problems again, the value proposition starts to become clear and it's sitting right there ready to use.
> [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.
I started the switch from Windows to Linux in 1999, so have no up-to-date firsthand experience. But, do you think the issues with Windows Update go much beyond the problems with updating arbitrary hardware running software that's in an arbitrary state due to how users have used it?
What I'd say to those Windows Update developers is they should go to Apple, where they can rely on a much more standardized hardware environment and a much more locked-down software environment, which makes that job a lot easier.
I don't think that the god-awfulness of Windows Update is in any way related to the hardware you're running when anything else on the market designed for the same purpose outperforms it.
Updates take ages to download and even longer to install. There is no verbosity option, only a progress bar that likes to get stuck. Did an error occur? Here's an unhelpful 0x%RANDOM% code, where the only mention of it online comes from those who also suffer from it.
How come apt, dnf, pacman or other open source utilities, that are often maintained by an individual, just work, when something with a development team sucks at it so much? While there are an under-the-hood differences between Windows and Linux, replacing system components and libraries should be the same everywhere.
To be clear, this wasn't some custom hack job computer or anything. This was a relatively cheap HP laptop that was just using OEM Windows 10. The hardware is about as vanilla as you get for a laptop.
Linux has the same or even greater hardware diversity, and I have never had a Linux update so thoroughly break my computer as Windows Update did for my mom's computer recently. I run NixOS unstable, I run a system update daily, and while I have had packages break, it still boots after the update. I can say similar things about Arch as well, and I think Ubuntu LTS would be even more reliable.
Windows Update is worse though, because since Windows doesn't have snapshotting in the same way that Linux can have with btrfs or ZFS or bcachefs, an update can fully just break the computer. If you install ZFS on root in Ubuntu it will take a snapshot after each update or even every `sudo apt install`, so even if I did have something break because of an update I'm generally able to get the computer into a usable state by rebooting an choosing something earlier.
But even worse, Windows updates aren't really "opt-in" like they are with Mac and Linux. Windows Updates will happen accidentally or just in the background, as was the case with my mom a few weeks ago. As far as she is aware, she didn't choose the update, it just happened and then her computer was bricked.
Importantly, Windows Update really only has one job, which is to not brick the computer it's updating, or at the very least provide an easy way to roll back if they do. Updates are important, we want security vulnerabilities patched ASAP, but if users are afraid to update out of fear of their computer being bricked and actively do hacks to disable them, then they have utterly failed at their job.
I stand by what I said. Whomever works on it should be ashamed of themselves, and they should stop being software engineers because they are very bad at it. I have never used a piece of software that has more consistently caused headaches than Windows Update; I'm sure I've used software that was more crappily written, but a system update tool IS NOT ALLOWED TO BE SHITTY.
You don't need to get their permission. Just install Linux (mint or any other flavor) and they will get used to it. Did this for a bunch of family members and after a few weeks of transition nobody ever complained after
I live several states away from them, so unless I manage to sneak in some elaborate KVM switch and abuse it in the rare time my mom is plugged into her desk, I don’t think that’s viable.
I suppose I could do it when I come down and visit when they’re not looking, though I think they would be pretty pissed if I did that.
How about having Linux in a VM, for them to try out...
Hah, one could lie and say "Inside this window called Virtual Box is what Windows 12 will look like, it's a chance to learn it!".
I'm not going to lie to them, they're not children and they're not idiots, they would figure it out pretty quick.
If I installed a VM for them, they would use it exactly once, right after I installed it for them, and then never again.
My suggestion is not completely serious.
Heh, "not children" but you complain about having to coddle them and their childish incapability/unwillingness to learn. Meh, enjoy your problem.
In fairness, there have been plenty of times I have had to message my mom (an attorney) for legal advice, and messaged my dad (an aerospace engineer) for help with math or any kind of non-software engineering, so it's not like they're terribly selfish; if the shoe were on the other foot they'd do the same for me.
While I do find it really irritating that they refuse to leave Windows and I do find their unwillingness to learn new stuff about computers infuriating, I do get it.
Linux has gotten a lot better and easier to use now, but historically there's a reason that it has been associated as a "nerd operating system". Prior to about ~10 years ago, desktop Linux was decidedly unpolished and difficult to use. Getting video and audio drivers working used to be a long and difficult ordeal, package managers were non-intuitive, and we hadn't fully gotten the "web apps have taken over the world" state that we're in now. I've been running Linux for like the last fifteen years and for quite awhile Linux had a well-earned reputation of being hard to use, and I think my parents are afraid of that.
It's gotten much better now, and I think a lot of people could pretty easily migrate without too much issue, but I can't completely blame people for still thinking about how crappy it used to be.
Did they not complain because nobody in your family talks to you anymore?
Agreed. Find a distro that most looks like their current setup (maybe Zorin OS?), customize it so it has all the app icons and bookmarks etc in the same position as their Windows set up, and just leave them to it.
If you don't want to be sneaky about it, just install it next time Windows craps itself.
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
Install Linux, call it "Windows 11" and blame everything on Microsoft and AI?
Unless they've got a genuine Windows app that they need, you might be able to get away with it...
I'm not going to lie to them about this. They're not stupid and even if they were that would be wrong.
Even if I did do that, I'm quite confident that unless I install the desktop version of Microsoft Office, they would never go for it.
Do the ultimatum or force them onto it. They will thank you later.
The problem is that even if i did manage to install it on their computer, I don’t think they would just get used to it, they would bitch at me and then just go to Best Buy and purchase a new computer.
I would make a back up of their Windows. Force onto Linux, train them. Make all the icons obvious and look like Windows. Pin their most used applications. Let them run for a bit and see if they request Windows. You have the backup so they can always go back. I bet she never buys a computer.
I'm not going to lie to them, I think that would be wrong and try and tell them it's actually Windows, though if I were upfront and just made the icons look like Windows that would be ok. Even with the default Cinnamon icon styling, if I put Chrome on the desktop they'd figure it out, but even if I were to somehow objectively prove that OnlyOffice or LibreOffice or Calligra or <insert Linux office application here> are better than Microsoft Office, unless I can get the desktop version of Microsoft Office working on there I'm pretty confident that they won't go for it.
I recently tried to get my mom to use the PWA of Word online, and she said it was "worse" than the desktop version but refused to elaborate as to why.
I know I sound like I'm being harsh on my parents, but it's not like they're stupid or anything. They have spent the last 30+ years using Windows and Microsoft Office, I don't blame them for relying on the tools that they have spent the last three decades learning; I use command line tools that have existed longer than I have [1]. I do understand the stubbornness even if it does drive me a little crazy.
[1] Yes I know that GCC and Emacs and tar and grep have gotten updates since they've been released, but so has Windows.
This may or may not help, but have a look at ZorinOS. The latest release and it's announcement is targeted towards those wanting to jump ship from Windows -> Linux. They've tried to account for the adjustment with built-in tips/prompts and the UI looks closer to Windows also.
You're right, Office is where you will struggle.
https://blog.zorin.com/2025/10/14/zorin-os-18-has-arrived/
I've actually played with Zorin a bit in a virtual machine. It seemed cool enough, and I tried showing my parents screenshots of it to show them how Linux isn't that different than Windows, but they were unconvinced.
I managed to get Winboat working on my NixOS laptop, so it's possible that if I set that up they could deal with it.
I actually tell people to avoid Arch-based distros for beginners. They can break really easily with the rolling release. Something LTS would be better.
I never suggested you to lie to them, I suggested you set the UI so it’s familiar…because that’s really easy to do. Still inform them it’s Linux but make it useable like Windows.
Seems like you have it all figured out though, I think I’ve shared enough help good luck.
maybe just give them an old laptop with linux to try and if it is not too bad, they might be okay with changing the main machine.
on the positive side, if their main machine is old, there are no longer win10 updates.
The laptop that caused all this shit was from 2019. Not "ancient" but not exactly "new" either, and the issue was because Windows Update did an auto-update to Windows 11 and decided my mom didn't need her computer to boot anymore. When I walked them through flashing Windows 11 onto a flash drive (using a stock Windows 11 image using Microsoft's own flashing tools) and installing it manually it worked fine, so it was specifically Windows Update that broke things, not Windows 11 itself.
I've had updates break Linux and cause things to not boot anymore, and those aren't fun, but generally fixing it boils down to rebooting to a previous snapshot [1], or logging in with the command line running like three commands.
I did try fixing the computer before we nuked it. I tried walking them through the Windows auto repair, which didn't do anything (but at least it took a long time), and I tried booting into safe mode, but it wouldn't get any farther than the regular boot did. Apparently there is a way to get into a Powershell live-boot (though I didn't know this at the time), so maybe I could have fixed it with that, anything is possible, but ultimately my solution was getting the to flash a live USB of Ubuntu, and I then mounted the drive and rsync'd everything to my server.
[1] Because Microsoft still doesn't have Copy on Write (despite being a proven and more than 20 year old bit of tech) and so they can't do good snapshotting.
Just force. Install linux and find an excuse like you'll do windows next week because reasons. Works wonders.
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.
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.
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.
And realize that Ubuntu is one of the more bloated distros.
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.
Having an OS that doesn’t feel trashy by default should be an incredibly low bar to clear, but alas.
Half these "disable junk" settings auto revert after every update .
And then you have people regularly showing up in threads saying they ran a "debloat" script and now its impossible to run teams and the fix is "rebuild the os". None of this is as simple or risk free as it could be.
Easily disabled, and then a week later, easily disabled and then a week later easily disabled and then a week later easily disabled.
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
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.
I’m not sure what those ads are. As others pointed out, plenty of choice out there. I’ve been a happy Debian user for over a decade.
The good thing with Linux is that you are not married to Ubuntu. So many options out there.
Or, you can use Linux Mint and get all of the compatibility of Ubuntu with none of Canonical's bullshit.
The point is not to let a trivial thing bother me and make my decisions for me.
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.
That’s not really close to playing BF6 and other AAA games though
Until it can't be.
LTSC is all that's keeping me from a complete switch.
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.
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.
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.
The whole point of Apple intelligence is that it shouldn’t feel like you’re talking with an LLM, it’s that it fades into the OS but delivers new features that make the OS more intelligent. I’m actually very bullish on it
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.
Yeah I'm on ios/mac and was puzzled. I do find the AI slop on youtube a bit annoying - you don't know a link is AI stuff till it's played for a few seconds.
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
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?".
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.
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.
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.
> 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!
> This forum is 100% a benevolent dictatorship and it works really well.
Part of the reason why it does is because there are so many other places to go to. But that is exactly the decentralized model in practice - it's not really anarchy so much so as a lot of small dictatorships, benevolent or otherwise (but you're free to vote with your feet).
"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.
Yes. Generative AI is bad. Most of the general population already realizes it. Only the tech and computer science bubble remains optimistic.
The (non-tech) industry I am in generates an enormous amount of text that it's fairly certain nobody reads past the executive summary.
My workmates love it. Amongst the tech community, I see a divide very similar to the crypto one - everybody who has a stake in it succeeding is very optimistic. Everybody working in other areas seems dubious at best.
Yeah, overall it feels somewhat useful in a work context. Nothing transformative though.
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?
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.
Web3/crypto?
Ad tech?
What bubble are you living in where it's universal and not mostly apathetic?
I don't think that this is tree. I'm a high school student, and I've overheard quite a few conversations between our admin about whether they prefer Microsoft Copilot or ChatGPT.
That may not be because they like it but because they're required to use it. The teachers in my area, at least, are mandated to use AI themselves and integrate it into their curriculum.
Yet non-tech people are paying for ChatGPT which blows my mind.
I think people in the cs bubble will be optimistic up until it directly affects them by destroying software engineering as a (good) career.
that's already happening for Juniors, combination of ai and less funding
It's already happening for all the seniors who got hit by the layoffs ("because AI make code go brrrr") in these past two years, too.
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
http://archive.today/74kzf
Thank you. Had to turn off my blocker for that site, I was drowning in pop-ups
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.
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
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.
> > 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.
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?
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.
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?
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…
Target literally just let 1800 people go, so they probably have an internal initiative to fill the gap with... That.
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)
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.
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.
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
[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...
[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
[3] OnlyFans Star Says She Slept With Meta Employees to Get Instagram Unbanned 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-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-...
the customer service was not "lost" to AI. it was never there to begin with, and never going to be there either. sadly, there is zero financial motivation for meta or google to help you recover your account.
and in cases when they did have humans... AI customer service is much better than the offshore lowest-cost non-english-speaking tech support that businesses would inevitably go for. atleast now the communication is comprehensible, even if i'm talking to a computer.
it is what it is.
I can't speak for Meta/Facebook specifically, but other major services like Google & Microsoft absolutely previously had human customer service.
I used to do over the phone technical support for a major PC vendor in the early/mid 2000s and the goal was to solve every customer's problem (in the shortest amount of time, ofc). But that type of stuff is gone in the US. Even with major ISPs/phone companies/banks you are routed to an AI TTS chatbot to try to solve your problem or route you around in confusion until you get lost/fed up and just quit.
I found that aws's chatbot isn't very good - I often can't get my questions answered with it
The psychology profiles they are generating on us scare me tremendously.
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
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.
Any open source projects you recommend?
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.
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!"
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
I'm drowning in annoying popup "We noticed that ads aren't being displayed." I never asked for and I hate it.
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.
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.
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.
>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
You can't opt out. Or when you can it's increasingly difficult. The AI features on most products activate themselves automatically and shove themselves on the screen. AI slop books, art, and music are flooding platforms making it incredibly difficult to filter out. There was a case where a physical book on mushroom identification was AI generated and filled with hallucinated highly dangerous advice.
A lot of these tools are also profitable for the user while being a net negative to society. Flooding platforms with slop can make you a quick dollar while ruining the platform for everyone else.
This presupposes that we have a truly free market.
That has never been less true than it is now, at least in America.
Oh, please. The market for email apps and social media or whatever people are worried about is adding is more than sufficiently free to allow people to switch to non-AI apps.
Social media is some of the least free of all markets, because the whole point of it is to be where the people you want to interact with are.
If your entire family is on Facebook, unless you want to deliberately cut yourself off from them, you're going to be on Facebook.
If we had a dozen different fully interoperable social networks (using atproto or some other federating protocol), then you might have a point. But that is not remotely the world we live in.
And if Google is putting LLM features in Gmail...they're not just the "email app" you use, they hold your email address. You'd need to completely change over your email address with everyone who uses it in order to fully get away from them. (Similarly with Microsoft's email...I don't know if they're putting LLM features in it yet, but if not I'd bet they will soon...)
No, social media and email apps are still free markets. A switching cost doesn’t make the market unfree.
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.
Seems like a bad call, curious how that works out for you.
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.
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.
“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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/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.
Hilarious your link has an autogenerated AI summary of the meme above the image. That pushes the content down the page.
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.
> 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?
Many programmers use CLIs still because they are faster ore more flexible than GUIs for their purposes still.
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.
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.