I have actually come to prefer using AI instead of a search engine at work for most things sysadmin related (using DuckDuckGo’s AI chat feature), but I 100% have found that Copilot performs far worse than competing products. Having it that engrained in the computer is a very negative feature, despite the battery improvements.
Copilot sucks. Gemeni is a sassy teenager. Chatgpt 4o is actually halfway decent. When they announced Gemeni had a million context tokens, that was awesome. But it can’t give coherent output to save its life. Useless.
“Chatgpt 4o is actually halfway decent.”
I think I need to redo my parameters cuz you aren’t the first person I’ve seen say this. I wasconvinced it got dumber lol
It got worse. We adapted parameters to try to compensate. You didn’t do anything wrong. You’ve just not yet implemented continuous improvement.
Perplexity.ai is also pretty nice. As far as I understand, it’s just some version of chatgpt but with the ability to search the web.
Copilot+ is a reason not to buy one of those laptops. It’s a privacy and security nightmare.
Is it that different than standard Windows? Either way I’m just hyped that it seems the age of ARM desktops is upon us, I definitely won’t be using any “Copilot+” branded OS though.
I’m not following this story closely but my understanding is that Copilot+ ones have a magical special chip (and keyboard button) and they take screenshots every few seconds so you can search your history. But, at least in the beta releases, they didn’t bother to mask passwords or really anything. You could have a private key in a screenshot.
I would hope by the final release, they add the bare minimum of security and encrypt it all but that’s not really good enough. It’s a misguided attempt to shoehorn Copilot into everything when A.I. can’t even wipe its own ass yet. Maybe someday. Probably not, though.
It’s clearly a gimmick and not an improvement. Press the “copilot button” and get help! But the copilot button isn’t a new button. It’s actually left-Shift + Windows key + F23. Modern computers don’t have F23 key but you can simulate it. I sure hope no hackers learn how to do that and search your entire history!
What you are thinking of is Recall, which is a selling point of Copilot+ PCs. As a correction, recall is opt-in, password protected and encrypted in the latest versions. Hitting the Copilot key will launch Copilot, which is a GPT4 AI assistant with image capabilities. Copilot+ itself just means the pc has
at least 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage and an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) capable of at least 40 TOPS (trillion operations per second) onboard.
As well as the copilot key on laptops.
the age of ARM desktops is upon us
I remain unconvinced that this is some big paradigm shift, and that the instruction set itself is mostly irrelevant for battery life and performance per watt.
Yes, Apple achieved a big jump with its first M1 at delivering some pretty amazing performance per watt, compared to contemporary chips from Intel.
But a closer look has shown that each successive generation of M-series Apple Silicon has been chasing higher performance at the cost of energy efficiency. Which is fine, but shrinks the gap.
And then, if you look at AMD’s low power x86_64 CPUs for laptops, you’ll see that they’re also able to deliver significant power savings compared to Intel. Comparing like for like, in terms of TSMC node, you see that AMD performance per watt seems to be in line with Apple’s. It’s just that Apple’s comparative advantage in business/legal strategy (not engineering) has them locking up TSMC capacity earlier.
Finally, a comparison of Apple’s mobile ARM SoCs to other manufacturers’ mobile ARM SoCs (including Qualcomm and Samsung) shows that Apple has a significant performance/efficiency lead over even other ARM chips.
So it’s probably not the instruction set. It’s just the engineering of the chips themselves, boosted by Apple’s business/logistics strategies getting their products to market first.
Pretending it’s not locked down like the og surface arm devices, I’d consider getting one and totally drop some flavour of linux on it, 3:2 is a great aspect ratio for laptops.
Otherwise yeah, I wouldn’t go anywhere near it
Edit: apparently I don’t need to pretend, this hasn’t been an issue for a while so that’s actually great
They’re BIOS locked and only accept Windows keys. On the plus side. Tuxedo is developing Linux notebooks with the same powerful, low-power ARM chips.
Yeah, I assumed so, really dislike that you can’t do what you want with hardware you own.
Edit: apparently not locked down, which is great
It is not bootloader locked, Linux support is WIP
EDIT: Source here https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/1dnu5nw/comment/ladiom2/?context=3
If you mean app compatibility, the only programs that will have issues are those needing AVX2
Wasn’t even thinking about that, I have an old surface rc2 that’s totally useless because MS abandoned it years ago and it’s locked down so you can’t install an alternate os on it. To be fair, I’m not sure how useful it could be but it’s really about the fact I can’t do what I want with hardware I own.
Edit: apparently this (locked down) hasn’t been an issue for a while so that’s actually great
I feel like narrow AI tools duped me for a while, but the more I started to really use Chat GPT professionally, the more I’ve likened it to professional mimicking software. It essentially works to pyt out responses that sound the most convincing but have nothing to do with putting out responses that are actually at all accurate. These are terrible tools outside of asking basic questions, idea generation, and generally summarizing existing information you feed into it. I use it to help me make lists and better phrase emails and company messages at this point and nothing that actually requires any actual fact finding.
It’s a good troubleshooting tool. Pasting in weird error messages that don’t turn up any useful search results is pretty useful, even if the response it gives is partially inaccurate, it usually at least gives a bit more information than a search engine, which gives me more context to narrow my search terms and find a solution to the error.
It’s especially useful for learning Nix, since the online documentation is a bit shit and ChatGPT seems to have enough grasp on the Nix language and how to configure things in NixOS to tell me what I’m doing wrong.
Professional bullshit artists, in the sense of the technical definition given by Harry Frankfurt in his influential book:
Frankfurt determines that bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn’t care whether what they say is true or false.
I spent a good 20 minutes trying to remove copilot from my windows 10 machine last night. It embedded itself into the taskbar, the edge explorer, and I finally had to go into system components to disable it. No doubt there will be another ms update that will revert all these settings again
On Windows 11 at least, the taskbar button toggle is in the taskbar settings, the second place you’d expect to find it (the first being the right-click menu on the button itself, though there isn’t one). I’m not aware of anything called Edge Explorer, but it looks easy enough to disable in Edge, and I’ve never seen it in Explorer.
I spent a good 20 minutes trying to remove copilot from my windows 10 machine last night.
On Windows 11 you can just uninstall it. I did. Win10 is old and about to be unsupported.
My pc is old unfortunately. I’d hate to upgrade it to support win11 jsut to disable all the ai crap. But I hate that my old pc keeps getting updates with copilot without me asking for copilot.
My pc is old unfortunately. I’d hate to upgrade it to support win11 jsut to disable all the ai crap.
Alternatives to soon-to-be unsupported Windows releases exist.
But I hate that my old pc keeps getting updates with copilot without me asking for copilot.
MS replaced Cortana with Copilot, so it’s kida just an update to an existing feature.
At some point you have to ask yourself if it would be less hassle to switch now or to try and tough it out until Windows becomes unbearable.
I know how Microsoft can increase battery life by between roughly 50%-100%, depending on model.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-laptop-7th-edition
Battery capacities34
Surface Laptop 13.8”: Battery Capacity Nominal (Wh) 54 Battery Capacity Min (Wh) 52
Surface Laptop 15”: Battery Capacity Nominal (Wh) 66 Battery Capacity Min (Wh) 64
Offer a 100 Wh battery.
