As a person who used to work at MSFT:

I can almost guarantee you there are a whoooole lot of people who have made their careers basically championing the very old chat bot model, and they are probably now either directly in charge of the OpenAI stuff, or at the very least ‘stakeholders’.

They will do nonsense corporate bullshit to make them selves seem very important, never really wrong about anything, and this will result in extremely slow and gradual actual adoption of the GPT stuff, all the while stressing all the reasons their old stupid bullshit can’t be seriously modified because of reasons that have to do with synergizing with other MSFT products.

The process of the company gradually figuring out that none of that matters when it comes to producing something that is actually better will be slow, painful and incremental.

Itll probably take half a decade.

…

For reference, as an aside, I was doing a contract of DBA kinda stuff when they unveiled Windows 8. We had to dogfood it, ie, the MSFT process of everyone working at MSFT has to beta test everything else MSFT is making.

Well… Windows 8 initially broke basically everything we were using to actually do DBA.

I got angry and pointed out that Windows 8 had removed the ‘windows’ from Windows. The initial version was soley the tablet based design, only allowing a maximum of two ‘panes’ open at a time.

We had to wait about a month for the various problems with SQL Manager Studio to be ironed out, and for them to basically allow the option to just use the more or less Windows 7 desktop for you know actually working on our PCs.

Point of me mentioning this is: I saw how ludicrous this all was, and was frequently verbally abused by our team lead for pointing it out.

Youre not allowed to go against the grain at MSFT unless youre a big dog. And… you become a big dog by bullying people and vastly overstating the necessity of what your team is doing.

The culture there is downright psycho and sociopathic.

MSFT appears to still be using a fundamentally old chatbot model that they’ve just slapped a bunch of extra ‘features’ (namely, Wooow! It has APIs and works on other MSFT stuff!) to, much like Bethesda’s game engine.

Probably barely different from Tay in terms of broad conceptual design, just patched and upgraded to do what it does faster.

The core design is garbage, and just like Windows itself, its nearly certainly a giant fucking mess of layers upon layers of different versions of itself hiding under a trench coat, all standing on top of something 10 to 20 years old.

Absolutely amazing.

My guess is that at this point there are so many user prompts its received so far in its training set that bring up both Copilot and privacy concerns that it first interpreted the question, then searched for the most common topic associated with itself (privacy), then spit out a hardcoded MSFT override response for ‘inquiry’ + ‘privacy’.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence

Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving.

LLMs are pretty capable of abstraction and understanding.

Though they obviously use logic in that they are constructed from/of it, they are not really capable of actual logical analysis, beyond emulating it.

They can’t really do any of the other attributes of intelligence at all, beyond basically decently to poorly emulating them.

Anyone who buys into this deserves the financial ruin that will so obviously happen to them.

If memory serves, this would not the the first time that Pakistan shut down its internet near or during an election.

Oh no need to apologize for ranting, this is exactly the kind of feedback I was looking for, thank you!

Damn, thanks for the write up!

Wish I could add something useful to it, haha.

Unfortunately as I am on mobile I cannot dm… but this may be an interesting discussion:

Is it any kind of possible to buy a kind of kit to essentially hybridize an existing bike into, if not a fully hybrid vehicle, at least something that would charge a battery system as you drive?

I realize the most likely answer to this is basically you would have to re-engineer the bike considerably, even if youre not trying to work an electric motor and hybrid drive system into the thing, there are likely a slew of problems.

That being said… maybe someone has attempted this?

Seems like hybrid motorcycles are just barely a thing that exists for purchase… but I have not been able to find any where on the internet detailing trying to hybridize an existing bike.

In my experience I have learned as much as I could from other software engineers and rarely had problems with them.

Of course their absolutely are software engineers with huge egos.

In my own experience at least, I worked with many who were very humble, and higher ups walked all over us and abused us and refused to listen to huge problems with plans we were instructed to carry out, and then we were blamed for not doing the thing that would never work in the first place.

Unfortunately for myself at least I seem to be faaar too autistic to be able to do this.

I am good at writing code, writing queries, solving interoperability problems, analyzing large data sets, and I can even manage to present reports in ways that are statistically valid but summarized to narratives.

What I cannot handle is my bosses bosses boss insisting I use an entirely new software I have never used before to solve a problem that we can already solve with software we have, for a problem that would not be a problem if she had listened to either my boss, my bosses boss, or the leads of all the other teams who have all been saying the same thing for months.

This kind of thing has happened to me at every single tech role I have ever worked.

Logic means nothing. What matters is the high up thinks something is ‘neat’ and theres no way they can be told, directly, or indirectly, that they have no clue what theyre talking about.

This is also generally true for software engineers.

In my own experience, the difficulty is that you basically have to teach someone software engineering before they even kind of understand what youre saying before they believe you.

Which is basically 99% of people, especially in a work setting.

The very rare 1% of people will usually give up and go, well, youre the expert, probably you know what youre talking about.

The rest will be angered by their own dunning-krueger effect and/or ego and be abusive.

EDIT: This is 100% true when talking to a video game player, unless they are somehow also a programmer.

There are 0 exceptions to the category of someone who has only played video games. None of them anything about programming, and they will be more angry and rude than the general public.

Not sure of the timeline, but yes I remember that.

I would not be surprised if something like 2% of the people who saw that were aroused enough or bored enough to… take the next step, leading to the … autophilia stuff.

Ugh.

Thats a key element as well, the insane corpo manipulation that only exists if you can prove it even though everyone who doesnt up their head up either their own ass or someone elses knows is absurdly rampant… but youre too busy to record it all!

Yep, Ive been saying this for years now as well.

We have giant mostly empty office buildings which could be converted into mostly apartments, with even make shift permitted commercial zones for basically street vendor / convention booth style shops every 10 floors.

Instead it apparently makes more sense to not do this because it makes more sense to keep them empty, heated and lit 24/7, as basically a way to prop up the retail property market.

Capitalism is a farce, and it has already doomed us all: we have now breached the 1.5 C warming barrier, even more rapidly than most of the worst case scenarios predicted. Permafrost in Siberia and Northern Canada is already thawing and releasing methane.

Enjoy the collapse of human civilization in your own lifetime as people and governments continue to squabble and combat each other over scarcer and scarcer resources as our entire way of life becomes too expensive to maintain.

Yep, been saying this for years now, the vicious and irrational hatred against work from home employees is driven by two main factors:

1. At a systemic level, despite work from home being obviously less costly in the long run than maintaining an office space, if work from home were allowed to proliferate it basically pop the commercial real estate bubble and then basically every corrupt mayor and idiots in upper management would be shown to be corrupt idiots.

2. At a more personal level, upper and middle management people essentially get their kicks from seeing busy little worker bees near them, and they would personally have existential crisis when they realize that 90% of what they do is negging and then ommitting or misrepresenting that in actual meetings. Actual meetings which can easily take place in zoom, or often replaced with just an email.

Well uh, yes. Its the internet, there are sites where people devote massive time and energy to discussing the wankability but also canonical accuracy of depictions of ‘what if 14 year old anime girl characters actually had penises that are canonically accurate and true to the art style as well’.

At least one person is into the weirdest shit you can imagine.

There was at one point a group of people who filmed themselves putting fleshlights in car exhausts and fucking them, then this got even more weird and people seemingly seriously said they had actual sexual attraction to vehicles, then people started fucking the exhaust pipes with no fleshlights, then someone , possibly multiple people actually seriously injured themselves this way.

And also yes to shock value, now that 4chan is involved, its more or less ‘this is funny because it will very likely make someone angry, and also theres no real way this sort of thing can be prevented, here, lets prove it’.

I have stared into the void, it has stared back into me, and destroyed all nearly all notions commonly assumed to define reason and humanity.

Do not do as I have done.

But thats just a single dinghy.

If you pluralize that its either dinghies or dingii?

Meh, my autistic brain gets stuck on weird stupid shit like this.

Its like… If you have a donut, then a second donut, you have two donuts.

You can say two donut to be cutesy i guess?

Very hard for me to tell when being cutesy is appropriate.

Dingi.

Pronounced ding eye? Dingii? Ding gee eye?

My brain hurts now.

Its a 3500 dollar computer you wear on your face, that can only perform basic computing tasks which can more cheaply be performed on a cell phone, draws enormous amounts of attention to the user when used in public spaces, and both the ability to use it in public spaces and the attention drawing nature of it are marketed as pros.

Ok, so its now exceedingly clear that anyone who would get this thing is a wealthy idiot who has 0 experience with an impoverished community, as if you walked through a poorer area, you would just get mugged and have this high value device stolen from you.

And frankly at this point I would morally support that happening.

Not that it likely will, as anyone both dumb amd rich enough to have this happen to them generally has no kind of on foot commute through any such impoverished area.