Microsoft says a Copilot key is coming to keyboards on Windows PCs starting this month
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/04/microsoft-says-a-copilot-key-is-coming-soon-to-windows-pc-keyboards.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.ml271
Comments170https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/04/microsoft-says-a-copilot-key-is-coming-soon-to-windows-pc-keyboards.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.ml
Do people actually want this?
Like, I know the megacorps that control our lives do (since it's a cheap way of adding value to their products), but what about actual users? I think many see it as a novelty and a toy rather than a productivity tool. Especially when public awareness of "hallucinations" and the plight faced by artists rises.
Kinda feels like the whole "voice controlled assistants" bubble that happened a while ago. Sure they are relatively commonplace nowadays, but nowhere near as universal as people thought they would be.
Nope. Just like those stupid hard coded buttons on my Roku remote that I have never used.
I think it's those stupid hard coded buttons on my remote that I accidentally press every so often then have to repeatedly try and back/exit out of the stupid thing it launched that I cannot remove/uninstall from my tv.
Super glue, or pliers and super glue.
If you can figure out how to get the remote open, you'll probably find that the buttons are all part of the same flexible rubbery insert (unless it's 10+ years old). Put a little tape on the bottoms of the ones causing you problems. The insulation should keep them from working, and it's 100% reversible if you ever do find a use for them.
If it's one of the older, more expensive remotes with individual switches, then, yeah, pliers and superglue. 😅
https://xdaforums.com/t/guide-remapping-android-tv-remote-buttons.4433617/
Absolutely not. But this is the new standard now.
The new Micro$oft standard, which, as always, is bullshit and should be avoided and ignored at all times.
Yes. The Microsoft standard. Like the Windows key on all keyboards nowadays.
Maybe I'm a pessimist but this is going to really resonate with the people who are "looking forward to AI" because they read headlines, but haven't actually used any LLMs yet because nobody has told them how.
I want a voice controlled assistant that runs locally and is fully FOSS and I can just run on my bog standard linux PC, hardware minimum requirements nonwithstanding
Mycroft was the best bet for this before now being continued by open voice OS.
All I want is a real life iteration of J.A.R.V.I.S. and several billion dollars so I can blurt out cool ideas and have them rendered and built in a couple hours.
I'll be good I promise.
Not a single soul wants this. They just want to use every foul trick to get you to use copilot (by accident even) just like they do with bing and their other garbage.
Another key to bind to something else? Hell yeah
Nope, just a new logo on an existing key.
:(
This is the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard of. I'm not buying any keyboard or laptop that has this key. There's enough Linux-first vendors these days that it's easy to avoid (Framework, System76, Tuxedo, etc). It's time to be done with Lenovo and Dell.
Which is exactly what people said about the Windows key.
Now it's all but impossible to buy a keyboard that doesn't have it. Worse, most of us use it without thinking.
Sure you can call it Super if you like, and even have a Tux key-cap on it, but there used to be a literal gap between the Alt keys and their Ctrl brethren in the lateral directions away from the space bar, and those days are long gone.
There'll be the niche users who stick with old keyboards without this new key, just like there are the die-hards who have stuck resolutely to the old IBM keyboards and the like from pre-1995, but if you want a new keyboard?
Gonna have to shell out a small fortune for a custom build or make do with that dumb new key.
(Shoutout to the Context Menu key which went as unmentioned in the above as it goes unused in day to day use, despite having been included with its Super cousin since day one.)
I don't see an issue with a "super" key. But what would a copilot key bring that's of any value? The super key already does everything you'd need.
more keys for custom keybinds ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ depending on where it's located I'll probably just use it as a microphone toggle
We have so many unused potential binds already, though. Knowing the way tech goes these days, they'll find a way to hard-code the key to one macro and that's it lol
Depends how they do it, if it's in the registry you can change it.
The point is to have an unused button that you can rebind freely
Pure hyperbole "late stage capitalism": they'll have it wired directly into the board. At best it will cover one key chord.
Even later stage, it'll send some proprietary data that only windows 11 can interpret. Linux users will figure it out and make use of it, then will be promptly sued out of existence for copyright infringement or something lol.
Can we get this more dystopian? I'm out of ideas.
Nah, they'll send a package to a Microsoft server that'll then respond with the keybind and open the program
yeah it's almost certainly gonna be bound to Super+C, the existing keybind for copilot
Wow when you out it that way it sounds even dumber
I don't think this is true. Just buy a laptop from a company that ships it with Linux. No Windows, no Windows keys. It doesn't have to be 'custom'.
The post mentioned this, and argues that a super a key is basically just a windows key
So what key are they gonna put there when all cheap generic Chinese keyboard makers start including this button on all their variants of keyboards?
The context menu or right-ctrl key, probably
The article actually says the Copilot key will mostly be replacing Menu or Right Control on existing layouts. So if you're already not using those (or are already re-binding them), it's just a new keycap.
Plus the configuration that is needed to remap the key back to the correct key code.
As you said, there used to be a gap there. Replacing a gap makes not that much harm and people find it useful even in Linux for keybindings. In more of an Alt kind of guy, but Super is also there for more combinations available.
The Copilot key appears to be going were the right Control or right Alt key are right now, so that's going to be a bother for a lot of people.
Same, I think I might give the System76 Darter a try when I eventually have to replace my Xps 9370. It's bad enough that my computer comes with a windows logo on the super-key and often windows preinstalled. Shipping with a non-ANSI/ISO layout is a no-buy for me.
I fully agree with you, but Framework is definitely not Linux-first. The only OS they offer preloaded on their laptops is Windows. You have to install Linux yourself if you want it.
I think they’re referring to Framework’s support for full Linux compatibility for at least Ubuntu, and making sure that the parts they use have first class Linux support and drivers and kernel integration.
Unfortunately, the "linux-first" vendors do not offer better deals than their competition.
It depends on how and what you're measuring. A lot of Linux first, like system 76 and purism, do so e serious work on the firmware and boot systems of their systems. Which for some is a huge value add compared.
They absolutely do, when one considers the negative value of Windows.
Like with the Windows key, this won't be an option.
Ah yes, just like you had that option with the windows key right?
I don't care as long as the placement is ok and I can map it to something useful. I'm a GNOME user so the Windows/Super key gets a lot of use. It's nice to have. A new key that I use for all my custom shortcuts would actually be kind of nice. Who cares that the default key caps are a Windows icon and this Copilot thing? Change the key caps and they are just keys.
This is Clippy v2.0 and I'm sure it will be just as helpful.
They've learned from their mistakes, and concluded that Clippy failed because there was no Clippy key.
Oh "great", more crap between Ctrl and Alt.
[Grumpy grandpa] In my times, the space row only had five keys! And we did more than those youngsters do with eight, now nine keys!
In my time it was also nine. Back to the roots. ;->
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard
Why doesn't my keyboard have a thumbs-up key?!
Nice
So you can pressed accidentally activating the fucking AI and make the numbers go up so Microsoft can then go and say to investors look millions are using my AI. So annoying.
That's funny, because getting an ad for Copilot inside my startmenu was actually what made me go back to Linux after 10 years.
This tracks.
Can't wait to see this gone in the next 3 years.
"Oh yeah I remember these keyboards! Good times, that was before the
before the what, op?
BEFORE THE WHAT??
sweats, knowing a time-traveler in our midst refused to tell us about the coming copilocalypse
Why? Win+C launches Copilot already, if you want to use it. It's simple enough currently, why change it? This will just make everything worse.
Why? Investment hype
Bingo
Awesome Keyboard with AI Support *
* On supported Operating Systems **
** With separate subscription.
I can't wait to no longer find a keyboard without this key.
Welcome to the custom mechanical keyboard scene.
I'm pretty sure you'll be able to find keyboards with a different icon that the ugly copilot, and then you can map it to whatever you want.
You can always use those keyboards from the 2000's
because most people are unaware of keybindings and when they inevitable tap on the new dedicated key they'll probably be shown a subscription screen for Copilot Premium or whatever they call it.
IMO it's a very disgusting and intrusive way of fishing subscriptions to the AI thing they've invested so much money on.
Like the shitty bixby button on phones.
In the five years of owning this phone, I have never once pressed that button on purpose. I press it on accident at least once a week.
5 years... do you have the S9? cause im exactly the same, never intentionally used it. ever.
I have the s10+ and it's actually useful, as you can remap the double click on that button to open any app you like. But yeah single click, never happened intentionally.
EDIT: F yeah, I just checked the settings and you can decide if you want bixby activation on single or double-click. Now I've set bixby to double click and on single-click it opens my password manager. If you don't select anything, it will do nothing on a single click.
The setting is under "Advanced Features" -> "Bixby Key" for me.
This requires logging in to bixby for me.
lol yep, S9.
Using it til it dies. Love this phone.
Alas, often, no. Just another logo we can't be rid of.
That's impressively awful
I guess I can just buy a sticker and remap the AI key to do ctrl instead lol
Hmm, maybe I can use it for the Compose key instead or Right Alt…
Compose has always been Capslock for me
as an i3wm user, I approve 😁
Lol, the first thing that went through my mind was "what feature can I add to i3 with this key?"
unfortunately it would probably just replace the context menu key. which I've already set it to keyboard layout switch. 😁 it's the best keybind I have. way faster than mod+space or alt+shift 😅
Linux laptops usually come with a super key.
What the fuck is a labtop?
Its the same thing as a laptop. Labtops are laptops used in a lab. (Or maybe I just made a typo, who knows)
Really milking that fad before they inevitably push anything useful behind a monthly paywall.
As long as the ability to manually turn off secureboot and remove the OS isn't locked behind a subscription...
It's already behind a paywall. You can't access ChatGPT-4 without paying.
and yet they are still loosing money by running ChayGPT 3.5 for free. I guess that in the future they'll switch to a local small model in the hardware that is capable enough.
I think it's like anything on the modern web, they'll lose money until they reach a critical mass of users who get accustomed to using ChatGPT in their day-to-day life, and then they'll kill the free tier.
Except their free tier is still around for everything that they started as free. Outlook, bing, Visual Studio Code, even office is free for students and teachers.
They'll always keep the low tier free to get people hooked and charge businesses whatever.
Microsoft has free tier Office tools because they're data brokers now. TMK they didn't always have free Outlook, it was bundled in Office, which cost money. I don't see ChatGPT remaining free forever, it costs too much to run. I could be wrong though, depending on how much valuable data they can scrape from it.
Yeah they didn't gave a free Office, Outlook or Visual studio. Now they do and there is no sign of them stopping it. Bing is expensive and they aren't stopping it.
Chatgpt is MS's first real chance of dethroning Google search. They're going to keep a free tier forever.
this kind of shit is what gives AI a bad rep
no one needs this
almost no one wants it
and they'll kill it in a couple of years like they did it with Cortana
They killed Cortana?
Thankfully, yes. But cortana has been replaced by copilot so we are in the same place
Tbh I was kinda sad they killed her off instead of trying to make her an actually useful AI assistant. Seemed like a missed opportunity since her Halo counterpart is an AI as well, and it would’ve been cool to maybe have an AR partner app that would have shown pre-Halo 4 version of her.
I won’t be happy until we have a hologram cortana
with 6 etheral arms and an always-smiling maw full of 4" long interlocking teeth
I bet your search history is interesting
Copilot is just Cortana on steroids (with a shiny new AI engine baked in)
I am getting flashbacks to the multimedia keyboards on yesteryear:
https://deskthority.net/wiki/Multimedia_keyboard
Thanks MS, but no thanks, I don't need it.
I love these, it has actual useful keys
I will admit that the volume wheel was awesome
yeah, the media controls are actually useful.
For real though, I loved those. That wireless Logitech one with the volume dial lasted me a decade.
My mom had one, I absolutely loved using that thing when I did
Probably through licensing agreements with PC retailers.
But you can also just decide not to buy them.
There's always the IBM Model M or, if you prefer USB, there are remakes with it.
Wow it's yuuge
Umm, it's just a keycap. You can map the key to whatever you want.
sure, any Apple keyboard
Microsoft is a monopoly. Stallman was right, as usual in software
I have nothing against the people that are working on AI and appreciate the work they do. However every time I see an article about a company using AI like this I just get the vibe that it's a bunch of middle aged men trying desperately to make things like the "future" they saw when they were a kid. I've seen amazing implementations of AI in a lot of different ways but I'm so sick of dumb ideas like this because some guy that used to watch Star Trek as a kid wants to feel like they live in the future while piggybacking on someone else's work. It's like the painted tunnel in cartoons where it looks like a real tunnel but in reality it's just a very convincing lie. And that's all that it is. Complexity does not mean sophistication when it comes to AI and never has and to treat it as such is just a forceful way to make your ideas come true without putting in the real effort.
Sorry, I had to get that out. Also I have nothing against Star Trek and I used to watch it as a kid because my parents watched it all the time.
I don't think they care about their own nostalgia. I think they ant to use other people's dreams to make a lot of money. I'm also sure some of them genuinely just ant to push the technological envelope just cause they can, ethics be damned. But ultimately, it's just money.
I would love nothing more than the utopian future Trek promised but greed is killing it.
It's a bit off-topic, but what I really want is a language model that assigns semantic values to the tokens, and handles those values instead of directly working with the tokens themselves. That would be probably far less complex than current state-of-art LLMs, but way more sophisticated, and require far less data for "training".
I'm not sure I understand. Do you mean hearing codewords triggering actions as opposed to trying to understand the users intent through language? Or is are there a few more layers to this whole thing than my moderate nerd cred will allow me to understand?
Not quite. I'm focusing on chatbots like Bard, ChatGPT and the likes, and their technology (LLM, or large language model).
At the core those LLMs work like this: they pick words, split them into "tokens", and then perform a few operations on those tokens, across multiple layers. But at the end of the day they still work with the words themselves, not with the meaning being encoded by those words.
What I want is an LLM that assigns multiple meanings for those words, and performs the operations above on the meaning itself. In other words the LLM would actually understand you, not just chain words.
Semantic embeddings are a thing. LLMs "work with tokens" but they associate them with semantic models internally. You can externalize it via semantic embeddings so that the same semantic models can be shared between LLMs.
The source that I've linked mentions semantic embedding; so does further literature on the internet. However, the operations are still being performed with the vectors resulting from the tokens themselves, with said embedding playing a secondary role.
This is evident for example through excerpts like
Emphasis mine. A similar conclusion (that the LLM is still handling the tokens, not their meaning) can be reached by analysing the hallucinations that your typical LLM bot outputs, and asking why that hallu is there.
What I'm proposing is deeper than that. It's to use the input tokens (i.e. morphemes) only to retrieve the sememes (units of meaning; further info here) that they're conveying, then discard the tokens themselves, and perform the operations solely on the sememes. Then for the output you translate the sememes obtained by the transformer into morphemes=tokens again.
I believe that this would have two big benefits:
And it might be an additional layer, but the whole approach is considerably simpler than what's being done currently - pretending that the tokens themselves have some intrinsic value, then playing whack-a-mole with situations where the token and the contextually assigned value (by the human using the LLM) differ.
[This could even go deeper, handling a pragmatic layer beyond the tokens/morphemes and the units of meaning/sememes. It would be closer to what @[email protected] understood from my other comment, as it would then deal with the intent of the utterance.]
Please don't.
Wonder if it will be CTRL + SHIFT + ALT + WIN + C
Also known as fist+c
Now I'm wondering, with which fingers would you press all those buttons? The most comfortable way to press these keys with 1 hand is to rotate the keyboard 180 degrees
They don't intend for you to, it's just easier to make a giant button combo that their generic HID driver handles as a special case than to create a custom keyboard protocol with their special key enums and a custom driver that only windows supports.
Is copilot another windows app I'll need to uninstall? Thanks for the heads up!
It should be the reason to switch to Linux, finally, again.
I'm happy as a clam with my 1984 loud as fuck IBM Model M keyboard in Windows.
Think you need a Windows key? CTRL-ESC. I use CTRL-ESC even on modern keyboards.
Best keyboard ever, will also last forever.
I use capslock as superkey.
I actually use caps lock fairly regularly as a embedded systems programmer. With my large hands CTRL-ESC is pretty easy for me.
That's a pretty cool keyboard
I bought mine here but there are other places that restore them.
Time to buy some more of those little Tux keyboard superkey stickers :)
Can they just make the copilot shortcut on my taskbar permanently fuck off? It appears erratically and I don't seem to be able to get rid of it when it's there.
https://debian.org
I dual boot PopOS which has been great. Only use Windows for a couple of games that don't work well with proton.
F. I still have a W10 drive for VR games.
Use CTT's winutil. I'm guessing it can get rid of that (and also telemetry and it makes updates less annoying and gives you a Ninite-like way to easily install a bunch of software and apply a bunch of tweaks etc.)
Immerge more! Hide the task bar, use only desktop icons to launch your games.
Right click taskbar.
Taskbar settings
Turn off copilot
Woo-hoo! Secondary hyper modifier key - can't wait!!!
Soon we'll be able to emacs the way the developers intended.
Yay! I petition to call it Duper
Lol fuck off Microdong.
Can't help but think about how Facebook inc rebranded itself to Meta to chase/promote the metaverse fad.
Just realized my keyboard is 22 years old.
Sounds like you can legally fuck it.
Who says he hasn’t?
So you guys don't think I should buy a new one, just attach a usb vagina to my old one?
Can't wait to accidentally press it while gaming, just like the Windows key!
Another key for me to pop off my keyboard. Great.
It's already bad enough that windows 11 has a bing AI button on the top left AND top right corners of the start menu. Like wtf
So it disappears without Windows?
I guess we'll have to find a use for that new key on Linux, and Linux laptop vendors will end up with some alternative symbol for it...
maybe bring back the hyper key! (Wikipedia link)
Nope
i run linux on a surface and it's great. when it breaks beyond repair though, i won't get another because of bullshit like this
Planning on buying a surface and installing Linux. How's your experience, is there so much bullshit to deal with? I really want a Linux tablet
touchscreen and stuff work fine in linux-surface
you need libcamera for the camera to work
Just make it remapable (is that a word?) and I don't really care
Remapping instructions are here
I don't use Windows, but given that their office key just sends ctrl+shift+alt+meta, I'm afraid that this could send something like meta+alt that windows users don't use, but it would be useless for some Linux users that already use that key combo.
I don't think you can easily remap keys in Windows.
Please see my explanation of what I meant by that.
Everyone talking it's bad but I think it's not, I mean you got another key for shortcut to anything you want after uninstall that crap it's useless anyway
Yeah. It's stupid and crummy, but it's a new key to bind. But then again, have you ever really used the context menu key? I have not.
Context menu key is kinda essential for navigating without a mouse. I don't use it all that often but I am very glad it is there.
True, I rarely use it when my mouse decided to crap itself
reminds me of the chromebook search key
AI AI AI AI AI AI!
Calm down, Steve
Pillar man theme intensives (yes, this is jojo reference)