AI computers aren’t selling because users don’t care
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/07/ai-computers-arent-selling-because-users-dont-care/Open linkView original on awful.systems740
Comments315https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/07/ai-computers-arent-selling-because-users-dont-care/Open linkView original on awful.systems
No thanks. I’m perfectly capable of coming up with incorrect answers on my own.
you're right tho
Even non tech people I talk to know AI is bad because the companies are pushing it so hard. They intuit that if the product was good, they wouldn't be giving it away, much less begging you to use it.
You're right - and even if the user is not conscious of this observation, many are subconsciously behaving in accordance with it. Having AI shoved into everything is offputting.
Speaking of off-putting, that friggin copilot logo floating around on my Word document is so annoying. And the menu that pops up when I paste text — wtf does "paste with Copilot" even mean?
They are trying to saturate the user base with the word copilot. At least microsoft isnt very sneaky about anything.
customers dont want AI, but only thhe corporation heads seem obssed with it.
It's partly that and partly a mad dash for market share in case the get it to work usefully. Although this is kind of pointless because AI isn't very sticky. There's not much to keep you from using another company's AI service. And only the early adopter nerds are figuring out how to run it on their own hardware.
One of the mistakes they made with AI was introducing it before it was ready (I’m making a generous assumption by suggesting that “ready” is even possible). It will be extremely difficult for any AI product to shake the reputation that AI is half-baked and makes absurd, nonsensical mistakes.
This is a great example of capitalism working against itself. Investors want a return on their investment now, and advertisers/salespeople made unrealistic claims. AI simply isn’t ready for prime time. Now they’ll be fighting a bad reputation for years. Because of the situation tech companies created for themselves, getting users to trust AI will be an uphill battle.
Apple Intelligence and the first versions of Gemini are the perfect examples of this.
iOS still doesn’t do what was sold in the ads, almost a full year later.
Edit: also things like email summary don’t work, the email categories are awful, notification summaries are straight up unhinged, and I don’t think anyone asked for image playground.
Insert 'Full Self Driving' Here.
Also, outlook's auto alt text function told me that a conveyor belt was a picture of someone's screen today.
Calling it “Full Self Driving” is such blatant false advertising.
Add Amazon's Alexa+ to that list. It's nearly a year overdue and still nowhere in sight.
More like: capitalism reaching its own logical conclusion
It was ready for some specific purposes but it is being jammed into everything. The problem is they are marketing it as AGI when it is still at the random fun but not expected to be accurate phase.
The current marketing for AI won't apply to anything that meets the marketing in the foreseeable future. The desired complexity isn't going to exist in silicone at a reasonable scale.
This.
"AI", however you want to define it, is useful now.
It's just useful in a janky probably-a-wash-time-wise sort of way where it only helps on things you're too bad at something to do by yourself but good enough at to check the model's homework, which is not gonna be the same for everybody.
But they went "gold rush!" assuming first movers would take all and muddled things to the point where I don't expect a normal user to be able to tell the useful stuff from the slop.
To be clear, there have been winners. People at OpenAI made a TON of money for themselves. People at the old dinosaurs of Google, Meta and Microsoft probably have numbers that look good and arrows going up. Nvidia made an absolute mint and will keep doing that as long as humanly possible.
But they did a terrible job at making a product out of this thing in aggregate exactly for those reasons.
Yeah but first to market is sooooo good for stock price. Then you can sell at the top and gtfo before people find out it's trash
I they didn't over promise, they wouldn't have had mountain loads of money to burn, so they wouldn't have advanced the technology as much.
Tech giants can't wait decades until the technology is ready, they want their VC money now.
Sure, but if the tech in the end doesn't deliver it's all that money burnt.
If it does deliver it's still oligarchs deciding what tech we get.
Yes. The ones that have power are the ones that decide. And oligarchs by definition have a lot of power.
They also oversold what it is in a better state, aka a set of useful niche tools, not a magic lamp.
And the implementation is just shitty.
I keep Qwen3 loaded in vram pretty much all day, sometimes I use Flux img-2-img/controlnet with tools. They're very useful. But as of now, they require beefy PCs, finicky research frameworks and fix-it-yourself UIs. Microsoft didn't package that, they... packaged something super crap instead. Like, remarkably bad given how much money they have.
The battle is easy. Buy out and collude with the competition so the customer has no choice but to purchase a AI device.
This would only work for a service that customers want or need
Ah, like with the TPM blackbox?
I think people care.
They care so much they actively avoid them.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I honestly can't think of any practical use case for AI in my day-to-day routine.
ML algorithms are just fancy statistics machines, and to that end, I can see plenty of research and industry applications where large datasets need to be assessed (weather, medicine, ...) with human oversight.
But for me in my day to day?
I don't need a statistics bot making decisions for me at work, because if it was that easy I wouldn't be getting paid to do it.
I don't need a giant calculator telling me when to eat or sleep or what game to play.
I don't need a Roomba with a graphics card automatically replying to my text messages.
Handing over my entire life's data just so a ML algorithm might be able to tell me what that one website I visited 3 years ago that sold kangaroo testicles was isn't a filing system. There's nothing I care about losing enough to go the effort of setting up copilot, but not enough to just, you know, bookmark it, or save it with a clear enough file name.
Long rant, but really, what does copilot actually do for me?
Our boss all but ordered us to have IT set this shit up on our PCs. So far I've been stalling, but I don't know how long I can keep doing it.
Tell your boss you talked to legal and they caution that all copilot data is potentially discoverable.
Set it up. People have to find out by themselves.
same here, i mostly dont even use it on the phone. my bro is into it thought, thinking ai generate dpicture is good.
It's a fun party trick for like a second, but at no point today did I need a picture of a goat in a sweater smoking three cigarettes while playing tic-tac-toe with a llama dressed as the Dalai Lama.
It's great if you want to do a kids party invitation or something like that
That wasn't that hard to do in the first place, and certainly isn't worth the drinking water to cool whatever computer made that calculation for you.
Before ChatGPT was invented, everyone kind of liked how you could type in "bird" into Google Photos, and it would show you some of your photos that had birds.
The only feature that actually seems useful for on-device AI is voice to text that doesn't need an Internet connection.
As someone who hates orally dictating my thoughts, that's a no from me dawg, but I can kinda understand the appeal (though I'll note offline TTS has been around for like a decade pre-AI)
longer: dragon dictate and similar go back to the mid 90s (and I bet the research goes back slightly earlier, not gonna check now)
similar for TTS
I use it to speed up my work.
For example, I can give it a database schema and ask it for what I need to achieve and most of the time it will throw out a pretty good approximation or even get it right on the first go, depending on complexity and how well I phrase the request. I could write these myself, of course, but not in 2 seconds.
Same with text formatting, for example. I regularly need to format long strings in specific ways, adding brackets and changing upper/lower capitalization. It does it in a second, and really well.
Then there's just convenience things. At what date and time will something end if it starts in two weeks and takes 400h to do? There's tools for that, or I could figure it out myself, but I mean the AI is just there and does it in a sec...
it’s really embarrassing when the promptfans come here to brag about how they’re using the technology that’s burning the earth and it’s just basic editor shit they never learned. and then you watch these fuckers “work” and it’s miserably slow cause they’re prompting the piece of shit model in English, waiting for the cloud service to burn enough methane to generate a response, correcting the output and re-prompting, all to do the same task that’s just a fucking key combo.
how in fuck do you work with strings and have this shit not be muscle memory or an editor macro? oh yeah, by giving the fuck up.
(100% natural rant)
I can change a whole fucking sentence to FUCKING UPPERCASE by just pressing
vf.gUin fucking vim with a fraction of the amount of the energy that's enough to run a fucking marathon, which in turn, only need to consume a fraction of the energy the fucking AI cloud cluster uses to spit out the same shit. The comparison is like a ping pong ball to the Earth, then to the fucking sun!Alright, bros, listen up. All these great tasks you claim AI does it faster and better, I can write up a script or something to do it even faster and better. Fucking A! This surge of high when you use AI comes from you not knowing how to do it or if even it's possible. You!
You prompt bros are blasting shit tons of energy just to achieve the same quality of work, if not worse, in a much fucking longer time.
And somehow these executives claim AI improves fucking productivity‽
exactly. in Doom Emacs (and an appropriately configured vim), you can surround the word under the cursor with brackets with
ysiw]where the last character is the bracket you want. it’s incredibly fast (especially combined with motion commands, you can do these faster than you can think) and very easy to learn, if you know vim.and I think that last bit is where the educational branch of our industry massively fucked up. a good editor that works exactly how you like (and I like the vim command language for realtime control and lisp for configuration) is like an electrician’s screwdriver or another semi-specialized tool. there’s a million things you can do with it, but we don’t teach any of them to programmers. there’s no vim or emacs class, and I’ve seen the quality of your average bootcamp’s vscode material. your average programmer bounces between fad editors depending on what’s being marketed at the time, and right now LLMs are it. learning to use your tools is considered a snobby elitist thing, but it really shouldn’t be — I’d gladly trade all of my freshman CS classes for a couple semesters learning how to make vim and emacs sing and dance.
and now we’re trapped in this industry where our professionals never learned to use a screwdriver properly, so instead they bring their nephew to test for live voltage by licking the wires. and when you tell them to stop electrocuting their nephew and get the fuck out of your house, they get this faraway look in their eyes and start mumbling about how you’re just jealous that their nephew is going to become god first, because of course it’s also a weirdo cult underneath it all, that’s what happens when you vilify the concept of knowing fuck all about anything.
The only things I've seen it do better than I could manage with a script or in Vim are things that require natural language comprehension. Like, "here's an email forwarded to an app, find anything that sounds like a deadline" or "given this job description, come up with a reasonable title summary for the page it shows up on".... But even then those are small things that could be entirely omitted from the functionality of an app without any trouble on the user. And there's also the hallucinations and being super wrong sometimes.
The whole thing is a mess
You guys are so deep down your circlejerking that there's just no way to pull you out of it.
But with every new tech, there will always be guys like you that rant and rage, and who will hardcore fixate on the shortcomings and misuses as justifications as to why it's bad.
But no worries, you'll catch up eventually. Or keep shouting at kids to get off your lawn. Either is fine.
presumably everyone who has to work with you spits in your coffee/tea, too?
A shame how being full remote kinda ruins their plans. But if you don't annoy the dickheads, are you even living? This thread has been a blast.
I have used a system wide service in macOS for that for decades by now.
Gotta be real, LLMs for queries makes me uneasy. We're already in a place where data modeling isn't as common and people don't put indexes or relationships between tables (and some tools didn't really support those either), they might be alright at describing tables (Databricks has it baked in for better or worse for example, it's usually pretty good at a quick summary of what a table is for), throwing an LLM on that doesn't really inspire confidence.
If your data model is highly normalised, with fks everywhere, good naming and well documented, yeah totally I could see that helping, but if that's the case you already have good governance practices (which all ML tools benefit from AFAIK). Without that, I'm totally dreading the queries, people already are totally capable of generating stuff that gives DBAs a headache, simple cases yeah maybe, but complex queries idk I'm not sold.
Data understanding is part of the job anyhow, that's largely conceptual which maybe LLMs could work as an extension for, but I really wouldn't trust it to generate full on queries in most of the environments I've seen, data is overwhelmingly super messy and orgs don't love putting effort towards governance.
I've done some work on natural language to SQL, both with older (like Bert) and current LLMs. It can do alright if there is a good schema and reasonable column names, but otherwise it can break down pretty quickly.
Thats before you get into the fact that SQL dialects are a really big issue for LLMs to begin with. They all looks so similar I've found it common for them to switch between them without warning.
Yeah I can totally understand that, Genie is databricks' one and apparently it's surprisingly decent at that, but it has access to a governance platform that traces column lineage on top of whatever descriptions and other metadata you give it, was pretty surprised with the accuracy in some of its auto generated descriptions though.
Yeah, the more data you have around the database the better, but that's always been the issue with data governance - you need to stay on top of that or things start to degrade quickly.
When the governance is good, the LLM may be able to keep up, but will you know when things start to slip?
what in the utter fuck is this post
But that's why I'm there.
I ask it for a query, then I go over it to confirm what it does and test it.
If you have no idea what you're doing, you're fucked with or without gpt. But if you do know what you're doing, GPT will save you time.
I don't understand how this is so controversial...
Personally, I've used llm tools more for interactive documentation, occasionally some base snippets for something I'm not familiar with, but found it doesn't do great for more complex stuff.
And yeah, you're right, people who know what they're doing they'll verify it, it's a concern I think when people just blindly run it without verifying, which 100% happens.
That's literally a built-in VSCode command my dude, it does it in milliseconds and doesn't require switching a window or even a conscious thought from you
If I just conveniently ditched the "adding brackets" part of the requirements, like you just did, perhaps.
Except then a bunch of stuff would break.
The first two examples I really like since you're able to verify them easily before using them, but for the math one, how to you know it gave you the right answer?
they don’t verify any of it
Have you even ever used AI? Because if you did, you'd know that it's quite verbose at explaining how it reached a result, and for stuff like this it will print the step by step calculations, making it very easy to verify and spot any flaw in the reasoning.
How could I possibly verify this answer:
Hey GPT, there's an even that starts on Monday, and will last 400h. When will it end?
I like to use sites that programmatically calculate this kind of thing, that's how I would verify it. But if I was going to do that, I'd just use it to begin with.
I use it to parse log files, compare logs from successful and failed requests and that sort of stuff. Other than that and searching, I haven't found much use for it.
and now we’re up to inaccurate, stochastic
diff. fucking marvelous.Stay tuned for inaccurate, stochastic
ls.How about real-time subtitles on movies in any language you want that are always synced?
VLC is working on that with the use of LLMs
I tried feeding Japanese audio to an LLM to generate English subs and it started translating silence and music as requests to donate to anime fansubbers.
No, really. Fansubbed anime would put their donation message over the intro music or when there wasn't any speech to sub and the LLM learned that.
All according to k-AI-kaku!
We've had speech to text since the 90s. Current iterations have improved, like most technology has improved since the 90s. But, no, I wouldn't buy a new computer with glaring privacy concerns for real time subtitles in movies.
You're thinking too small. AI could automatically dub the entire movie while mimicking the actors voice while simultaneously moving their lips and mouth to form the words correctly.
It would just take your daily home power usage to do a single 2hr movie.
Apparently it's useful for extraction of information out of a text to a format you specify. A Friend is using it to extract transactions out of 500 year old texts. However to get rid of hallucinations the temperature reds to be 0. So the only way is to self host.
Setting the temperature to 0 doesn't get rid of hallucinations.
It might slightly increase accuracy, but it's still going to go wrong.
Well, LLMs are capable (but hallucinant) and cost an absolute fuckton of energy. There have been purpose trained efficient ML models that we've used for years. Document Understanding and Computer Vision are great, just don't use a LLM for them.
They're great for document management. You can let it build indices, locally on your machine with no internet connection. Then when you want to find things you can ask it in human terms. I've got a few gb of documents and finding things is a bitch - I'm actually waiting on the miniforums a1 pro whatever the fuck to be released with an option to buy it without windows (because fuck m$) to do exactly this for our home documents.
a local search engine but shitty, stochastic, and needs way too much compute for “a few gb of documents”, got it, thanks for chiming in
Offline indexing has been working just fine for me for years. I don't think I've ever needed to search for something esoteric like "the report with the blue header and the photo of 3 goats having an orgy", if I really can't remember the file name, or what it's associated with in my filing system, I can still remember some key words from the text.
Better indexing / automatic tagging of my photos could be nice, but that's a rare occurrence, not a "I NEED a button for this POS on my keyboard and also want it always listening to everything I do" kind of situation
I wish that offline indexing and archiving were normalized and more accessible, because it’s a fucking amazing thing to have
Oh we care alright. We care about keeping it OUT of our FUCKING LIVES.
AI is going to be this eras Betamax, HD-Dvd, or 3d TV glasses. It doesn't do what was promised and nobody gives a shit.
Betamax had better image and sound, but was limited by running time and then VHS doubled down with even lower quality to increase how many hours would fit on a tape. VHS was simply more convenient without being that much lower quality for normal tape length.
HD-DVD was comparable to BluRay and just happened to lose out because the industry won't allow two similar technologies to exist at the same time.
Neither failed to do what they promised. They were both perfectly fine technologies that lost in a competition that only allows a single winner.
BluRay was slightly better if I recall correctly. With the rise in higher definition televisions, people wanted to max out the quality possible, even if most people (still) can’t tell the difference
Blu-ray also had the advantage of PS3 supporting the format without the need for an external disc drive.
@philycheeze @xkbx yes, I think Microslop's fumble of selling the HD DVD drive only as an external add-on really hindered the format
@philycheeze @xkbx I bought one anyway. 10 years later, mind you :p
They’re not necessarily bad, it’s just an extra barrier to entry.
Blue ray also had the advantage of not having multiple D’s in its name.
That's not why it won, though. It won because the industry wanted zone restrictions, which only Blu-Ray supported. They suck for the user, but allows the industry to stagger releases in different markets. In reality it just means that I can't get discs of most foreign films, because they won't work in my player.
I'm sure that was a factor, but Blu-ray won because the most popular Blu-ray player practically sold itself
It's hard to say what was the final nail in the coffin, but it is true that Blu-Ray went from underdog to outselling HD-DVD around the time the PlayStation 3 came out. I'm not sure how much those early sales numbers matter, though, because I'm sure both were still miniscule compared to DVD.
When 20th Century Fox dropped support for HD-DVD, they cited superior copy protection as the reason. Lionsgate gave similar sentiment.
When Warner later announced they were dropping HD-DVD, they did cite customer adoption as the reason for their choice, but they also did it right before CES, so I'm pretty sure there were some backroom deals at play as well.
I think the biggest impact of the PlayStation 3 was accelerating adoption of Blu-Ray over DVD. Back when DVD came out, VHS remained a major player for years, until the year there was a DVD player so dirt cheap that everyone who didn't already have a player got one for Christmas.
Nah Blu-ray was significantly better, 50gb capacity vs 30gb
The big plus for HD DVD was it was far cheaper to produce, it didn't need massive retooling for manufacturing.
Not just that, space. BluRays have way more space than DVD's. Remember how many 360 games came with multiple discs? Not a single PS3 game did, unless it was a bonus behind the scenes type thing.
Xbox 360 used DVDs for game discs and could play video DVDs. They "supported" HDDVDs - you needed an addon which had a separate optical drive in it. Unsurprisingly this didn't sell well.
Afaik betamax did not have any porn content, which might have contributed to the sale of VHS systems.
Dude don’t throw Betamax in there, that was a better product than the VHS. AI is just ass.
I was just about to mention porn and how each new format of the past came down to that very same factor.
If AI computers were incredible at making AI porn I bet you they'd be selling a lot better haha
Betamax actually found use in Television broadcast until the switch to HDTV occurred in 2009
No, it didn't.
Thanks for reminding me of that!
Will stop spreading that “fact”
the later digital variants of beta weren't retired by sony until ~ 2016.
I had no clue that they did digital betamax....
That would make senes though...
There was at one point an HDVHS as well it was essentially a 1080P MPEG stream on a VHS tape
No, I’m sorry. It is very useful and isn’t going away. This threads is either full of Luddites or disingenuous people.
nobody asked you to post in this thread. you came and posted this shit in here because the thread is very popular, because lots and lots of people correctly fucking hate generative AI
so I guess please enjoy being the only “non-disingenuous” bootlicker you know outside of work, where everyone’s required (under implicit threat to their livelihood) to love this shitty fucking technology
but most of all: don’t fucking come back, none of us Luddites need your mid ass
@blarth @TheThrillOfTime huh. You totally name at least one use case then, huh
You only didn't because it's so blindingly obvious
(It's BS)
Also, learn about Luddites, man
I have friends who are computer engineers and they say that it does a pretty good job of generating code, but that's not a general population use case. For most people, AI is a nearly useless product. It makes Google searches worse. It makes your phone voice assistant worse. It's not as good as human artists. And it's mostly used to create dumbass posts on Reddit to farm engagement. In my life, AI has not made anything better.
Reducing computer performance:
Turbo button 🤝 AI button
now that you mention it, kinda surprised I haven't ever seen a spate of custom 3D-printed turbo buttons from overclocker circles
it could turn on the RGB! though that would imply that the RGB could be turned off in the first place, which is optimistic on my part
it's the button for more RGB
saw a microphone with RGB and i'm like wtf is this thing supposed to do, flash disco lights when you're on stream shouting slurs at your esteemed fellow gamers
They're called "heated gaming moments" /j
reheated gaming moments
Fresh(?) off the PUBG Bridge
nah, just call a fuckwit a fuckwit. even jokingly giving them breathing room is something they know how to abuse.
@dgerard @self no that's the Real Good Button
Same issue from when we had turbo buttons: why have a button for something you don't turn off?
your comment demonstrates a remarkable lack of imagination
Better option: An array of flip switches for throttling to different speeds.
Best option: Mount these flip switches above you on an overhead control panel.
And a clear lack of understanding of what the turbo button actually did
I thought it makes the game tick faster or slower, such that you have to have it set correctly or it's unplayable.
Some early PC software, mostly games, were written expecting the computer ran at a fixed speed which was the speed of the original IBM PC which used an Intel 8088 that ran at 4.77 MHz. If the IBM PC was more like computers such as the Commodore 64 which changed little during its production run, that would have been fine. But eventually faster PC's were released that ran on 286, 386, 486, etc. CPUs that were considerably faster and hence software that expected the original IBM PC hardware ran way too fast.
The turbo button was a bit of a misnomer since you would normally have it on and leave it on, only turning it off as sort of a compatibility mode to run older software. How effective it was varied quite a bit - some computers turning it off would get you pretty close to the original IBM PC in terms of speed, but others would just slow the computer down, but not nearly enough, making it mostly useless for what it was intended for.
Kind of, though it's about the CPU's clock speed rather than the details of the game.
So, pedantically? no.
Experientially? yes.
I had one on my PC in the late 90s, early 2000s.
That's not fair! I care! A lot!
Just had to buy a new laptop for new place of employment. It took real time, effort, and care, but I've finally found a recent laptop matching my hardware requirements and sense of aesthetics at a reasonable price, without that hideous copilot button :)
quite annoyed that the Snapdragon laptops are bootlocked cos they'd make great Linux boxes
How are they bootlocked? Just need the right iso. I have done it, because I didn't know they came with Linux for this particular client and they put windows on it, had to get a specific iso to reinstall when they borked it.
oh really? I thought MS had demanded boot locking for the ARM laptops.
I'm not 100% sure, I just know I did it once. Let me see if I can get the iso I used for Linux.
yeah looks like I'm thankfully wrong!
Which laptop did you buy if you don't mind sharing?
Decided on this:
Still had some issues under Linux / NixOS a couple of weeks ago (hardware-wise everything worked; but specific programs, esp. Librewolf, will randomly start eating CPU and battery out of nowhere, with what looks like noops. Haven't investigated further, yet.
sweet, glad to know it generally works with linux. this is available in my part of the world. been shopping around for a personal for-work laptop since my company is stingy. And I plan to move on anyways.
It generally works, yes, but I'd hold off for another month or two in the hopes of the issues being resolved in the kernel
I really wanted to like that laptop but the screen is so incredibly glossy that unless you're in a totally dark room it becomes a mirror.
I think it's a matter of preference. Haven't noticed the screen being a mirror yet, but then again I feel like any even mildly matte screen looks like it's being viewed through a veil...
I am a bit worried/curious about how the oled will deal with my very static waybars though, lol
wtf is going on with that touchpad - is it a tap calculator input?
Numpad/pin input. Utterly useless in my opinion. Also apparently activates itself pretty regularly by accident from palms resting when typing. YouTube comments are full of people desperate for a windows/driver update which lets you deactivate this thing.
Oh, btw, I did not go through the trouble of enabling support under Linux (you can, but it's optional, because, well... Linux)
Imagine that, a new fledgingly technology hamfistedly inserted into every part of the user experience, while offering meager functionality in exchange for the most aggressive data privacy invasion ever attempted on this scale, and no one likes it.
Y'all remember when 3D TVs were going to be revolutionary?
@Agent641 @dgerard remember when it was INEVITABLE that the deeds to your house were going to be an NFT?
3D TVs I can see happening, if there's some breakthrough that fixes the current tech shortcomings .
But NFTs, and blockchain in general? Hahahahhah.
To many separate components need to improve.
Hardware. Right now, 3D TV's require special glasses, or they only support a single viewer in a very narrow viewing range.
Content. Movies made for 3D with depth effects are better than old shows remastered to have "pop out" effects. I saw Pacific Rim in Imax 3D and it was amazing. I also saw Nightmare Before Christmas remastered for 3 and it was fucking terrible.
Infrastructure. Cable/Service providers need to provide services capable of streaming 3D movies consistently with solid performance.
User acceptance. To me, the market is still prioritizing picture, sound, and frame rate over 3D effects. People just don't care for it right now.
"But you see, there is an immutable proof that you 'own' this ugly monkey drawing!!"
Wow, this monkey will mature into a 404 error eventually(maybe??). What an investment!
Turned out all we needed was a higher frame rate.
A friend of mine is a streamer. On his discord, the topic of the Switch 2 came up, and one of his fans stated their desire for it to support 3D TV. Rather than saying my gut reaction -- "are you crazy?" -- I simply asked why. I consider it a great moment of personal self control.
I mean the thought of big screen 3ds emulation would be pretty fun, but yeah that technology died a decade ago. Thats like asking why the Switch 2 doesn't have a slot for SNES carts!
@Agent641 @dgerard hey, I have a NVidia 3D Vision set and I like it a lot. No more driver support though 😭
Y'all remember when Web 3 was supposed to be the next big thing?
they are still cool, just headache inducing for enough of the population combined with it absolutely being a gimmick lead to it's failure.
WTF is an AI computer? Is that some marketing bullshit?
afaict they're computers with a GPU that has some hardware dedicated to the kind of matrix multiplication common in inference in current neural networks. pure marketing BS because most GPUs come with that these days, and some will still not he powerful enough to be useful
This comment is the most importantly one in this thread. Laptops already had GPUs. Does the copilot button actually result in you conversing with an LLM locally or is inference done in the cloud? If the latter, it’s even more useless.
@Matriks404 @dgerard got it in one! It's MS's marketing campaign for PCs with a certain amount of "AI" FLOPS
IDK if the double pun was intended, but a FLOPS is a measurement of how many (floating point) operations can a computer make per second
"Y2k ready" vibes.
Yes.
It's not care. Its want. We don't want AI.
FR I think more people actively dislike it, which is a form of care.
Depends on the implementation.
Just about everyone I know loves how iPhones can take a picture and readily identify a plant or animal. That's actually delightful. Some AI tech is great.
Now put an LLM chatbox where people expect a search box, and see what happens... yeah that shit sucks.
As I biologist I'd like to correct your sentence: "iPhones can take a picture and pretend to sometimes manage to get close to identifying a plant"
It sucks at identification too
Hotdog or not hotdog
Whenever I ask random people who are not on IT, they either don't know about it or they love it.
People who don't know what it is are often amazed by how much it looks like a real person and don't even think about the answers it gives being right or not.
That's a boring perspective fuck you for sharing.
Thats an interesting perspective thanks for sharing.
Google, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia and everyone else is hyping up AI. Consumers are not really seeing much benefit by making everything AI-ified. Executives are raving over it but maybe aren't realize that people outside of the C-suite aren't that excited? Having it shoved in our faces constantly, or crammed in places companies hope they can save money is not helping either.
It's FOMO amplified by capitalistic competition. No company wants to be the one left behind. I guarantee Google, Meta and even OpenAI know the limitations of their products. They don't care, they just want to be at least as good as their competitors, because they assume at some point one of them will reach "good enough." And at that moment, if they're not in position to grab market share, they'll lose a once-in-a-generation chance for billions or trillions of dollars in value.
We're the casualties, because the people in the middle - companies with no AI but whose C-suite buys into the hype - demand we use unworkable products because they're too willfully ignorant to know they're not panaceas to whatever is bothering those C-suite execs at the moment.
Quarterly Driven Development
My problem is that it's not that fucking useful. I got the Pixel 9 specifically because of its advertised AI chip for the assistant and I swear it's just gotten worse since the Pixel 7. I used to be able to ask Google anything through the assistant, and now 90% of my questions are answered with "can't find the information."
They also advertised (or at least heavily alluded to) the use of the AI chip when you are in low network areas but it works just as good outside of 4g+ coverage as it ever did without the stupid chip.
Whats the point of adding AI branded nonsense if there's no practical use for it. And that doesn't even start to cover the issues with AI's reliability as a source of information. Garbage in = garbage out.
i dint get a pixel for that reason after PIxel 5a died, the exonys chip is significantly weaker than other flagship phones, and they sacrificed thier battery power/efficiency capacity since 5A(which was a very defective phone) just to prop up AI.
We know google was saving money on not using QUALCOMM/snapdragon chips, which most others are using. AI is just thier excuse so they can put less effort into making quality product.
When Gemini can find the information, they added flowery "social" bullshit before, in the middle and after the information I asked for wasting my time
I was looking at new phones and basically every one was advertising their AI assistant. Are any of them better than the digital assistants from 2016?
I need to unlock my phone for the Gemini bs to skip or pause music.
Fuck AI
Bad news for people who use google: they've removed the same feature, so their assistant is more useless than Cortana a decade ago (only a mild exaggeration)
Seriously missed an opportunity to being that back as their agent.
Legitimately though, Cortana was pretty great. There was a feature to help plan commutes (before I went more or less full remote), all it really did was watch traffic and adjust a suggest time to depart but it was pretty nice.
Say it every time someone mentions WP7/8/10, those lumia devices were fantastic and I totally miss mine, the 1020 had a fantastic camera on it, especially for the early 2010s
I loved my Lumia. I have the windows phone launcher on my phone currently haha
As technology advanced, humans grew accustomed to relying on the machines.
it’s really weird that this turned into a tantrum where you tried to report other users for their jokes???
the fuck? please go be weird somewhere else
Comment removed for being weird (derogatory). I refrained just barely from hitting the "ban from community" button on the slim chance it was a badly misfired joke from a person who can otherwise behave themself, but I won't object if any other mod goes ahead with the banhammer.
it was some shitty follow-up to your joke so unfunny it made your post less funny just by being under it. pull this thread from mastodon and chances are you’ll see it if you really want to
anyway if you want a laugh, they threw a tantrum and reported your post because we deleted theirs:
their joke was in that exact tone too because they’re a comedy black hole
If you press the three dots, then "comment moderation history" you can see what it said.
I was vacillating on reply harshness, but "hey tell me when you're home" ... some people just need to get better with informed consent.
(agree that this probably wasn't banworthy (yet), but close)
wow, your posts really aren’t good
The only real purpose of AI is to get sweet VC money. Beyond that...
The fuck does Microsoft need VC money for?
They don't, its data mining.
I care. I care enough to crater copilot.
The average technical person realises ai is shit.
The average non-technical person doesn't need an ai computer, because chatgpt is free.
not exactly true on the 2nd one, just because cpgt exist is not the reason an average person believes they dont need AI. they know AI is shit from the get-go, doesnt take a programming genius to realizing, when you know that only the corporations are the only ones obsessed with it, and it hadnt produced any valuble product.
and then had to deal with many AI system, like chat boxes, or google searches,, especially on reddit.
Do they care? No! Will they push more AI? Yes! Will they listen to the consumers? I don't think so.
Same thing happens with lot of products over the years. Companies push new stuff that we don't want, and a year later becomes a regular thing! They push AI day by day, from websites AI chat help to in app AI assistant. Do consumers like it? No, but still you gonna find it everywhere! and now they push it in computers and looks what it happens! No sales!
Call me crazy, but at some point, they need to look at their data or their consumers and do the right thing.
It's maddening that they did actually take away the headphone jack from all modern phones and there's nothing we can do about it even though it objectively sucks
But there's no space on the new thin phones.
STFU yes there is. Gimme my 3.5mm.
"The perfect size of the screen is ((3.5 + (year - 2010) * 0.5)) inches."
STFU. Make phones small like iPhone 4 again.
most, Sony still has them
Outright rejection of their shit, I won't buy new smartphones from them. Currently using a dumbphone although the case is breaking and they don't make this one any more. Nokia could work but costs quite a bit tbh. Getting rid of the phone entirely is tempting.
If I ever buy a smartphone again it will be the cheapest second hand thing I can find. Maybe don't even take it out the house, it can stay at home like a landline and will be restricted to at most LAN connections only.
@V0ldek
Does anyone sell a case with a built-in USB DAC and 3.5mm jack?
maddening how many details i have to filter phones for these days, (no oled (very bad experience with fragility of pixel4), ideally no cancer unremovable bloatware or LineageOS support (which needs Snapdragon cpu), fucking headphone jack...)
You can still buy phones with a headphone jack. It's just that most people buy the one without because most people have a wireless headset they use with the phone.
It's SUPER simple: if something new comes along and sells, it will become the standard. If it doesn't sell, it won't.
Removing the headphone jack allowed manufacturers to make phones thinner/lighter/cheaper/whatever and people didn't vote against it, therefore it stays.
Microsoft pushing a feature that most users will never use or care about? Never!
Laughs in Window 8 optimized for touchscreens
Some more news had the best take on this imo. It's clear: these companies spent the last five+ years pouring billions into AI. And right now, AI isn't up to snuff, it can't do everything that was promised, so now these companies are seeking a return on their investment.
Unfortunately for us, these companies are brands like google, apple, and Microsoft which means that their solution to AI not being a sellable product on its own is that they can shove it into everything they produce without asking the consumer. They now have to figure out how to make money off of it, which is difficult because AI doesn't do anything supremely useful right now. It's writing is passable but amateurish, it's law work has too many flaws for it to replace anyone, it's art skills are 100% clockable and nobody likes them, and it's ability to serve better ads is unproven so far. So we get shit like AI powered laptops that don't sell.
If I want at AI I have a multitude of options. It's baked into my editors and easily available on the web. I just paste some crap into a text box and we're off to the races.
I don't want it in my OS. I don't want it embedded in my phone. I'll keep disabling it as long as that is an option.
Google, Facebook, etc. have been burning money to gain market share and "good will" from users knowing that when the money faucet stopped or if they found a way to make money, they'd abuse their market share and squeeze their users for profit.
Once interest rates increased and the VC infinite money glitch went away (borrow at low interest rates, gamble on companies, repeat), the masks came off and the screws started turning, hard. Anything they can do to monetize anyone else involved, they're trying.
The same story has been happening with AI but without the infinite money glitch - just investors desperate for a good bet getting hyped to hell and back. They need adoption and they need business to become dependent on their product. Each of these companies are basically billions in the hole on AI.
Users, especially technical users, should know that not only is the product failing to live up to the hype but that embracing AI is basically turning the other cheek for these companies to have their way with your wallet even faster and more aggressively than they already are with everything else they've given away.
Most features are relabelled years old shit...google on tap is now gemini screen search.
Things like chatbots have gotten better but bleh, I dont want to give up my privacy for this shit
I don't even want Windows 11 specifically because of AI. It's intrusive, unnecessary, and the average person has no use for it. The only time I have used AI for anything productive was when I needed to ask some very obscure questions for Linux since I'm trying to get rid of Windows entirely.
Can the NPU be used for practical purposes other than generative AI? If not, I don't need it.
It depends on how broad you are with the definition. There are a lot of uses for an NPU that aren't hosting your own chatgpt analog.
list them, as far as I can tell NPUs are shitty cut-down GPUs with a few functions much slower
You are right that they are effectively limited use GPUs, but that doesn't make them useless. That's really the point, I'd agree it is a weird fit for laptops though.
My personal interest is object detection / facial recognition which is a function a lot of AIs have, but you may or may not classify it as 'Generative AI' on it's own.
while the ship has sailed on calling the opencv shit you’re doing AI (thx, grifters of the first AI bubble), which part of object detection and facial recognition is generative?
Fuck the ai os wave. Do not force that shit into my life. I'm fine with using ai, but ai is not gonna stare over my shoulder. I decide when I use it. Never going back from Linux. Still stuck with a samsung phone but we'll see
Year of Linux
Nein!
Doch!
Ooh!
Don’t care AND are not stupid.
they are useless... Copilot is not worth even $50 of an update
Oh hey, I got one of those buttons on my new laptop that literally never booted into Windows. Pressing it Linux says it's "Meta + CTRL" (I think), which is pretty useful. Got it for the good price/performance/build-quality ratio.
Didn't yet find a good use for that fancy NPU, the XDNA driver just arrived a month ago or so. Perhaps for use with Upscayl or something actually useful.
Technically it's Meta+Shift+F23
launch ELIZA obv
These "AI Computers" are a solution looking for a problem. The marketing people naming these "AI" computers think that AI is just some magic fairy dust term you can add to a product and it will increase demand.
What's the "killer features" of these new laptops, and what % price increase is it worth?
Hell yeah
How did this thread blow up so much?
What the hell is an AI computer? Like one with a beefy GPU?
What is even the point of an AI coprocessor for an end user (excluding ML devs)? Most of the AI features run in the cloud and even if they could run locally, companies are very happy to ask you rent for services and keep you vendor locked in.
Gen AI should be private, secure, local and easier to train by it's users to fit their own needs. Closest thing to this at the moment seems to be Kobold.
Does Ollama accept custom parameters now?
I wasn't talking about their effectiveness though. Yeah, they're sloppy as hell, but I'd rather trust a sloppy tool I set up at home and use myself than having someone I don't trust at home using their sloppy tools, tinkering with my property without permission when I'm not looking and changing their terms and prices each day.
But granted your point is a really good one. These AI ready laptops don't give the bang for your buck you'd expect. We're all better off taking good care of our older harware and waiting longer for components that are a true improvement to replace them.
no thx
What's wrong with running your own AI on your own PC? That's a very luddite reaction for someone who moderates a "tech takes" forum.
it’s weird your local AI told you fuck all about the labor movement whose name you’re using as an insult, but oddly enough I don’t feel like wasting my time explaining this quote unquote “tech takes” forum to the type of asshole we exist to sneer at
remarkably, your post is one of those "tech takes" that we hang around the watercooler for
although I'm not sure you'll get why
lol and then only after posting so I read @self's post. good going, me!
Please stop shoving ai into everything,please give us opt out from AI icons and stuff /srs
I imagine it’s paying a premium for issue
Local AI kind of sucks right now, and everything is massively over branded as AI ready these days.
There aren’t a lot of compelling local use cases and the memory constraints of local mean you end up with fairly weak models.
You need a high end high memory local setup to get decent token rates, and I’m finding right now 30-70b models are the minimum viable size.
That doesn’t compare with speed of online models running on GPUs that cost more than luxury cars.
Ai bro here. The reason there shit aint selling is because its useless for any actual ai aplication. Ai runs on gpus even an ai cpu will be so much slower than what an nvidea gpu can do. Of course no one buys it. Nvideas gpus still sell very well, and not just because of the gamers.
ah yes the only way to make LLMs, a technology built on plagiarism with no known use case, “useful for any actual ai application” is to throw a shitload of money at nvidia. weird how that works!
A lot of these systems are silly because they don't have a lot of RAM and things don't begin to get interesting with LLMs until you can run 70B and above
The Mac Studio has seemed an affordable way to achieve running 200B+ models mainly due to the unified memory architecture (compare getting 512GB of RAM in a Mac Studio to building a machine with enough GPU to get there)
If you look the industry in general is starting to move towards that sort of design now
https://frame.work/desktop
The framework desktop for instance can be configured with 128GB of RAM ($2k) and should be good for handling 70B models while maintaining something that looks like efficiency.
You will not train, or refine models with these setups (I think you would still benefit from the raw power GPUs offer) but the main sticking point in running local models has been VRAM and how much it costs to get that from AMD / Nvidia
That said, I only care about all of this because I mess around with a lot of RAG things. I am not a typical consumer
ah yes the only way to make LLMs, a technology built on plagiarism with no known use case, “not silly” is to throw a shitload of money at Apple or framework or whichever vendor decided to sell pickaxes this time for more RAM. yes, very interesting, thank you, fuck off
I am not suggesting that anyone buy any particular thing.
I am just stating that the bottleneck has little to do with AI Chip vs GPU as it mostly boils down to RAM available to the "AI Chip"
Built on copyright infringement, not plagarism (the data scientists that built them aren't going around pretending all the training content was their ideation/creation). There are so many NLP tasks and areas of research that have been wholly obsoleted due to LLMs including sentiment analysis, summarization, translation, NER, data extraction, etc., so I find the "no known use case" to be rather ignorant. The first consumer computers also had tremendous costs. Paradigm shifts in technology are never cheap until scaling.
I think this comment is unfair toward @[email protected] and you should reflect a bit on why that is.
also you’re right, I was unfair towards cubism_pitta. I wasn’t enough of an asshole.
hey fuckers. next time you get the sudden, overwhelming urge to jack off in public about how much money you’re feeding into the machine that does plagiarism and nothing else, keep it the fuck off my instance.
lol
soz kid, you’re definitely not tall enough for this ride. maybe go over to the back there and have a lollipop
Enclosed please find one (1) complimentary ticket to the egress.
LOL. I checked the modlog. Man, the monocle fell off that sealion real quick.
OK, I will reflect on why you think that comment was unfair.
okwhateverdude
I currently only possess a 3060 12GB (It was a lot when I got started) and I doubt these supposed AI PCs can even beat that. These supposed AI PCs are just worse than an ordinary gaming PC at AI. But yeah, unified memory might be the future, and will most definitely help bridge the gap between, fancy gaming gpu, and expensive server hardware.
Let it be said. I have not put my money where my mouth is :)
But running the largest models at any reasonable speed is multiple A100s money and not 3060 money.
Anything that can deliver reasonable speed and not cost $40k+ is an interesting prospect (AI PCs.... are not delivering this currently)
I agree, its very limited what can be done with a reasonable budget. So in practice AI systems are at the moment bullshit and reserved for enthusiasts.
Google (Gemma) and Alibaba (Qwen) have some smaller models that supposedly works fairly well on weaker hardware, but most people would probably just pay for cloud based one.
So the AI computers are obviously not a good deal at this time. I guess they could have used the NPU for some sort of speedy OCR stuff on the "privacy nightmare screencapture thing" they have been making to search for stuff.
then stop wasting our fucking time
I didn’t read the rest of your post but it’s vaguely LLM-shaped so off you fuck
I wrote it "by hand" on a smartphone. The entire thing. I never use LLM to write text for humans to read. A bit outnof principle. You would probably discover that I actually dislike some AI studf as well if you read some of it.
I wanted to address if AI is entirely bullshit or not.
Ethics does not need to be a part of that equation. The article shared is about the Copilot PCs.
I can see why people don't want them, because they do not actually do anything especially useful. I listed about every usecase I know about.
When it comes to the ethics AI is problematic, and many workers, myself included is kinda forced to use it to improve performance, or atleast attempt to use it.
I can trust a calculator that uses so little electricity that it works with ambient light. Why would I want to use an untrustworthy AI?
Fucking blood diamonds that don't even cut glass.
me: writing software for a calculator I don’t even own yet so I can maybe hopefully have a pocket version of one of the only good products of the first AI boom
them: Math Yes, it is fairly good at math. You can’t trust it,
Yes you can, and you should use it in most cases. I do too.
However, there are more advanced math that sometimes have to be done, and it's kinda nice to just get it solved quickly and automatically. Then you just look over it and see that it's right.
You did not have to find the right formulas, calculate x, etc. you just verify after it is done.
If you don't know the right formulas, how do you know how to verify it?
I had a lot of advanced math courses taking my degree. So I know what is possible, and that there is a way to do x and y. Often I do not recall, since it is over 10 years ago.
So it just does the math, and then I recall formulas and knowledge that are kinda buried.
If it's just an equation then Wolfram Alpha is a better choice.
Also if I don't have the equation yet, then a decent LLM can help me make it.
Your first line is a confession that you are a bad person.
I get that you and others dislike AI. I am not a huge fan either.
Calling me a bad person is a hurtful and shitty thing to do.
You assume that I think LLMs are ethical. I do not.
It is however not what I wanted to focus on when I wrote my reply. I wanted to point out some actual usecases, to balance out the "LLMs are not useful, just trash" circlejerk.
The copilot PCs are not being sold because they do not deliver anything of real value to the user. The average user does not have any strong opinion if LLMs are ethical or not. They do care about usefulness.
this post has been deleted as a prion
What does this mean?
Just 'automation'. If you're counting them like 'a cattle' you're just as wrong, my dude.
Maybe I explained myself poorly, I meant that I tell the LLM to create an "automation" which is a term in HomeAssistant.
The LLM makes the automation based on my instructions.
I am a bit confused about what you are talking about 🤔
People expect AI to be default feature. Image search was once what was "AI". Photo recognition was once what was "AI". Voice recognition was once what was "AI". These all fall under the field of AI/ML. It's until the next state of the art comes along. Then it's no longer "AI" but a standard feature.
I have no idea why this phenomenon is but that's the way it's been. When the field of AI/ML makes its leap to the next frontier. The current "AI" which is LLMs will longer be "AI" but a standard feature.
Maybe because fictional media as set the goalpost at AGI. So nobody is expecting to be buying "AI" hardware until they are buying an AGI machine that is a conscious cybernetic lifeform. Otherwise practical AI as we know it is assumed to be just another software package that runs on any computer.
you know you could just write your own posts, right? it’s free! you don’t need to regurgitate the marketing that’s being pushed by all these vendors. they already have paid marketers to push the bilge
people expect a Cylon level level of AI intelligence or skynet, both are quite similar fictional concepts. funny thing in the cylons case, it was based of the brainwaves of a human girl, that was replicated into robots, which developed thier own AI/conscieness overtime.
The only issue here is that there is no really useful ubiquitous feature yet. Once that comes, people will not care about any security issues or any other reason against it. It's coming for sure. Maybe they need recall feature to train right now, maybe they won't anymore at some point.
@PixelatedSaturn @dgerard
> It’s coming for sure
You got a source for this?
At first I was skeptical of the guy who told me, but they seemed rich and therefore trustworthy.
You have a source for that? 😁
https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/9/24339817/vlc-player-automatic-ai-subtitling-translation
Lemmy people do not like your comment, but I think you are spot on. Laypeople just do not care about privacy, like, at all. That's how instagram, facebook and such are popular despite all the privacy infractions.
It's so sad how people 1000% prefer convenience over privacy..
"so true bestie" says the dipshit, brushing under the carpet all the notes about overt efforts and capital expended by monopolist captive operators
Some people are really crazy around here and they will downvote anything and everything AI, especially posts from someone who might not be an anti-ai activist.
I've got my own view. I've worked in a company that does ai research and I've seen the how fast the progress is. I'm also old enough to remember vividly a time when people couldn't imagine that anyone would put their entire life online for everyone else to see. Yet here we are.
Edit: You can see already some crazy triggered poor soul commenting here 😂
ooh wow, the speed of progress. such a well known indicator of something definitely being good, and never at all being abused by ghouls!
sometimes I wonder if any of you dumb fuckwits ever read any historical perspectives at all
The thing LLMs can effectively replace is Google search (and other search engines). Microsoft is shoving copilot down your throat because shoving Bing up your ass was harder when it was already full of other shit.