Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now
theverge.com
theverge.com
If anyone wonders why Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and other tech companies who make gobs of money from advertising are so interested in AI, this is why. The ads will appear so "naturally" inside content that it will be impossible for a program (e.g. adblocker) to tell the difference between the content and the ad.
There is NO better way to deliver an ad, short of directly injecting thoughts and memories directly into the human brain somehow.
Now I’ll go drink a nice, cold glass of tap water.
I'm also not overly familiar with the scope of the law, so I don't know how much (or if) it applies to software of this sort.
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https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/218596/70s-or-earl... for those not in the know.
* soda pop <--- consider replacing this with Coke Zero, on sale at a Kroger's near you this week
This AI thing is dumb for it though, should've kept Wordpad for that.
This is also why so many people run into problems trying to eject removable drives -- because the last thing they did was to save a file onto that drive, and now Outlook or whatever the program that did the save has its current directory pointing there.
It makes sense since 10 or so years ago it was often the case that one file explorer had a lock on a folder and another file explorer couldn't delete that folder. Then tools like processviewer.exe gave some insight.
(And cute: it spins when I click it. Blech.)
That said, I'm not sure notepad benefits from it.
A generic taskbar (Windows one included) is only passable for the root level of switching contexts (on *nix there's also couple levels below that: virtual consoles and virtual desktops of the DE).
I don't understand how the editor has regressed to the point that 15 year old software performs better than the modern equivalent.
Paint.Net (v3), Notepad++, IrfanViewer, Foobar2000 & VLC
Macs have Pixelmator and Preview for images, Apple Notes is actually very decent for actual notes, Zed for nerdy text files, QuickTime/IINA for video (or hell even VLC looks much nicer than on Windows). All of them are modern, beautiful, and work well
macOS is the most consistent OS and Windows the least [1]. With the exception of IrfanView I find neither of those apps particularly crusty though. There's https://imageglass.org
I personally moved from macOS to KDE Plasma and I'm a happy camper as long as I stay with Plasma/Qt apps.
[1] https://ntdev.blog/2021/02/06/state-of-the-windows-how-many-...
Don't get me wrong, it's an incredible endeavor and the developers deserve endless praise, but for people that aren't already familiar with navigating things like GIMP, KDE, Open/LibreOffice, it's not especially welcoming.
This is true for all complex software, though. People who have never used Apple's software also struggle with it until they become more familiar.
By contrast, "open this image and draw a single red circle in it" in GIMP is as challenging to a newbie as quitting vi. Even for an intermediate user - I use GIMP a handful of times per year and I absolutely could not tell you from memory how to do that.
The moment you criticize an app, someone on the Internet will jump in to tut-tut and insist to you that it's "complex software" and you can't possibly understand how complex it is. Case in point: Just a few years ago the Windows Terminal team chastised[^1] users by claiming that fast font rendering would literally require several PhDs of research and can't be solved otherwise[^0]. At some point we have to realize that claiming something is complex doesn't prove that it's inherently complex nor justify any complexity in how it was built.
[^0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28743687
[^1]: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362#issuecomm...
Something like a year later, Microsoft did actually improve the behavior and never credited the guy who proved it was possible.
Thanks for telling me about that development. I'm … speechless.
Why is there a playlist by default? What are these dozens of obscure options at the first level under every main dropdown in the title/menu bar?
I vaguely remember recently trying mpv and being pleasantly surprised, but I mostly use QuickTime or IINA on macOS. mpv seems to be available cross-platform though; maybe the Windows port is usable?
Is there? I know the feature but I thought it was off by default and I think it's this way on my computers.
I am no expert but these things I've done in limited amounts. Mostly I just double click a file and watch it though.
(No I can’t use Krita for specific reasons and it isn’t much easier anyway)
It was like, hidden underneath the janky gui, there was actually a lot of thought put into how things work together.
If you want to annotate screenshots, KDE's screenshot tool, Spectacle, has this built in too.
VLC is simple as pie. open folder, click music or video, it plays. drag files to it, it adds them to the playlist. same functionality as WinAmp, etc.
I had to watch three (3) youtube tutorials to figure out how to import a pdf and copy-paste a signature to it.
Having said that, VLC is still my last resort when nothing else can play a file.
[1] One example is subtitle rendering. Last I checked VLC was just plain uglier than MPC-HC.
In today's modern world of "UI Overhauls" (read: fucking everything up and taking away every useful power you had in the name of 'usability') it's basically god tier. The damn thing is stable, that's literally all i need. I'll learn the interface, just for the love of God don't change it every time i get used to it!
Also, please tell me you are not trying to take the standard IBM desktop Interface (File, Edit...) away ?
The non full screen UI is a little more crusty but still looks better than the windows version imo.
I usually use rg, which is way faster than grep for searching many repositories at once.
But one of my tasks involves searching things in a single XML file of hundreds megabytes, or even several gigabytes, and for this, grep is way faster than rg apparently.
So under the right conditions, grep is actually quite fast and you may be missing out if you never try using it.
The choice to go for windows as main OS kinda includes prioritizing advanced features and versatility over the UX. Even firefox is not as nice on windows than on mac.
In Windows i use Notepad++ so i don't have to use Vim (which is for me the only viable alternative of a lightweight "programmer's editor" and what i used for a while before learning about Notepad++ - everything else, like vscode, emacs, etc feel much more heavyweight) since i dislike its modal nature and non-standard[0] shortcuts.
[0] i know that technically they predate whatever Notepad++ uses but pretty much everything else (including on KDE, GNOME, most X11 toolkits, etc) uses the same or similar shortcuts and keys as Notepad++ so who came first is moot, it is what i am used to that matters
Then don't use it. For sure regular notepad works fine for quick text edit. The use case for notepad++ is for when you want to do more than that. I, for example, frequently have to do a bunch of more complicated things to plain text files and notepad++ works great for those where notepad has no chance.
Never had this issues for notepad++.
For text it's fine.
- open a file for editing, realize you needed admin rights, npp allows you to relaunch with escalation and keeping the change in memory
- find all gives you a list of items, a count of them, and quick preview of each
- supports the editorconfig format, so inherits rules you've designed for your other IDEs
- colors
- allows tail -f (the eye icon)
- can be extended with plugins (unlike notepad) although the out of the box works well enough for most (unlike vsc)
- less bloated than electron apps, when comparing with any vscode setup you would use for larger developments
- tracks which open files have had a change, lets you choose if you want to reload the file (update contents displayed without reopening the app) or not (helps you save what you're seeing before verifying what might have replaced it)
- lets you see and change encoding very easily
There's more, but I just picked a few things I find useful every day when I need to deal with many windows machines at a midsized company.
The problem is that this can make it ambiguous whether edits have been saved to the file or not and even someone reopening the file to verify that they remembered to save the information will be fooled into thinking its there.
> As a positive note, the default text editor Notepad is nice and lightweight, a good piece of software.
Unfortunately, they screwed it up with Windows 11. And apparently they are doubling down on this.
[1] https://sebastiano.tronto.net/blog/2023-01-28-windows-deskto...
I understand why people would like it, but there are bugs in different places and it wastes more time for me having tabs when some very good workflows involve having numerous distinct instances of Notepad on different parts of the monitors instead.
In a way where it was absolutely perfect for the longest time.
It still works like that but combined with autosave you really have to check a lot to make sure the file is not already open in another instance or different tab lots of times.
Or your previous message(s) pops up every time you open Notepad days or weeks later.
Even though for like 40 years when you opened a new instance of Notepad, you could reliably expect a blank text window.
And when you double-click on a TXT file, you want that file to open without having some other text on some other tab that came from somewhere else you might not remember that well.
So it's like it has Recall already built in, the AI has not even been injected yet, and it autosaves everything you type now by default.
No resemblance to a keyboard logger or anything like that, nothing to see here, nope, au contraire.
I guess that's why they're going to call the next level Rewrite.
I can't wait, in just like the last year, for the first time ever it's already way less usable than in W9x, but what can you expect anyway?
it improves the usefulness of previous notepad, which was clunky to use for lack of those features and prone to data loss (no autosave, duh), which would actually make the old notepad almost useless. it improves it so much, it's probably the easiest way to quicky note something, and be sure that it won't go anywhere.
it's just the right amount of actually useful features that makes it so much more usable. and lack of those features would just immediately prompt one to look elsewhere for something that has those (like notepads, which is pretty good as well). some other editors might not be as quick and not even as good at autosaving and actually keeping stuff. (like sublime, which would lose sessions and data in them with absurd regularity, which hasn't happened once in a year of use of notepad (sure, not saving manually is bad, but having functionality just not work and fail with regularity is worse)
Inside my IDE that's not a problem because my software projects are under version control and I can easily revert unwanted changes, but for general files somewhere on my hard disk… hm.
Not for me. Tabs and autosave are features I absolutely don't want in Notepad. The entire value of Notepad to me is that it's simple and basic. The tabs are irritating, but at least I can pretend the tab bar doesn't exist (although I wish I could hide it), and autosave as well as restoring the last document can be disabled.
But even having to start configuring Notepad to restore some of what makes it valuable to me reduces its utility. There is great value in having a bare-bones text editor. In those cases where more features are desired, using a more featureful editor is possible. That's what I do.
All that said, there are plenty of simple editors out there that I can use instead, so it's not really an earth-shaking deal. It's just a little sad to me. Notepad had managed to maintain its value proposition and avoid feature creep for a very long time. I guess all good things come to an end eventually.
Microsoft has absolutely no concept of the value that anyone gets out of anything they make. The one and only question they seem capable of asking is "how can we monetize this?"
They really pulled out the monkey's paw when I wished for tabs.
I assume most users are just full screen, list view-ing it though instead of the large icon view.
I personally don't find tabs useful at all, but I don't really hate them. Well, I wouldn't hate them if more applications would avoid showing the tab bar if there was only one tab showing. I get annoyed by the waste of space that provides to those of us who will never use the tabs.
(im not sure if you can do that on windows actually)
There has, for a number of years, been a move away from Windows to macOS and Linux for devs. I suspect this will start to accelerate because people don't want tools that are obnoxiously omnipresent.
Carpenters have various ways to keep their most used tools at hand, but you don't see them wearing a charm bracelet of every tool they need.
These are people who are missing valuable business insights or who are working on novel solutions and include many developers. Those are the ones who will struggle with relevance going forward.
Equally, large corporations are at significant risk if the productivity of a single person increases further. If you look at the game industry, indie games are running circles around the AAA games, but this is limited to exceptional individuals or teams. Make more people individually exceptional and it's going to be real hard for big companies to eat.
I wish it were that simple, but I feel for this to be true then consumers would need to want it.
In reality it gives them plausible deniability for increased surveillance, control, and extracting more value from customers without their consent.
Obviously there will be winners and losers and it will shake out -- personally I can't imagine using notepad for more than pasting arbitrary text and it seems like the least features is the best -- but bonafide text tools without AI in 2024 are crippling.
It may be convenient but more than once just replaced the time I needed to write my code by time fine tuning the prompt because the AI didn’t quite got what I wanted.
On top of that I must review foreign code. That’s harder than code I already know.
And on top of that the end result lacks the feeling of accomplishment in solving a problem because it wasn’t me who wrote it.
I‘m degraded to some kind customer of the AI.
Assembly line workers are said to be alienated from the product they produce, I guess the same will happen for AI users.
We overestimate the short term effects and underestimate the long term effects (Amara's law). We're currently in the trough of disillusionment where people are running around saying that AI failed, was overblown, etc, while people like me are working with corporations to completely change how they operate, to an outrageous efficiency boost. Our world is going to look very different in a decade.
>It may be convenient but more than once just replaced the time I needed to write my code by time fine tuning the prompt because the AI didn’t quite got what I wanted
Most software developers spend very little of their time actually "coding", and most of their time investigating, understanding, comparing, and so on. I have never used AI for "production" code -- I never copy/paste something into my code -- but dozens of times a day I do use it to get rough outlines, investigate libraries and their use, and most importantly to get heuristics on paths to take in the code I do write. It has proven absolutely invaluable to me and I can't imagine not having it as an accelerator now.
I agree with this. I just seriously doubt that it's going to look better because of it. I suspect the opposite.
Differentiating, sure. Extraordinarily powerful? I disagree (outside of certain specific niches).
How does this explain the fact that people don't want AI. Just having AI in your product description makes people hate your product (https://www.techspot.com/news/104122-study-finds-including-a...)
As soon as AI is added to anything people immediately start googling how to disable it (including when google added AI)
They compare "AI" to "New Technology", and there was a mild preference for the phrase "New Technology". Casting that as "hating" it is a bit of a misrepresentation. Further "AI" as a general term is mysterious and unknown. One of their examples was an "AI-Powered TV"...like, what does that even mean? Or an "AI-powered financial service". They sound terrible.
>As soon as AI is added to anything people immediately start googling how to disable it
Okay? Some people dislike almost everything new or different. Most people don't. If every major company is busy trying to get in front of AI, maybe it isn't quite the big "makes everyone hate it!" thing you imagine it is, no?
The ugly is that it's a self-reported poll, but it's a well run self-reported poll, with a large effect, and good statistical relevance.
The actual article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2...
Putting an amorphous "AI-powered" on an imaginary product is nonsensical, and doesn't carry over to the conclusion that "people hate AI". Yes, I would be wary of a "AI-powered coffee maker" or an "AI-powered toothbrush" because that just sounds like nonsense. But there are a lot of places where people already understand the value proposition, and the more people experience it, the more they demand it and it becomes entry stakes.
Just the most trivial example: one of my children has a habit of sending thoughts as a long series of texts. One thought split over a dozen texts. The "AI-powered" summarization of notifications in iOS 18.2 is absolutely brilliant for those times I can only glance, looking at it in detail when the situation avails. Thus far it has been 100% accurate and profoundly useful. That's the most tosser, simplistic example of many, many ways AI has added to my life.
Considering how fanatical Apple users can be about literally anything Apple throws at them they were not excited about AI
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/25-of-smartphone-owners-don...
> Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, and all of the other big companies as well! They're doomed!
Many of them are certainly in a bit of trouble because they've poured obscene amounts of money into AI and it really hasn't turned into anything people really want. They keep forcing AI at people in every product they can because they're hoping that eventually something will stick and people will fawn over it, but so far people just haven't found AI to be all that useful, they don't trust it (https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2023/06/05/in-ai-w...) and they have privacy concerns (with good reason).
It's great that you've found it useful. I know a few people who get some value out of it, even if only as a toy, but there's no killer app for AI certainly nothing that justifies the insane costs that went into it. Most of the time it's just getting in people's way and it's largely been ignored by the public (https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/artificial-inte...)
No True Scotsman all over here. Where people embrace and adopt AI, it isn't real. But a million incredibly dumb sociology surveys of nebulous, imaginary things are super convincing.
>Many of them are certainly in a bit of trouble
Literally none of them are "in trouble". I mean, Google has kind of underperformed and is behind the ball, but absolutely none of them have retreated at all.
Seriously, this whole discussion is hilarious. Every single major company is dumping enormous efforts into AI, redoubling and redoubling again their commitment based upon market analysis and what they've seen. If you counter this by pointing at some asinine college survey of fantasy products with absurd titles, you might be deluding yourself.
I also know what I see around me. Every time a search engine or social media site or OS pushes an AI feature I see people coming to me asking if I know how to turn it off. Tips like adding -"ai" -"stable diffusion" -"midjourney" -"prompt hunt" -"open art" to searches have spread to everyone I know.
You're right that Google and Microsoft would have better numbers than I do and maybe it's better to trust the hype-train fed to us by the multi-billion dollar corporations who have massive sunk costs to justify to their shareholders, over glorified internet surveys. I'm not even saying that AI can't ever become wildly popular, but I know that nobody around me is impressed or even optimistic about AI, most everyone wants to get away from it, and that includes the stereotypical grandmother types who genuinely want the tech they interact with to be easier to use and the the stereotypical tech/nerd types who want it to be more powerful. That's not a very good sign.
Also, let's not pretend that those "fantasy products with absurd titles" aren't representative of the kind of absurd products we've all seen "AI" slapped onto.
(and honestly, I think the only data most people in the market are basing their decision off is 'chatGPT got a million users in 5 days'. But then, their monthly site visits are now down more than 90% from their peak. I think there is value in AI in general, but it's very over-hyped and there's a lot of quite frankly crap integrations which provide little to negative value)
In your opinion. Others will have entirely different opinions.
Yes, you can use Ctrl+alt+v but not all applications support it, and not all applications that do consistently respect it.
The windows clipboard is a functional mess and getting worse.
whtsthmttrmn left the following comment, but then deleted it-
"I know this is rude to say, but I feel you weren't too skilled before LLMs became a household term."
This is such a howler that I am going to indirectly reply to them here because this is a position that comes up constantly as some sort of rather strange defensive posture: A Luddist "If you aren't dismissive of them, clearly you must be mediocre. Look at my world-weary cynicism that makes me elite"
I've worked in software development for just shy of three decades. I have been a lead engineer or organization-wide architect for multiple medium to large organizations. I was a "senior engineer" at 23 for an industrial controls company. I have always been the guy when it comes to coding challenges or choices at every single organization I've worked at. I've done embedded development, did interactive web applications before almost anyone, have published papers and magazine articles, and have an extremely rich resume across many languages and platforms, with a long history of wins.
Yeah, I'm pretty good at this stuff. And I find "AI" extremely useful to my life. I have subscriptions across multiple products, and at this moment am building a Jina v3 embedding system for an insurance company.
Sneering and acting dismissive isn't going to make it not the game changer that it is. It's coming and you can't stuff your head into sand. Well...you can, but you're just assuring your upcoming unemployment.
In fact let me turn this completely around and say that only the truly mediocre are riding this Luddism train. In an average day I'm working across a half dozen different programming languages, multiple platforms, many endpoints and toolings, and operations and mathematics that I constantly have to refresh myself on. If I was doing copy/pasta template code all day in a tiny little niche I probably wouldn't find LLMs useful. But I don't, so I do.
Downvotetards need to understand this harder to break out of their funk. Criminally underrated comment, thank you and I wish I could give you more karma.
They are truly data leeches trying to lap at any cut you might have for a bit of tasty data.
What did they do this time?
In the stupidest twist of fate, you cannot open Outlook offline, at all. There is no concept of "offline" in the New Outlook. I assume this is Microsoft forcing away the issues of the past of 50+GB OST files by making Outlook a glorified webmail client instead.
Oh, and Microsoft Teams? You can open that offline and it's got a full cached experience. Innovation at its finest!
20231110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38217457 Microsoft steals access data: Beware of the new Outlook (German) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38219568 dupe/English)
20231109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38212453 Windows 11 Update 23H2 is stealing users' IMAP credentials
> the new Outlook is a thin wrapper around the cloud version, so the IMAP sync happens in the cloud, not locally
Visual Studio and VSCode have also become infested with little Copilot icons.
It still surprises me to have shows stopping bugs with it, In THE first party IDE, in Windows, using pure .NET and other microsoft tooling
I couldn't describe a more perfectly vacuum'ed spherical cow, and still, copilot dies randomly even after they have acknowledged the problem and made some fixes
Though some applications also benefit from app-specific integration on top of that.
The reason macOS can do this is because a large majority of apps are either native AppKit or otherwise hook into the system text facilities (which is why text services work in text fields in Chrome and Firefox for example).
Microsoft really don't know what they're doing. They're trying to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks without thinking of any externalities such as people getting pissed off and leaving to other platforms.
Third option: Put it in its own app. I'll decide how I want it to "help".
AI is best integrated at the application level because the application developers are best suited to tune the algorithm and determine which pieces of context are most relevant.
A lot of our opinions on AI (like the one you just conveyed) stems from now nascent the design thinking around AI truly is. Like early internet, I suspect 10 years from now the UX of these tools will be much more mature. There'll likely always be a need for what ChatGPT has now, but these do feel like OS features.
The underlying files are still just plain text and if it's not .md (or whatever other extensions may make sense) it's not rendered.
Seriously, no one writes with Notepad. It's just for quick copy-paste text manipulation. That's it. No need for gen-AI.
I used Notepad to make simple HTML pages back in 1995 - maybe, two dozen lines of "<h1>" and "<blink>". That's the most text I've ever written in Notepad.
I write musings, short stories, song lyrics, etc. and keep an archive of all these text files to reflect on later. Sometimes I write notes and letters to my future self.
All notepad.
[0]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-update-i...
why does Windows take 2 minutes to decide what updates to install, then 45 minutes to install them when Debian on the same machine can do both in under 30 seconds?
let me tell you a story...
It was supposedly worth all the power expenditure, because changing the world needed energy. Now we see where we are.
I'm inside this "newfangled AI thing". There are groups which create value, but they create value for everybody. The humans and the nature in general, and they use AI for scientific ends. Medical image processing, ecosystem monitoring, etc. etc.
Letting bots loose on the internet, letting them consume what they say and making them answer "Sauce is a food taste enhancer, and dressing is used to keep wounds clean while allowing them to heal. A standard serving of a dressing is two spoons".
Edit: although yes I do agree that the 'value' part is tricky. If internet spam can generate more 'value' for some people than doing science, then when intelligence is cheap we are in for a rough time.
Also, I'm very aware that there are many smaller models in production which can run real-time with negligible power and memory requirements (i.e. see human/animal detection models in mirrorless cameras, esp. Sony and Fuji).
However, to be honest I didn't see the same research on LLMs yet. Can you share if you have any, because I'd be glad to read them.
Lastly, I'm aware that AI is not something only covers object detection, NLP, etc. You can create very useful and light AI systems for many problems, but how LLMs pumped with that unstopping hype machine bothers me a lot.
I’ve yet to hear any good use cases for crypto, and I’ve been asking for years on here. Meanwhile there are a bunch of AI tools out there that are working and helping.
However, if we narrow what AI is to LLMs, we have a stochastic parrot which needs to be fed the world literally to enable it to create semi-coherent sentences about something being asked. More importantly, what that parrot says doesn't have to be true, it can't be guaranteed to be true, and can't be verified about its accuracy about its slop.
And you spend gigawatts of power just to train this thing which selects and prints words based on probability and some randomness.
That doesn't solve any problems.
Those "stochastic parrots" have still proven that they are immensely useful. You might not personally find value out of coding assistants, but many many people do (as an example). People are (allegedly) turning to LLM's rather than StackOverflow for help [0]. They work well for boilerplate where you're an SME and able to validate the output - I can review 10x the amount of code I can write for example. They work (remarkably) well for summarising input text. An example - I semi occasionally (3-4x per year) have to deal with a few hundred GB of audio files that need cleanup. The cleanup tasks are "run FFMPEG with parameters", except I can not ever remember the parameters (they're different for different things). I can: read https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html or I can ask ChatGPT to write a script to clip the silence and add a 0.5 second intro fade to every file in a specified folder, and the entire task is done before I've even thought about it. I get to focus on what I want to, rather than munging data around.
If you expand your definition from LLMs to Transformers, then you get Whisper as a stand out example of something awesome. There's definitely negatives, but things like Diffusion are being used outside of image generation for drug discovery. We're not going to yolo AI generated drugs into human testing, but we can save an awful lot of screwing around to find something viable.
> And you spend gigawatts of power just to train this thing which selects and prints words based on probability and some randomness. > That doesn't solve any problems.
I disagree, it does solve problems. A very fair question to ask is "is it worth the cost" and I would agree that it's not worth the cost. That doesn't mean it doesn't solve real problems.
[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387278/has-stack-ex...
People are spending all that money training because they are trying to fix the problems you're complaining about, and this includes fixing the power consumption problem. If we can create 3B parameter models that have capabilities on par with today's 405B parameter models, that's worth spending a lot of energy training. But nobody knows what is possible, so they have to try. I feel like you're basically arguing nobody should try because you don't believe they will ever improve, but that seems contradicted by the general trajectory of how things have been working the past decade. More resources spent on training means more efficient and useful models.
Only if you ignore the fact that a database (in traditional sense) doesn't solve the problem of decentralized peer to peer payments, which is the key differentiator of cryptocurrencies.
> I’ve yet to hear any good use cases for crypto, and I’ve been asking for years on here.
If you've been asking for years, I'm sure that someone, at some point, has told you about crypto's censorship resistance and international payments in places that are poorly served by the banking system for a variety of reasons.
Would you like to hear more or have you already dismissed these as "not good use cases"? It would be nice to differentiate between use cases that don't apply to you personally, and use cases that don't apply to anyone.
And the point that the useful cases cede to make a useful product. The thing that is a _feature_ of a cryptocurrency is why people don't use it. I've had this debate dozens of times on here.
> If you've been asking for years, I'm sure that someone, at some point, has told you about crypto's censorship resistance and international payments in places that are poorly served by the banking system for a variety of reasons.
You know what else solves that? Cash and Western Union. And it has done for a long, long time.
People do, in fact, use them. Is it a popular payment method in western countries? No, but do some people use it? Yes, they do.
For privileged people, decentralization is usually a serious flaw. For others, it's an extremely important characteristic that lets them transact at all. The world isn't black and white, and people have use cases that are different from yours.
You're being self-centered, and that's okay, but perhaps you should factor it into your mental model before making sweeping statements in front of a global audience.
> You know what else solves that? Cash and Western Union. And it has done for a long, long time.
Not nearly as well, or there wouldn't be anyone using cryptocurrencies for that purpose.
You could make identical boring, bad-faith arguments about AI products. I think 99.99% of all "AI" products available today are completely useless - to me - but I don't go around proclaiming that all of AI is completely useless, and that all of its problem areas are better solved by statistics and "if" statements.
Don't mistake your own privilege, ignorance, and lack of imagination with the lack of real-world applications.
> You're being self-centered, and that's okay, but perhaps you should factor it into your mental model before making sweeping statements in front of a global audience.
> but I don't go around proclaiming that all of AI is completely useless, and that all of its problem areas are better solved by statistics and "if" statements.
> Don't mistake your own privilege, ignorance, and lack of imagination with the lack of real-world applications.
If you can't make your point without making sniping attacks about my character, then this isn't a conversation I want to continue having.
> For privileged people,
Privileged person is anyone living in a western country who hasn't had to deal with censorship. I consider myself to be a privileged person in that regard. That's not an attack on anyone's character.
> You're being self-centered
That's anyone who fails to consider use cases other than their own. I wasn't speaking to your character, It was a description of your reply, not your character, because it contained sweeping statements that only apply to certain groups of people.
> but I don't go around proclaiming that all of AI is completely useless, and that all of its problem areas are better solved by statistics and "if" statements.
That's not an attack on anyone?
> Don't mistake your own privilege, ignorance, and lack of imagination with the lack of real-world applications.
I've explained that privilege isn't an attack on anyone's character. As for the rest, sorry, but which words am I supposed to use when someone denies that a problem is real (which fair enough, I'll elaborate), later admits that there are other services that solve the same problem, but they still want to claim that there are no problems that the obscure product is solving, despite that product having real-world users who are using it for that exact problem?
AI is already implemented into businesses in various ways. Even if it’s not done so official you still have loads of employees pouring company secrets into chatGPT and Claude because they work.
It is certainly reasonable to suspect that the scale of investments (in trillions of dollars) don't match the scale of the opportunity. But it's a bit silly to pretend that no one is getting any value out of this.
At the end of the day, data centers are 2% of energy use, according to the IEA. That's trending up, but even in couple of years, data center stuff is mostly going to be typical cloud stuff, then crypto, and then a fraction for AI.
It would be order of magnitude more efficient to send couriers with cash to pay for those instead.
Never, in just 2-3 months we will have much, much bigger problems
I’m very sceptical about all these AI announcements but text editing is case where I think this “AI” stuff can actually be used for good.
Anyway, I use TextEdit in plain text and autocomplete, autocorrect and spellcheck all work just fine, as they work in every text box in macOS. That Windows' Notepad got some of that just in 2024[1] is bonkers…
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/8/24194047/microsoft-notepad...
I assume this was the 1:1 correlated w/ the deprecation/removal of wordpad, as both were shipped everywhere prior.
On the other - the whole appeal of notepad was that it was a barebones text editor with none of that fluff (aka - it's a text editor, not a word processor or IDE).
MS has a large number of alternatives for the folks who wanted them.
When I opened Notepad - it's explicitly because I don't want the machine trying to tell me what I entered is wrong, or fix it. I just want a big dumb textbox for my file.
---
Basically - If you wanted those features you're looking for MS Word or Wordpad.
But MS discontinued Wordpad, and now they seem intent on trying to turn Notepad into Wordpad 2.0.
My prediction is this will not work well, since it directly competes with Office, and is not what the legacy users of notepad want.
But hey... a text editor is an easy place to shove text based AI, and cool shiny new thing of the year means some exec can claim to be shoving novel solutions into prod and bump up AI usage.
No no, the choices are "Enable" and "Maybe later"
Whenever I go grocery shopping it always takes me quite a while to decide which rice is worth my hard earned money and which isn't, especially because some rice makes my tiny rice cooker to start foaming all over.
Now they're uplifting Notepad.
Perhaps this will create room for a Notepad--.
And arguably Windows 10 adding in the emoji IME when you hit WindowsKey + .
A magazine would be an improvement. I worked in a place where the owners were very susceptible to airport billboard ads.
Every time they came back from a trip, we would brace for change.
It scares me every time because they wouldn't be splashing out the big bucks for those billboards if they weren't effective, and I absolutely don't want the military (or any other entity engaging in major expenditures) to be making those decisions based on billboards.
This explains why airports are entirely covered in ads that seem to be aimed at C-level execs only (nobody else gives a shit).
Also with Gaia it feels like very single year they just have to tweak and change the interface to the point where nothing is easy or intuitive anymore. It's like designers need to justify their jobs so they just keep making change on top of change and departing from what made sense, just to make changes, just to be doing something.
better is the enemy of good. /s
It depends on the company.
If you work for a hyper-scale tech company that only cares about money money money, then yeah -- nobody's getting promoted for improving core functionality.
But I've worked at several companies where that sort of thing is not only rewarded, but celebrated. One was a factory. Another was healthcare. Tech is the aberation, but on HN we pretend that it's normal and good.
I get your complaint in general, but it does not seem like this is a good example of throwing random unrelated stuff in.
If I want to do writing I'll use one of the 6 tools on my PC more suited to that task.
It's _also_ useful in my apps dedicated to writing and even the text areas of browsers. I think it's all about implementation though, Apple's writing tools are quietly buried in the context menu for most text inputs. Microsoft has a tendency to be pushy and in your face about their latest AI offerings like shoving it into the Start Menu, or making it a prominent and visible element of their UI (Copilot in VSCode, even when you're not a subscriber) and the Verge's screenshot isn't enough for me to judge this by.
WordPad would be a much better place to shove in a complex feature like AI.
In these cases, the best tool is the one you've already got.
I use notepad to write quick notes or to strip formating from text.
(and i hate with a passion when a program tries to be "smart" - hello clippy)
I don't believe it's useful. I don't think Notepad is a "writing app." And I'm fairly certain not a single user in the history of ever has asked for this.
Maybe taking a step back here, what core functionality is missing from notepad? I see this as a fairly feature complete tool for a core set of behaviors already.
The possibilities are infinite.
Instead of realising that people don't want these features and actively disable or avoid them, they've come to the conclusion that they're not being used because they're prominent enough, so they are being put everywhere so they cannot be missed.
Windows is no longer a Personal Computer Operating System that you can just use.
And people wonder why some of us were so insistent on not allowing this garbage pile of technologies to be open labeled 'AI.'
I've seen several essays/posts describing "AI Fatigue" recently.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
At least based on search volume, we're still on an upward swing.
"Just switch" is great for home machines, but for most, that's not an option at work.
On my personal computers, that's a different story.
https://sourceforge.net/p/notepad2/code/HEAD/tree/ for source code.
In some cases that'll remove something that was always a questionable waste of time, and in other cases it'll represent a real loss of information.
Microsoft's "CoPilot PCs" scheme places a lot of emphasis on the hardware being powerful enough for locally-processed "AI" features and isn't about offloading everything (I suspect because they're starting to acknowledge that not everyone has a highly-reliable multi-megabit Internet connection).
The difference between Google and Microsoft is that Google have no problems just killing of things that doesn't perform to their standard (which is bad in it's own way). With Microsoft backwards compatibility is everything, so once something is in Windows, it says around for a very, very, long time.
AI assistance in writing isn't a bad idea, but maybe not in Notepad. I know that this isn't they way modern Microsoft wants to do things, but exposing an API that would allow 3rd. party vendors to AI support in Windows seems like a more sensible approach. Except they'd probably have to make it accessible from Javascript to make anyone use it.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_automobile
That is why outside Microsoft own employees, no one else cares anylonger about it, after the whole mess that keeps going on.
[0] https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/toilet-camera-uses-a...
[1] https://today.duke.edu/2021/05/smart-toilet-uses-artificial-... (from before the LLM hype cycle, even!)
Many times, I just paste my copied text in Notepad to strip the formatting + special characters and close it after re-copying the data. Pretty efficient.
Now that I open Notepad.. all my previous tabs are open asking me to close them one after the other (extra click on not so save the file) :@ so annoying
Edit: Oh. It does too.
The value of notepad and paint to me are that they are simple and reasonably minimalistic. Adding features makes those sorts of programs less useful to me.
Also, I can't trust any software that incorporates AI because I can't trust that my usage of that software won't be used to train AI.
So this move means that I won't be using these tools anymore. Not that it matters to anyone aside from myself, of course. It's also not a huge deal to me -- I'll just start using different tools that still meet my needs.
Every single built-in "basic" text editor of every single distro comes with syntax highlighting, line numbers, tabs, etc.
I just want a rectangle to type text into.
Notepad is turning into what Linux text editors already are: too complicated.
I only consider graphical applications to be applications.
The first user shouldn't be the programmer :-)
Neat, but there a bunch of really basic operations they could of added to make it an actual daily driver.
Imagine if instead of Windows Recall being installed and available automatically on machines, they just added Recall as an optional downloadable add-on via the App Store... I don't think it would have received nearly as much backlash.
Why would anyone use this over Ubuntu? They need something to differentiate themselves from the inexorable creep of free software.
There will always be valid reasons to use Windows over Ubuntu.
Granted, the drivers point is a good one.
Technically correct but misleading. It's connected to Canonical, a multi-billion dollar private company limited by shares.
So far the only feature I've seen them talking about for the NPUs on the Copilot PCs is image generation in Paint. Something feels off here.
Google+ required having a public profile with a real name. Gmail/calendar/docs users who were tricked into activating plus, but didn't comply, got banned or forced to make a real name profile. Merging of Hangouts, Orkut, Blogger, YouTube comments, and Play Store reviews into the same "social network" made no sense. It was a blatant move to inflate user numbers, at cost of annoying users of the other services, who didn't sign up for a me-too Facebook. That was the first time when Google became uncool.
Microsoft remembers Bill Gates's mantra that piracy at the individual level actually gets you an audience who will then sign on the dotted line once the big-money deals -- enterprise license contracts -- need to be made.
What?!
What about AI PC, NPUs in e.g Lunar Lake and in general AI@Edge?
If this was in the context menu, along with Cut, Copy and Paste, you would be getting AI integration for free on every application that renders a text box widget.
I mean... spell check is implemented like that right? They seem to be pitching this as a way to correct or improve text so why not build on that?
I'm not even a fan of this sort of generative AI "type whatever" tool, or I at least find it to normally be inadequate. But if they're going to do this AI pivot in Windows anyway, the choice of implementation here seems short sighted.
Having it be just inside notepad or specific apps means you also need to train people to change their workflows or context switch to use it.