Microsoft dumps AI into Notepad as 'Copilot all the things' mania takes hold | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft dumps AI into Notepad as 'Copilot all the things' mania takes hold

theregister.com

28 pointsrntn24 comments

It should a case study how every tech company eventually ruin the experience of their platforms, and how Apple never does. You can fault Apple for not innovating enough, but what they never do is 'shoving in the face', which is endemic to companies like Microsoft. I had to use Windows to test my app's Windows build [1], it's crazy how many random things are there, with no obvious way to remove them.

There's donkey right in the corner of the bottom search bar reminding me that today is "World Donkey Day". On the other corner is some random info clicking, which I get breaking news, weather, and stock-related info. I just begin using the system, when there's popup about co-pilot chat or something. Search is almost useless as it seems more interested in returning bing-related results vs what's actually on my computer.

Everything seems to be designed to maximize 'user engagement' of products that are hot right now, and what upper management seems to be interested in. The news is no surprise as it seems everyone in the company is rallying behind AI efforts without paying heed to user experience.

[1]: https://textquery.app/

> Everything seems to be designed to maximize 'user engagement'

That's precisely what it is. Pointless middle managers will do anything to juice their engagement numbers and get that promotion. Microsoft as a whole considers customers a resource to be exploited. The subjective experience of users is not even a point of discussion because metrics "prove" that users love copilot popups every fifteen seconds.

Maybe Apple hasn't shoved AI into all their applications yet, but that doesn't change the fact that 'Apple Intelligence' uses a very meaningful chunk of the non-upgradable storage on their current laptop + mobile OSes and cannot be uninstalled even if you disable every AI feature you're allowed to.

I worry that this change increases the attack surface of what was a very safe application for viewing untrusted files. Of course, I worried about that at the release of 'new' notepad too...

Use Sublime Text. It's much better and while there are AI plugins (because of course there fucking are) it isn't directly integrated into the core application.

I don't get the point of things like changing the tone of something with AI in Notepad. If I'm going to write something formal, I'm probably not writing it in Notepad.

What I'd kind of like with something like Copilot in a text editor, assuming it's going to be included in the first place, would be recommendations to fix formatting or a source to help find issues in config files.

It harkens back to the days of Clippy...

"It looks like you're trying to write a suicide note. Would you like help with that?"

But now it's going to be AI transforming "remove all files from the storeroom" into "rm -r *"...

in a standard windows installation, notepad and wordpad were the only tools for writing. Wordpad was the one, where formatting could be set. But it reached its EoL and is removed from new versions of windows. Notepad was upgraded with tabs for multifile edit. So, it makes sense, as a lot of people do not buy ms office or know about the other software like open office. ... May be its to complicated for them. So, having copilot in notepad solves two pains:

- giving the ones, who do not care for formatting, copilot in the only writing programm in windows/standard.

- allowing MSFT to push their copilot to users in an effort to establish it and to force users into an MSFT-Account

I don't like it either..

Wow it defaulted to "enabled" for me but wasn't working because I'm not signed in with a Microsoft account. I didn't even notice it was on.

I use notepad as a copy/paste tool to strip formatting and make minor edits. I paste a lot of sensitive information there; I already had to turn off the "restore content on reopen" feature, this is disturbing that I am not sure whether having Copilot enabled could possibly send content to an LLM unprompted (maybe it's just menu-driven but I don't know...)

I would like to recommend notepad++. It does the job and I especially like it for multi-document and the other feautures like regex replace and plugins, etc...

https://notepad-plus-plus.org

I got out of Microsoft a very long time ago. Whatever nice things they had they are now activity. They seem to be following the current US Admin, except in tech.

Crazy times.

> mania takes hold

Sure, unlike the rest of the industry, which has taken a noticeably restrained approach to AI... But, oh, wait, this is El Reg, so it's all to be taken with a whole shaker full of salt.

Anyway, PSA time: if you're on Windows, and you dislike anything about the "New Notepad" experience (for me, the inexplicable approach to tab handling was the dealbreaker), here are the arduous steps required to get rid of it:

1. Find Notepad in your Start menu, right-click its icon, select Uninstall.

Yeah, I know... (FAQ: "Will this restore my precious notepad.exe to its previous functionality, which is wrapping the Win32 text edit control without any frills? Yes!")

I had to hack my windows with some shady regex i found in order to stop constant and forced updates because of things like this (although this is not a big deal but they add up and it's only a matter of time until they release an update with ads everywhere).

I just completely disagree with the philosophy of software being something that is constantly updated and changed (of course it needs updates but less is more here, instead of the usual CI/CD with daily production updates every day). We could have solid and reliable software that optimizes for stability, but that would cost companies more money so instead they allow themselves all the runway they need to fix and update as much as needed and they can cut costs around testing and engineering while using end users as their testers.

I'm definitely looking into Linux but unfortunately I do like Nvidia GPUs and I have concerns around that. Regardless, it's not tha I don't want to pay for an OS. MacOS is basically the best of both worlds, but I wish there was something like MacOS for PCs. I heard Valve is making a SteamOS, and I think that looks promising.

next time you can head to \Windows\System32\Tasks\Microsoft\Windows\UpdateOrchestrator and rename all the files* containing reboot in their name, or, move them to a backup folder and then create two new folders with exact the same name as the files and set their properties to read-only, so windows can't recreate the original files. And you're done. No more reboots except you want to. My actual uptime: 52:16:07:09 (d:h:m:s) -> Thank me later ;)

*(as I remember there are two files, Reboot_AC and Reboot_Battery)

I am going to stick with Notepad++

Will the AI madness ever end?

Is it dumb? Yes. Can you still use Notepad as Notepad? Also yes.

We'll all survive.

It is interesting that a giant like Microsoft got hoodwinked into paying billions for this technology and now has nothing better to do with it than jam it into notepad at the request of absolutely no one.

It's like writing on a wall that most of Hacker News just does not want to observe.

> has nothing better to do with it

This is pretty untrue, considering how much other stuff they're putting Copilot into.

Chances are a few people working on all the rest of the new stuff with Notepad thought it would be fun to add it, and managed to get it in. It probably didn't take much to add.

They're going to jam it into everything, Notepad is just low hanging fruit. Wait until AI is the universal interface for Windows and all Windows applications.

I find it pretty funny that despite Copilot being a chatbot through and through, the only way you cannot talk with "it" is through Teams.

Yes, I know you can set up your own Bot Framework identity that then brokers everything to a model. But one would think that they'd want people to be able to just chat with Copilot where folks chat with everyone else.

> the only way you cannot talk with "it" is through Teams

This is definitely a feature for Teams for all platforms I have Teams installed on.

On the Android app, there's a Copilot icon at the top right next to the search button. Pressing that takes me to a prompt to talk to Copilot.

On the Windows app, there's an icon in the left nav bar.

EDIT: Looking at thinking about it though, it would be nice to be able to say add copilot to a group chat and be able to @copilot or whatever within the room, have it respond, and have its response be shared with everyone like any other chat participant.

Must be disabled here using organizational policies then cause I see nothing of the sort. To be fair, I also did run into something like this with Outlook. With that I knew that there were integrations though, so I knew to search for it and could confirm it's disabled. Didn't occur to me to search for this regarding Teams, but it makes sense. Pretty strange though, cause we do have Copilot working in Edge, I use it all the time. And it's not the el cheapo free version.

Closely related, all this session management crap is what drives me personally insane, not the presence of AI. Might again be just the organizational policies making things fall apart though. But my expected experience would be to just log in to Windows, and have Copilot just working everywhere. Not log into Copilot in Edge, log into Copilot in VS Code, log into Copilot in (...). So annoying.

Yeah, my employer seems to have the mindset if we don't bother trying to standardize and enable AI tools people are just going to end up quietly using other tools in more questionable and far less DLP-compliant ways, so you might as well get ahead of it and say if you want to use AI tools here are the allowed ways and tools.

Microsoft seems to have pretty good DLP kind of tooling around Copilot.

And I do agree, I feel like Microsoft has regressed about linking sessions to your desktop session. If I'm already logged in on the desktop session just auth with that. Instead I have to login to all the various tools. Sure, maybe throw a "Log in with your account?" prompt or something to confirm I want to use it or re-auth a passkey or whatever, but annoying I need to resupply a password.

And that's not just some way IT has things configured, same kind of thing on my personal devices.

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