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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

This is the first time a corporation has spoiled a word for me.

"Copilot" is a term like any other and when I first heard the name, I thought it was an alright, if uninspired, choice.

Now I can't hear the word "Copilot" used in any context without having negative feelings due to Microsoft's saturation campaign.

Speaking of this, I also wonder about present and future people named "Claude", a mainstream name in some parts of the world.

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This happens all the time. Mercedes is a fairly common first name for girls in Spanish countries. Then, of course Alexa, etc.

Fair enough, although nobody thinks Mercedes cars will possibly replace/destroy humanity.

Please don't give them any ideas.

Although they definitely contributed to climate change through their cars so.. at least negatively impact humanity.

Yes, the people who bought the cars had nothing to do with it. It's the manufacturer's fault.

Nobody ever thought Copilot could replace/destroy humanity, it can barely butter its own toast.

No, but it was bound to replace everything that Microsoft touches, by virtue of having its buttons everywhere displacing everything else.

Thanks to MS stopping, the next Word is just not a huge COPILOT button in the middle to who you have to chat to write your stuff.

Mercedes was a name of an actual lady, a daughter of a businessman who brought the first Daimler-Benz cars to the market.

I wonder if there existed a real Alexa after whom the AI assistant was called.

Apparently not, though there seem to be two distinct stories about where it _does_ come from:

> Amazon developers chose the name Alexa because it has a hard consonant with the X, which helps it be recognized with higher precision. They have said the name is reminiscent of the Library of Alexandria, which was also used by Amazon Alexa Internet for the same reason.

I long believed a not-insignificant factor was that they had bought the trademark to alexa when they bought the company.

Perhaps try pronouncing it "Copy lot", in honor of how they were planning to harvest their training data by recording customers' screens.

Facetiously, of course.

> Speaking of this, I also wonder about present and future people named "Claude"

The % of people using Claude Code is minuscule compared to all the french speakers who use claude as a name, not everyone uses or cares or knows about AI coding agents.

Happens frequently. I can't hear tremendous anymore. Just considering ai I'm fed up with load bearing, wrinkle, catch...

It got to the point where I feel irrationally hostile to a message when it claims I'm right :).

Hey now, I love Claudish! That's my honest load bearing assessment that I'd like to flag.

You’re absolutely right

Even just the term AI is now so cancerous!

A bit unrelated to that thread but I love that clip from a debate where John McCarthy interjects: https://youtu.be/pyU9pm1hmYs?t=152

“Excuse me. I invented the term artificial intelligence. I invented it because we had to do something when we were trying to get money for a summer study in 1956, and I had a previous bad experience”

(The whole debate is interesting, I would recommend if you like that type of historical things)

"crypto"

How often were you using copilot before hand?

More often than I was using the words Gemini, Claude or Alexa.

Windows

Really? A word?!

It looks like this one flew over your heads. Would you like having it explained to you?

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