I’ve become quite good at paying just enough attention that I can jump in if anything important comes up, and meanwhile continuing to work. I don’t turn my camera on.

We stick to that format with minor variations:

1. Recap of the morning’s school run and dog walks
2. Update on everyone’s pets’ health
3. Update on peoples’ kids’ behaviour
4. Update on team members’ health and their families
5. Miscellaneous gripes
6. All the sports: what happened, what people think will happen, and details of particular players
7. Sports statistics in depth
8. Mutual accusations of breaking things
9. Defence against said accusations
10. Gripes about boss’s emails
11. Long, in-depth accounts from two team members of their last day’s work, minute by minute, with digressions into big-picture frustrations and grumbles about management, customers, etc.
12. Recounting of the history of these issues over the last 15 years or so.
13. Each person tells us that they’re working on the thing the kanban board says they’re working on, and that it will take them as long as it says on the board.
14. Holiday plans or accounts of past holidays
15. Goodbye
16. One guy jumps in with a 15-minute anecdote about taking his dog to the vet
17. Goodbye
18. Any further anecdotes about things people’s dogs ate, etc.
19. Goodbye.

Its supposed to take 10-15 minutes but it takes up to an hour, sometimes more. I usually tune in late and sometimes pretend I lost my internet connection halfway through.

The demands of hype.

Who hasn’t encountered that one jerk who builds only new code to impress management, and never maintains or fixes existing code? I think of them as proof-of-concept posers. They make things that look flashy, impress the execs, and barely work for a single use care, then dump all the bugs, maintenance and actual architecture on the other devs. LLMs are going to be a gift to these people and a pain for everyone who actually knows how to engineer things well. They’ll encourage this kind of shallow flashiness and make the maintenance problems worse, but the execs will be convinced that only the LLM posers are productive and everyone else is sitting idle.

Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but for several years and on several different machines I’ve found Linux just works, while Windows is an endless treadmill of frustration and brokenness.

I thought you made a good point. I have decades of experience and I find LLMs useful for the things you described.

Pee drinking is somewhat impressive, but can he eat shit and die?

Ooh, unemployment! How exciting! I love Microsoft now.

What even is the requirement? “Must be able to ask a chatbot to do stuff”?

“We were still required to find some ways to use AI. The one corporate AI integration that was available to us was the Copilot plugin to Microsoft Teams. So everyone was required to use that at least once a week. The director of engineering checked our usage and nagged about it frequently in team meetings.”

The managerial idiocy is astounding.

And it won’t be the rich that get hurt when the AI bubble bursts. It will be us.

I agree that they are useful for this. In fact, as a programmer I find them quite useful whenever I need a bit of a guided start on something that otherwise I’d have to trawl the internet to find. Once the LLM has given a pointer it’s easier to follow up with appropriate resources. And the LLM is useful for writing code when the code is predictable and you know reasonably precisely what you need, where the LLM really just saves you some typing and you know how to review it for correctness. Outside of these cases you have to be pretty careful how you use them.

But I don’t think LLMs are as useful a tool as the business people want them to be. Programming is unusual in that it involves very predictable patterns, and the aim is to find the most appropriate pattern for the task. And software documentation too follows very predictable patterns. Where an LLM has seen the exact same pattern many times, it will be good at producing it on demand. So programming and explaining software is a good use case for LLMs. But not many areas of activity are like this, and when you get out into all the nuance and complexity of other less formal domains, LLMs are so prone to slipping up that they’re much less useful.

I’ve tried getting LLMs to summarize notes for talks on complex topics, and they are not good at it. I’ve tried getting them to tidy documents and they’re not good at it. I’ve tried getting them to explain complex topics for someone who knows nothing, and they can be good at it but they can also be misleading, and you don’t know which one you’re getting unless you go to other sources you could have checked in the first place.

So I think they’re most useful for a quick orientation on a topic that points you to further sources, or for very highly formalized activities like programming. But they can’t be trusted for math or physics or law or medicine or literature or philosophy or complex decision making or psychology or any number of other areas.

It’s impressive, just not particularly useful, and certainly not something most people consider a priority.

Windows still takes forever to delete files, has a search indexer that makes laptops too hot to touch, steals focus while you’re typing in a password, takes much longer than Linux to open a web browser, turns apps white and “Not responding” for no apparent reason, has an ugly and slow Start menu that doesn’t foreground the things you want, pops up needless crap like stock tickers and news stories while you’re trying to get on with other things, sneakily turns on settings you deliberately turned off, and hassles you continually to agree to things you already said no to. And it spies on you.

Microsoft, if you’re looking to please users, those are all higher priorities for real users than any AI. But you’re not looking to please users, are you? Because Windows is for Microsoft, not for users.

The build quality justifies the price,

Doubt.

I expect they’re aware, but they want to earn a living. All of these dumb AI initiatives come from execs who never question that they know best and don’t give a crap how the devs feel.

I never have that kind of problem on Linux. I have random problems all the time on Windows, plus I have to fight a system that keeps trying to cajole or trick me into things I don’t want. These days, any mainstream Linux distro has far less friction for the user than Windows 11.

They trained it on the work of people like you.

Functionally it’s good and fast. Privacy-wise I would recommend at least encrypting the files before uploading. Cryptomator would help if your friend is willing to use it. VeraCrypt volumes also work, and they sync quickly because Dropbox is smart enough to only update the bits of the volume file that have changed.

If you’re looking for something similar but not US-based, pCloud is good and allows you to save the data in Europe. But encrypt your files there too.

It’s political censorship dressed up as protecting children, as usual. The Trump fascists have been deleting all kinds of information from government websites, and internet archives allow people to see what has been censored, including facts about climate change, Black history and economic trends.

Web archives preserve information the US Government has deleted, like reports on the economy, climate change, and Black history. In general they work against censorship of the internet. This is just another case of using “protecting the children” as a cudgel to kill politically inconvenient sources of information.