Outlook not so good… nailed that one too.

Inspired by your comment, I polled ChatGPT 5 direct and Copilot itself, and ChatGPT was smarter than the executive by saying it was a bad idea, while Copilot itself said it might be a bad idea, but it’s aligned with Microsoft’s vision, which may be more important, but ultimately seemed to have no idea if it was a good idea or bad idea…

So I guess ChatGPT at least is smarter than the MS CEO. Of course Copilot seemed primed to try to favor and vindicate Microsoft’s decision. I tried a more aggressive statement that it was stupid to try to get that ‘I agree with you by default’ and it still tried to soften the perspective in favor of Microsoft.

As a bonus, I asked if it would be a good idea to rename LibreOffice to LibreSidekick. It looked more like the ChatGPT 5 answer for Office to Copilot, saying it’s a dumb idea, until the end when it said unless it has an AI assistant like Microsoft Copilot, then it would be a good idea…

It’s really vague, and does warrant some specific examples…

I’d say if anything, they pretend some things are more peaceful than they are. Like sending the military in to capture a foreign leader being portrayed as simply “a military operation” rather than “act of war”. Emphasizing celebrations by Venezulan ex-pats.

The nominally socialist nations that receive media attention are generally truly not particularly peaceful, and the socialist nations that are pretty good peace wise are well known, but just too ‘boring’ to be in a ‘news’ cycle.

I suppose the point is that people can’t just take someone’s declaration of ‘socialism’ at face value, as there’s too many examples of malicious authoritarianism that claimed affinity to socialism as part of their rise to power. Not to say that capitalist nations are faring any better, just that the word ‘socialism’ when wielded as a brand isn’t to be trusted.

Ugh, the color choices for ‘former’ versus ‘socialist ruling party’ are impossible for color blind folks…

Yeah, absolutely nothing in the writing explained why he stuck with the emperor. I feel like the last thing he would have done based on his motivation to that point is stick with palpatine. Beyond being a psychopath, it doesn’t even make sense by those standards.

Empire strikes back set up a couple of plot twists that the series really couldn’t execute on. Nice in the movie since they got to leave it open ended, but bad for the series when they actually had to run with resolving those twists.

Also, he was the one who killed his wife.

Upon finding out that he was the one ultimately responsible, he went “nooooo” and I suppose went “well, as long as I’m in this cool suit, guess I’ll just keep doing the evil then”.

Frankly, I find his arc to be one of the least convincing “how a guy went evil and was redeemed” in fiction. Empire strikes back had the benefit of being able to leave it vague enough to leave it a potentially interesting turn, but when they actually had to delve into it, was pretty unfulfilling

Fun space action movies, but execution on the “twists” was not the strong point.

The reference is an example of a flippant sort of response of answering the request, but with something lacking the depth the person was asking about.

He probably doesn’t mind talking about the game broadly, but it can be a bit much for someone to be annoying about saying it should have been a different genre that they would have enjoyed. I suppose your question could be flipped around, why attend a panel discussing doom if you don’t really care for doom?

Sounds like a couple of randos, no one significant. The perspective is the interesting part, not the person expressing the perspective.

Oh phone trees are terrible, I refer exclusively to online self service. I suppose an LLM might be able to help a caller connect to the correct set of humans better than phone trees…

If I’m resorting to phone, it’s because I really really need a human. I know there still exist some very old people stuck calling… But if they can’t work your online portal, they won’t be able to work a phone tree either…

The robo-bullshit is great, if the thing has no nuance. Self checkout, paying bills, buying stuff online.

The things is those things are great because they are so predictable. LLM takes the predictability out. It’s also generally not allowed to do anything that the self service portal was not allowed to do, so you get stuck with a more imprecise interface instead of the nice, precise interface of a traditional portal, and no access to more nuanced help. It’s the worst of both worlds.

Yeah, have a new executive who managed a vaguely segment appropriate “hello world” with code gen and so regularly rants about why we should be paying human developers.

The biggest improvement on the user side was to stop trying to weigh the bagging area to prevent loss.

The newer machine vision based systems are less likely to screw up. “Unexpected item in bagging area” was an almost universal experience, nowadays I have only been flagged for human review once.

Also, one store I was at just lets you put your items under a camera without finding barcodes, and you just confirm the identified products.

Think the issue is either a self service portal that works in very predictable way (like the self checkout) or a human to deal with nuance.

To the extent an LLM might be useful, it’s likely blocked from doing so because the operator doesn’t trust it either.

The biggest annoyance is that the LLM support tends to more aggressively refuse to bring a human in.

So, Windows is harder to use you say. And “incompetent” users should stick to Linux?

That’s a take that would have been absurd many years ago. I personally am willing to do things the hard way for some benefit, so I have a Windows PC for gaming. But all my other systems are Linux systems, laptop, workstation, or embedded. However Windiws is supposed to be the easier choice.

I’ll even grant that Windows PITA is mostly not deliberate action by Microsoft. It’s mostly letting vendors be their crappy self and messing up the experience, with a bit of windows driver model incompatibilities breaking hardware support abandoned by vendor, but kept alive Linux side.

Main issue is the inconsistent drivers naturally included in Windows update and just how many things demand you install a weird vendor specific driver, with the steward of what should be a generic Winfows driver sometimes breaking things for other vendors, and/or neglecting the Windows update vintage of their driver.

Architecturally, the Windows driver model should be saner, but for most random devices I have better luck with Linux in how drivers are maintained and supported over time.

I found it relatable because just last night same thing happened in my windows boot, but all of a sudden it decided I had no wifi adapter, even though it worked fine in Linux and hadn’t broken in Windows before. I see it indicating an error in device manager, found a “guide” that specifically called out that device manager error that suggests rebooting the router, because people writing websites troubleshooting guides are morons. The driver model has some weird behaviors that make device behavior more convoluted.

In Linux, generally it either loads and works or it doesn’t and if it doesn’t, you absolutely need a fixed driver or the hardware has a problem. In Windows it can absolutely not work and you go through some weird things, end up with exact same driver and version as before but suddenly it actually works…

Considering a lot of the full YouTube videos are full of padding, taking over ten minutes to get to the point, I can understand why the shorts would have appeal.

Problem is one way or another people are being incentivized to target a specific runtime regardless of whether they have the material to fit.

Another facet of “renting” to your kid is that if they get divorced, the inlaw has no claim to the house, so it won’t get caught up on dividing the property. So it can be a subtle way of protecting your kid’s living arrangement without being overtly skeptical of the relationship.

Another phenomenon I’ve heard is buying a house and renting it until a kid comes of age to move into it, to give them a fair shot at reasonable housing in a market that just goes mad.

Well yeah, I would assume Steam would be a big priority for this scenario…