Microsoft insists Copilot+ PCs are 'empowering the future' – reality disagrees Microsoft suspects that a "transformative shift" is being driven in personal and enterprise computing by its Copilot+ PCs and an expanding Windows on Arm ecosystem. Copilot+ PCs? Customers just aren't buying it – yet READ MORE Enterprise customers clearly don't agree, or at least they didn't in January, when analysts spoke of …
... I search for how to disable it or otherwise make it go away.
I know the feeling. Lappie was getting pretty old (10+) so got new one. When it arrived, dd'ed it and put *nix on it. Smarty pants, right? Up to the point I tried to remap those Co-peelot keys... Left now with a couple of useless, function-less keys that don't let themselves be remapped. Are very intelligent. Push them, nothing happens. Nothing. Crickets. As usual with tech lately, turns out you pay more for less. And then we are not even going into the whole "whose your daddy" question...
Me too. This is exactly why Linux is necessary. Linux lets you do what YOU want. Instead of having Microsoft dictate what you do. Sick and tired of them forcing things I don't want on me. They do it with every new version of Windows and this is finally the breaking point. I've already switched multiple PCs over to Debian 13 and have no intention of ever upgrading to Windows 11. Microsoft has boulder sized balls thinking users will accept something like Recall. It is nothing but spyware.
I'll probably get downvoted to hell for saying this, but apparently Recall runs locally only.
But it does need extra storage space, RAM and the NPU chugging away constantly in the background to run OCR and object recognition on all the screenshots it takes so you can do text searches for stuff that may have been up on screen earlier.
The biggest reason for my total avoidance of anything from Microsoft on my retirement PC was their licencing nonsense. AI came a close second.
Does anyone remotely IT aware actually want this, ever-increasing, AI infection? I can see is an interest from MBA types who are just over their pride about their technical ignorance.
^^^^ This.
The same as bundling Crappilot with O365, they have to come up with a ruse which will put some sales in the "AI" bucket so they can puff it to the markets.
Unfortunately, people not wanting this shite is immaterial, it simply has to be done to justify the tens of billions that's gone down the AI drain. The next step will be to enshittify non-Crappilot W11 by taking out some feature everyone uses.
Yeah, that pretty well sums it up. AI is kind of a litmus test or canary in the coal mine kind of moment for free markets. If they still exist, AI companies will have to buy their data or license it and Recall will die as the anti-consumer cesspool it is. If not, well, then we know that we are a country controlled by megarich oligarchs.
Outfit let a lot of experienced developers go.
Then spent 1 entire week (3 different people) desperately trying to get a combination of ChatGPT and Copilot (and then Deepseek, Gemini) to setup a feed into 3rd parties systems
3rd party were also drinking the "AI" kool aid.
All they wanted to do was get the OAuth settings for a docker container from Google.
The transcripts are pure comedy gold with non existent parameters, completely bogus claims about docker, and a lot of quite dangerous scripting that needed to run as sudo.
I could have done it in 30 minutes, because I'd have to check the task.
3 people. 1 week to not do something that takes 30 minutes.
At another outfit leads have to report on number of PRs and lines of code added as a metric of productivity.
Since adoption of copilot, the metric has gone up. Upper management is very happy.
But changes break things other teams work on, don't follow the guidelines and introduce bugs.
The remaining experienced devs now spend their time firefighting and explaining why they take longer to deliver.
Chatter about leaving is common.
Goodhart’s Law:
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
That said, this was raised as stupid. Management was scratching their heads and said: "We need something to create reports off! Do you have better ideas?"
There was silence, because why would people do their job at fraction of their salary.
How about time on target? That's a classic.
Or maybe even some kind of issue count at [release window]?
Or why not something that actually lets you find and fix project issues, something like evidence-based scheduling to try to figure out where and what guesstimates go wrong?
Or how about defining a purpose for the report? That would probably answer two questions at once – both what and why.
I suppose making the c-suite understand that it's a non-linear and partially-creative process towards a goal that might not actually click together until at the very last second – so nothing measured along the way correlates to the final outcome – is a bit too much to ask of the poor souls…
Measurement is great and all, but how often do people misapply a measurement to tell a story it doesn't tell? It's like that old axiom about liars and statisticians. Data != Truth. Like, it's 73 degrees outside. There's a measurement, now is it hot or cold?
Is it humid? Is the sun shining? Is it raining? Is the wind blowing? Are you standing still or moving a lot? Is it °C or °F? Are you nervous or calm? Are you hairy? Fat? Wearing a coat or a swimsuit?
The human need to simplify creates a rather bizarre predisposition to over-use a single measure to make conclusions the measurement seldom actually supports by itself.
There is a booming business now in companies that specialize in fixing the 'code' your stupid LLM crapped out and it ran once on your dumb-ass CTO's machine for his exact data and now they want to deploy this pile of steaming feces.
So it's the usual C-level stuff: cut people who know what they're doing, tout the salary savings, then pay 3x as much in consulting fees to clean up your highly paid incompetence.
It's telling that the number of new GitHub repos created has been roughly flat for the last 3 years. If software engineers are massively more productive now vibe coding is replacing them, then... where is that productivity going? Since it isn't obviously appearing in the public domain. One might think this AI stuff is all a bit of a fad, at least in the LLM domain.
Microsoft has degenerated from a technology company to being a marketing operation where clueless managers dream up stupid ideas all day to jack up the stock price valuation.
Microsoft Recall, Notepad AI and AI PC's are just some of their half-assed ideas. I have a dire feeling more is to come floating out of their behinds in the near future.
The new version of Visual Studio looks like a nightmare. Nothing but AI BS. No thanks. Visual Studio 2022 can be my last version of Visual Studio. Just like Windows 10 is my last version of Windows. I don't want AI. Never asked for it. And won't accept it. If you want any semblance of control over anything, you have to move to Linux. There is no way around it at this point.
My last MS programming system that produced useful o/p was Visual Studio version before vb.net.
I used XP from 2002 to 2016 (I did try Server 2003, but went back to Linux + Server 2000 on two boxes, then just Linux). I tried Vista, Win7, 8, 10. Used Win7 for 2 months and then ditched Windows in Jan 2017. I'd used Windows from DOS since 1991 (Only used Win 9x for games) and NT 3.x from 1994 till 1996 then NT 4.0 till 2002.
Used SQL up to version 7 and the MSDE then. Switched to MySQL
Used IIS till 2005, switched to Apache & php.
Used MS Office till 2012, switched to Libre Office completely. Had used Star Office then Open Office in parallel.
Used PaintShopPro since v3, but switched to The GIMP in 2015.
There did use to be a line in the middle, which read
2) ????
That had been added by the CFO when the CAO told him that the CSO thought something was missing, but the CIO reported back that the CTO said he couldn't understand; so the PA to the CEO asked the CRO to see if the CMO would take on the responsibility of removing that line item before the AGM. He was able to delete the entry but became exhausted, leading the other CMO to tell him that he needed to to take his ACU; so the task was reassigned to the CDO - who was delayed because the CTO (not the same officer) failed to review the BCH in a timely fashion and the CPO had to get a BMW PDQ. But that was involved in an RTA. Thankfully, the COO plays golf with the DCC of the BTP who used the OBN to go outside his COC and quieten things down, but still the CDO was MIA and before the CDO (no relation) could catch up on the paperwork and renumber the agenda, the CLO brought down the hammer on changes (which caused the CAIO's AI on AI to go into AOB, but that is a tale for another day).
To cut a long story short, despite the best efforts of our World Class C-suite, you will see that it was inevitable we'd have to present the proposal with what appears to be a numerical sequence shortfall.
For C suite more like:
1) Stuff nose with Colombian fairy dust
2) Get some K
3) Binge watch AI YouTube influencers
4) Get some more Colombian fairy dust
5) Call your mates
6) Call escorts
7) Watch AI YouTube influencers together
8) Watch an escort writing an outline of presentation about the company market expansion options using AI
9) Get more K
10) Order Enterprise Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude.
11) Run around the room screaming and beating your chest
12) Call Derek for some Mandy
13) Go clubbing, but really sit on the toilet messaging with ChatGPT
14) Scream "I have not finished number 2" to answer banging at the door.
15) Accidentally email photo of toilet floor with AI added spiders to HR
16) Recall the message
17) Pass out.
> 12) Call Derek for some Mandy
For some reason all I can think of now is the Shamen’s Ebeneezer Goode with the lines “Got any salmon?” and “got any veras? sorted.”
Yes, everything I know about drug culture, I learned from early 90s dance music and repeated watchings of Trainspotting.
“And you want to call your mother, and say Mother, I can never come home again, ‘cause I seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere, somewhere in a field in Hampshire, all right…”
If Qualcomm were to actually put some decent effort into supporting Linux running of those Snapdragon laptops i might actually consider buying one, but ive not interest in running Window 11 on one and until the state of Linux on them is on par with what I can get on x86, ill not be going near them.
SWMBO's laptop is well past being due for replacement so I decided to investigate this possibility. There are a number of howtos for installing Linux on them so it seems to have accomplished already. However, like me, she needs 17" or bigger display and there don't seem to be any so that was the end of that. They also seem a bit on the expensive side for Yorkshire sensitivities.
Arm will have to stay in the cupboard where it's running the Nextcloud server.
All this AI is the great be-all and end-all of everything reminds of how the photographs of their products, a burger chain displayed on their premises was once translated/interpreted by someone into:
"We can't make anything that looks remotely like this but our marketing department can convince you to eat your own shit."
Arguably however, the best characterisation of marketing came from an episode of The Simpsons where Homer has volunteered to participate in the development and testing of some new medical products.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMLpTczJRgA
No. It's telling customers to send their old PCs to landfill and buy an OEM Windows licence with a new PC attached. If it fails I wouldn't be surprised to see a new W11 special edition tat will install without the H/W requirement but it won't be a free upgrade or else some more paid W10 support deals.
Microsoft has done this before and they're still there.
Anyone who has been in IT for a while has seen them kill off working products, replace them with less useful ones and force us to buy new hardware to get comparable performance.
This time they have AI in it. More undesirable garbage we don't need. Because I'm retiring soon, I have used it as an excuse not to spend a lot of money to upgrade my win10 pc to run their latest software. Microsoft trusts that their market share is so total that their users are still trapped. Most of them probably are.
There are no ARM ATX motherboards or disk images you can boot from to boot such board. Now you know why ARM will never become a mainstream PC. To build an ARM image for any board requires a device tree and Yocto knowledge.Enough for most to stop reading here. Until ARM has Linux plug and play and PCI driver management and can boot from a single , standard image to configure itself for a board or provides easy driver loading, the ARM based PC is a non starter. That means never. Maybe RISC-V folks will understand this. Probably not.
The majority of office workers can replace a Wintel PC very easily, regardless of the hardware, the processor or the OS. You just need file format compatibility, an Office suite and a browser. Corporates that have sold their soul to SaaS suppliers, don't even need the Office suite. Most of them could switch to chromebooks/dumb terminals tomorrow. Given that Recall/AI is spyware, they should do that, if they value their security. It is a pity the Pi PCs are not sold retail with some advertising. Most people don't know they exist.
"There are no ARM ATX motherboards or disk images you can boot from to boot such board. Now you know why ARM will never become a mainstream PC."
Why should an ARM processor use an ATX motherboard? It's perfectly feasible to start from scratch and establish new standards for H/W extensions and firmware. The fact that nobody has seen fit to do it doesn't mean that nobody will.
Some of us have long memories and remember the S-100 motherboards. There was no provision for 16-bit processors let alone 32 or 64. By your logic it follows that16, 32 o4 64 bit processors could never become mainstream.
Recall (the current version) STILL uses an encryption method that Microsoft cracked a LOOONG time ago.
When your internet connection is idle, it PUMPS every screenshot, text discussion and email to the brand-new $50 BILLION DOLLAR storage facility in the US.
Microsoft refuses to say why they spaffed $50,000,000,000 to build a recall-only data storage centre when they claim they "don't store your data for more than is necessary"
Fun fact: Recall T&Cs state "the definition of "necessary" is entirely at Microsoft's discretion"
Microsoft has 100% access to ALL this data and has AI built to look for "the juicy stuff". i.e. porn websites, "offensive" tweets etc etc.
Recall is at its heart the worlds biggest attempt to collect a store of blackmailable material to use against future CEOs and politicians. It even dwarfs China's efforts to store peoples personal data.
The constant attempt at hand-holding is like the mother that doesn't stop trying to run their children's lives once they've left home. It's almost as annoying as popups that attempt to get me to sign in with my Google/Facebook credentials. I don't have either so it's not even an option. Not that I would anyway.
I am going to ignore the AI stuff, which of course is infecting x64 anyway.
I have nothing against ARM, though windows on ARM seems to be suffering the Linux curse to some extent. Users want all their old stuff to work exactly as it always has. For many years linux evangelists have let people know that there are equivalents for the stuff that doesn't work, and the bugs are pretty minimal for the stuff that uses a compatibility layer.
I don't think users care. They want their computer to work like always. Why pay more for one that doesn't?
Linux attracts people obsessed with control over their computer, free software or whatever else. Copilot+ PCs attract... i assume the casual excited AI crowd (but not the enthusiasts with workstations), and people who need/love battery life?
I bought a Yoga i7 Pro laptop, which happens to have an 'ai' chip.
I already had to opt out of Copilot for Microsoft 365.
The day it will be forced on the paid subscription is the last day I will use it.
I never use Copilot nor any other ai crap, and I pray that Recall will never infest Windows in the EU.
I wonder if an NPU can be used advantageously for non Ai-related tasks, such as real-time audio processing ?
I wonder if an NPU can be used advantageously for non Ai-related tasks, such as real-time audio processing ?
Copilot+ branding mandates ≥ 40 TOPS which seems pretty spectacular but that is using 8 bit floating point.
32 bit floating point MAC [row×column] calculations could be useful in a number of scientific and engineering applications but as another has observed, the GPU in your graphics adaptor might actually be a lot faster even for AI.
Desktop wasn't W11 compatible has gone to Mint. I'm not jumping through hoops to install a second rate OS even if it is possible.
Kids are going Macbook, Apple always been cooler with the kids anyway and tbh that shit just works, W11 doesn't even reliable work at the basics.
Yes Apple's AI stuff is just as shit as Coprolite but they at least let you turn it off without too much bitching and they won't force it back on every update which you know MS will.
I'm fairly confident that CoPilot+ capable PCs will become more and more common. Not because people ask for them but simply because CPU manufacturers will increasingly add NPU enabled CPUs to their lineup, and I wouldn't be at all surprised that in a year or two's time only the bottom tier CPUs (think Intel's N100 or the AMD APU from yesteryear) not having a NPU.
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