That’s funny, because getting an ad for Copilot inside my startmenu was actually what made me go back to Linux after 10 years.
This tracks.
how the fuck can they just decide this
Probably through licensing agreements with PC retailers.
But you can also just decide not to buy them.
can i decide to buy a keyboard without the windows key today?
There’s always the IBM Model M or, if you prefer USB, there are remakes with it.
Wow it’s yuuge
sure, any Apple keyboard
Umm, it’s just a keycap. You can map the key to whatever you want.
agreed, however it defeats the point that its going to be optional if they really decide to do it.
Microsoft is a monopoly. Stallman was right, as usual in software
stallman is still right
Do people actually want this?
Like, I know the megacorps that control our lives do (since it’s a cheap way of adding value to their products), but what about actual users? I think many see it as a novelty and a toy rather than a productivity tool. Especially when public awareness of “hallucinations” and the plight faced by artists rises.
Kinda feels like the whole “voice controlled assistants” bubble that happened a while ago. Sure they are relatively commonplace nowadays, but nowhere near as universal as people thought they would be.
Do people actually want this?
Nope. Just like those stupid hard coded buttons on my Roku remote that I have never used.
I think it’s those stupid hard coded buttons on my remote that I accidentally press every so often then have to repeatedly try and back/exit out of the stupid thing it launched that I cannot remove/uninstall from my tv.
And it just needs to load a hasty scribbled overloaded UI that takes forever to load with no content because you don’t have an account and/or are not connected to wifi.
Do people actually want this?
Absolutely not. But this is the new standard now.
Current LLMs are manifestly different from Cortana (🤢) because they are actually somewhat intelligent. Microsoft’s copilot can do web search and perform basic tasks on the computer, and because of their exclusive contract with OpenAI they’re gonna have access to more advanced versions of GPT which will be able to do more high level control and automation on the desktop. It will 100% be useful for users to have this available, and I expect even Linux desktops will eventually add local LLM support (once consumer compute and the tech matures). It is not just glorified auto complete, it is actually fairly correlated with outputs of real human language cognition.
The main issue for me is that they get all the data you input and mine it for better models without your explicit consent. This isn’t an area where open source can catch up without significant capital in favor of it, so we have to hope Meta, Mistral and government funded projects give us what we need to have a competitor.
Sure, all that may be true but it doesn’t answer my original concern: Is this something that people want as a core feature of their OS? My comments weren’t that “oh, this is only as technically sophisticated as voice assistants”, it was more “voice assistants never really took off as much as people thought they would”. I may be cynical and grumpy, but to me it feels like these companies are failing to read the market.
I’m reminded of a presentation that I saw where they were showing off fancy AI technology. Basically, if you were in a call 1 to 1 call with someone and had to leave to answer the doorbell or something, the other person could keep speaking and an AI would summarise what they said when they got back.
It felt so out of touch with what people would actually want to do in that situation.
I suppose having worked with LLMs a whole bunch over the past year I have a better sense of what I meant by “automate high level tasks”.
I’m talking about an assistant where, let’s say you need to edit a podcast video to add graphics and cut out dead space or mistakes that you corrected in the recording. You could tell the assistant to do that and it would open the video in Adobe Premiere pro, do the necessary tasks, then ask you to review it to check if it made mistakes.
Or if you had an issue with a particular device, e.g. your display, the assistant would research the issue and perform the necessary steps to troubleshoot and fix the issue.
These are currently hypothetical scenarios, but current GPT4 can already perform some of these tasks, and specifically training it to be a desktop assistant and to do more agentic tasks will make this a reality in a few years.
It’s additionally already useful for reading and editing long documents and will only get better on this end. You can already use an LLM to query your documents and give you summaries or use them as instructions/research to aid in performing a task.
I guess my understanding of an LLM must be way off base.
I had thought that asking an LLM to edit a video was simply out of scope. Like asking your self driving car to wash the dishes.
Maybe I’m a pessimist but this is going to really resonate with the people who are “looking forward to AI” because they read headlines, but haven’t actually used any LLMs yet because nobody has told them how.
I want a voice controlled assistant that runs locally and is fully FOSS and I can just run on my bog standard linux PC, hardware minimum requirements nonwithstanding
how could it possibly be that urgent that it needs a key dedicated to it
It’s probably like the Bixby button on my Samsung phone: all it does is complain I haven’t set it up yet when I accidentally push it while changing the volume.
You don’t just remap it to screen on and off?
It’s a work phone and I don’t really care about it, but thanks for letting me know that’s possible.
This is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard of. I’m not buying any keyboard or laptop that has this key. There’s enough Linux-first vendors these days that it’s easy to avoid (Framework, System76, Tuxedo, etc). It’s time to be done with Lenovo and Dell.
This is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard of. I’m not buying any keyboard or laptop that has this key.
Which is exactly what people said about the Windows key.
Now it’s all but impossible to buy a keyboard that doesn’t have it. Worse, most of us use it without thinking.
Sure you can call it Super if you like, and even have a Tux key-cap on it, but there used to be a literal gap between the Alt keys and their Ctrl brethren in the lateral directions away from the space bar, and those days are long gone.
There’ll be the niche users who stick with old keyboards without this new key, just like there are the die-hards who have stuck resolutely to the old IBM keyboards and the like from pre-1995, but if you want a new keyboard?
Gonna have to shell out a small fortune for a custom build or make do with that dumb new key.
(Shoutout to the Context Menu key which went as unmentioned in the above as it goes unused in day to day use, despite having been included with its Super cousin since day one.)
I don’t see an issue with a “super” key. But what would a copilot key bring that’s of any value? The super key already does everything you’d need.
Gonna have to shell out a small fortune for a custom build or make do with that dumb new key.
I don’t think this is true. Just buy a laptop from a company that ships it with Linux. No Windows, no Windows keys. It doesn’t have to be ‘custom’.
The post mentioned this, and argues that a super a key is basically just a windows key
My keyboard has a Linux key. And I happily use it.
Hey! I used the context menu key today… Just to see what it does and ask why?
The context menu key is more useful when it’s remapped to the compose key.
I don’t care as long as the placement is ok and I can map it to something useful. I’m a GNOME user so the Windows/Super key gets a lot of use. It’s nice to have. A new key that I use for all my custom shortcuts would actually be kind of nice. Who cares that the default key caps are a Windows icon and this Copilot thing? Change the key caps and they are just keys.
Unfortunately, the “linux-first” vendors do not offer better deals than their competition.
It depends on how and what you’re measuring. A lot of Linux first, like system 76 and purism, do so e serious work on the firmware and boot systems of their systems. Which for some is a huge value add compared.
I fully agree with you, but Framework is definitely not Linux-first. The only OS they offer preloaded on their laptops is Windows. You have to install Linux yourself if you want it.
Rebranded Cortana?
Destined to fail.
Is it just Cortana? I was under impression they’re integrating ChatGPT-like llm into windows.
Chatgpt is just Cortana with better marketing. AI isn’t smart, it’s just algorithms producing a facsimile of language via pattern heatmaps. What was Cortana if not just an earlier version of the same thing?
““AI”” is all a techbro marketing bubble. Will burst and move on eventually.
Like holy shit we had the autofill feature in Photoshop ages and ages ago and that’s just doing what the “intelligent” image generators do. We didn’t call it AI back then. All marketing for what amounts to just some interesting algorithms.
Chatgpt is just Cortana with better marketing. AI isn’t smart, it’s just algorithms producing a facsimile of language via pattern heatmaps. What was Cortana if not just an earlier version of the same thing?
Well no, not really IMO. Cortana as far as I know wasn’t based on LLMs as we know them today, it was a way older method of NLP. You’re right that on a high level it’s pretty similar but the underlying technology is qualitatively different IMO.
The next AI winter can’t come soon enough
Time to buy some more of those little Tux keyboard superkey stickers :)
Really milking that fad before they inevitably push anything useful behind a monthly paywall.
As long as the ability to manually turn off secureboot and remove the OS isn’t locked behind a subscription…
Can’t wait to accidentally press it while gaming, just like the Windows key!
This is Clippy v2.0 and I’m sure it will be just as helpful.
They’ve learned from their mistakes, and concluded that Clippy failed because there was no Clippy key.
at least clippy, for all his faults, had the good sense to be a cute cartoon paperclip.
I liked Clippy and Wizard. There is a massive difference.
Why? Win+C launches Copilot already, if you want to use it. It’s simple enough currently, why change it? This will just make everything worse.
Why? Investment hype
Awesome Keyboard with AI Support *
* On supported Operating Systems **
** With separate subscription.
Can’t help but think about how Facebook inc rebranded itself to Meta to chase/promote the metaverse fad.
Is copilot another windows app I’ll need to uninstall? Thanks for the heads up!
It should be the reason to switch to Linux, finally, again.
i dont really understand the revenue model here. i also dont understand how there’s going to be enough computational power to do LLM shit for all windows users all the time? this sounds bad for the environment.
Running a pre trained model is much cheaper than training one. But I’d imagine in this case you’ll be sending it over to Microsoft Servers, so they can keep track of everything you ever search so they can better advertise to you.
So you can pressed accidentally activating the fucking AI and make the numbers go up so Microsoft can then go and say to investors look millions are using my AI. So annoying.
