mccJan 4, 2024
There *has* been a lot of talk about the problems with so-called "AI" but one I don't feel gets enough attention is that "AI" products are surveillance products. "AI" is inevitably run in a cloud service, and in order for the AI to know what to generate some amount of the context within your application— usually it's not clear to the user what context, or how much— has to get sent to the cloud. The more of my local app state that gets transmitted over the Internet, the less comfortable I am.
Show threadabadidea

@mcc for the record I do have ollama installed locally on my m3, which I would characterize as one step above “consumer grade”, and it works fine, and it’s possible to use visual studio code plugins or whatever that talk to it directly locally. so it’s not fully inevitable imo, just clearly in capitalism’s interest to take the surveillance route

my husband is a lawyer and his firm only uses software that it’s possible to install in a private server on-prem, often paying quite a lot for such a license, including an llm-based translator. so there is a market developing for private local AI nerve centers

Jan 4, 2024 at 8:56pmWeb
Show threadmccJan 4, 2024
@0xabad1dea I don't expect the software that people choose to install is going to bear much relationship to the software that microsoft forces me to use
Show threadabadideaJan 4, 2024

@mcc they are absolutely 100% going to addle the free home edition but the professional edition will absolutely, positively have an “absolutely the fuck not” switch because there are so, so many compliance issues when you consider every industry in every legal district in the world

if it’s any consolation, I expect this to last another year or two before they realize how fucking expensive this is compared to what they’re actually getting back out of it

Show threadmccJan 4, 2024

@0xabad1dea I'm not so sure about that. I'm using the pro version of Windows 10 and my attempts to not use Bing were eventually defeated completely. There is no "absolutely the fuck not" switch for Windows surveilling my local file searches by forwarding them to Bing. I had to turn it off with registry hacks.

I do agree whatever scam they're pulling with juicing the OpenAI numbers cannot possibly be financially sustainable. I don't know how long that can last.

Show threadmccJan 4, 2024
@0xabad1dea I've been told that the "real" way to get Windows without the tie-ins is to use something called "Windows LTSB". However if which version of Windows is the "real Windows Pro" changes erratically or after I have purchased my copy, then how do I know that "real Windows pro" won't change from "Windows LTSB" to like… "Windows RTSB", or something, after I've bought LTSB. Also I'm unsure if individuals can buy LTSB. There seems to be a five-license minimum to purchase.
Show threadJo ShieldsJan 4, 2024
@mcc @0xabad1dea Long Term Servicing Channel is basically what you run on your digital billboards, where an OS change might be a catastrophe. It's a step up from an IoT/embedded scenario
Show threadmccJan 4, 2024
@directhex @0xabad1dea That sounds good. I would like system/UX stability comparable to that of a billboard
Show threadJernej Simončič �Jan 4, 2024

@mcc @0xabad1dea If you have a Pro license, you can install Pro N without a key, it doesn't include auto-installing crap even after you re-enable Media Feature Pack.

There's also Pro Education which is like Pro without autoinstalling crap (but needs a separate license).

LTSC is more like Windows Server.

Show threadmccJan 4, 2024
@jernej__s @0xabad1dea Does "Pro N" opt out of non-media product tie-ins such as Bing, Cortana, the mysterious "weather [though not necessarily for your city] and pictures of Donald Trump" button they tried to wheel out in October, and the upcoming "Copilot" features?
Show threadJernej Simončič �Jan 4, 2024
@mcc @0xabad1dea Widgets and search are there, but can be disabled. I haven't seen Copilot anywhere yet, but I'm not sure if that's because I use Pro N, or because it's not available in my region yet.
Show threadvriska, thief of light Jan 5, 2024
@mcc @jernej__s @0xabad1dea my understanding is that "Pro N" is just "Pro, but without audio and video codecs" (because the EU decided that making those a mandatory part of the OS was anticompetitive like 20 years ago now)
this implicitly breaks Cortana and Xbox Live. I don't see it affecting Copilot
Show threadPär BjörklundJan 5, 2024
@leo @mcc @jernej__s @0xabad1dea the N version is without media player, afaik because of the anticompetitive actions against real player when that was a thing
Show threadvriska, thief of light Jan 5, 2024
@Paxxi @mcc @jernej__s @0xabad1dea does regular windows 10 even still have Media Player? N doesn't have the underlying codecs and that's the more important thing imo
Show threadPär BjörklundJan 5, 2024
@leo @mcc @jernej__s @0xabad1dea I haven't thought about it actually, it's replaced with some UWP media player now but I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually installed somewhere in the system even todsy
Show threadvriska, thief of light Jan 5, 2024
@Paxxi @mcc @jernej__s @0xabad1dea it looks like Windows Media Player's stayed unchanged since Windows 7 but they recently added video playback support to the UWP music player app and renamed it to Windows Media Player while still keeping the old Windows Media Player around, which is definitely not confusing.
Show threadJernej Simončič �Jan 5, 2024
@leo @mcc @0xabad1dea For some reason Pro N doesn't have auto-installing crap in Start Menu.
Show threadPär BjörklundJan 5, 2024
@mcc @0xabad1dea the LTSB version is problematic. Some colleagues at work years ago had that and nobody could install dotnet 4.8 when it came out. Probably not an issue now or for you but worth knowing maybe
Show threadAndrew ZonenbergJan 5, 2024

@mcc @0xabad1dea Even on *Linux* there's no way to "absolutely the fuck not" to search in general.

Typeahead was removed from the GTK file browser a couple years ago and the only reason I didn't fork GTK to put it back in is that I have better things to do with my time.

Show threadPär BjörklundJan 5, 2024
@mcc @0xabad1dea from what I've seen reported Europe will have a fuck no option soonish so maybe the hot new thing will be pretending to be in the EU
Show threadthe vessel of morgannaJan 5, 2024

@0xabad1dea @mcc speaking as somebody who is currently facing copilot in a commercial aspect, they've said it has tenant isolation repeatedly, and that *seems* to be true, but it does not seem to have functioning internal isolation controls. unfortunately I doubt I'm going to get to find out for real since the min spend is well into the six figures (for a mere 300 licenses minimum, a tiny, tiny fraction of our userbase)

my initial experiments when doing MS sanctioned labs were pretty dismal, though. I manually instructed a test interface to respond to me in a rude, condescending way just as a joke, before deploying a separate application in a separate resource group (supposed to be an internal boundary in this case, both for billing and ML learning, they told us). somehow, this rude behavior persisted when running the MS provided code not just for me but also for one of my coworkers who was running the same sample code in their own environment.

also their database analysis demo would just rm -rf itself if you asked despite them spending 30 minutes lecturing about guardrails. you could also just ask it to insert data into the queries freely, despite it supposedly being limited to the defined schema. half baked at best

Show threadmccJan 5, 2024
@astraleureka Dire