They've been disrespecting consent for years now. There have been posts about it online. "No" turned into "maybe later" turned into "remind me in 3 days" and now, even when I do turn on the few features I like, I will get bombarded to turn them on [0]. Turns out my local library puts guests on a Debian based system with libreoffice. I'm sure the majority of people don't even notice but it probably reduced cost dramatically and is easier to lock down.

[0] teams has a new calendar that's actually better. But even after turning it on I still get pop-ups to enable it.

When civilians like myself say that AI feels enormously overhyped, this is just one part of what we experience that fuels this cynical outlook. If AI was so great, it would sell on its own merits, and companies (not just Microsoft) wouldn't have to jam it in everywhere, making it an opt-out nightmare.

This article talks about Visual Studio, but Copilot is running amok across Office 365 too. Outlook now blocks screen real estate with a message begging you to use "AI Coach" to "check" your email, and Word, PowerPoint and Excel all have Copilot buttons everywhere, with automatic PowerPoint "summaries", even though I'm the sole author.

More and more my response to stuff from the Magnificent Seven is to opt out, opt out, opt out. The number of annoyances on Windows keeps going up. Even Annoyances.org seems to have given up.

VSCode's UI has a lot of distractions. Even if you use AI for other things, I can see the appeal of wanting to disable Copilot.

They will stop at nothing to steal and spy on what you’re doing to train the models on free data. The models need more data that isn’t copyright. By using windows you consent to … blah blah blah.

What we need is a huge server farm running copilot doing nothing but watching gay porn

> Uninstalling Windows Copilot now requires using PowerShell and then preventing reinstallation via AppLocker, according to Microsoft documentation.

You don’t hate Microsoft enough.

Off -prem AI is just publishing proprietary or private data with extra steps. If it can’t be done on-prem with a model I can download, I’m not going to hook it into any of my workflows. Period .

Fortunately, on-prem models with agents bolted on are good enough for most things. For the rest I’ll just cut and paste into the web interface on off premises services. That way I know what I’m sharing.

Clippy 2.0?

"It might have something to do with the billions these super-corporations have sunk into the technology."

"Appears like" is not correct. You could say "looks like," but that's not the title of this article.