I had the experience too. Working with Azure is already a nightmare, but the copilot tool built in to Azure is completely useless for troubleshooting. I just pasted log output into Claude and got actual answers. Mincrosoft’s first party stuff just seems so half assed and poorly thought out.

I had a WTF moment last week, i was writing SQL, and there was no autocomplete at all. Then a chunk of autocomplete code appeared, what looked like an SQL injection attack, with some "drop table" mixed in. The code would have not worked, it was syntactically rubbish, but still looked spooky, should have made a screenshot of it.

"They package "copilot" in a way that constantly gets in your way."

And when you try to make it something useful, the response is usually "I can't do that"

that's what happens when everyone is under the guillotine and their lives depend on overselling this shit ASAP instead of playing/experimenting to figure things out

I think that's partially true. The point is to have the freedom to pursue higher-level goals. And one thing tech doesn't do - and education in general doesn't do either - is give experience of that kind of goal setting.

I'm completely happy to hand over menial side-quest programming goals to an AI. Things like stupid little automation scripts that require a lot of learning from poor docs.

But there's a much bigger issue with tech products - like Facebook, Spotify, and AirBnB - that promise lower friction and more freedom but actually destroy collective and cultural value.

AI is a massive danger to that. It's not just about forgetting how to think, but how to desire - to make original plans and have original ideas that aren't pre-scripted and unconsciously enforced by algorithmic control over motivation, belief systems, and general conformity.

Tech has been immensely destructive to that impulse. Which is why we're in a kind of creative rut where too much of the culture is nostalgic and backward-looking, and there isn't that sense of a fresh and unimagined but inspiring future to work towards.

People want the cookie, but they also want to be healthy. They want to never be bored, but they also want to have developed deep focus. They want instant answers, but they also want to feel competent and capable. Tech optimizes for revealed preference in the moment. Click-through rates, engagement metrics, conversion funnels: these measure immediate choices. But they don't measure regret, or what people wish they had become, or whether they feel their life is meaningful.

Nobody woke up in 2005 thinking "I wish I could outsource my spatial navigation to a device." They just wanted to not be lost. But now a generation has grown up without developing spatial awareness.

> but friction is necessary if we want to maneuver and get feedback from the environment

You are positing that we are active learners whose goal is clarity of cognition and friction and cognitive-struggle is part of that. Clarity is attempting to understand the "know-how" of things.

Tech and dare I say the natural laziness inherent in us instead wants us to be zombies being fed the "know-that" as that is deemed sufficient. ie the dystopia portrayed in the matrix movie or the rote student regurgitating memes. But know-that is not the same as know-how, and know-how is evolving requiring a continuously learning agent.

I don't think I could agree with you more. I think that more in tech and business should think about and read about philosophy, the mind, social interactions, and society.

ED Tech for example I think really seems to neglect the kind of bonds that people form when they go through difficult things together, and the pushing through difficulties is how we improve. Asking a robot xyz does not improve ourselves. AI and LLMs do not know how to teach, they are not Socratic pushing and prodding at our weaknesses and assessing us to improve. The just say how smart we are.

In my experience part of the 'frictionless' experience is also to provide minimal information about any issues and no way to troubleshoot. Everything works until it doesn't, and when it doesn't you are now at the mercy of the customer support que and getting an agent with the ability to fix your problem.

Looking at it from a slightly different angle, one I find most illuminating, removing "friction" is like removing "difficulty" from a game, and "friction free" as an ideal is like "cheat codes from the start" as an ideal. It's making a game where there's a single button that says "press here to win." The goal isn't the remove "friction", it's the remove a specific type of valueless friction, to replace it with valuable friction.

I don't know. You can be banging your head against the wall to demolish it or you can use manual/mechanical equipment to do so. If the wall is down, it is down. Either way you did it.

Agreed! I recently listened to a podcast (video) from the "How Money Works" channel on this topic:

"How Short Term Thinking Won" - https://youtu.be/qGwU2dOoHiY

The author argues that this con has been caused by three relatively simple levers: Low dividend yields, legalization of stock buybacks, and executive compensation packages that generate lots of wealth under short pump-and-dump timelines.

If those are the causes, then simple regulatory changes to make stock buybacks illegal again, limit the kinds of executive compensation contracts that are valid, and incentivize higher dividend yields/penalize sales yields should return the market to the previous long-term-optimized behavior.

I doubt that you could convince the politicians and financiers who are currently pulling value out of a fragile and inefficient economy under the current system to make those changes, and if the changes were made I doubt they could last or be enforced given the massive incentives to revert to our broken system. I think you're right that it will take a huge disaster that the wealthy and powerful are unable to dodge and unable to blame on anything but their own actions, I just don't know what that event might look like.

> correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade

You need to also have a robust alternative that grows quickly in the cleared space. In 2008 we got a correction that cleared the incumbents, but the ensuing decade of policy choices basically just allowed the thing to re-grow in a new form.

Looking forward to the OpenAI (and Anthropic) IPOs. It’s funny to me that this info is being “leaked” - they are sussing out the demand. If they wait too long, they won’t be able to pull off the caper (at these valuations). And we will get to see who has staying power.

It’s obvious to me that all of OpenAIs announcements about partnerships and spending is gearing up for this. But I do wonder how Altman retains the momentum through to next year. What’s the next big thing? A rocket company?

Problem with "it will hurt" is that it will actually hurt middle class by completely wiping it out, and maybe slightly inconvenience the rich. More like annoy the rich, really.

How do you guarantee your accelerationism produces the right results after the collapse? If the same systems of regulation and power are still in place then it would produce the same result afterwards

Yeah, it started with the whole Wall Street, with all the depression and wars that it brought, and it hasn't stopped, at each cycle the curve has to go up, with exponential expectations of growth, until it explodes taking the world economy to the ground.

It's like when a child doesn't want something, you "give them a choice": would you like to put on your red or white shoes?

This assumes fair competition in the tech industry, which has evaporated without a path for return years ago.

> you have to be hoping (or even working toward) a correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade.

I'm not hoping for a market correction personally, I'm hoping that mobs reinvent the guillotine

They deserve nothing less by now. If they get away with nothing worse than "a correction" then they have still made out like bandits

I suspect that AI is in an "uncanny valley" where it is definitely good enough for some demos, but will fail pretty badly when deployed.

If it works 99% of the time, then a demo of 10 runs is 90% likely to succeed. Even if it fails, as long as it's not spectacular, you can just say "yeah, but it's getting better every day!", and "you'll still have the best 10% of your human workers in the loop".

When you go to deploy it, 99% is just not good enough. The actual users will be much more noisy than the demo executives and internal testers.

When you have a call center with 100 people taking 100 calls per day, replacing those 10,000 calls with 99% accurate AI means you have to clean up after 100 bad calls per day. Some percentage of those are going to be really terrible, like the AI did reputational damage or made expensive legally binding promises. Humans will make mistakes, but they aren't going to give away the farm or say that InsuranceCo believes it's cheaper if you die. And your 99% accurate-in-a-lab AI isn't 99% accurate in the field with someone with a heavy accent on a bad connection.

So I think that the parties all "want to believe", and to an untrained eye, AI seems "good enough" or especially "good enough for the first tier".

> if AI fails to deliver, it fails to deliver for everyone and the people that bought into the hype can blame the consultants / whatever.

Understatement of the year. At this point, if AI fails to deliver, the US economy is going to crash. That would not be the case if executives hadn't bought in so hard earlier on.

> Don’t attribute to malice that which can equally be contributed to incompetence.

At this point I think it might actually be both rather than just one or the other.

“Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” - Keynes.

Convention here is that AI is the next sliced bread. And big-tech managers care about their reputation.

> Don’t attribute to malice that which can equally be contributed to incompetence.

This discourse needs to die. Incompetence + lack of empathy is malice. Even competence in the scenario they want to create is malice. It's time to stop sugar-coating it.

Ultimately it's a distinction without a difference. Maliciously stupid or stupidly malicious invariably leads to the same place.

The discussion we should be having is how we can come together to remove people from power and minimize the influence they have on society.

We don't have the carbon budget to let billionaires who conspires from island fortresses in Hawaii do this kind of reckless stuff.

It's so dismaying to see these industries muster the capital and political resources to make these kinds of infrastructure projects a reality when they've done nothing comparable w.r.t to climate change.

It tells me that the issue around the climate has always been a lack of will not ability.

> At that point, it takes a lot of guts to say “No, we’re not going to buy into the hype, we’re going to wait and see” because it’s simply a matter of corporate politics

Isn't that the whole mythos of these corporate leaders though? They are the ones with the vision and guts to cut against the fold and stand out among the crowd?

I mean it's obviously bullshit, but you would think at least a couple of them actually would do something to distinguish themselves. They all want to be Steve Jobs but none of them have the guts to even try to be visionary. It is honestly pathetic

It's mass delusion

Pure greed is stupid greed.

Also, if the current level of AI investment and valuations aren't justified by market demand (I believe so), many of these people/companies are getting more money than they would without the unreasonable hype.

you seem to be committing the error of believing that the problem here is just that they’re not selling what people want to buy, instead of identifying the clear intention to _create_ the market.

> Pure greed would have a strong incentive to understand what the market is actually demanding in order to maximize profits.

Not necessarily, just look at this clip [1] from Margin Call, an excellent movie on the GFC. As Jeremy Irons is saying in that clip, the market (as usually understood in classical economy, with producers making things for clients/customers to purchase) is of no importance to today's market economy, almost all that matters, at the hundreds of billions - multi-trillion dollars-levels, is for your company "to play the music" as best as the other (necessarily very big) market participants, "nothing more, nothing less" (again, to quote Irons in that movie).

There's nothing in it about "making what people/customers want" and all that, which is regarded as accessory, that is if it is taken into consideration at all. As another poster is mentioning in this thread, this is all the direct result of the financialization of much of the Western economy, this is how things work at this level, given these (financiliazed) inputs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOYi4NzxlhE

I think there are 2 things at play here. LLMs are, without a doubt, absolutely useful/helpful but they have shortcomings and limitations (often worth the cost of using). That said, businesses trying to add "AI" into their products have a much lower success rate than LLM-use directly.

I dislike almost every AI feature in software I use but love using LLMs.

Is she going to pay enough to fund the multitrillion dollars it costs to run the current AI landscape?

Given that they aren’t meeting their sales targets at all, I guess that’s a little bit of encouraging about the discernment of their customers. I’m not sure how Microsoft has managed to escape market discipline for so long.

They think we're all stupid.

As time goes by, I'm starting to think they may be right more than they're wrong.

And this is a sad and depressing statement about humanity.

> There's a non-zero chance that someone somewhere will actually manage to build the tech up into something close enough to AGI

Bullshit

> And what else would they do? What's the other growth path?

Are you arguing that if LLMs didn’t exist as a technology, they wouldn’t find anything to do and collapse?

this idea that AI is the only thing anyone could possibly do that might be useful has absolutely got to go

The cost of the boat sinking is also very high and that’s looking like the more likely scenario. Watching your competitors sink huge amounts of capital into a probably sinking boat is a valid strategy. The growth path they were already on was fine no?

There's no such thing as antitrust in the US right now. Google's recent slap on the wrist is all the proof you need.

Under the current US administration the only thing Microsoft is getting is numerous piles of taxpayer bailouts.

Trump has ushered in a truly lawless phase of american politics. I mean, it was kind of bad before, but at least there was a pretense of rule of law. A trillion dollar company can easily just buy its way out of any enforcement of such antitrust action.

I don't see how people don't see it. LLMs are a revolutionary technology and are for the first time since the iPhone are changing how we interact with computers. This isn't block chains. This is something we're going to use until something better replaces it.

> "someone who genuinely believed that we're only seeing the beginnings of what the current breed of AI will get us, and that it's going to be as transformative as the introduction of the internet was."

I think that. It's new technology and it always takes some years before all the implications and applications of new technology are fully worked out. I also think that we're in a bubble that will hose a lot of people when it pops.

Two things can be true:

1) We have barely scratched the surface of what is possible to do with existing AI technology. 2) Almost all of the money we are spending on AI now is ineffectual and wasted.

---

If you go back to the late 1990s, that is the state that most companies were at with _computers_. Huge, wasteful projects that didn't improve productivity at all. It took 10 years of false starts sometimes to really get traction.

All these boosters think we're on the leading edge of an exponential, when it's way more likely that we're on the midpoint to tail of a logistic

outside of the recovery community, this is known as 'fraud'

If rationalization comes back, everyone will talk like in Michael Moore’s documentary about GM and Detroit. A manager’s salary after half a career will be around $120k, like in an average bank, and that would be succeeding. I don’t think we even imagine how much of a tsunami we’ve been surfing since 2000.

Riding hype waves forever is the most polar opposite thing to “sustainable” that I can imagine

I'd consider hallucinations to be a fundamental flaw that currently sets hard limits on the current utility of LLMs in any context.

> Every problem you apply AI to still has a ton of engineering work that needs to be done to make it useful.

Ok, but that isn't useful to me. If I have to hold the bot's hand to get stuff done, I'll just do it myself, which will be both faster and higher quality.

You’re correct, you need to learn how to use it. But for some reason HN has an extremely strong anti-AI sentiment, unless it’s about fundamental research.

At this point, I consider these AI tools to be an invaluable asset to my work in the same way that search engines are. It’s integrated into my work. But it takes practice on how to use it correctly.

Auto Hotkey doesn't work well for Epic manipulation because Epic runs inside of a Citrix Virtual Machine. You can't just read Window information and navigate that way. You'd have to have some sort of on-screen OCR to detect whether Epic is open, has focus, and is showing the tab that I want to close. Also, the tab itself can't be closed...I'm just clicking on the tab next to it.

And in an ideal world, one could report this as a bug or improvement and get it fixed for every single user without them needing to do anything at all.

If they resurected Clippy and made it the face of their Ai I would switch in a heartbeat.

> Reality is that either the product sells or it doesn’t.

Why do people use this useless phrase template?

Yeah, the point is that it's not selling, and it's not selling because people are getting increasingly skeptical about its actual value.

"The technology is not useful", at least in enterprise contexts, is what this comes out to. Which is really where the money is, because some vibecoder paying $20/mo for Claude really doesn't matter (especially when it costs $100/mo to run inference for his queries in the first place). Enterprise is the only place this could possibly make money.

Think about it: MS has a giant advantage over every other AI vendor, that they can directly insert the product into the OS and LOB apps without the business needing to onboard a new vendor. This is best case scenario, and by far the easiest sell for these tools. Given how badly they're failing, yeah, turns out orgs just don't see the value in it.

Next year will be interesting too: I suspect a large portion of the meager sales they managed to make will not renew, it'll be a bloodbath.