The DU Lounge

Copilot was surprisingly easy to kick out. I was very pleased.

Any tech co making these shitty ai features should recognize that what most customers want of Ai is the easiest path to disabling the damn thing. And hiding it is just putting off customer fury.

That was the first time in years I had real consumer satisfaction out of tech-the ease with which CoPilot could be disabled.

I disabled as much AI as I could a few months ago, when all those ai and crypto creeps were humping Trump. Yan LeCun, Norbert Weiner and Turing aside that field is just annoying. I shut off duck.ai, got Siri to stop learning from anything I do on my phone and so on.

Your story reminds me of another thing that really annoyed me. I had started vaguely noticing stories about these foul things called AI Agents around a year ago. They sound just like the situation in your anecdote underpants.

These awful, heavy-handed things that go around making decisions for you.

Who are the customers for these things ? It reminds of that rubbish IOT pitch- your fridge will order food for you! Presumably so you can get more done at your bullshit non-job?? And I thought I was lazy when it comes to chores.
Even I am not so lazy that I want to be the brainless dupe to beta-test such rubbish.

If you have some really high end shit which is explicitly Yan LeCun certified and not creep certified, okay. But that is a field I generally don’t trust based on what I have seen so far.

Who are these people who want their lives needlessly complicated by machinic (and invariably lousy) decision making? So you can validate the bullshit job of some rando tech creep at the expense of your own work and health? Where do I sign up for that?!

It is “disruptive” which no one outside that cultish, brainless tech entrepreneur culture considers a positive term . Again who are these people?

I now have only two things I can’t seem to shut off (that I know of) - this ai summary assistant in Adobe and WhatsApp’s Meta LLM.

If anyone knows how to turn off that Adobe AI assistant please do tell me. I take spiteful pleasure in disabling ai.

The Meta thing can’t be turned off. Yan LeCun is the sole reason I use it. I mean I know he has little to do with Meta’s overall culture, but at least I could overcome the aversion I had. It is a useful little app. Damn shame they had to sell it. Matt Stoller -this economist who is one of about 4 cool people I follow online- covered it on his blog. He covers the anti-trust hearings that the very cool Lina Khan run FTC set in motion.