It will be back in a few years more expensive than ever of history is to be believed.

And it's horrible.

The right click menu never once showed me “loading…” when I just want to click “properties”

A not too overly flashy UI that made efficient use of your screen space.

It didn’t used to by default shove “news and entertainment” bing suggestions. Nobody wants to open their browser after an update to be greeted by tabloid rags.

The search used to work. You could find files instead of bing results. You could grep text files with the explorer search bar (across the network too) and it just worked. Good luck doing that today.

In my experience most people who use a computing device may be able to tell me “this is window” or “this is Mac” by virtue of the branding being all over the stuff but for all intents and purposes these things are appliances.

In the same way most people except ambitious DIYers don’t rip apart their 500-1000 dollar washing machine to replace a worn belt the call a repair guy. Or in your case, have a buddy who knows how to do it.

You’d think our plans would be cheaper given they’re offloading all this work to agents they don’t have to pay a salary to…right?

You ought to be held responsible for what it does whether you are closely supervising it or not.

judging by the number of people who think we owe explanations to a piece of software or that we should give it any deference I think some of them aren't pretending.

I really don't understand where all the confusion is coming from about the culpability and legal responsibility over these "AI" tools. We've had analogs in law for many moons. Deliberately creating the conditions for an illegal act to occur and deliberately closing your eyes to let it happen is not a defense.

For the same reason you can't hire an assassin and get away with it you can't do things like this and get away with it (assuming such a prompt is actually real and actually installed to an agent with the capability to accomplish one or more of those things).

These are machines. Stop. Point blank. Ones and Zeros derived out of some current in a rock. Tools. They are not alive. They may look like they do but they don't "think" and they don't "suffer". No more than my toaster suffers because I use it to toast bagels and not slices of bread.

The people who boost claims of "artificial" intelligence are selling a bill of goods designed to hit the emotional part of our brains so they can sell their product and/or get attention.

We KNOW these tools are not perfect. We KNOW these tools do stupid shit from time to time. We KNOW they deviate from their prompts for...reasons.

Creating the conditions for something bad to happen then hand waving away the consequences because "how could we have known" or "how could we have controlled for this" just doesn't fly, imo.

Because reading through hundreds of lines verbose output is not a solution to the problem of "I used to be able to see _at a glance_ what files were being touched and what search patterns were being used but now I can't".