I think in the end it's branding. They want people to think "Copilot = AI" but the experience is anywhere from fairly effective to absolute trash. And the most visible applications are absolute trash. It really says something when Ethan Mollick is out there demonstrating that OpenAI is more effective at working with Excel than the built in AI.

There was an article posted here yesterday that said "MS has a lot to answer for with Copilot", and that was the point: MS destroyed their AI brand with this strategy.

I'd heard about it from a friend in the mid-80s, this friend was an aspiring writer and he mentioned OTR but then was musing about his new word processor typewriter, saying that he felt like the need to physically change pages added breaks to his writing process and he was worried that with the basically infinite page on the word processor it would be too easy to write crap. I wish I had a way to look this guy up and get his take on writing today.

I owned an early Roomba an it would just bump into things and "bounce" off. There was some sort of rudimentary fencing devices you could use to keep it in an area. I guess they decided cameras and things work better but I feel like the original worked well enough. You still had to vacuum but especially with pets it kept the disorder under control.

I'm trying to restrict my spending as much as possible. No new car, no vacation (or at least nothing big), limiting eating out, etc. I'm cutting back on as many unnecessary expenses as I can, and being mindful of what businesses I do spend my money on.

In other words, when it comes to banking regulation, the President has the final say.

What I liked about that process is that it relied less on their ability to suss out a solution to some problem they'll never have to solve on the job and focused more on average activities. Sometimes I'd get a candidate who would go "wait, is this a trap?" and start asking a lot of questions - good! Now I got to see them refine requirements.

Having them review a PR is a good exercise too, you can see how they are at feedback.

That aside, the one thing I haven't liked is the electronics. Many times it gets out of sync with the phone and simply can't connect, the only fix is to shut the car off, open the door so the stereo shuts off, then restart the car. The FM radio also quit working at one point, which I didn't really care about, but the dealer applied a software update and it started working again. That's just the visible stuff though, so much of the car is software controlled now, I think you have to start taking any software issues as a warning about the overall car.

That said AMZN is a lot more like the old model, they never really subscribed to the Microsoft & Silicon Valley ways of doing things.

I know those events were over a decade ago and I appreciate the author's willingness to reexamine their beliefs, but that's what's meant by second-order thinking. What I got from reading a few of their writings is that this is a person I probably would avoid interacting with.

[1] https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/11/16/onfire/

Let's face it, at this point creating an LLM is not that difficult, relatively speaking. I can download dozens with Ollama, and many of them are brilliant. But look at ChatGPT or Claude and then look at Google - which is the better product?