My company now made mandatory copilot trainings. Nobody wants to use it, but a guy in a suit made them spend hundreds of thousands on it and now it’s our problem.
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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I get daily emails reminding me that the company paid for copilot and we should be using it.
You could use it to auto reply and delete said mails.
Isn't the entire purpose of copilot that it shouldn't need much in the way of training? I think the extent of it at my employer is "this is the one you use."
I've tried it a few times, the only thing it seems remotely good for is when your recollection of a source is too fuzzy to form a traditional search query around. "What's that book series I read in the early 2000s about kids who traveled to another world and the things they brought back from it just looked like junk." Kind of questions.
I'm a self-taught C# dev, I've found tremendous success specifically just describing what I want to do in dumb language that I'd feel stupid asking people IRL about and that aren't googleable without knowing what both the terms "null-coalescing" and "non-merchandise supergroup" are describing.
There are a lot of patterns that don't have obvious names and that aren't easily described without describing a specific scenario in a way that might only make sense institutionally, or with additional context that your average person might not have. ChatGPT is fairly good at being the "buddy that you have a bunch of in-jokes with that can remember things better than you". I can skip a lot of explaining why I need to do a thing a certain way like I can with my coworkers (who all aren't programmers), and I can get helpful answers for programming questions that my coworkers don't know the answers to.
It's frustrating to see this incredibly advanced context-aware autocorrect on steroids get used in ways that don't acknowledge the inherent strengths of what LLMs are actually great at doing. It's infuriating to have that potential be actively misused and packaged as a service and have that mediocre service sold to you once a month as a necessity by idiots in suits watching a line on a chart.
Yeah, this is much the same kind of use. If you work on the assumption that it is just something that has read everything, and everything that has been written about everything you can find it's utility. Folk want it to be some kind of fact genie, but the only facts it knows are what words go together, and it literally doesn't know the difference between real and made up.
That's my favorite use of ai, remembering old ass movies I have fragments of memories about from my childhood
Dude, they flubbed this so damn hard by over reaching. A few years ago, when they mentioned there would be a button in word that you could use to make a slide deck of your word dock, I was so excited. The teams meeting part where it will summarize meetings is honestly fantastic in doing Roberts rules of order type stuff. My response was "I hate what this means in terms of privacy, but godamn that sounds useful".
In turning into an everything all or nothing they massively screwed up. I have a self hosted instance of llama-gpt that I use to solve the "blank page" problem that AI was actually great at.
I have a lot of issues with AI on principle, like a lot of folks. But it blows my mind how hard they screwed up delivery (and I don't just mean the startups, that's to be expected). There's plenty to be said about uber at a principle level, but it's still bloody convenient. The entire roll out of a AI-ecosystem reeks of this meme: "but we made plans!".
Hey, you know that thing you use? What if it had a button on it that opened an AI prompt?
Well my mum says it's a really smart idea from her special little innovator.
"It has a gradient so you know it's AI." <- Uh, what does this mean?
AI logos and buttons tend to be "shiny" with a gradient color scheme.
This is the actual answer, the other replies are over thinking it. There’s a gradient on his face ffs
I thought they meant gradient descent
What are you talking about asking questions? It's AI ... it's all we need to know
"gradient descent" is a jargon word for one kind of training method.
I thought it meant that all the icons/interfaces for AI seem to have a graphical gradient between colors, usually cool colors like blue/purple/pink. (Like the face in the meme)
No. Not at all. It's about gradient descent, an optimization technique.
I hope this comment finds you well,
This meme perfectly captures the desperate plea of tech companies trying to get users to embrace their AI features. It's like they're saying, "We promise it's worth it—just look at that gradient!" 😅
I am an person
You can ask it anything bro
Ask it to fuck off.
Hi! Copilot has detected informal language in your response. Are you stressed by any chance? I have scheduled a priority meeting with your allocated HR during your lunch break to sort things out. Please let me know if you need anything else. Happy coding!
Fucking Adobe PDF is becoming damn near unusable because of this. Frustrating because I absolutely have to use it all day every day.
try okular
PDF X-change has entered the chat
I don’t even use LLMs to generate code because all we ever do anymore is migrate the horde of microservices with one or two endpoints that was going to fix software development forever three years ago to the latest hype hosting and devops platform that will somehow eliminate the maintenance cost of having all those services this time for real.
I have never once found an "AI" feature integrated by a corporation useful.
I have only ever found "AI" useful when it's unobtrusive, and something I chose to use manually. Sometimes an LLM is useful to use, but I don't need it shilled to me inside a search bar or in a support chat that won't solve my problem until I bypass the LLM.
I find customer support service Chatbots useful, they tend to ask the right questions before connecting me to an actual human, so I don't have to explain myself over and over. They also categorize your problem so you won't be forwarded 3 times till you finally reach the right department. They're essentially like the "press 1 to..., press 2 to..." shtick during a service call, except the customer support person has access to your chat history.
I find those kinds of chatbots useful, but those aren't the ones I encounter 90% of the time. Most of the time, it's a chatbot that summarizes the help articles I just read, giving faulty interpretations of the source material, that then goes on to never direct me to a real person unless I tell it multiple times that the articles it's paraphrasing aren't helping. (and sometimes, they have no live support at all, and only an LLM + support articles)
I have occasionally found the Google search AI handy in pointing me in the right direction, like when I can't remember or don't know a particular term for something, it's decent at giving me the term I'm actually searching for. Can't trust it for shit as it's intended to be used though.
Oh yeah, it's definitely useful for that!
Since LLMs are essentially just very complicated probabilistic links between words, it seems to be extremely good at picking the exact word or phrase that even a thesaurus couldn't get me.
At work I use the summary function in edge to generate code since all tohet llm are blocked. It is really helpful to burp templates of programs when you tell it your grand mother is dying
No bro, you didn't use enough ✨✨✨✨ emoji
Fucking google messages now has "AI"
And Proton Mail as of today. JFC JUST GIVE ME A LINUX DRIVE CLIENT FOR FUCKS SAKE.
Proton Mail also has AI? Just opened the app and found nothing
Do you pay for it?
No, I use "the free plan". /srs
Yeah, I signed up early as a paid user. It'll be on yours eventually after they have us do the alpha tests lol.
??? Most of the AI creators are more like "PAYWALL!!! PAAAAYYYWALLLL!!!"
Please bro please let me generate a few sentences of garbled sentences for you please bro I fucking love to say stuff like "delve" please
I like how on Amazon, the "Rufus" thing always pops up over the stuff I'm trying to read.
"How can I turn off rufus" didn't come up with anything except how to turn it off in the app, not on the website.
I had to use Ublock Origin to select and block it.
Kagi’s AI summariser is pretty good. It cites its sources and, by default, it only kicks in when you search with a ? on the end.
To be fair, I’m pretty impressed with Kagi Search overall. But that’s a topic for a different thread, I think.