Microsoft is adding a new key to PC keyboards for the first time since 1994
arstechnica.com
Copilot key will eventually be required in new PC keyboards, though not yet.
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Copilot key will eventually be required in new PC keyboards, though not yet.
AI is absolutely "a thing", not sure there's really a debate about that. The desperation here is they want to be the first company to completely immerse itself in Generative AI, but they're moving so fast they're just shoving every experiment they can come up with down their customers' throats.
AI is going to be a huge part of the future, but Microsoft might not be a part of that future if they fuck up with over implementation of nascent tech.
My bad, I should be more specific. They're so desperate for a fancy chatbot to be a part of everybody's workflow that they're going to add a special key that is not needed, or wanted by the vast majority.
I hope this can be remapped to something useful.
You mean the Bixby button? (/s, but I think you can see my comparison of uselessness there)
Yeah, I'm glad the Bixby button was dropped. What a joke. I don't need an assistant to use my phone, thanks.
I’m surprised people didn’t instantly remap the Bixby button to something else.
On my S10 I had it long press to activate flashlight, and double press to silence my phone. It was really handy.
Wasn’t that impossible for awhile?
Maybe, but I’m trying to remember which model. My S8 and onward I always remapped my Bixby button via 3rd party app (no root) so maybe it was the S7 that wasn’t remappable?
edit: The S8 was the first phone with the dedicated Bixby button, according to Google, so maybe it wasn’t remappable initially. I got it a year+ into it’s life cycle and I never activated Bixby
Tried to look it up: https://mashable.com/article/samsung-will-let-you-customize-bixby-button
That article claims the option came out when the s10 was out. I seem to remember being able to mod it on my phone as well S9. Can't test it though because while I've had this phone for 5 years now I may have not babied it enough. The physical bixby button has fallen into the phone itself so I can hear ot rattle around. If I were speculating, I would assume it either A. became available to all 3 phones during that same software update, or we remember it sooner being part of something like putting the phone into developer mode so we could have further modifications
Thanks for the link! Yeah, I definitely used a 3rd party app/software to be able to remap the S8 button. I think it was called something literally like “Bixby Remapper”. I thought I used the same app for my S10 but I might have just remapped it natively.
As an aside, my S8 is still alive and kicking after all these years, while my S10 had button problems like yours + OneUI became a buggy mess on it after a year. The build quality just doesn’t feel the same.
Wasn’t that impossible for awhile?
The button itself wasn't bad Have such an extra button on my Sony too and it's very nice (I have it set to take screenshots).
The problem is when they don't let you map it to whatever you want.
I agree with you, AI is a thing alright, an overhyped chatbot thing. LLM's are going to be neutered by pandering, and the true potential will be limited by investor fear and paranoia.
What makes you think they'll be neutered? You think China is going to stop what they're doing with them because the US might do something stupid? The genie is out of the bottle.
It’s a trend lately, that potentially sensitive things will be said or output from the models, so you can see an increasingly crazier set of guardrails getting put around the LLM’s so that they don’t offend someone by mistake. I’ve seen their usefulness decrease significantly, but their coding assistance is still somewhat good, but their capabilities otherwise decrease significantly.
I haven't had those problems with locally run models (stable diffusion, llamafile)
Agreed, but in the context of this post, that copilot key on the keyboard will take people to the most inoffensive and "walled garden" variety of generative AI that will be so one-size-fits-all to the point that its usefulness will pale in comparison to local run models or SaaS hosted style services that give you a hosted model to run off of.
I use copilot on a daily basis for programming. It has made me much more productive and it's a real pleasure to use it. Nothing overhyped about it.
Curious to see what it will bring for other domains, e.g. for dealing with emails.
I do agree that there's a lot of filtering happening. Not a huge deal for more applications. Luckily you can run your own models that are not filtered. I can definitely see a future where you run your own models locally. Afaik Apple recently did some stuff around that.
Why are you talking about what Apple might do, in relation to locally run models, when that's what Facebook's already done? And it's source available, which is more than the Apple one will likely be.
I understand why it would seem unimpressive someone that doesn't do something like research or programming in their daily life but when you do those things it's very clear the difference they're already making.
The thing I'm coding at the moment for example I've been using it to tear ideas for image processing scripts, it'd have taken me a day to do one before maybe longer but even the free gpt can have an idea working after half an hour or fiddling. Being able to focus on coming up with ideas rather than the finer details of implementation.
We're going to see people get used to using them properly and their uses spread into many other areas of life - you will be customising games UI and making complex control input using natural language tools 'Linux, remove the clock and put a system resource thermometer there instead for whatever bits are most likely to overheat' ten years from now you'll look back and wonder how people did anything without ai just like people often wonder how we lived without internet and mobile phones
It's overhyped but LLMs have become basically an essential part of my daily workflow. I can't imagine developing without it now and I've been using them for less than 12 months. The technology is only going to improve, and that's both cool and scary to think about.