This is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard of. I’m not buying any keyboard or laptop that has this key. There’s enough Linux-first vendors these days that it’s easy to avoid (Framework, System76, Tuxedo, etc). It’s time to be done with Lenovo and Dell.
I fully agree with you, but Framework is definitely not Linux-first. The only OS they offer preloaded on their laptops is Windows. You have to install Linux yourself if you want it.
I think they’re referring to Framework’s support for full Linux compatibility for at least Ubuntu, and making sure that the parts they use have first class Linux support and drivers and kernel integration.
This is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard of. I’m not buying any keyboard or laptop that has this key.
Which is exactly what people said about the Windows key.
Now it's all but impossible to buy a keyboard that doesn't have it. Worse, most of us use it without thinking.
Sure you can call it Super if you like, and even have a Tux key-cap on it, but there used to be a literal gap between the Alt keys and their Ctrl brethren in the lateral directions away from the space bar, and those days are long gone.
There'll be the niche users who stick with old keyboards without this new key, just like there are the die-hards who have stuck resolutely to the old IBM keyboards and the like from pre-1995, but if you want a new keyboard?
Gonna have to shell out a small fortune for a custom build or make do with that dumb new key.
(Shoutout to the Context Menu key which went as unmentioned in the above as it goes unused in day to day use, despite having been included with its Super cousin since day one.)
We have so many unused potential binds already, though. Knowing the way tech goes these days, they’ll find a way to hard-code the key to one macro and that’s it lol
Pure hyperbole “late stage capitalism”: they’ll have it wired directly into the board. At best it will cover one key chord.
Even later stage, it’ll send some proprietary data that only windows 11 can interpret. Linux users will figure it out and make use of it, then will be promptly sued out of existence for copyright infringement or something lol.
What, fuck licenses, we’re doing subscriptions here. With multiple tiers, first one just reduces the charge per activation, and the ones after that give you X “free” uses per 12 hours.
The article actually says the Copilot key will mostly be replacing Menu or Right Control on existing layouts. So if you’re already not using those (or are already re-binding them), it’s just a new keycap.
As you said, there used to be a gap there. Replacing a gap makes not that much harm and people find it useful even in Linux for keybindings. In more of an Alt kind of guy, but Super is also there for more combinations available.
The Copilot key appears to be going were the right Control or right Alt key are right now, so that’s going to be a bother for a lot of people.
It depends on how and what you’re measuring. A lot of Linux first, like system 76 and purism, do so e serious work on the firmware and boot systems of their systems. Which for some is a huge value add compared.
Same, I think I might give the System76 Darter a try when I eventually have to replace my Xps 9370. It’s bad enough that my computer comes with a windows logo on the super-key and often windows preinstalled. Shipping with a non-ANSI/ISO layout is a no-buy for me.
I don’t care as long as the placement is ok and I can map it to something useful. I’m a GNOME user so the Windows/Super key gets a lot of use. It’s nice to have. A new key that I use for all my custom shortcuts would actually be kind of nice. Who cares that the default key caps are a Windows icon and this Copilot thing? Change the key caps and they are just keys.
I have the s10+ and it’s actually useful, as you can remap the double click on that button to open any app you like. But yeah single click, never happened intentionally.
EDIT: F yeah, I just checked the settings and you can decide if you want bixby activation on single or double-click. Now I’ve set bixby to double click and on single-click it opens my password manager. If you don’t select anything, it will do nothing on a single click.
The setting is under “Advanced Features” -> “Bixby Key” for me.
because most people are unaware of keybindings and when they inevitable tap on the new dedicated key they’ll probably be shown a subscription screen for Copilot Premium or whatever they call it.
IMO it’s a very disgusting and intrusive way of fishing subscriptions to the AI thing they’ve invested so much money on.
Like, I know the megacorps that control our lives do (since it’s a cheap way of adding value to their products), but what about actual users? I think many see it as a novelty and a toy rather than a productivity tool. Especially when public awareness of “hallucinations” and the plight faced by artists rises.
Kinda feels like the whole “voice controlled assistants” bubble that happened a while ago. Sure they are relatively commonplace nowadays, but nowhere near as universal as people thought they would be.
Not a single soul wants this. They just want to use every foul trick to get you to use copilot (by accident even) just like they do with bing and their other garbage.
I think it's those stupid hard coded buttons on my remote that I accidentally press every so often then have to repeatedly try and back/exit out of the stupid thing it launched that I cannot remove/uninstall from my tv.
If you can figure out how to get the remote open, you’ll probably find that the buttons are all part of the same flexible rubbery insert (unless it’s 10+ years old). Put a little tape on the bottoms of the ones causing you problems. The insulation should keep them from working, and it’s 100% reversible if you ever do find a use for them.
If it’s one of the older, more expensive remotes with individual switches, then, yeah, pliers and superglue. 😅
Maybe I'm a pessimist but this is going to really resonate with the people who are "looking forward to AI" because they read headlines, but haven't actually used any LLMs yet because nobody has told them how.
I want a voice controlled assistant that runs locally and is fully FOSS and I can just run on my bog standard linux PC, hardware minimum requirements nonwithstanding
All I want is a real life iteration of J.A.R.V.I.S. and several billion dollars so I can blurt out cool ideas and have them rendered and built in a couple hours.
Current LLMs are manifestly different from Cortana (🤢) because they are actually somewhat intelligent. Microsoft’s copilot can do web search and perform basic tasks on the computer, and because of their exclusive contract with OpenAI they’re gonna have access to more advanced versions of GPT which will be able to do more high level control and automation on the desktop. It will 100% be useful for users to have this available, and I expect even Linux desktops will eventually add local LLM support (once consumer compute and the tech matures). It is not just glorified auto complete, it is actually fairly correlated with outputs of real human language cognition.
The main issue for me is that they get all the data you input and mine it for better models without your explicit consent. This isn’t an area where open source can catch up without significant capital in favor of it, so we have to hope Meta, Mistral and government funded projects give us what we need to have a competitor.
Sure, all that may be true but it doesn’t answer my original concern: Is this something that people want as a core feature of their OS? My comments weren’t that “oh, this is only as technically sophisticated as voice assistants”, it was more “voice assistants never really took off as much as people thought they would”. I may be cynical and grumpy, but to me it feels like these companies are failing to read the market.
I’m reminded of a presentation that I saw where they were showing off fancy AI technology. Basically, if you were in a call 1 to 1 call with someone and had to leave to answer the doorbell or something, the other person could keep speaking and an AI would summarise what they said when they got back.
It felt so out of touch with what people would actually want to do in that situation.
I suppose having worked with LLMs a whole bunch over the past year I have a better sense of what I meant by “automate high level tasks”.
I’m talking about an assistant where, let’s say you need to edit a podcast video to add graphics and cut out dead space or mistakes that you corrected in the recording. You could tell the assistant to do that and it would open the video in Adobe Premiere pro, do the necessary tasks, then ask you to review it to check if it made mistakes.
Or if you had an issue with a particular device, e.g. your display, the assistant would research the issue and perform the necessary steps to troubleshoot and fix the issue.
These are currently hypothetical scenarios, but current GPT4 can already perform some of these tasks, and specifically training it to be a desktop assistant and to do more agentic tasks will make this a reality in a few years.
It’s additionally already useful for reading and editing long documents and will only get better on this end. You can already use an LLM to query your documents and give you summaries or use them as instructions/research to aid in performing a task.
A year ago local LLM was just not there, but the stuff you can run now with 8gb vram is pretty amazing, if not quite as good yet as GPT 4. Honestly even if it stops right where it is, it’s still powerful enough to be a foundation for a more accessible and efficient way to interface with computers.
It’s probably like the Bixby button on my Samsung phone: all it does is complain I haven’t set it up yet when I accidentally push it while changing the volume.
i dont really understand the revenue model here. i also dont understand how there’s going to be enough computational power to do LLM shit for all windows users all the time? this sounds bad for the environment.
Running a pre trained model is much cheaper than training one. But I’d imagine in this case you’ll be sending it over to Microsoft Servers, so they can keep track of everything you ever search so they can better advertise to you.
and yet they are still loosing money by running ChayGPT 3.5 for free. I guess that in the future they’ll switch to a local small model in the hardware that is capable enough.
I think it’s like anything on the modern web, they’ll lose money until they reach a critical mass of users who get accustomed to using ChatGPT in their day-to-day life, and then they’ll kill the free tier.
Except their free tier is still around for everything that they started as free. Outlook, bing, Visual Studio Code, even office is free for students and teachers.
They’ll always keep the low tier free to get people hooked and charge businesses whatever.
Microsoft has free tier Office tools because they’re data brokers now. TMK they didn’t always have free Outlook, it was bundled in Office, which cost money. I don’t see ChatGPT remaining free forever, it costs too much to run. I could be wrong though, depending on how much valuable data they can scrape from it.
Yeah they didn’t gave a free Office, Outlook or Visual studio. Now they do and there is no sign of them stopping it. Bing is expensive and they aren’t stopping it.
Chatgpt is MS’s first real chance of dethroning Google search. They’re going to keep a free tier forever.
Chatgpt is just Cortana with better marketing. AI isn’t smart, it’s just algorithms producing a facsimile of language via pattern heatmaps. What was Cortana if not just an earlier version of the same thing?
““AI”” is all a techbro marketing bubble. Will burst and move on eventually.
Like holy shit we had the autofill feature in Photoshop ages and ages ago and that’s just doing what the “intelligent” image generators do. We didn’t call it AI back then. All marketing for what amounts to just some interesting algorithms.
Chatgpt is just Cortana with better marketing. AI isn’t smart, it’s just algorithms producing a facsimile of language via pattern heatmaps. What was Cortana if not just an earlier version of the same thing?
Well no, not really IMO. Cortana as far as I know wasn’t based on LLMs as we know them today, it was a way older method of NLP. You’re right that on a high level it’s pretty similar but the underlying technology is qualitatively different IMO.
Everyone talking it’s bad but I think it’s not, I mean you got another key for shortcut to anything you want after uninstall that crap it’s useless anyway
Can they just make the copilot shortcut on my taskbar permanently fuck off? It appears erratically and I don’t seem to be able to get rid of it when it’s there.
Use CTT’s winutil. I’m guessing it can get rid of that (and also telemetry and it makes updates less annoying and gives you a Ninite-like way to easily install a bunch of software and apply a bunch of tweaks etc.)
Aaaaah. I really, really wanted to complain about the excessive amount of keys.
(My comment above is partially a joke - don’t take it too seriously. Even if a new key was added it would be a bit more clutter, but not that big of a deal.)
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