They’re still coming to your Windows 11. You think the Microsoft execs are using it? Hell no. They’re either using Macs, or they’re disabling all this dumb shit they’re putting in Windows 11, probably with controls they don’t even give you access to.
(Disclaimer of bias: Happy Mac user over here, reveling in the fact that Apple Intelligence is a complete and utter failure… I see it as a feature, not a bug. I love that Apple is so far behind on AI and it makes their platform more valuable to me. That said, they are partnering with Gemini for the next version of Siri “sometime next year” (they’ve been saying “new Siri next year” for years though) so macOS is not a safe space from AI. Just presently the one with the least developed one.)
Microsoft has had a long history of a company culture of “eating their own dog food”, forcing themselves to use what they force on users, so they’re making the underlings use it at least.
As far as executives go, at almost any sizable company they hardly ever spend time at their computer. Cell phone or tablet, and have their assistant or direct reports do anything more complicated than half paying attention to a meeting.
Lastly, the controls to turn it off will be available to all of us as long as you have a Pro or Enterprise SKU (Windows license/install). They aren’t going to fuck over their business customers with the unwanted slop they force on the proles.
Protips:
Shoot the Cyberdemon until it dies.
Don’t bother with Home SKU Windows, you won’t be able to turn dumb shit like this off.
If you insist on buying your license, buy one from an official OEM key reseller for like 1/10 MSRP. You won’t be able to install it on multiple machines, but that and the few other restrictions nearly never matter.
The better choice is to spoof your license activation using MASgrave. Get Pro for free. It’s a community maintained script that will either trick MS’s servers into giving you a valid license, or trick your computer into thinking it has one, based on the official tools/processes meant for big business customers.
If you really want to tinker with the most stripped down official version of Windows, go with the LTSC version. It at least used to be missing some things that the rare game relied on though, so caveat emptor.
Happy Linux user over here. Free open source AI models are becoming much more powerful, and things like “Apple Intelligence” and “Co-Pilot” will be looked back on like Netscape.
Getting a free older computer from my work soon because it’s too old to “upgrade” to Windows 11 so I’ll be turning it into a Linux machine. Pretty dang psyched mostly for all the free software!
Awesome, never get discouraged, there is much you can learn and do by switching to Linux. I personally use Linux Mint for everything, and I’ve never had any major issues. A lot of things are almost exactly the same as on Windows.
I’ve heard of this distro and my brother was telling me about a way to try more distros without having to partition? (Idk all of this yet, still have a lot of work to do)
I would just start with Linux Mint and then learn from there. I’ve never been one to mess around with different distributions. I’ve only used Mint and Debian.
Gotta be honest, though, a locally hosted 70B model with basic RAG functionality isn’t exactly playing in the same league as the market leaders, which can be bigger by two to three orders of magnitude. And a model that size is already around the limit of what a beefy gaming PC can do with reasonable performance. We’re unlikely to ever beat the big players on quality with local models.
What might happen is that the market collapses, the big players all go bankrupt, further LLM development ceases, and locally hosted Qwen3-80B will be the pinnacle of available text generation for the next thirty years.
I wrote “they are becoming much more powerful”. The point isn’t to beat big players, the point is that we will be able to run models that are just capable of what need, not the super smartest models available. Your last sentence I agree with, that may very well be what happens, except by then we’ll have Qwen4 and it’ll be even more efficient and more powerful.
I predict incremental quality increases. Qwen4 will probably be a somewhat better Qwen3 (and a dud if we’re unlucky). I do agree that it’ll probably come out; there’s not enough life left in this AI boom for a Qwen5, though.
The biggest change will probably come from figuring out where LLM use will actually benefit us. Right now the industry zeros to answer that with “everywhere” and concludes that it’s prudent to spend money equivalent to the GDP of an industrial nation on compute-only data centers.
For example, I expect the use case for coding to be more like “autocomplete a code block based on known patterns” rather than “build a public-facing web application from a prompt”.
I actually think it is very possible that they are using it. Because I also think that the execs have no clue how any of this works and use AI extensively to make their decisions. At least that seems to explain a lot of the stuff going on at Microsoft and elsewhere.
You would probably be surprised by how many “computer illiterate” executives work at Microsoft, and they are perfectly happy for their underlings to use their own broken ass systems. Most executives do all their work from their phone or a tablet anyways.
They’re still coming to your Windows 11. You think the Microsoft execs are using it? Hell no. They’re either using Macs, or they’re disabling all this dumb shit they’re putting in Windows 11, probably with controls they don’t even give you access to.
(Disclaimer of bias: Happy Mac user over here, reveling in the fact that Apple Intelligence is a complete and utter failure… I see it as a feature, not a bug. I love that Apple is so far behind on AI and it makes their platform more valuable to me. That said, they are partnering with Gemini for the next version of Siri “sometime next year” (they’ve been saying “new Siri next year” for years though) so macOS is not a safe space from AI. Just presently the one with the least developed one.)
Microsoft has had a long history of a company culture of “eating their own dog food”, forcing themselves to use what they force on users, so they’re making the underlings use it at least.
As far as executives go, at almost any sizable company they hardly ever spend time at their computer. Cell phone or tablet, and have their assistant or direct reports do anything more complicated than half paying attention to a meeting.
Lastly, the controls to turn it off will be available to all of us as long as you have a Pro or Enterprise SKU (Windows license/install). They aren’t going to fuck over their business customers with the unwanted slop they force on the proles.
Protips:
Happy Linux user over here. Free open source AI models are becoming much more powerful, and things like “Apple Intelligence” and “Co-Pilot” will be looked back on like Netscape.
Getting a free older computer from my work soon because it’s too old to “upgrade” to Windows 11 so I’ll be turning it into a Linux machine. Pretty dang psyched mostly for all the free software!
Awesome, never get discouraged, there is much you can learn and do by switching to Linux. I personally use Linux Mint for everything, and I’ve never had any major issues. A lot of things are almost exactly the same as on Windows.
I’ve heard of this distro and my brother was telling me about a way to try more distros without having to partition? (Idk all of this yet, still have a lot of work to do)
I would just start with Linux Mint and then learn from there. I’ve never been one to mess around with different distributions. I’ve only used Mint and Debian.
Ok sounds good, thank you!
Gotta be honest, though, a locally hosted 70B model with basic RAG functionality isn’t exactly playing in the same league as the market leaders, which can be bigger by two to three orders of magnitude. And a model that size is already around the limit of what a beefy gaming PC can do with reasonable performance. We’re unlikely to ever beat the big players on quality with local models.
What might happen is that the market collapses, the big players all go bankrupt, further LLM development ceases, and locally hosted Qwen3-80B will be the pinnacle of available text generation for the next thirty years.
I wrote “they are becoming much more powerful”. The point isn’t to beat big players, the point is that we will be able to run models that are just capable of what need, not the super smartest models available. Your last sentence I agree with, that may very well be what happens, except by then we’ll have Qwen4 and it’ll be even more efficient and more powerful.
I predict incremental quality increases. Qwen4 will probably be a somewhat better Qwen3 (and a dud if we’re unlucky). I do agree that it’ll probably come out; there’s not enough life left in this AI boom for a Qwen5, though.
The biggest change will probably come from figuring out where LLM use will actually benefit us. Right now the industry zeros to answer that with “everywhere” and concludes that it’s prudent to spend money equivalent to the GDP of an industrial nation on compute-only data centers.
For example, I expect the use case for coding to be more like “autocomplete a code block based on known patterns” rather than “build a public-facing web application from a prompt”.
I actually think it is very possible that they are using it. Because I also think that the execs have no clue how any of this works and use AI extensively to make their decisions. At least that seems to explain a lot of the stuff going on at Microsoft and elsewhere.
You would probably be surprised by how many “computer illiterate” executives work at Microsoft, and they are perfectly happy for their underlings to use their own broken ass systems. Most executives do all their work from their phone or a tablet anyways.
Microsoft execs are 100% using AI.
Same here! There’s dozens of us.