I don't understand what microsoft is doing with their Copilot whatever push.
They have 50 different offers, all with their own pricing, and they all suck, and Microsoft themselves don't like their results in that field.
Let me solve it for you Microsoft: the money maker you're sitting on today, is "hey excel, make a summary of those 8 sheets to identify our 5 most profitables products and their evolution in sales the past 3 years, add that on a new sheet at the end with a visual graph". None of their product does that right now, instead they tell you the step on how to do it.
Instead of making a bazillion different weird thing, Excel and Office already have their API, just make your "AI" bridge natural talk to excel common task and see every company register it for their employee. I'm not even exagerating, I would in an instant.
I tried many AI tool for excel and none of them come anywhere close to that. It must be much harder than I first thought, but then again they spent BILLIONS on this.
For a company that own business logic as a basic idea, they're really terrible at exploiting it with new ideas. Even just natural talk to power query steps would be worth it.
autoexec · 12h ago
> It must be much harder than I first thought, but then again they spent BILLIONS on this.
Which is why MS and every other company keeps pushing half-baked garbage AI products onto the public at every opportunity. So much money has been sunk into AI that they need something to show for it. They also hope that as people use it they can improve the AI they have so that maybe one day it can become something worthwhile. As a bonus it's one more way for them to collect your data and get you used to asking an AI for what you need instead of using your brain.
wincy · 12h ago
I asked o3 pro to do something like this a few months ago when I paid for a month of ChatGPT Pro. It got very excited and said it was on it and spent 20 minutes absolutely cranking. Then it spit out the world’s saddest excel file with no formatting, and half the data truncated.
disqard · 1h ago
Your description was hilarious!
Thank you for the laughs :D
OT: I wonder if we'll see some "core personalities" that are innate to each mega-LLM (Claude, O3, Copilot, Gemini)... methinks this has comedic potential.
homeonthemtn · 8h ago
Sounds like my post-coffee morning routine, with similar results
balderdash · 4h ago
I’ve been thinking about something similar - Microsoft needs to make dead simple “AI scripts” record: I download this csv file, I then manipulate the data this way, add these formulas, add a cover sheet, do these checks, and then upload the new sheet a with the following columns into system X. Once you have that recorded, and adjusted to what you want. Next you just download the file and run the script.
The amount of repetitive data manipulation at companies is literally insane, just ask anyone in accounting, operations, hr, etc… just being able to automate repetitive task in excel for people that can’t code or aren’t excel/Vba super users would be incredibly valuable.
dotancohen · 1h ago
> The amount of repetitive data manipulation at companies is literally insane
Serious question: why isn't coffee being thrown at the low-hanging-fruit takes? Not only would it make them quicker, it would make them more reliable as well.
moi2388 · 1h ago
That’s how custom agents in Microsoft copilot and Microsoft copilot studio work.
You pretend it’s AI, but in reality you’re just building literally power automate flows which you can call through an LLM lmao
danso · 12h ago
Having recently watched a corporate trainer spend 15 minutes trying to figure out why Copilot wasn’t correctly importing a CSV with headers when “it worked fine when I showed this 2 weeks ago” —
my guess is that the tech isn’t quite there yet to sell (reliable) AI-powered Excel
bn-l · 12h ago
The tech is arguably not there yet. From my own observations, normies get annoyed quickly because they expect it to work like deterministic software. And they tend to be way less interested in it in general, especially when I’m breathlessly telling them about this and that latest development.
karel-3d · 12h ago
oh wow people want their software to be deterministic and with the same set of inputs get the same set of outputs! What is this, the 90s?
surgical_fire · 11h ago
> normies get annoyed quickly because they expect it to work like deterministic software
In very few use cases it is acceptable to have non-deterministic result for computation tasks. It does not matter if you are a normie or an advanced user.
dotancohen · 11h ago
Normal people don't understand what the word deterministic is, nor do they really expect their software to produce deterministic results. For one thing, they're not running the operation multiple times and comparing the outputs. For another, if they give the same task to three different people they're going to get three different results anyway, so what does it matter if the computer gives three different results, if they even notice.
surgical_fire · 11h ago
> Normal people don't understand what the word deterministic is
I would argue that they implicitly do, as any user expects the same action performed on a computer or similar system to provide the same outcome.
> For another, if they give the same task to three different people they're going to get three different results
Give the same three tasks to a single user to be executed three times separately, and he will get supremely annoyed if his actions do not give him the same results.
bigstrat2003 · 7h ago
Not even implicitly understand. A layman is perfectly capable of understanding what deterministic behavior is, and claiming otherwise is just condescension.
dotancohen · 1h ago
Then you and I work with very different people. Here it seems "reset it and try again" is considered a viable problem solving technique.
fn-mote · 7h ago
I think “normal” (non-computer) people have a mental model for computing that is more like a (possibly bad) coworker.
They would quickly adapt to “reload it a few times if it doesn’t work right away”.
Isn’t this what people are already doing when they browse the web? I know I am.
izacus · 6h ago
What are you basing those claims on?
nolok · 12h ago
But I can ask the AI, it understand what I want and give me the steps. I can ask it to give it to me in api call instead and it does, after a bit of mashup.
Sure the api link and permissions and yada yada plays a part, but thats exactly how they can trap us into office365, with already use azure permissions and everything.
Again I'm sure it's harder than it looks, but it's not an AI problem anymore, and they're throwing billions at it.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 · 12h ago
> normies
do you mean users?
wkat4242 · 12h ago
Yeah they don't understand we're in the equivalent phase that the commodore 64 was for the computer.
danudey · 7h ago
> I don't understand what microsoft is doing with their Copilot whatever push.
Anything they can think of. Honestly, anywhere they think that they could put AI to try to convince people that it's a real thing to care about, they put it there. Google is doing the same thing; I get popups any time I try to access any Google thing, like mail, docs, or the Google Cloud console. I don't care, Gemini, and I don't trust you.
Even Apple is jumping in on the AI train, presumably just to avoid getting beaten up in the press for being "behind the times", but thankfully they seem to be trying to start slow and make a good product out of it (which they have yet to do) rather than telling everyone that it can revolutionize everything that anyone ever does and forcing people to hear about it at every opportunity.
donmcronald · 12h ago
> "hey excel, make a summary of those 8 sheets to identify our 5 most profitables products and their evolution in sales the past 3 years, add that on a new sheet at the end with a visual graph"
Aren't they just pattern recognition and regurgitation machines? How would it analyze and interpret unique data with a pattern it's never seen?
Some of the AI stuff is very useful, but it's been massively oversold. In my experience, it's great for working on documentation or creating a one-time-use script to query an API, but it's not good at the "big picture" tasks they want for a sales pitch.
dotancohen · 11h ago
> How would it analyze and interpret unique data with a pattern it's never seen?
That's called unsupervised learning, and it was field of study in machine learning long before LLMs were anything near viable. Surprisingly, LLMs are good at it too.
prashnts · 12h ago
I would give the LLM statistical tools that work to find general anomalies, distributions etc. from the spreadsheet. Then it's about an LLM interpreting (or not) those results in natural language.
Of course this is a can of worms for a product because we can still not guarantee accuracy.
donmcronald · 12h ago
That makes sense to me in terms of tech, but I don't get how the economics will work. If one company has an agent that's a great statistical tool, another is great for making charts, another is great for grammar and spelling, etc., I'm guessing it'll cost a bazillion dollars in subscriptions.
tialaramex · 12h ago
Microsoft's branding is mostly about time and should not be assumed to have any other significance. You might think you can guess what "Visual Direct COM" would be or "Active Windows.NET" but the words have no meaning beside "Currently this word is hot so my new product needs that word". A Copilot XBox Edge might be a video game console with AI but it equally might be a new version of Excel. There is no coherent rationale.
A company with an actual rationale names products PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PS3, PS4, PS5
Microsoft called their rival products XBox, XBox 360, XBox One, XBox Series
Asked to put six animals in order, some might figure Anteater, Bear, Elephant, Fox, Goose, Pigeon makes sense - alphabetical order, English names. Others might try to rank them by size, the Elephant is definitely bigger than a Bear, but is the Fox bigger than a Goose? Not sure. You might give them Latin names, there are several reasonable things you might do or at least attempt
But Microsoft are like that's easy: Elephant, Dog, Squirrel, Another Squirrel, Sparrow, Bear, Elephant. And like, that's not even six animals, and it's the wrong animals, and your order makes no sense, what is wrong with you?
danudey · 7h ago
How many times has Microsoft had some kind of product that isn't taking off how they wanted to, so they just rename it and give it a new coat of paint? Microsoft Office? I think you mean Office 365! What does that mean? Nothing, it's just Office but you don't get to decide when to update.
Anyway, now it's Office 365 Copilot! What does that mean? It means it's Office, but with an AI which you didn't ask for, which doesn't really do much for you practically, and also which costs 50% more, and you can only opt-out by trying to cancel your subscription entirely.
You can tell AI is a grift because it's all dark patterns and lies with these people.
shrikant · 5h ago
On my Android, it's called "M365 Copilot", which is even more wtf...
JumpCrisscross · 6h ago
> 50 different offers, all with their own pricing
They also randomly time out mid-task, e.g. in image generation, without an obvious way to pay for more compute time.
frollogaston · 4h ago
I feel like companies are getting there, it's just that everyone is scrambling now and things are in early stages.
brikym · 5h ago
Easy. 50 different teams get to 'make impact'.
mceoin · 12h ago
Check out Sourcetable, you might like it for your AI spreadsheet work. It's much better than Excel copilot in every aspect (financial modeling, data science, data cleaning, agent tools, etc.)
oidar · 12h ago
It really is super obvious that the winning move for most apps is to add an text interface with LLM capabilities. Like autocad - but LLM accessible.
Mystery-Machine · 12h ago
You say "text interface" because that's what you're most used to. It could as well be audio interface.
Spoom · 12h ago
Not quite the thing you're describing, but I saw this demoed recently and thought it was pretty cool: The AI function in Google Sheets[1]. Call Gemini with the context of individual cells and have it respond in the same cell. Take a look if your company is in Workspace Labs.
They’re going for the “if we throw shit at everything then some of it will stick”. The problem is everything is covered in shit.
The things that aren’t shit are harder than they thought.
insane_dreamer · 9h ago
My experience with Google Docs + Gemini is similar. Gemini is great for coding, but the integration with Docs / Sheets / Slides / Drive is absolute garbage; does hardly anything useful, doesn't do the actual tedious jobs I want it to do. It couldn't even find a document in Drive based on my description, or create a decent-looking slide.
(Gemini is proving excellent for coding, but it shocks me how poor the integration is for other uses.)
The "AI" integrations I've tried in other tools (Figma, Gamma) are pretty much garbage too.
kburman · 12h ago
It feels like one user-hostile move after another from Microsoft lately. Forcing Edge, using dark patterns to block Chrome, resetting telemetry with updates, the whole Recall fiasco... and now this. It's exhausting.
My working theory is they see Google's browser revenue and think, "we're the OS, we deserve a bigger cut." It's an incredible level of arrogance that's burning through decades of user trust for short-term gain.
Instead of all this, why not actually compete by being better? They could make Windows a bastion of privacy that protects users from app snooping. They could foster a real native app ecosystem again, like on macOS, so the OS itself adds unique value. That's how you build loyalty, not this constant squeezing of your user base.
autoexec · 12h ago
I feel like Microsoft's attitude is that they can screw over their users, make money hand over fist by exploiting their private and personal data, and Windows users will be powerless because there's nowhere else for them to go. Anyone who was going to use an Apple computer is already doing it. They aren't afraid of linux either (although maybe they should be since it's been gaining ground). Why care about building loyalty or adding value when you're a monopoly?
tracker1 · 12h ago
They should be more scared... Mac, ChromeOS and Linux now have roughly 1/3 of desktop/laptop users. Linux having gained a lot of ground just this past year, and IMO Valve is probably solely responsible for most of that.
Even with the Valve store cut as high as it is, and some of their sketchy terms... they've been far better stewards to gaming than MS has been to Computing/OS.
tracker1 · 12h ago
Exactly... they've had glimmers of greatness here and there, and it feels like a handful of executive weenies literally twist it to try and wrench every penny of value from every user/customer they can.
For the love of $diety, complete a UI transition across the OS, get things in order, stop shoveling things onto people, don't return ads and internet search results from start-menu searches and just make great products. I was an Edge fan until they added all the garbage, starting with coupons, etc.
VS Code has been good, but they gimp their own .Net support... they do great with .Net/C# but turn around and dump their only SQL for ARM option as ARM is taking off... They rebrand RDP despite it being considered the best UI remoting option around. They keep releasing CoPilot everything that doesn't do the one thing that would give their users the most value, and are sub-par with open offerings.
At this point, I cannot support MS-SQL over PostgreSQL for any new projects given a choice. I definitely don't support developing solutions to run on Windows Server, and I'm questioning my use of VS Code despite it being by far my favorite editor since shortly after release.
skydhash · 12h ago
Isn't Google Revenue mostly Ads? Chrome is free, YouTube is free, and most of the services targetting the general public are also free. With Microsoft, it was expected that you pay for anything useful (Windows, Office, Visual Studio,...).
deafpolygon · 12h ago
why? they already sell your data to all the 3 letter agencies
rs186 · 12h ago
Bloomberg's piece on Microsoft Copilot, if you haven't read it:
Basically, nobody wants to use Copilot, because it sucks.
dmix · 12h ago
> Microsoft is struggling to sell its Copilot AI assistant to corporations because many of their employees want ChatGPT.
So Copilot isn't using GPT?
I tried googling it and one thread said they use GPT4. Maybe it's the wrapper they built that doesn't work well.
rs186 · 11h ago
GPT and ChatGPT are two different things. One is an LLM, the other is a full product.
> Maybe it's the wrapper they built that doesn't work well.
That's the issue. It's almost difficult to imagine you can build a bad product on top of GPT models, but Microsoft showed us how.
tracker1 · 12h ago
When Edge first released, I really liked it... even made it my default on Linux for a while. Then came the in-the-box features, like coupon offers, etc... and I just had more and more crap to disable to where I just went back to Brave.
I like nice browser syncing between devices. I don't even mind what that means in terms of some slack on privacy... What I don't like are in your face marketing efforts. I absolutely abhor commercials, and have been willing to pay for services that don't have them. I switched to Linux literally the first time I saw an ad in the start menu search results.
I don't need Microsoft products. I'm a computer user first, and a consumer a distant second. MS really needs to learn this lesson. Just saw that US Gov is reporting 6% Linux desktop usage, which is higher than the 5% StatsCounter recently posted. Linux has gained 20-30% in just this past year, even Gaming on Linux while less than perfect/ideal is still relatively smooth for most games thanks to Valve/Steam, they definitely use their 30% cut well and while expensive seem to be at least a good steward of their ecosystem.
I feel like Microsoft has completely lost he plot in a lot of ways. Azure and .Net have had every opportunity to become darlings in the developer community... the tooling and options are pretty good. VS Code has become just about the most popular developer editor (not to mention forks). Why they choose to abuse their common users is beyond me... if they just stuck to the great parts without trying to wrench every penny of value from every user they would be much more well regarded.
As it stands, any company selling commercial software should seriously be working on packaging for Linux... at least appImage/Flatpak. There's especially good opportunity for competing software vendors to Adobe in this space. It's one of the few gaps, and the tide of software for Linux is definitely growing and there's plenty of room for commercial software here.
jerrygoyal · 4h ago
I moved to Vivaldi.
carodgers · 12h ago
+1 for Brave!
anthk · 10h ago
Brave it's Spyware.
donmcronald · 12h ago
> you can let Copilot see all your open tabs so it can understand the full context of what you’re exploring online
Isn't that going to poison the context with low quality, SEO blog spam? How long is it going to be before content mills start filling the web with defensible lies?
For example, "exploding cell phone charger X is built with a high quality transformer." The AI will mindlessly regurgitate that without considering the nuance of source. When I evaluate that stuff the source plays a major role in the weight I give to the statement.
None of the AI I've seen does a proper job of considering the source and I'm guessing it's because they can't attribute sources due to the massive IP theft that was required to build the systems.
Mystery-Machine · 12h ago
Google already has page score for every website out there. What makes you think that their LLM can't be made to use it? That statement sounds a lot like "AI can't generate human fingers, it will never be able to generate realistic images with humans in them" or "it can't do X so it will never be able to code Y". Shortsighted.
donmcronald · 10h ago
Google search results are much worse than they used to be. And how would an LLM extrapolate good outputs from garbage inputs?
fleebee · 12h ago
Not sure I like the fact that Copilot inferred that Dylan likes football so it offered to buy tickets when Dylan launched his browser.
In general, this seems to be less about empowering users and more about shoving AI in their faces. You don't need to prompt anything, it just is there.
hankman86 · 12h ago
Why has basic product management gone out of the window in this new era of AI enablement? Like on the most basic level: who ever asked for this, where is product-market fit for this kind of browser automation?
asim · 12h ago
Whoever starts by replacing the operating system with this style of interface wins. The point isn't to reinvent the browser, it's to change how we interact with technology completely. Right now it's all iteration but essentially if all you need is ChatGPT then just make the OS a chat interface to begin with.
TrackerFF · 12h ago
A big ongoing challenge is how to automate human actions on websites - specifically those that don't offer any API for the data needed, and and make it as hard as possible to scrape them. Almost every data job I've had, have had such part time projects going on internally, typical "How do we automate data extraction from [x] site" where the websites either refuse to provide any services, or simply can't (don't have the resources). And up until now it has been some sort of RPA / Robotic Process Automation problem.
I'm not talking about nefarious motives for doing such either, for our part it is just tedious task where humans spend too much time filling in forms / clicking on UI components, and doing the download manually.
So while letting agents run wild on problems like this can (and surely will) lead to abuse, it will likely also free up so much time for the people doing such tasks for actual work.
Aachen · 12h ago
> or simply can't (don't have the resources). And up until now it has been some sort of RPA / Robotic Process Automation problem.
Wouldn't it be like half the cost to your organisation if you do it for them? If govt agency xyz doesn't have the resources to build this, offer to make it, get access to the source, plug it into a dead simple API, get your data and everybody's happy?
I've never held a data analysis position so I have no idea if such an org would be open to it. If not, it sounds more like the former issue (gatekeeping and unwillingness) than the latter (inability or resource lack)
AuthAuth · 6h ago
The site wont give you a dead simple API.
meindnoch · 12h ago
No, because then they would realize their data is worth money.
Aachen · 7h ago
The person above said they were approaching these places already, so latest at that time, they've realised that
thesdev · 11h ago
> For decades, the way we’ve used browsers has remained linear: open a tab (or 20), search for something, read a page, repeat. It’s a model that’s worked well, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed.
Maybe it doesn’t need to change if it's working well? Have you considered that?
bigstrat2003 · 7h ago
Next they'll be trying to sell you on eating with your ear or something because "for millennia, the way we eat food hasn't fundamentally changed".
terhechte · 11h ago
So interesting to read all these negative comments. I'm actually considering installing Edge because this something I've really been wanting for some time. I run Safari & Firefox and I know there're some plugins, but this deep integration (e.g. across tabs) is missing. I usually open 15+ tabs when I'm researching something, and then being able to ask an LLM questions across these tabs is awesome.
The main reason for me not to install this, honestly, is that I've heard that OpenAI is working on something similar and I already have their subscription. I might just wait a bit longer, but I really can see the appeal of this product.
elphinstone · 4h ago
A feature nobody wants in a browser nobody uses.
rich_sasha · 6h ago
What I really need is a copilot plugin for my copilot. Coming up with good prompts is hard, I want an LLM fine tuned for this particular task.
adamrezich · 12h ago
It's kind of funny how “Copilot” has become the new “Live”—this Brand Word that Microsoft marketing seems obsessed with, branding everything they can with it, completely regardless of how much they dilute whatever positive qualities their users initially associated with it.
x______________ · 45m ago
I (unfortunately) updated swiftkey to the latest version in an attempt to troubleshoot an issue I had, low and behold, a new copilot button has appeared!
(Ironically, I was trying to remove an @ key that popped up in an app which reduced the length of my space key by 1/3rd)
Edit: Disabling the copilot options in settings is necessary as they are on by default, disabling does not remove the button. Thanks to this post for reminding me to review settings after an update.. *unhappyface
Edit2: So I just discovered that that you can obtain several types of debug info by triple tapping on the version number in the about screen... That's nifty!
rs186 · 11h ago
Who would thought that Microsoft did not change a single bit after two decades?
Don't forget about MSN, Windows Live, Metro. I wonder what will be the "next big thing" they'll gonna push as a brand
cibyr · 12h ago
"built to the highest Microsoft standards of security, privacy and performance" seems perhaps importantly different from "but to the highest standards".
askonomm · 12h ago
Translation: plain-text/no security, as much telemetry as possible, and performance depends on how beefy of a computer you have, but it better be beefy.
rs186 · 11h ago
"the highest Microsoft standards of security, privacy and performance" is a very low bar. It doesn't add any confidence. They might as well not talk about it at all.
summermusic · 2h ago
And then just a beat later:
“…with you as the user always in control.”
What a joke.
meindnoch · 12h ago
I wonder if "the highest Microsoft standards" are above of below "military grade"?
skydhash · 12h ago
> For decades, the way we’ve used browsers has remained linear: open a tab (or 20), search for something, read a page, repeat. It’s a model that’s worked well, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed.
Is it linear though? I think most people are using tabs the way everyone use documents. Open one, find the passage you need and keep it there. Lots of current web app makes that hard (lazy loading, memory leaks,...).
A better augmentation would be annotations. Create a new notetaking session which appears in a side bar, then either screenshot or highlight a section, then it is saved alongside the comment (and tags) and the context (link, date,..). No need for a lurking agent.
ADDENDUM
A somewhat simpler version can be found in Orgmode and Emacs. You can store link to almost anything and then the capture feature in Org mode can use them in templates.
ghxst · 12h ago
I had no idea that Microsoft set up a discord server for copilot.
fzaninotto · 12h ago
This new browser mode is a robot that replaces visitors on websites. It can't be good news for website editors...
Should we (developers) start building websites for robots?
josefresco · 12h ago
We already build websites for Googlebot so I don't really see much a difference. Maybe designers should be worried because if there's nothing to "look at" there's no point in making it look nice. This feels like XML/XHTML all over again.
franze · 12h ago
Well, guess what we are doing when we say SEO?
askonomm · 12h ago
AI is building websites for AI. Let the enshittification Olympics commence!
mortsnort · 3h ago
I get the MS Copilot hate, but Perplexity, Dia, Open AI and others are entering the AI browser space. I don't think Google and MS can just sit it out and hope AI browsers don't catch on.
At this point most of us have a ChatGPT tab (or 20) open at all times- it's more convenient just having it on the page. It's also genuinely revolutionary when integrated into things like Colab notebooks.
nerevarthelame · 11h ago
I tried using it and am not impressed. I don't know if it's possible to do any of the things shown in the promotional videos. It seems like a typical web-enabled LLM, but in a browser extension. I didn't see ANY functionality from "Copilot mode" that doesn't already exist in any other web-enabled LLM. It couldn't book anything. It didn't move through the site. It did poor analysis. It hallucinated links. It gaslit me and told me that I needed to manually do the things I was asking - and gave me incorrect instructions on how to do that.
I had to double-check that I was correctly opted into this new feature because it seemed like a terrible implementation of very established technology. Every task I attempted was a frustrating failure. Embarrassingly bad stuff.
If you really want to know my specific gripes:
I navigated to a major hotel chain's site that I have discounted rates at, subject to availability. I asked Copilot to find me a hotel within driving distance to my home with those discounted rates available for certain dates. It claimed that it checked that the rates were available (something I didn't expect it to be able to do), and gave me a few hotels. The hotels exist, but every one of the "View hotel details" links were broken. Although it said it checked to see if rooms were available under the discounted rates, it definitely didn't. I tried to get it to book a reservation anyway, and it said that the "page isn't loading properly right now - either it's been moved or there's a glitch on the hotel's site." The hotel's site was working just fine.
I navigated to a recipe website I often use. I asked Copilot to find me some recipes fitting certain basic criteria ("vegan," "quick and easy").
The links it provided to each recipe were all to the main page - not actually to the recipes themselves, even though the labeled link text suggested it would be to the individual recipe.
Although the site has a plethora of vegan options, 2/4 of its recommendations were non-vegan recipes that it gave tips on how to make vegan. Recommending that I make quesadillas by "swapping nutritional yeast instead of dairy cheese" is a terrible, awful idea. Especially in the context of all the other great, already vegan recipes on the site it ignored to make this recommendation.
For the other converted-to-vegan recipe, I manually searched for the original recipe (since it couldn't provide recipe-specific links) to see that the author already had a vegan version of the recipe linked in the original instructions. Copilot's veganization was unnecessary and lower quality than what the author had already provided on the site.
aziaziazi · 11h ago
For what it worth: nutritional yeast is great to replace parmigiana-like cheese. For mozzarella it’s probable a bad choice if you want to be as close as possible, but yeast is definitely not an hallucination as a cheese replacement. I’d be interested to see one or two propositions if you’re willing to share.
aussieguy1234 · 4h ago
Not enabled for Linux I see
deafpolygon · 12h ago
more ways to try and track user behaviour and steal… i mean, request private user data.
crinkly · 13h ago
From the Privacy Policy: There will always be clear, visual cues on your browser when Copilot is viewing or listening.
They have 50 different offers, all with their own pricing, and they all suck, and Microsoft themselves don't like their results in that field.
Let me solve it for you Microsoft: the money maker you're sitting on today, is "hey excel, make a summary of those 8 sheets to identify our 5 most profitables products and their evolution in sales the past 3 years, add that on a new sheet at the end with a visual graph". None of their product does that right now, instead they tell you the step on how to do it.
Instead of making a bazillion different weird thing, Excel and Office already have their API, just make your "AI" bridge natural talk to excel common task and see every company register it for their employee. I'm not even exagerating, I would in an instant.
I tried many AI tool for excel and none of them come anywhere close to that. It must be much harder than I first thought, but then again they spent BILLIONS on this.
For a company that own business logic as a basic idea, they're really terrible at exploiting it with new ideas. Even just natural talk to power query steps would be worth it.
Which is why MS and every other company keeps pushing half-baked garbage AI products onto the public at every opportunity. So much money has been sunk into AI that they need something to show for it. They also hope that as people use it they can improve the AI they have so that maybe one day it can become something worthwhile. As a bonus it's one more way for them to collect your data and get you used to asking an AI for what you need instead of using your brain.
Thank you for the laughs :D
OT: I wonder if we'll see some "core personalities" that are innate to each mega-LLM (Claude, O3, Copilot, Gemini)... methinks this has comedic potential.
The amount of repetitive data manipulation at companies is literally insane, just ask anyone in accounting, operations, hr, etc… just being able to automate repetitive task in excel for people that can’t code or aren’t excel/Vba super users would be incredibly valuable.
You pretend it’s AI, but in reality you’re just building literally power automate flows which you can call through an LLM lmao
In very few use cases it is acceptable to have non-deterministic result for computation tasks. It does not matter if you are a normie or an advanced user.
I would argue that they implicitly do, as any user expects the same action performed on a computer or similar system to provide the same outcome.
> For another, if they give the same task to three different people they're going to get three different results
Give the same three tasks to a single user to be executed three times separately, and he will get supremely annoyed if his actions do not give him the same results.
They would quickly adapt to “reload it a few times if it doesn’t work right away”.
Isn’t this what people are already doing when they browse the web? I know I am.
Sure the api link and permissions and yada yada plays a part, but thats exactly how they can trap us into office365, with already use azure permissions and everything.
Again I'm sure it's harder than it looks, but it's not an AI problem anymore, and they're throwing billions at it.
do you mean users?
Anything they can think of. Honestly, anywhere they think that they could put AI to try to convince people that it's a real thing to care about, they put it there. Google is doing the same thing; I get popups any time I try to access any Google thing, like mail, docs, or the Google Cloud console. I don't care, Gemini, and I don't trust you.
Even Apple is jumping in on the AI train, presumably just to avoid getting beaten up in the press for being "behind the times", but thankfully they seem to be trying to start slow and make a good product out of it (which they have yet to do) rather than telling everyone that it can revolutionize everything that anyone ever does and forcing people to hear about it at every opportunity.
Aren't they just pattern recognition and regurgitation machines? How would it analyze and interpret unique data with a pattern it's never seen?
Some of the AI stuff is very useful, but it's been massively oversold. In my experience, it's great for working on documentation or creating a one-time-use script to query an API, but it's not good at the "big picture" tasks they want for a sales pitch.
Of course this is a can of worms for a product because we can still not guarantee accuracy.
A company with an actual rationale names products PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PS3, PS4, PS5
Microsoft called their rival products XBox, XBox 360, XBox One, XBox Series
Asked to put six animals in order, some might figure Anteater, Bear, Elephant, Fox, Goose, Pigeon makes sense - alphabetical order, English names. Others might try to rank them by size, the Elephant is definitely bigger than a Bear, but is the Fox bigger than a Goose? Not sure. You might give them Latin names, there are several reasonable things you might do or at least attempt
But Microsoft are like that's easy: Elephant, Dog, Squirrel, Another Squirrel, Sparrow, Bear, Elephant. And like, that's not even six animals, and it's the wrong animals, and your order makes no sense, what is wrong with you?
Anyway, now it's Office 365 Copilot! What does that mean? It means it's Office, but with an AI which you didn't ask for, which doesn't really do much for you practically, and also which costs 50% more, and you can only opt-out by trying to cancel your subscription entirely.
You can tell AI is a grift because it's all dark patterns and lies with these people.
They also randomly time out mid-task, e.g. in image generation, without an obvious way to pay for more compute time.
1. https://support.google.com/docs/answer/15820999
Disclaimer: Googler, opinions my own.
The things that aren’t shit are harder than they thought.
(Gemini is proving excellent for coding, but it shocks me how poor the integration is for other uses.)
The "AI" integrations I've tried in other tools (Figma, Gamma) are pretty much garbage too.
My working theory is they see Google's browser revenue and think, "we're the OS, we deserve a bigger cut." It's an incredible level of arrogance that's burning through decades of user trust for short-term gain.
Instead of all this, why not actually compete by being better? They could make Windows a bastion of privacy that protects users from app snooping. They could foster a real native app ecosystem again, like on macOS, so the OS itself adds unique value. That's how you build loyalty, not this constant squeezing of your user base.
Even with the Valve store cut as high as it is, and some of their sketchy terms... they've been far better stewards to gaming than MS has been to Computing/OS.
For the love of $diety, complete a UI transition across the OS, get things in order, stop shoveling things onto people, don't return ads and internet search results from start-menu searches and just make great products. I was an Edge fan until they added all the garbage, starting with coupons, etc.
VS Code has been good, but they gimp their own .Net support... they do great with .Net/C# but turn around and dump their only SQL for ARM option as ARM is taking off... They rebrand RDP despite it being considered the best UI remoting option around. They keep releasing CoPilot everything that doesn't do the one thing that would give their users the most value, and are sub-par with open offerings.
At this point, I cannot support MS-SQL over PostgreSQL for any new projects given a choice. I definitely don't support developing solutions to run on Windows Server, and I'm questioning my use of VS Code despite it being by far my favorite editor since shortly after release.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-24/chatgpt-v...
And HN discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44367638
Basically, nobody wants to use Copilot, because it sucks.
So Copilot isn't using GPT?
I tried googling it and one thread said they use GPT4. Maybe it's the wrapper they built that doesn't work well.
> Maybe it's the wrapper they built that doesn't work well.
That's the issue. It's almost difficult to imagine you can build a bad product on top of GPT models, but Microsoft showed us how.
I like nice browser syncing between devices. I don't even mind what that means in terms of some slack on privacy... What I don't like are in your face marketing efforts. I absolutely abhor commercials, and have been willing to pay for services that don't have them. I switched to Linux literally the first time I saw an ad in the start menu search results.
I don't need Microsoft products. I'm a computer user first, and a consumer a distant second. MS really needs to learn this lesson. Just saw that US Gov is reporting 6% Linux desktop usage, which is higher than the 5% StatsCounter recently posted. Linux has gained 20-30% in just this past year, even Gaming on Linux while less than perfect/ideal is still relatively smooth for most games thanks to Valve/Steam, they definitely use their 30% cut well and while expensive seem to be at least a good steward of their ecosystem.
I feel like Microsoft has completely lost he plot in a lot of ways. Azure and .Net have had every opportunity to become darlings in the developer community... the tooling and options are pretty good. VS Code has become just about the most popular developer editor (not to mention forks). Why they choose to abuse their common users is beyond me... if they just stuck to the great parts without trying to wrench every penny of value from every user they would be much more well regarded.
As it stands, any company selling commercial software should seriously be working on packaging for Linux... at least appImage/Flatpak. There's especially good opportunity for competing software vendors to Adobe in this space. It's one of the few gaps, and the tide of software for Linux is definitely growing and there's plenty of room for commercial software here.
Isn't that going to poison the context with low quality, SEO blog spam? How long is it going to be before content mills start filling the web with defensible lies?
For example, "exploding cell phone charger X is built with a high quality transformer." The AI will mindlessly regurgitate that without considering the nuance of source. When I evaluate that stuff the source plays a major role in the weight I give to the statement.
None of the AI I've seen does a proper job of considering the source and I'm guessing it's because they can't attribute sources due to the massive IP theft that was required to build the systems.
In general, this seems to be less about empowering users and more about shoving AI in their faces. You don't need to prompt anything, it just is there.
I'm not talking about nefarious motives for doing such either, for our part it is just tedious task where humans spend too much time filling in forms / clicking on UI components, and doing the download manually.
So while letting agents run wild on problems like this can (and surely will) lead to abuse, it will likely also free up so much time for the people doing such tasks for actual work.
Wouldn't it be like half the cost to your organisation if you do it for them? If govt agency xyz doesn't have the resources to build this, offer to make it, get access to the source, plug it into a dead simple API, get your data and everybody's happy?
I've never held a data analysis position so I have no idea if such an org would be open to it. If not, it sounds more like the former issue (gatekeeping and unwillingness) than the latter (inability or resource lack)
Maybe it doesn’t need to change if it's working well? Have you considered that?
The main reason for me not to install this, honestly, is that I've heard that OpenAI is working on something similar and I already have their subscription. I might just wait a bit longer, but I really can see the appeal of this product.
(Ironically, I was trying to remove an @ key that popped up in an app which reduced the length of my space key by 1/3rd)
Edit: Disabling the copilot options in settings is necessary as they are on by default, disabling does not remove the button. Thanks to this post for reminding me to review settings after an update.. *unhappyface
Edit2: So I just discovered that that you can obtain several types of debug info by triple tapping on the version number in the about screen... That's nifty!
A link that I found on a different HN thread that is somewhat related: https://www.osnews.com/story/19921/full-text-an-epic-bill-ga...
“…with you as the user always in control.”
What a joke.
Is it linear though? I think most people are using tabs the way everyone use documents. Open one, find the passage you need and keep it there. Lots of current web app makes that hard (lazy loading, memory leaks,...).
A better augmentation would be annotations. Create a new notetaking session which appears in a side bar, then either screenshot or highlight a section, then it is saved alongside the comment (and tags) and the context (link, date,..). No need for a lurking agent.
ADDENDUM
A somewhat simpler version can be found in Orgmode and Emacs. You can store link to almost anything and then the capture feature in Org mode can use them in templates.
Should we (developers) start building websites for robots?
At this point most of us have a ChatGPT tab (or 20) open at all times- it's more convenient just having it on the page. It's also genuinely revolutionary when integrated into things like Colab notebooks.
I had to double-check that I was correctly opted into this new feature because it seemed like a terrible implementation of very established technology. Every task I attempted was a frustrating failure. Embarrassingly bad stuff.
If you really want to know my specific gripes: I navigated to a major hotel chain's site that I have discounted rates at, subject to availability. I asked Copilot to find me a hotel within driving distance to my home with those discounted rates available for certain dates. It claimed that it checked that the rates were available (something I didn't expect it to be able to do), and gave me a few hotels. The hotels exist, but every one of the "View hotel details" links were broken. Although it said it checked to see if rooms were available under the discounted rates, it definitely didn't. I tried to get it to book a reservation anyway, and it said that the "page isn't loading properly right now - either it's been moved or there's a glitch on the hotel's site." The hotel's site was working just fine.
I navigated to a recipe website I often use. I asked Copilot to find me some recipes fitting certain basic criteria ("vegan," "quick and easy").
The links it provided to each recipe were all to the main page - not actually to the recipes themselves, even though the labeled link text suggested it would be to the individual recipe.
Although the site has a plethora of vegan options, 2/4 of its recommendations were non-vegan recipes that it gave tips on how to make vegan. Recommending that I make quesadillas by "swapping nutritional yeast instead of dairy cheese" is a terrible, awful idea. Especially in the context of all the other great, already vegan recipes on the site it ignored to make this recommendation.
For the other converted-to-vegan recipe, I manually searched for the original recipe (since it couldn't provide recipe-specific links) to see that the author already had a vegan version of the recipe linked in the original instructions. Copilot's veganization was unnecessary and lower quality than what the author had already provided on the site.
"CoPilot, please install Firefox for me"