That’s Roku’s Basilisk

I forget what it’s called, but there’s a measure of what people need to live. But it includes a likely more than bare necessities. So included, for example, is having one 5-day holiday in the UK and going out to a restaurant once every 3 months. Not exactly extravagant, but accounting for one or two things that make life worth living beyond the way that these kinds of things often just count you as okay if you’re not actively starving.

This year, in order to maintain that lifestyle as a single person with no kids, the average person would need to be earning £35,000 a year. That’s higher than the median income. Minimum wage is less than £20,000.

Couple that with public services all having gone to shit and it’s no wonder people feel like they do.

Want to stop Farage, Keir? Make people feel like they can afford a decent quality of life. Rather than trying to out-bastard him on immigrants and trans people. Make people feel like they’re doing okay and the hatred against those groups will mostly disappear all by itself and Farage will have no power. But if people feel insecure, that’s when the door is open for finger-pointing and cries of “it’s THEM who are taking your money”, which is the only trick Farage has got.

Thank you

They‘re probably okay with the price because the number of private users will dwarf the commercial users.

As for businesses shutting it down - any business which is using it has already bought the hype. They‘re not using it because it‘s actually effective. They‘re much more likely to crack down on workers than they are to ban AI all together.

I do agree that it won‘t work out in the end, not because this particular strategy is stupid, but because the products don‘t work and no strategy could work.

And there‘s still no compelling use-case for the average consumer. Coders and scientists? Can be. But most people don‘t really have a use for it in most situations, even in business contexts. It‘s mostly a solution in search of a problem, and even then it‘s so unreliable that even things trying to sell you it as a solution have to add the disclaimer that you shouldn‘t use it for anything that‘s remotely important.

So even if the costs were markedly less than they are, there‘s still no real path to profitability because there‘s no real call for it.

The only use I‘ve found as a consumer is using something like Perplexity as a search engine. And that‘s not a testament to how good Perplexity is, but instead a testament to how bad other search engines have become. Perplexity just avoids things like SEO and is mostly quite good at finding sources which aren‘t themselves AI-generated.

And…I really see a near future in which AI-SEO becomes a thing and Perplexity et. al. become just as useless as google.

You can operate without a local account - source, I‘m on Windows 11 and I‘ve never had a Microsoft account - but it‘s a massive PITA and takes a lot of playing around and disconnecting from the internet during install, and stuff like that.

You‘re right that 99% of people won‘t know/won‘t bother to go through the hassle and that Microsoft through the years have been making it harder and harder to have a local account, but at the moment it‘s still technically possible.

It‘s perhaps worth noting that the first people the Nazis came for was LGBTQ people. If you‘ve seen photos of Nazi book-burnings, there‘s a high percentage chance that what you‘ve seen is the first book-burning, because the vast majority of photos are from one event. The books being burnt at that event was research from an organisation called Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (the Institute of Sexual Science), which was founded by a gay activist and focused mainly on LGBTQ research and care - including gender-affirming surgery. The Nazis very deliberately tried to wipe out this research and acknowledgement that trans people existed.

If you don‘t care about the current attacks on trans people in and of itself, it should trouble you as a canary in a coal mine. The famous poem‘s first line should be „first they came for the trans people“, rather than „first they came for the Socialists“. Don‘t do the „and I did nothing because I wasn‘t trans“ thing.

It all matters, even if your concern is purely for yourself.

The issue there is that even at that pricepoint, Microsoft is still operating CoPilot at a loss. If they drop it more, they’ll be making even more of a loss. Which is the standard business model for new products these days, but the losses on AI products dwarf things like Netflix and Uber during their “operate at a loss to drive everybody else out of business” phase.

Of course, that would all be fine if CoPilot was some killer product that people quickly found themselves unable to work without. Instead, the feedback shows that workers find that it’s not useful or reliable enough to be worth using, and Microsoft’s own latest advert for CoPilot in Excel contains data which shows that at best operation it doesn’t work 46% of the time, and that figure can be as high as 80%.

I’m not sure these problems are really surmountable - you’ve got an incredibly expensive-to-run product which doesn’t do much that’s useful and is bad at the things that it actually could be useful for. It’s not just Microsoft, it’s the entire tech industry that’s facing this problem.