AI is going to destroy a lot of software companies in a way I haven’t seen talked about yet: it will give CEOs exactly what they ask for.
Before you jump in with “AI produces garbage and isn’t reliable by design,” let me say I agree with you 100%, but for the sake of argument, assume for a moment it could produce a high quality product.
Once a company gets large enough, very often the CEO gets completely removed from how their company actually works. I know I’ve worked at several companies where the job of my boss was to shield me from corporate nonsense so I could make an actually good product. If I and/or my boss were replaced with AI that actually followed the corporate nonsense, the company would go belly-up quite quickly.
I think many CEOs are looking to replace huge fleets of workers with AI they can directly prompt. Even if it worked flawlessly, since they don’t know how their products actually bring value to their customers, they will speed-run torpedoing their company’s place in the market by their own ignorance, ego, and overconfidence.
Yup. Think we’re going to go through a technological dark age for a bit, but hopefully non-shit companies will rise from the ashes. That or I’m gonna have to get used to FOSS everything.
Foss everything
The only real option
This is the way. I switched from w11 to Ubuntu recently (using it was like breathing fresh air after being in a traffic jam), and today I switched from excel to libre calc and my thought though was like, oh shit, almost every functionality I use regularly is just visible on the toolbars at the top. Neat.
In excel I usually have to fucking web search where functionality is.
I want to switch but everything is such a fucking fight on Linux. I’ve spent probably 5 hours trying to get an FPV radio to work and another 40 minutes just trying to install stepmania. Running into walls everywhere.
What distro you on? I tried mint a few years ago and constantly had major issues. It was untenable. I’ve found Ubuntu to be much more stable and forgiving. Linux certainly demands a little more technical knowledge from it’s users but it definitely seems to be getting better year on year.
Trying bazzite because games. Problem is everything outside of steam is a struggle.
Ah fair dos, I’ve not actually tried much gaming on Linux myself. I did try and fail to play tarkov arena but maybe that was Ubuntu just protecting me lol
There will be mainstream adoption of Open Source Software but you’re dreaming if you think it will remain free. Marketing alone to get the masses to adopt these options will have a cost that people will be paying for.
Free as in “Freedom”. not free as in “Beer”.
Not charging money for your product had NEVER been a requirement in open source. Most people just give out away and get their money from elsewhere because theoretically someone could just download the source code and compile it themselves.
LMAO The copium that these Microsoft chuds are huffing must be quality stuff for them to ignore criticism from their user base. Their naked desperation for users to embrace agentic Browsers and OS is cringe as fuck. I can only hope that this hurts them badly, when users continue to find ways to circumvent the AI madness that Microsoft has succumbed to. Glad that I switched to Linux and can watch the storm rage on the Broken Window side without worry.
It always makes me wonder: what exactly do they have to gain pushing AI to everything? Like, what’s the angle here?
Asskissing.
Decisionmakers at MS are divorced from reality. The cognitive dissonance is incredible. They make shit up as they go along and the rest eat it all up and re-spew some new godawful incarnation of the terrible ideas.
None of the decisions are based in reality or quality market research (what users want). Their market research boils down to AI is god and we need to make it even more ungodly.
Which isn’t that surprising. When you have a single company dominating a market niche (say, desktop OS-es on PCs), the focus isn’t increasing, retaining or in any way satisfying customers. It’s making shit up as you go along, trying to get your department’s lines a bit higher than the other one so you as a high-to-mid level manager get that sweet, sweet bonus.
It’s not limited to MS and OS-es. The same thing applies to Google and the search and browser markets, as well as Nintendo and their ecosystem, or HP and printers.
You don’t even need a monopoly for this shit to happen. You just need to be “too big to fail”. Luckily, such unsustainable behavior won’t be “too big to fail” forever, but it’s impressive just for how long a company with such rotten echochamber decisionmaking behaviour can keep chugging along just fine, all the while hurting the customers and the economy in general through knock-on - or shall I say trickle down - effects.
I personally see two major factors :
- it’s yet another way to collect data for monetization (selling to governments and advertisers).
- it’s a symptom of market culture : it exists not to serve the user, but to be a product to sell to the user. In that light, it behaves and evolves exactly as any other thingy which tries to reinvent itself year after year, to keep customers interested, regardless of its intrinsic value as an operating system.
but that’s just me, I can’t claim to understand the inner workings of Microsoft
Makes sense, especially with all the tech bros racing to enshittify the world.
It collects data that is sufficient for a personal profile. MS is already arbitrarily blocking accounts in Europe. Now think of Trump. The proliferation of flock cameras and cameras in general. Post something wrong once and you’re gone. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_TlmtdjrOxc
Consider it an alternative chat control that evaluates itself. Automated for maximum efficiency.
In addition, it is also one of the greatest strengths and economic factors of the US… industrial espionage.
Three big things, from most to least obvious:
- They own openai, which is a ponzi scheme.
- They are spying on you. Obviously. This is a better excuse to do more of that more openly.
- This creates a corporate controlled abstraction layer between you and everything you do with any networked device, puts more decision control and discernment in the corporation’s hands. When Amazon tried to move to voice based ordering, it was on this same logic; that you would say ‘alexa, order toilet paper’ and they would choose the toilet paper to order based on what’s best for them-sponsored, most profitable, etc, like you can only buy things from a selfish hyper sociopathic genie. LLM based ux doesn’t just put the corporation between you and products, but between you and all information, between you and truth.
AI is obviously the next big thing. If your product isn’t full AI right now, you’ll miss out.
So basically I’m convinced the reason everyone’s chasing AI is all just greed and fomo. People at the top of the ladder seem generally more detached from reality.
If your program/OS has to constantly phone home to operate, you can’t easily distinguish the traffic related to it’s operation from the traffic snooping all your data. Extra points if you willingly give the AI access or information.
One step ahead - installed Syncthing on an always-on Windows box located at my office, pointed it at some needed Google Drive folders, and synced to Debian. The Windows box has other syncing tasks anyway so it’s not costing anything in power. The Debian laptop is becoming my main workhorse.
rclone is too much of a PITA to configure. insync is way too expensive, especially with multiple Google Drive accounts. Gnome’s sync thinggie does weird stuff with filenames in LibreOffice etc, is basically unusable.
I need Google Drive due to my existing business setups.
I really can’t think of any tasks I do regularly, or even occasionally, I’d want to use AI for.
Maybe I’m an outlier? Read above a 6th grade level (that’s half the US right there) with a background in software development. If someone was like “find all the words in this list that start with ‘ab’” I’d reach for grep or python or similar.
Edit: obligatory: I switched to Linux (pop!_os) full time this year. A few hiccups but on the whole very good.
I don’t understand how you don’t see that you’re on an extreme edge of outliers… Do you seriously think most people even know what grep or python is? (Hint: they don’t)
The vast majority of people have absolutely no experience or interest in coding. The majority of people live without an adblocker, that alone should tell you everything you need to know. It’s kinda funny IMO, comments like yours are so common here and you all seem completely unable to understand the very obvious and basic fact that you are extremely far removed from the average person in any of this. You and everyone else always write like you think most people can code and figure things out that require years of experience and knowledge, while the truth is that anything more complicated than clicking on a big green “install” button and having everything work perfectly is too much for 95% of humanity.
To be fair you could paste the list in a spreadsheet and sort it in about 10 more seconds than it would take to grep it.
I don’t understand how you don’t see that you’re on an extreme edge of outliers
I recognize I’m an outlier. It makes me a little sad that most people won’t get to where I was in middle school, computer and literacy wise. I guess that’s technically years of experience but it’s also stuff a child can do.
Is it because I’m an outlier that I think AI is trash? Maybe.
Find all the words that start with “ab”… Ctrl + F “ab” and do a scan to see how many instances of ab aren’t at the start.
(x = results found) - (y = count that don’t start with ab) = z.
The one thing I use AI at work is to compose corporate flavoured bloated texts with buzzwords (self-evaluation, HR communication) so I can also sound like a brainwashed useful drone.
I only use windows for work, but I hate it with passion.
Recall anyone? Or the renamed version copilot vision ( using cloud storage instead of local storage).
