Do people actually want this?
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.
Do people actually want this?
Nope. Just like those stupid hard coded buttons on my Roku remote that I have never used.
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.
Super glue, or pliers and super glue.
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. 😅
And it just needs to load a hasty scribbled overloaded UI that takes forever to load with no content because you don’t have an account and/or are not connected to wifi.
Do people actually want this?
Absolutely not. But this is the new standard now.
The new Micro$oft standard, which, as always, is bullshit and should be avoided and ignored at all times.
Yes. The Microsoft standard. Like the Windows key on all keyboards nowadays.
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
Mycroft was the best bet for this before now being continued by open voice OS.
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.
I’ll be good I promise.
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.
Another key to bind to something else? Hell yeah
Nope, just a new logo on an existing key.
:(
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 hope the LLM bubble pops this year. The degree of overinvestment by megacorps is staggering.
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.
I guess my understanding of an LLM must be way off base.
I had thought that asking an LLM to edit a video was simply out of scope. Like asking your self driving car to wash the dishes.
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.
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.
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.)
I don’t see an issue with a “super” key. But what would a copilot key bring that’s of any value? The super key already does everything you’d need.
more keys for custom keybinds ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ depending on where it’s located I’ll probably just use it as a microphone toggle
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
Depends how they do it, if it’s in the registry you can change it.
The point is to have an unused button that you can rebind freelyPure 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.
Can we get this more dystopian? I’m out of ideas.
Nah, they’ll send a package to a Microsoft server that’ll then respond with the keybind and open the program
yeah it’s almost certainly gonna be bound to Super+C, the existing keybind for copilot
Wow when you out it that way it sounds even dumber
Gonna have to shell out a small fortune for a custom build or make do with that dumb new key.
I don’t think this is true. Just buy a laptop from a company that ships it with Linux. No Windows, no Windows keys. It doesn’t have to be ‘custom’.
The post mentioned this, and argues that a super a key is basically just a windows key
So what key are they gonna put there when all cheap generic Chinese keyboard makers start including this button on all their variants of keyboards?
The context menu or right-ctrl key, probably
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.
iit’s just a new keycap
Plus the configuration that is needed to remap the key back to the correct key code.
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.
The video made it look like this was the context menu key. This may just be a key cap change for WHQL certification of keyboards.
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The context menu key is more useful when it’s remapped to the compose key.
My keyboard has a Linux key. And I happily use it.
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.
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.
Unfortunately, the “linux-first” vendors do not offer better deals than their competition.