Hacker Timesnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | simonw's commentslogin

Which product called Copilot did you ask?



Maybe, but Microsoft has a lot of products which they branded Copilot. Pretty sure that was his point.

Microsoft loves to do this with brand names -- a friend who's still there said they stopped counting at 30 different "Defender for ______" products.

In case people missed it in the other thread, GitHub have now disabled this: https://twitter.com/martinwoodward/status/203861213108446452...

> We've disabled it already. Basically it was giving product tips which was kinda ok on Copilot originated PR's but then when we added the ability to have Copilot work on _any_ PR by mentioning it the behaviour became icky. Disabled product tips entirely thanks to the feedback.


I’m grateful they disabled it, but their response still feels a bit tone deaf to me.

> Disabled product tips entirely thanks to the feedback.

This sounds like they are saying “thanks for your input!”, when really it feels more like “if you didn’t go out of your way to complain, we would have left it in forever!”


Of course they would have. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Why do you think governments spend billions upon trillions trying to get their citizens to essentially "shut up" instead of improving their conditions?

Accepting the megacorp euphemisms without critique ("product tips") is how enshittification festers.

I've not seen any evidence that these were ads and not "tips".

Ads implies someone was paying for them. Promoting internal product features is not the same thing - if it was then every piece of software that shows a tip would be an ad product, and would be regulated as such.


> Ads implies someone was paying for them.

It doesn't to me.

By my understanding of the term, Netflix can most definitely advertise Netflix shows on its own platform, a flyer that a barber hangs on a public bulletin board is an advertisement, and the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile is advertising hotdogs when it drives through my town. Do you not consider these things to be advertisements?

I pretty much agree with what https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/advertisement says.


I could buy it if this was just being shown to the person who was using Copilot. Hey, here's a feature you might like. Seems OK. But it was put into the PR description. That gets seen by potentially many people, who are not necessarily using Copilot.

When apple puts an advert for an apple show in front of for all mankind, that's an advert.

Maybe I put up with it and it just adds to my subconscious seething, or maybe I get the episode elsewhere because if I watch on jellyfin I don't have the advert. Of course that then harms the show as my viewing isn't counted, but they've cancelled it anyway so perhaps it doesn't really matter.

If it isn't an advert, then at very least there's a button to disable it.


ads usually implied a financial incentive. But that's not always the case. Technically, if I was to praise someone's blog and link to it, that would also be an ad.

Ads tend to also imply tangential information shown to you in an undesired area. If this was some tool tip and not embedded in the PR comment, many wouldn't call it an ad.


If you have uv installed you can start a chat with the model (after a 2GB model download) with this one-liner:

  uvx --with llm-mrchatterbox llm chat -m mrchatterbox

GitHub have now disabled this: https://twitter.com/martinwoodward/status/203861213108446452...

> We've disabled it already. Basically it was giving product tips which was kinda ok on Copilot originated PR's but then when we added the ability to have Copilot work on _any_ PR by mentioning it the behaviour became icky. Disabled product tips entirely thanks to the feedback.


That's not what's happening. Disney were due to invest $1bn in OpenAI to partner on Sora and that deal has been cancelled.

OpenAI were completely taken by surprise by the success of ChatGPT. Internally there were debates over whether they should launch it at all.

It's had a ton of hype since then of course.


Which Copilot was this? There are a bunch of different products that share that name now.

Microsoft has had a lot of naming blunders in the past but this has to be their worst. Copilot is currently, a tool to review PRs on github, the new name for windows cortana, the new name for microsoft office, a new version of windows laptop/pc, a plugin for VS code that can use many models, and probably a number of other things. None of these products/features have any relation to each other.

So if someone says they use Copilot that could mean anything from they use Word, to they use Claude in VS Code.


>Microsoft has had a lot of naming blunders in the past but this has to be their worst.

Nah I still rate "Windows App" the Windows App that lets you remotely access Windows Apps. I hate it to death, its like a black hole that sucks all meaning from conversations about it.


"Microsoft Remote Desktop" was such a good and distinct name. RIP.

It’s probably a useful feature: if it’s named copilot, assume it’s slop and avoid it.

funny enough I have a page just for tracking this also https://notes.zachmanson.com/microsoft-product-names/

Has anyone been able to replicate the behavior described in this issue yet?

I think it's a very bad idea for a prescription glasses wearer to have only a single pair of glasses where that single pair has a built in camera.

It's not just "having" them though, it's carrying them everywhere and constantly swapping over to your dumb glasses as you walk in and out of places that don't like the smart ones.

Which is sort of my point: when main purpose is convenience, if you have to do something inconvenient to use it then you killed the thing altogether. So if manufacturers want this to fly, they need to sort out the privacy question before there's a sign on every public place saying "no recording glasses". If I was in Meta's position, i'd be going to regulators to ban glasses without an externally controlled hard shutoff mechanism.

It might seem a trivial thing currently, but some of these factors will be the ultimate determinants of exactly how much utility humans can get out of AI. If it can't see what you can see, it can't help you with that.


> [W]hen main purpose is convenience, if you have to do something inconvenient to use it then you killed the thing altogether.

Funny. Because UV-activated darkening lenses inevitably fail in a half-darkened state, I have a pair of always-dark prescription sunglasses and prescription -er- clearglasses. I can tell you from personal experience that it's inconvenient to carry both and swap between the two as my location and the time of day changes, and yet... somehow there's still a solid market for always-dark prescription eyeglasses.

Weird, innit?


I’ve thought about that before. On one hand: “I need these to see.” Other: “No, you need some glasses to see. Picking these as your only pair was bad decision making.”

It sounds like OP is talking about having this extra pair with them where they go, not just having a pair in general.

Which is a fair expectation IMO. There are plenty of places where it's not appropriate to record that they might encounter in the course of a normal day.

You got that exactly the wrong way round.

Here's one set of numbers from the CATO institute: https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/illegal-immigrant-murde...

The only way your statement holds up is if you treat the act of existing while undocumented as a crime for this comparison, in which case sure - it's a tautology.


First of all, the link you provided mixes illegal migration with legal migration, a classic trick trying to downplay the effects of illegal immigration.

Second, it compares murder rates only, in the state of Texas, a state well known to have extreme amounts of legal guns. You can hardly generalise from this data.

Here is some interesting data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Denmark

FWIW I don’t live in the USA.


> First of all, the link you provided mixes illegal migration with legal migration

No it doesn't. I chose that article specifically because it provides figures for native-born citizens, legal immigrants and illegal immigrants:

> Over the 10-year period from 2013 to 2022, the homicide conviction rate in Texas for illegal immigrants was 2.2 per 100,000, compared to 3.0 per 100,000 for native-born Americans. The homicide conviction rate for legal immigrants in Texas was 1.2 per 100,000.

I accept that the figures in other countries may not work out the same way as figures in the USA.


I would not trust these numbers either way, because they are from a think thank with a very specific agenda.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: