You're entirely right, but they need to maintain Windows in order to promote those services. The OS and their various applications have a symbiotic relationship where they prioritize each other.
If Microsoft discontinued Windows and switched to just providing web apps, the competition would be a lot stiffer.
They literally tried that strategy with Internet Explorer 6 a long time ago where they didn't really update it for years, only doing the bare minimum. The result was a downward spiral in market share that they were unable to stop once they started trying again, ultimately resulting in IE effectively becoming obsolete.
Because browsers are one of the very few components that actually need to catch up to the rest of the world, but they've already outsourced most of that work to Chromium.
If this is the case, Windows seems like it should be very important. Otherwise they can't deliver their subscription services. I'm not going to subscribe to cable TV if my TV is broken.
> AI has the potential to do something similar for cognition. It's not very good at it yet, but externalised cognition has the potential to be transformative in ways we can't imagine - in the same way Socrates couldn't imagine Hacker News.
Wouldnt the endgame of externalized cognition be that humans essentially become cogs in the machine?
Reminds me of that one messed up game[0] in 17776[1] (which I highly recommend reading from the start) Specifically in that the rules for an entirely different kind of game seem to have grown out of control.
And I don't want to use tools I don't understand at least to some degree. I always get nervous when I do something but don't know why I do that something
I didnt build my car either. But I understand a bit of most of the main mechanics, like how the ABS works, how powered steering does, how an ICE works and so on.
So far, eqch and every time I used an LLM to help me with something it hallucinated non-existant functions or was incorrect in an important but non-obvious way.
Though, I guess I do treat LLM's as a last resort longshot for when other documentation is failing me.
Speaking as someone who doesn't really like or do LLM-assisted coding either: at least try Gemini. ChatGPT is the absolute worst you could use. I was quite shocked when I compared the two on the same tasks. Gemini gets decent initial results you can build on. ChatGPT generates 99% absolutely unusable rubbish. The difference is so extreme, it's not even a competition anymore.
I now understand why Altman announced "Code Red" at OpenAI. If their tools don't catch up drastically, and fast, they'll be one for the history books soon. Wouldn't be the first time the big, central early mover in a new market suddenly disappears, steamrolled by the later entrants.
I was in the same camp until a few months ago. I now think they're valid tools, like compilers. Not in the sense that everyone compares them (compilers made asm development a minuscule niche of development).
But in the sense that even today many people don't use compilers or static analysis tools. But that world is slowly shrinking.
Same for LLMs, the non LLM world will probably shrink.
You might be able to have a long and successful career without touching them for code development. Personally I'd rather check them out since tools are just tools.
With proton, at least, you can just use your own domain and if they ever get bad, you just point the MX record to some other service, or self host, and pretty much have it taken care of.
Maybe you can give a bit of context why you feel that way? Dropping a 2+ hour, <2000 views, 4chan video without context isn’t really the type of comment HN is looking for as far as I can tell
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