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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

> Coloring book will be available only on Copilot+ PCs. To use Coloring book, you will need to sign in with your Microsoft account.

Can someone please explain why these two things are ever simultaneously true? You buy the stupid Copilot+ PC that has "AI" NPU hardware, right? So the AI features should be able to run locally. But if you have to sign in with a Microsoft account, then surely, it doesn't run locally, which begs the question, why does it require a Copilot+ PC at all?

Not even going to bother asking "does anybody want this to begin with" because at this point there is no real need to bother asking that.

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I feel the deepest existential pain in my heart that despite companies being 'all in' on AI, they can't integrate anything meaningful that would make sense to the end use, but would require even a braincells worth of mental effort of ML expertise or actual requirements people have.

My two favourite 'AI' tools in image editing have been ones that can replace tedious work.

One such example are segmentation models that can be used for smart cutouts, removing backgrounds etc.

Now we have both 'segmentation' and 'AI' in paint - but the segmentation uses the exact same shitty flood fill with tolerance that's probably existed in the first paint program at Xerox PARC, while the 'AI' feature is another by-the-numbers crappy stable diffusion model that's strictly worse than anything you could get with your first Google search.

Proper color fill will not make shareholders happy while AI-powered image color replacement will.

I have like 3 Microsoft shares, and it would have made me happy :(

I read somewhere that even for the "Copilot" things that supposedly run locally, windows needs to send a request to microsoft to confirm if your input is allowed by their rules.

Microsoft really want to force you to log in with an MS account, as well as slurp all your documents into the spy cloud, and they keep pushing back on the various ways round this people have found.

(I found an odd one: for some reason I can't log into my PC with my MS account, which let me create the local account I actually wanted. System broken in my favor.)

The best way is to set up samba on a Linux machine, even a raspberry pi, and create a domain. Then you can create group policy to turn off a lot of nonsense and set up your computer by connecting to the domain. No MS account required, although you can associate one of you like.

Windows feels like it has a lot of attrition from home users now and perhaps it is only a matter of time before it's no longer worth writing exclusive software for it.

The goal is obviously to onboard consumers to an app store ecosystem so MS can charge monopoly rents to app developers for access to Windows users.

Everything MS is doing in Windows is to this end.

Obviously not. They introduced their app store (13 years ago!, fuck time goes by), probably trying to do this.

They got to like step 3 of their 10 step master plan and gave up and have been lingering there.

Microsoft has been a walking husk of a company for the past decade and a half that somehow inexplicably stumbled into a trillion dollar valuation.

Come on man, the usual reason: $$$

Its is Micro$oft after all :P

The reason we're getting this AI gumbo is that obviously the product people at M$ we're told: "Make money by selling AI features!!!". Which flipped their minds from their usual "I am Steve Jobs" fantasies, which tell them to _consider the User experience first_, to _Consider the companie$ experience first_, and they can't keep the two concepts in their little heads at the same time because they are, after all, just product people.

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