DaiPlusPlus (u/DaiPlusPlus)

DaiPlusPlus commented on LG TV's new software update installed MS Copilot, which cannot be deleted old.reddit.com/r/mildlyin... · Posted by u/bj-rn

542458 · 18 hours ago

I really doubt the user data for a smart tv user is all that valuable. Meta has infinitely more rich data and an entire tightly optimized ad system and is on a platform where people commonly make large purchases and makes around $10 per user per year.

DaiPlusPlus · 17 hours ago

> I really doubt the user data for a smart tv user is all that valuable.

According to a 2021 article about Vizio's user-hostile advert display devices, they boast of an average revenue of $13/yr - up from $7.30/yr, though consider this was 2020 when more people were at-home watching TV instead of going outside, meeting people, touching grass, the usual.

https://deadline.com/2021/03/vizio-smart-tv-streaming-ipo-12...

> A range of advertising opportunities drive revenue, including revenue sharing with programmers and distribution partners as well as activations on the device home screen. In the fourth quarter of 2020, the company said average revenue per user on SmartCast was $12.99, up from $7.31 in the same period of 2019.

-------------

If you'll allow me to make an arbitrary assumption that a new TV set bought today will last about 10 years, then $13/yr means the advertising revenue implies Vizio has reduced the sale-price of their TVs by $130 compared to before we had no-opt-out advertising displayed on our own property as a condition for the privilege of using said device.

DaiPlusPlus commented on Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025... · Posted by u/ArmageddonIt

etothet · 5 days ago

From the article: "What I find really interesting about this change on Apple’s part is how it seemingly goes against their own previous human interface guidelines..."

Welcome to Apple of the last decade. As an avid user of many Apple products, this has been extremely frustrating to experience. Hopefully Alan Dye's departure will see at least partial return to obeying Apple's own HIG.

DaiPlusPlus · 5 days ago

I think the problem might be generational… the only people who know - or care - about the HIG are older millennials

DaiPlusPlus commented on Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025... · Posted by u/ArmageddonIt

IcyWindows · 5 days ago

I believe some programs used to let you even drag menu items to the toolbar.

DaiPlusPlus · 5 days ago

MS Office’s fully customisable toolbars, complete with built-in icon editor.

…ripped out when the Office Ribbon was introduced in 2007; the now-limited customisation is now considered an improvement because of the IT support problems caused by users messing up their own toolbars.

I mean, yes; but that’s what Group Policy is for! And the removal of the icon editor is just being downright mean to bored school kids.

DaiPlusPlus commented on What Is Generative UI? tambo.co/blog/posts/what-... · Posted by u/grouchy

averynicepen · 7 days ago

I bristled at the title, article contents, and their spreadsheet example, but this does actually touch on a real paint point that I have had - how do you enable power users to learn more powerful tools already present in the software? By corollary, how do you turn more casual users into power users?

I do a lot of CAD. Every single keyboard shortcut I know was learned only because I needed to do something that was either *highly repetitive* or *highly frustrating*, leading me to dig into Google and find the fast way to do it.

However, everything that is only moderately repetitive/frustrating and below is still being done the simple way. And I've used these programs for years.

I have always dreamed of user interfaces having competent, contextual user tutorials that space out learning about advanced and useful features over the entire duration that you use. Video games do this process well, having long since replaced singular "tutorial sections" with a stepped gameplay mechanic rollout that gradually teaches people incredibly complex game mechanics over time.

A simple example to counter the auto-configuration interpretation most of the other commenters are thinking of. In a toolbar dropdown, highlight all the features I already know how to use regularly. When you detect me trying to learn a new feature, help me find it, highlight it in a "currently learning" color, and slowly change the highlight color to "learned" in proportion to my muscle memory.

DaiPlusPlus · 7 days ago

> how do you enable power users to learn more powerful tools already present in the software?

On-the-job-training, honestly; like we've been doing for decades, restated as:

Employer-mandated required training in ${Product} competence: consisting of a "proper" guided introduction to the advanced and undiscovered features of a product combined with a proficiency examination where the end-user must demonstrate both understanding a feature, and actually using it.

(With the obvious caveat the you'll probably want to cut-off Internet access during the exam part to avoid people delegating their thinking to an LLM again; or mindlessly following someone else's instructions in-general)

My pet example is when ("normal") people are using MS Word when they don't understand how defined-styles work, and instead treat everything in Word as a very literal 1:1 WYSIWYG, so to "make a heading" they'll select a line of text, then manually set the font, size, and alignment (bonus points if they think Underlining text for emphasis is ever appropriate typography (it isn't)), and they probably think there's nothing more to learn. I'll bet that someone like that is never going to explore and understand the Styles system on their own volition (they're here to do a job, not to spontaneously decide to want to learn Word inside out, even on company time).

Separately, there are things like "onboarding popups" you see in web-applications thesedays, where users are prompted to learn about new and underused features, but I feel they're ineffective or user-hostile because those popups only appear when users are trying to use the software for something else, so they'll ignore or dismiss them, never to be seen again.

> By corollary, how do you turn more casual users into power users?

Unfortunately for our purposes, autism isn't transmissible.

DaiPlusPlus commented on The past was not that cute juliawise.net/the-past-wa... · Posted by u/mhb

johnfn · 7 days ago

This comment is a real rollercoaster. I can’t tell which side you’re arguing for.

DaiPlusPlus · 7 days ago

Clearly advocating for the continued use of paper checks

DaiPlusPlus commented on Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas arstechnica.com/ai/2025/1... · Posted by u/OptionOfT

throwaway2037 · 9 days ago

This is a great post. Next time that you see it, grab a screenshot, put on GitHub pages and post it here on HN. It will generated lots of interesting discussion about rubbish suggestions from poor LLM models.

DaiPlusPlus · 9 days ago

> rubbish suggestions from poor LLM models.

We get rubbish suggestions from SOTA(tm) LLM models too, y’know.

DaiPlusPlus commented on Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas arstechnica.com/ai/2025/1... · Posted by u/OptionOfT

xnorswap · 10 days ago

This is the most annoying thing, and it's even happened to Jetbrains' rider too.

Some stuff that used to work well with smart autocomplete / intellisense got worse with AI based autocomplete instead, and there isn't always an easy way to switch back to the old heuristic based stuff.

You can disable it entirely and get dumb autocomplete, or get the "AI powered" rubbish, but they had a very successful heuristic / statistics based approach that worked well without suggesting outright rubbish.

In .NET we've had intellisense for 25 years that would only suggest properties that could exist, and then suddenly I found a while ago that vscode auto-completed properties that don't exist.

It's maddening! The least they could have done is put in a roslyn pass to filter out the impossible.

DaiPlusPlus · 9 days ago

You can still use the older ML-model (and non-LLM-based!) IntelliCode completion suggestions - it’s buried in the VS Installer as an optional feature entirely separate from anything branded CoPilot.

DaiPlusPlus commented on Everyone in Seattle hates AI jonready.com/blog/posts/e... · Posted by u/mips_avatar

whoamiopa · 11 days ago

Very new ex-MSFT here. I couldn’t relate more with your friend. That’s exactly what happened. I left Microsoft about 5 weeks ago and it’s been really hard to detox from that culture.

AI pushed down everywhere. Sometimes shitty-AI that needed to be proved at all cost because it should live up to the hype.

I was in one of such AI-orgs and even there several teams felt the pressure from SLT and a culture drift to a dysfunctional environment.

Such pressure to use AI at all costs, as other fellows from Google mentioned, has been a secret ingredient to a bitter burnout. I’m going to therapy and under medication now to recover from it.

DaiPlusPlus · 10 days ago

(Fellow ex-msftie here too; but I left for a startup almost exactly 10 years ago, and I miss how that older culture is apparently gone).

What I don't understand is where the AI irrationality is coming from: the C-suite (still in B37?) are all incredibly smart people who must surely be aware of the damage this top-down policy is having on morale, product-quality, and how the company is viewed by its own customers - and yet, they do.

I'm not going to pretend things were being run perfectly when I was at MS: there were plenty of slow-motion mistakes playing-out right in front of us all[1] - and as I look back, yes, I was definitely frustrated at these clear obvious mistakes and their resultant unimaginable waste of human effort and capital investment.

Actually, come to think about it... maybe perhaps things really haven't changed as much? Clearly something neurotoxic got into the Talking Rain cans sometime around 2010-2011 - then was temporarily abated in 2014-2015; then came back twice as hard in 2022.

-------

[1]: Windows 8 and the Start Screen; the SurfaceRT; Visual Studio 2012 with SHOUTY MENUS and monochrome toolbar icons; the laggy and sluggish Office 2013; the crazy simultaneous development of entirely separate new reimplementations of the Office apps for iOS, Android, WinRT, the web. While ignoring the clear market-demand for cloud-y version of Active Directory without on-prem DCs (instead we got Entra, then InTune).

DaiPlusPlus commented on Anthropic acquires Bun bun.com/blog/bun-joins-an... · Posted by u/ryanvogel

the_overseer · 12 days ago

From the link:

"For now, I’ll go dogfood my shiny new vibe-coded black box of a programming language on the Advent of Code problem (and as many of the 2025 puzzles as I can), and see what rough edges I can find. I expect them to be equal parts “not implemented yet” and “unexpected interactions of new PL features with the old ones”.

If you’re willing to jump through some Python project dependency hoops, you can try to use FAWK too at your own risk, at Janiczek/fawk on GitHub."

That doesn't sound like some great success. It mostly compiles and doesn't explode. Also I wouldn't call a toy "innovation" or "revolution".

DaiPlusPlus · 11 days ago

I did take a look at the generated sources when I first saw the article and it seemed coherent and organised, though.

DaiPlusPlus commented on IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off businessinsider.com/ibm-c... · Posted by u/nabla9

jimmar · 11 days ago

I don't know that I'd trust IBM when they are pitching their own stuff. But if anybody has experience with the difficulty of making money off of cutting-edge technology, it's IBM. They were early to AI, early to cloud computing, etc. And yet they failed to capture market share and grow revenues sufficiently in those areas. Cool tech demos (like the Watson Jeopardy) mimic some AI demos today (6-second videos). Yeah, it's cool tech, but what's the product that people will actually pay money for?

I attended a presentation in the early 2000s where an IBM executive was trying to explain to us how big software-as-a-service was going to be and how IBM was investing hundreds of millions into it. IBM was right, but it just wasn't IBM's software that people ended up buying.

DaiPlusPlus · 11 days ago

> but it just wasn't IBM's software that people ended up buying.

Well, I mean, WebSphere was pretty big at the time; and IBM VisualAge became Eclipse.

And I know there were a bunch of LoB applications built on AS/400 (now called "System i") that had "real" web-frontends (though in practice, they were only suitable for LAN and VPN access, not public web; and were absolutely horrible on the inside, e.g. Progress OpenEdge).

...had IBM kept up the pretense of investment, and offered a real migration path to Java instead of a rewrite, then perhaps today might be slightly different?