gnomicutterance

They have had hands down the best accessibility in desktop markets for 20 years, no contest. Overwhelming market share for many assistive techs. Which is why I’m absolutely livid at them now. If they break Windows I have nowhere else to go. Garbage people making garbage choices.

The accessibility community is pretty divided on AI hype in general and this feature is no exception. Making it easier to add alt is good. But even if the image recognition tech were good enough—and it’s not, yet—good alt is context dependent and must be human created.

Even if it’s just OCR folks are ambivalent. Many assistive techs have native OCR they’ll do automatically, and it’s better, usually. But not all, and many AT users don’t know how to access the text recognition them when they have it.

Personally I’d rather improve the ML functionality and UX on the assistive tech side, while improving the “create accessible content” user experiences on the authoring tool side. (Ie. Improve the braille display & screen reader ability to describe the image by putting the ML tech there, but also make it much easier for humans to craft good alt, or video captions, etc.)

Yeah, I’m a windows user and agree with you completely. People choose operating system, not battery life.

I would love if they solved the problems that made windows on ARM not ready for prime time, even though I’m enough of a power user it will probably never be for me. But this is not the way.

Part of this is still trying to make a combination full featured windows laptop that’s also a Chromebook equivalent that’s also a tablet that’s also a dessert topping, when those should be separate devices with different ecosystems. UWP Metro apps were tablet-first when they first launched, sucking on desktop. The tablet pushing in Windows 10 initially broke accessibility. 2-in-1 Surfaces are way too heavy to be good tablets, because they’re still full featured PCs.

I do not want to mix this duck sauce with that chocolate bunny.

Yeah but they’ve been marketing Windows on ARM as a Macbook Air killer for a few years now. This is more of a rebrand of that effort.

This green bubble/blue bubble thing is so exhausting. It’s like this is the first walled garden these whiny toddlers (and the DOJ) have ever encountered. Not using gmail for personal email hurts me both socially and professionally, & has probably kept me out of the running for jobs. Back when people used Facebook, there were social events I wasn’t invited to because I wasn’t on Facebook. None is this is new, and it predates computers. (Ask a teetotaler or sober person about their dating opportunities, why don’t you?)

Since this isn’t really even related to GenAI at all, in our house the theory is:

• MS has been trying and failing to push ARM in PCs for a while
• Now they take one with an NPU and rebrand it as Copilot+™️®️ PCs
• They have market research that says initial sales are going to be soft and they panic because early soft sales create a bad vibe
• So, without doing any of the usual build up of exciting the tech press, without hyping trade show buzz, they rush an unfinished, insecure, unwanted product to market in the hope it will be the killer app at last for high-battery life ARM on Windows.
• They use lot of AI hype language to capitalize off the hype cycle, even though besides the OCR it seems to be pretty limited in its relationship to anything machine learning at all.

It’s funny how they’ve taken on Marx and Communism as an unmarked Good Person in a weird sort of half troll (remember Musk claiming to be a socialist? to say nothing of Ms. Boucher as a cosplay elf reading the communist manifesto). It’s not quite like American racists and capitalists claiming Dr. King would have Supported Them, Actually, because it’s half serious (people like leftism so unfettered wealth acquisition is the real leftism) and half trolling. They’re trying to get props and have a haha-j/k back door out of the claim at the same time.

Death to Chronos!

At the risk of being sincere in the snark pit, hugs. Good for you for taking care of yourself.

But you see it’s your moral responsibility to earn to give™️. This means that in order to do good in the world you have to keep milking every last maximized penny out of your cancer cure. To save people. Altruism, y’see.

I love it so much. No spoilers though; we’ve only gotten so far.

Yeah, that’s a huge problem with private education. If it’s expensive to the student, they want a profit. If the uni is expensive to run and privately funded, they want rich alumni. (And sadly, even in public universities in the US, the funders have a horrifically profit motivated view: the purpose of public education is to produce a highly trained body of workers. The crisis in American higher ed is deep right now; lawmakers and academic administrators fundamentally don’t believe in the humanities.)

Still, part of this is CS’s fault as a field. You mentioned to David the difference between engineering and physics, and in most places, those are different academic fields of study. Both valuable, but different. Why shouldn’t CS do the same?

I’ve found that most of the best working application programmers I’ve worked with have a liberal arts background with a humanities focus, because the training leads to a more holistic view of complex systems, and a better ability to work with potential user needs, and for programming closer to the user in a chaotic system, that can be more useful than understanding NP completeness and context free grammars.

Tl;dr I think we’re violently agreeing with one another. US universities shouldn’t be so aggressively focused on turning out graduates who will become productive, rich worker bees, and using an academic field of study to do so is corrupting the academic field & not ideal for the students.