Am I now the old guy . . .

[AverageOldGuy]

. . . shouting at the kids to "Get off my lawn!!!" ??????

Last night I went through every app on my computer, phone, and tablet as well as the settings on each device and turned OFF that damn "text suggestions as you type," "auto-correct spelling," similar "assistants" as well as consigning to the trash Microsoft's "CoPilot," which was created by Satan himself.

[Irish_Dem]

1. Exactly.

I yell at my devices to stop bossing me around, telling me what to do, and trying to control me.

They need to mind their own damn business.

[PatSeg]

9. Ha, ha!

Reminds me of a very old TV commercial where someone yells, "I can do it myself!!!"

It does feel bossy and intrusive. I do love spell-check however.

[BidenRocks]

28. Excedrin headache #5

[PatSeg]

34. Excedrin!

I knew it was some pain relief medication.

[Irish_Dem]

38. Yep definitely a love hate relationship with the electronic devices.

But my daughter's robot floor mop/vacuum is my arch enemy.

[PatSeg]

39. I swear, they are really trying to take over!

If they can't control us, then they will try to destroy us! The machines are taking over.

[Irish_Dem]

40. I wonder if someday the robots and machines will take over.

All the data centers they are building.
Maybe in the future they will turn on humans.

Would be a great sci fi movie.

[PatSeg]

42. Science fiction has predicted such a takeover

of the machines for a very long time now. Our science fiction writers are often prophetic.

[-misanthroptimist]

2. No, you're not

You're the old guy yelling, "Stop trying to get into my head!" That's a lot more personal and well justified.

I'm the same way.

[Faux pas]

3. I yell and want to throw all my

electronics through all my windows. I hate copilot the most!

[haele]

15. Y'know, before Co-Pilot got involved, auto-fill was just an annoyance.

I could ignore the "helpful completion" and type over it. The Auto-Edit overseer function came with an autocorrect function had to be turned on and so ignored except in its only real useful function as the always on spell or grammer check (the red zigzag under a word or usage not in the Office dictionary).
Unlike the old Auto-Edit Co-Pilot still tries to correct the many acronyms I normally type in a report or email to what it thought was supposed to be the word I needed to use on the Auto save cycle - even when I'm several sentences down.

Luckily, I can still go back and force the acronym or word I wanted to use, the equivalent of smacking Co-Pilot on the nose with a rolled up newspaper, and not have to keep revisiting it, but...
I'm just really nervous that MS is going to decide that it's okay for Co-Pilot can also scan and edit received emails and downloaded documents, affecting incoming information that I require to do my job effectively.
Just because the fat-Ego Barons of Tech believe that AI is better than a normal human being when collating inputs and coming to decisions.

[Faux pas]

41. Your problems with copilot

are much more annoying and important than mine. I'm retired so my problems are just irritating. I'm sorry that it causes you extra work.

[AnotherMother4Peace]

4. It's called decluttering. I'm deleting apps, changing email, unsubscribing, blocking. The simpler, the better.

[SidneyR]

5. I'm an old guy and I like all those things.

[surfered]

6. I draw the line at connecting my coffee pot to the internet

[generalbetrayus]

27. It already is - you just haven't realized it yet.

[Phentex]

7. They went too far! I didn't mind spell check

but I want it to just check what *I* have typed. It started changing whole words to things I never typed and then *I* had to correct it. How was that helping me?

Then it would make suggestions. No. I know what I am trying to say.

Turned it all off so ya get what ya get.

I turned off all voice activated anything.

THEN I had to change some settings so that my phone did not come on automatically and open apps while I am driving and start doing stuff I never intended for it to do. Leave me alone, phone! Mind your business.

[Diamond_Dog]

32. I agree, Phentex.

Even more annoying is when you’re typing someone’s surname and spell check keeps insisting on making it into a different word altogether.

[CBHagman]

10. I'd frame it differently: You are resisting corporate control.

I'm always looking for ways to resist autocomplete and whatnot.

[debsy]

11. I am required to use copilot at work

I am so distressed about AI yet must contribute to its growth or lose my job. I know I am not the only one in this position. It is mortifying, to say the least!

[malaise]

12. Last week I turned off the iPad password suggestions

I suddenly discovered I coukd do this. So freaking annoying.
Now I search you tube for advice on how to shut down lots of crap.

[twodogsbarking]

13. Why think when others can do the thinking for you?

Oh wait.

[flashman13]

14. You are just an old curmudgeon, like me, who simply wants to remain in control of as much of your life as possible.

I have decluttered from as much automated shit as I can.

I am seriously considering ditching my current Windows laptop and going with Apple to avoid Windows 11. W 11 is a giant busy body.

[jfz9580m]

21. I tried

Its too hard..
I am stuck with that toad Nadella though I agree completely with this:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

[ret5hd]

31. you should at least try (hey, it's free)...

something like Linux Mint.

might save a bit of money.

[BeneteauBum]

16. I hate my word prompt

When I reread my correspondence, I often find the ‘corrected’ version not even close to the message I want to impart. Argggghh!

Peace ☮️

[3825-87867]

17. When we were kids growing up in the 50s, 60s or whenever,

we had our parents and others telling us what to do, how to do it, when to do it, what we couldn't do, what wasn't allowed! And then they told us, who will tell you what to do when you grow up!
Isn't it great that NOW, we have machines telling us what to do and not do or when to do it then if you don't "do it right" another machine will talk you through it? Insert card...wait...ok..push enter...didn't work? Call this number and talk to AI for instructions!
And yet, many today are too stupid to even know what to do WHEN a machine tell us!
I've met the future - and it wasn't us.
Progress, eh!

[Vinca]

18. LOL - I know. It drives me nuts sometimes. I'm scared to death my car will crap out and I'll have to get a

new one. It sounds like the new ones take Albert Einstein to operate.

[NewLarry]

23. My sister got a new car a couple years back

and she literally forced the salesman to have the heads-up display and numerous other things disabled. Told him if they couldn't do that, the sale was off.

[Escape]

19. Yeah, and I am tired of my truck telling me what to do, too...

My new truck is very bossy and arrogant and decides what we listen to on the sophisticated futuristic sound system, which I have to operate using my cell phone.

The truck also shuts off it's motor at stoplights and tries to rip the steering wheel out of my hands if I cross over the highway line without signaling. It is always beeping at me and refuses to move if I don't have the seat belt fastened and won't even start if I don't have the belt fastened and my foot on the brake.

And sometimes a message comes on the screen telling me that I shouldn't be looking at the screen so much because it is dangerous. Seriously.

My first car was a new 72 Volkswagen. It was very obedient and always treated me with respect.

[AverageOldGuy]

22. Tell me about it

My new 2025 Subaru Outback thinks it’s smarter than I am and it probably is.

About that auto-start/stop - Google auto start/stop eliminator. I bought a cord for my Outback, pop off a cowling behind rear view mirror, unplug one cable, insert this device into the cable and put it all back together. 5 minutes. The vehicle then remembers your last selection - if you turn that function off, it stays off until u turn it back on. My son did same thing to his Jeep .

[Escape]

25. Thanks...

Actually, I found a button I push every time I start the truck, that shuts that "feature" off. With that new "engine stop" feature, we will all be replacing our starters every two or three years now and I can't imagine that all that starting and restarting is saving any gas.

[calimary]

36. Sounds like it's not really a truck you're driving.

It’s an ornery mother-in-law.

And I should know! I’M a mother-in-law now, too!!!

[highplainsdem]

20. No. You're smart to avoid using generative AI. All those "helpful" features are designed to leave you

dependent on AI.

[jfz9580m]

24. Ed Zitron is pretty much the opposite

And he feels the same way.

Yasha Levine and Ed Zitron are the two tech critics I mainly follow.
And Zitron at least is moderately pro tech and this is him:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

He nails it. A deep and abiding frustration I feel is over this coercing forcing of unwanted crap that hinders your actual use of your own resources.

In fact, sometimes I post a lot here when I should be working out of a spiteful if self-defeating wish to exert choice in at least what I interact with when rubbish tech is disrupting (their own pathetic word of choice in creep valley - how is disruption a positive thing?) me.

I get furious at the notion that some libertarian crackpots want me to learn to adjust my life around their rubbishware and not the other way around. Wtf. They are antisocial elements.

[Buddyzbuddy]

26. I'm with you AOG.

I used my Blackberry until I couldn't,
I like my cars w/ no computer,
I like to put pencil to paper when writing notes,
I've written a daily stock market journal on notepads of which I've kept for years.
I've never had coffee served by a "barrista"
I hate 5G because I live near an airport so they're having to modify it.
I HATE my new laptop with W11, copilot and cloud service so Microsoft can charge me for a subscription that I don't want or need.
Don't get me started on "smart" T.V.'s that you have to disable.

I'm going back to bed. Let me know when it's 1970 and my Malibu is in the driveway.

[generalbetrayus]

29. I feel this way about The Cloud on my iPhone.

[lastlib]

30. I heard the finder of auto correct dyed a few days ago......

The funnel is tomato.

[William Seger]

33. There's one thing that Copilot is pretty good at: software development

To repeat some of what I wrote recently in the Computer Help forum, I have a program that I wrote 25 years ago, which I still use on three websites (if it ain't broke, don't fix it). I haven't touched it in the last 5 years, but I recently needed to make a change, and I no longer had the Visual Studio IDE (Integrated Development Environment, which typically includes a code-aware editor, compiler, linker, and debugger), and the last version I had used was from 2012 (again, if it does what you need, why mess with it).

I installed the latest VS version, and it was COMPLETELY different from the last version I used. I was completely lost and couldn't get it to build from my existing project definition files, and was looking at a rather depressing amount of time to figure out why.

VS now includes Copilot, so in desperation, I decided to give it a try. I gave it my original source files and asked it to compile and build the program from scratch. I expected a rather half-assed job with lots of problems left to resolve, mainly from the large number of dependencies on other packages and subsystems I used, but I was hoping it would at least give me a good starting point with a project I could work on. It churned for quite a while, checking what it had done, finding problems in both my code and what it had just done, fixing them without any help from me, and trying again. In the end, it actually figured out all my dependencies and fixed all the problems, automatically downloading what it didn't already have, and built a working program!

Then, I needed a web server on my computer to test, which I could have done, but why bother if Copilot knows how? So I asked Copilot to enable the IIS server and configure a website with certain requirements (like installing my program as a CGI, which isn't as obvious as it used to be), and it did so with no complaints. I also needed a MySQL database server, so I asked Copilot to download and install it, then set that up an account that my program would log into, and again it did it with no help at all from me.

My program was developed to run on Microsoft systems because all of my sites were on Windows hosts, but I always wanted to create a Linux version, since those hosting services are now much cheaper than Windows. Many years ago, I spent quite a bit of time trying to do that, but with no success, so I gave up. I decide to see if Copilot could do that, and son-of-a-bitch, it did! I don't have a Linux system, so I've asked a friend to try to build and run it, but if it works, I'll be moving all my sites to Linux hosts. If it doesn't, I expect I can ask Copilot to fix specific problems.

Later, I was thinking about a web page that I have that has a lot of complex Javascript calculations. I wanted a phone app to do the same thing, so a while back I tried a program that wraps HTML in an Android app. It's basically just an imbedded browser emulator, so the HTML display worked, but I couldn't get it to run the Javascript, for some reason. It occurred to me that maybe Copilot knows how to do that, and it turns out, it's even better: It gave me the option to convert it to a native code app, and it worked! I didn't like some of the formatting it did, so I told Copilot to change some text sizes and margins and to remove some unnecessary text and buttons, just describing them by where they were on the page, and I even added an app icon -- all without me having even a foggy notion of what it was doing or how the app was actually coded, using packages I had never heard of.

So yes, this old guy was very impressed with Copilot for saving me a LOT of time. However, just this morning, I came across a good example of why it's dangerous to trust AI with things it's not very good at: checking facts and formulating truly logical conclusions. This is already a very long post, so I'll spare you the details, but in short it involved a controversy in Egyptian archeology which I have been following for a couple of years. I asked Google's AI what were the oldest known examples of Egyptian stone vases, and much of what it said agreed with what I already knew. But then, it linked to the YouTube channel of a pseudo-archeologist who is well known for making extraordinary claims without extraordinary evidence. It linked to a particular video that was making a claim based only on two photos, and I now know that one of those photos had been misidentified by a London museum, and that he was making claims about the other photo that contradicted what the archeologists who did the excavation said about it.

AI is just a tool, and like all tools, results depend on how you use or misuse it. What scares me, maybe more than AI itself, is how many people don't realize that AI doesn't stand for Actual Intelligence.

[Sogo]

35. Please, tell me how to do that....

!

[hunter]

37. What's an app?

The way I use computers hasn't changed much in the past 25 years, hell, maybe not since the creation of the World Wide Web back when one surfed it using Lynx or Mosaic, which were not called apps.

Other than DU posts I write everything in markdown using whatever text editor is handy. I can do that on anything from my Atari eight bit to the latest Microsoft or Apple monstrosity.

My little flip phone is pretty much the same as my first cell phone except it has a camera and a micro SD card to store the photos on. Supposedly I can store music on the SD card too but I don't. Mostly I use it as a telephone.

I guess that makes me some kind of Luddite.

Two innovations I actually enjoy about the modern digital world are no-advertising streaming television and ebooks. Those are independent of my computer or cell phone. I prefer paper books but my wife and I already have enough of those to stock a Carnegie library.

[Polybius]

43. Yes

No auto correct stinks with big thumbs.