Ok, fine in that scenario a few decades from now others will trust us…

My general point is that discussing the intricacies of potential local AI model usage is way over the head of the people that would even in theory care about the facile “AI PC” marketing message. Since no one is making it trivial for the casual user to actually do anything with those NPUs, then it’s all a moot point for this sort of marketing. Even if there were an enthusiast market that would use those embedded NPUs without a distinct more capable infrastructure, they wouldn’t be swayed/satisfied with just ‘AI PC’ or ‘Copilot+’, they’d want to know specs rather than a boolean yes/no for ‘AI’.

The issue is that to the extent that might even make sense, no major player is actually doing anything to help that happen. Every big player is exclusively focused on taking AI use cases into their datacenters, because that’s the way to maintain control and demand subscriptions.

If you did do it, then the users would complain that the ‘AI feature’ as executed on their puny NPU is really slow compared to what the online alternative does.

So that scenario is a hypothetical, and they are trying to make sales based on now. ‘AI PC’ doesn’t make any sense because people imagine what you describe, but in reality just cannot tell a difference because nothing works any differently for their ‘AI experience’. Their experience is going to be a few niche Windows features work that most people don’t even know about or would want.

Well, first Dell’s use of ‘confused’ is mainly a way to walk “away” from AI as a marketing strategy without having to walk it “back” (they can’t walk it back: Microsoft will keep Copiloting it up, the processor comparies will keep bundling NPUs, and the consumer exposure to AI will continue to have nothing to do with any of the ‘AI PC’ or not). So ‘confused’ is a way to rationalize the absence of ‘AI PC’ in their marketing strategy without having to actually change what they are doing.

But to the extent ‘confusing’ may apply, it’s less about ‘AI’ and more about ‘AI PC’. What about this ‘AI PC’ would impact your usage with AI, for most people the answer is ‘not at all’, since mostly it’s over the internet. So for the layperson, an ‘AI PC’ just enables a few niche Windows features no one cares about. Everything pushing around the ‘AI’ craze is well away from actually running on the end user devices.

The real ‘quiet part’ would be that they are avoiding it because a large number of people hate ‘AI’. To say they are ‘confused’ is still keeping the quiet part quiet…

More to the point, the casual consumer isn’t going to dig into the nitty gritty of running models locally and not a single major player is eager to help them do it (they all want to lock the users into their datacenters and subscription opportunities).

On the Dell keeping NPUs in their laptops, they don’t really have much of a choice if they want modern processors, Intel and AMD are all-in on it still.

It’s just a softer thing to say than ‘a lot of people hate AI and it’s alienating potential customers’. They can’t come out and say that out loud, they don’t want to piss off Microsoft too much and they aren’t going to try to do NPU-free systems (it’s not really possible). They aren’t going to do anything to ‘fight back’ against the AI that people hate (they can’t), so their best explanation as to why they pull back from a toxic brand strategy is that ‘people just don’t care’ rather than ‘people hate this thing that we are going to keep feeding’.

But if they need to rationalize the perspective, an “AI” PC does nothing to change the common users experience with the AI things they know, does not change ChatGPT or Opus or anything similar, that stuff is entirely online. So for the common user, all ‘AI’ PC means is a few Windows gimmicks that people either don’t care about or actively complained about (Recall providing yet another way for sensitive data to get compromised).

In terms of “AI” as a brand value, the ones most bullish about AI are executives that like the idea of firing a punch of people and incidently they actually want to buy fewer PCs as a result. So even as you can find AI enthusiastic people, they still don’t want AI PCs.

For most people, their AI experience has been:

• News stories talking about companies laying off thousands or planning to lay off thousands for AI, AI is the enemy
• News stories talking about some of those companies having to rehire those people because AI fell over, AI is crap
• Their feeds being flooded with AI slop and deepfakes, AI is annoying
• Their google searches now having a result up top that, at best, is about the same as clicking the top non-sponsored link, except that it frequently totally botches information, AI is kind of pointless

For those that have actually positive AI experience, they already know it has nothing to do with whether the PC is ‘AI’ or not. So it’s just a brand liability, not a value.

And I’d be more ok with LLM technology in general if not for:

• The rampant copyright infringement
• The overcommitment of financial and actual resources

In and of itself, ok a neat little trick with some utility so long as it isn’t taken too seriously.

The people wanted actual reasoning AI, not generative AI. They didn’t expect us to devote most of our nominal economic activity toward a few big tech companies to get it. They didn’t expect them to assert that text generators are ‘reasoning’ and when called on it declare that it’s not reasoning as humanity has known it, but here’s some buzzwords to justify us claiming it’s a whole new sort of reasoning that’s just as valuable.

Probably not invade, but some more targeted clandestine operations seem an actually possible outcome…

Practically speaking, if a foreign state feels they are going to get in a violent fight anyway, they may be more inclined to take action that doesn’t require a lot of people to make some key strategic changes.

Outlook not so good… nailed that one too.

Inspired by your comment, I polled ChatGPT 5 direct and Copilot itself, and ChatGPT was smarter than the executive by saying it was a bad idea, while Copilot itself said it might be a bad idea, but it’s aligned with Microsoft’s vision, which may be more important, but ultimately seemed to have no idea if it was a good idea or bad idea…

So I guess ChatGPT at least is smarter than the MS CEO. Of course Copilot seemed primed to try to favor and vindicate Microsoft’s decision. I tried a more aggressive statement that it was stupid to try to get that ‘I agree with you by default’ and it still tried to soften the perspective in favor of Microsoft.

As a bonus, I asked if it would be a good idea to rename LibreOffice to LibreSidekick. It looked more like the ChatGPT 5 answer for Office to Copilot, saying it’s a dumb idea, until the end when it said unless it has an AI assistant like Microsoft Copilot, then it would be a good idea…

Why would Putin enjoy a heavy US naval presence in the contested Artic Circle waters?

In theory, he might not like a heavy foreign naval presence, but Greenland is already NATO aligned. So he’d be trading a NATO aligned region for a US-only region in exchange for a fractured NATO. Sounds like a decent trade. Also keep in mind practically speaking they are probably equally unlikely to actually boost military presence much, and if they really wanted just that, NATO would probably mostly let them do it if USA paid for it, without USA having to take it.

The Danish are not meaningfully contributing to the Ukraine conflict. And there is no reason to believe the big EU militaries would stop feeding supplies to Ukraine if the US invaded Greenland.

This isn’t about just Denmark, which materially would barely be impacted right now since Greenland is doing practically nothing. It’s about the notion of one NATO member invading another, and the absolute clusterfuck that would bring. A USA versus European NATO scenario would be his dream scenario. See “Foundations of Geopolitics”, where it’s mostly about getting Russia’s opponents to fracture and ruin alliances:

Russia should “introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social, and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics”.

This is also the book that makes annexation of Ukraine the top priority, that it must be secured before the broader Russian agenda can be executed. It also says they need to make the UK isolated from the broader EU. They know that above all else alliances must be broken for them to stand a chance to seize power.

Oh phone trees are terrible, I refer exclusively to online self service. I suppose an LLM might be able to help a caller connect to the correct set of humans better than phone trees…

If I’m resorting to phone, it’s because I really really need a human. I know there still exist some very old people stuck calling… But if they can’t work your online portal, they won’t be able to work a phone tree either…

The robo-bullshit is great, if the thing has no nuance. Self checkout, paying bills, buying stuff online.

The things is those things are great because they are so predictable. LLM takes the predictability out. It’s also generally not allowed to do anything that the self service portal was not allowed to do, so you get stuck with a more imprecise interface instead of the nice, precise interface of a traditional portal, and no access to more nuanced help. It’s the worst of both worlds.

Yeah, have a new executive who managed a vaguely segment appropriate “hello world” with code gen and so regularly rants about why we should be paying human developers.

The biggest improvement on the user side was to stop trying to weigh the bagging area to prevent loss.

The newer machine vision based systems are less likely to screw up. “Unexpected item in bagging area” was an almost universal experience, nowadays I have only been flagged for human review once.

Also, one store I was at just lets you put your items under a camera without finding barcodes, and you just confirm the identified products.

Think the issue is either a self service portal that works in very predictable way (like the self checkout) or a human to deal with nuance.

To the extent an LLM might be useful, it’s likely blocked from doing so because the operator doesn’t trust it either.

The biggest annoyance is that the LLM support tends to more aggressively refuse to bring a human in.

So, Windows is harder to use you say. And “incompetent” users should stick to Linux?

That’s a take that would have been absurd many years ago. I personally am willing to do things the hard way for some benefit, so I have a Windows PC for gaming. But all my other systems are Linux systems, laptop, workstation, or embedded. However Windiws is supposed to be the easier choice.

I’ll even grant that Windows PITA is mostly not deliberate action by Microsoft. It’s mostly letting vendors be their crappy self and messing up the experience, with a bit of windows driver model incompatibilities breaking hardware support abandoned by vendor, but kept alive Linux side.