I'm Drowning in AI Features I Never Asked for and I Hate It

This probably does not affect everyone because I have never seen this issue in Mint

Even still, even if it does require a tech-literate person to fix, they have access to that by me, and I can likely fix it for them in a few minutes with tmate or something, as opposed to Windows Update bricking the computer, which required basically an entire day from me to fix.

Oh, and if an update does cause an issue, Linux has competent snapshotting tools because they have filesystems that didn’t coexist with dinosaurs and as such if something breaks a fix is a reboot (and probably a twenty minute phone call with me) away. On Ubuntu if you install ZFS on root you can configure it to take an auto snapshot before updates, for example.

I suppose I could do it when I come down and visit when they’re not looking, though I think they would be pretty pissed if I did that.

If you don't want to be sneaky about it, just install it next time Windows craps itself.

While the parent comment indicates that a child is possibly overstepping, your comment is a greater overstep.

Even if I did do that, I'm quite confident that unless I install the desktop version of Microsoft Office, they would never go for it.

Linux has the same or even greater hardware diversity, and I have never had a Linux update so thoroughly break my computer as Windows Update did for my mom's computer recently. I run NixOS unstable, I run a system update daily, and while I have had packages break, it still boots after the update. I can say similar things about Arch as well, and I think Ubuntu LTS would be even more reliable.

Windows Update is worse though, because since Windows doesn't have snapshotting in the same way that Linux can have with btrfs or ZFS or bcachefs, an update can fully just break the computer. If you install ZFS on root in Ubuntu it will take a snapshot after each update or even every `sudo apt install`, so even if I did have something break because of an update I'm generally able to get the computer into a usable state by rebooting an choosing something earlier.

But even worse, Windows updates aren't really "opt-in" like they are with Mac and Linux. Windows Updates will happen accidentally or just in the background, as was the case with my mom a few weeks ago. As far as she is aware, she didn't choose the update, it just happened and then her computer was bricked.

Importantly, Windows Update really only has one job, which is to not brick the computer it's updating, or at the very least provide an easy way to roll back if they do. Updates are important, we want security vulnerabilities patched ASAP, but if users are afraid to update out of fear of their computer being bricked and actively do hacks to disable them, then they have utterly failed at their job.

I stand by what I said. Whomever works on it should be ashamed of themselves, and they should stop being software engineers because they are very bad at it. I have never used a piece of software that has more consistently caused headaches than Windows Update; I'm sure I've used software that was more crappily written, but a system update tool IS NOT ALLOWED TO BE SHITTY.

Updates take ages to download and even longer to install. There is no verbosity option, only a progress bar that likes to get stuck. Did an error occur? Here's an unhelpful 0x%RANDOM% code, where the only mention of it online comes from those who also suffer from it.

How come apt, dnf, pacman or other open source utilities, that are often maintained by an individual, just work, when something with a development team sucks at it so much? While there are an under-the-hood differences between Windows and Linux, replacing system components and libraries should be the same everywhere.

Ironically AI can be leveraged to do just that. Hope to see some efforts on this front

What we don't know, of course, is when that will happen. Because a lot of people have a real monetary incentive to pretend it isn't happening.

If your entire family is on Facebook, unless you want to deliberately cut yourself off from them, you're going to be on Facebook.

If we had a dozen different fully interoperable social networks (using atproto or some other federating protocol), then you might have a point. But that is not remotely the world we live in.

And if Google is putting LLM features in Gmail...they're not just the "email app" you use, they hold your email address. You'd need to completely change over your email address with everyone who uses it in order to fully get away from them. (Similarly with Microsoft's email...I don't know if they're putting LLM features in it yet, but if not I'd bet they will soon...)

Oh, no wait! Google answers?

If I remember on Monday, I'll reply with my portion. Don't own nearly enough to go near radiation on my weekend.

People don't care if it can answer questions with more nuance when the smart stuff they paid hundreds or thousands for no longer works.

Everything from picking an image in Slides now activating image gen to returning to your main search results now being taken up by AI Mode

You wonder if people are really clearing performance reviews off these metrics without anyone digging deeper

If we take the thing nobody asked for and shove it in users faces as often as possible, this will get lots of happy customers and the product will take off!

There definitely should be an easier way, but here you go:

  .qa-mode-box {
    display: none;
  }