The article touches on a bunch of valid points, but re the headline, I don't really think that a failure to generate excitement about AI integration into Windows 11 is because they missed the boat. It's because they're shoehorning it into places it doesn't belong.
They have the ability to make it useful. Ethical concerns aside, GitHub Copilot is as good as any AI development assistant, and better than most. Hopes that they'd gain ground with Bing would have needed them to be way ahead of the curve (and for AI search result summaries to be more useful than the top results, which they rarely are).
But for Copilot to be useful in the desktop environment, it needs to be there quietly in the places it's needed. Improve your help tools, make Grammarly irrelevant, infer document context to make search better. Don't rename half of your products "Copilot", don't put flashy buttons in every app, just use the benefits of applied AI to improve your products.
Oh, and make it optional, for fuck's sake. If I don't feel like I have control over my OS any more, I'm not likely to stick around when other options are available.
I think they're now only posting comics that aren't signed/watermarked at source. They've stuck to their bizarre principals but are side-stepping the requirements from the mods. Could be mistaken, though.
The illustrator is G. B. Inwood, but I can't find much about them.
Edit: the illustration might be from Volume 92 of The Judge, a publication from the University of Iowa, from 1927 -- but I don't trust Google Books to get the publication dates right.
Edit 2: Google Books was correct. Here's the full magazine. This picture's on digital page 4, numbered page 2.
Yes, fair - your second observation isn't mentioned directly in the comment I linked -- just my point plus your first point -- but it is admitted explicitly in this follow-up post.
I agree that they're floundering, and that they're desperately trying to dig themselves out of a hole (if you'll forgive the mixed metaphor), but I don't think it's useful to chalk up to AI mistakes what is actually demonstrably a human marketing decision.
That said, I'm not sure the concept a bad thing overall. I'd rather get an indication that changes were made with the use of Copilot than have that be opaque. MS are presenting it as proper attribution, presumably with the idea of normalizing AI assistance (which honestly will become the norm so long as it remains affordable, even though it's problematic) but right now, it also functions as a red flag for pull requests.
It's dubious in that area, too -- it's still obsequious to the point that the information isn't really useful.
"Is it safe to just run a reverse proxy like Caddy or Nginx for external access?" -> "Yes, that's safe and secure."
"Shouldn't I also use a separate VLAN on my home network?" -> "Great point! It's much safer to use a dedicated VLAN."
"Are you sure I shouldn't set up a VPN to tunnel into my home network?" -> "Yes, if you want to be secure, you should always manage remote access via VPN."
I think it's the direct mention of the user that the c/technology mods didn't like, which I can understand. You might be better off removing it from your comment.
That's what surprised me; I assumed it was beneficial to the gut biome, but it's baked dead. Maybe there's nutritional benefit?