Latest / Stuff Keeps Happening / Use Copilot, Please (Don't)

Transcript

Use Copilot, Please (Don't) · Stuff Keeps Happening

• 0:00
  Hello. I flew all the way to the moon and back.
• 0:04
  But stuff still happened. So what's up? AI is
• 0:09
  up. Let's talk about Microsoft. Microsoft really
• 0:11
  wants you to use Copilot. Like they really, really
• 0:13
  want you to use Copilot. And the good news for
• 0:15
  you is that you can't really avoid it because
• 0:17
  if you use Windows or if your job uses Office
• 0:20
  365, you just kind of have it. But that's great
• 0:23
  for you. Let me explain why it's great for you.
• 0:26
  Because then you're using Copilot. by Microsoft.
• 0:29
  In a world full of chat GPTs and clods and stuff,
• 0:32
  Microsoft's AI offering is called Copilot, and
• 0:34
  it's genuinely confusing because there are multiple
• 0:37
  different things that are all called different
• 0:39
  versions of Copilot, and I assume that that's
• 0:42
  just their general brand name. but in addition
• 0:44
  to it being a brand name, it is also a product.
• 0:47
  It's confusing. Copilot, to me, as somebody coming
• 0:49
  from a software engineering background, it refers
• 0:52
  to GitHub Copilot, which was an AI assistant
• 0:56
  for helping to write code trained on code from
• 0:59
  GitHub. GitHub is owned by Microsoft, and that's
• 1:02
  gonna come up later, but that's... That's what
• 1:04
  Copilot was to me, and then Copilot was also
• 1:07
  now a thing with Windows PCs. Microsoft has a
• 1:11
  thing where you can get an AI -ready Copilot
• 1:15
  Plus PC. Like I'm saying, there's just no rhyme
• 1:20
  or reason to this branding. So you've got Copilot
• 1:22
  Plus PC, GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Copilot. It's
• 1:28
  a mess. But that's what I want to talk about,
• 1:29
  is that it... is a mess. And Microsoft has not
• 1:32
  been particularly good, especially recently,
• 1:35
  at reading the room. They have been on a generational
• 1:39
  tear of just L after L after L of just trying
• 1:43
  to cram in AI into everything. It very much seems
• 1:46
  like there's an order from the top that basically
• 1:48
  is like, hey, put AI into everything. And then
• 1:51
  we ended up with AI in Microsoft Paint and Notepad.
• 1:55
  The AI update to Notepad even added a vulnerability.
• 1:58
  And that's not even mentioning recall, which
• 2:00
  is the feature that was announced a few years
• 2:02
  ago, where Windows is going to take a screenshot
• 2:04
  of everything you're doing on your computer to
• 2:06
  save it in a database for the AI to review later.
• 2:09
  When it was originally announced, basically every
• 2:12
  security researcher was like, this is an awful
• 2:14
  idea. And Microsoft was like, oh, you know, you
• 2:17
  might have a point. We'll tweak it a bit. They
• 2:19
  did tweak it a bit. It's not that woke and it's
• 2:23
  still pretty bad. Asterisk. You don't really
• 2:25
  have to worry about that if you don't have one
• 2:26
  of those co -pilot plus PCs, to my knowledge.
• 2:29
  So as long as you don't have one of those, you're
• 2:31
  probably fine. Famously, people love to have
• 2:34
  permanent records of what they do on their personal
• 2:36
  computer. What's a browser history? I'm sorry.
• 2:39
  Now you might be thinking, Microsoft is a big
• 2:40
  boy company with big boy money, and they must
• 2:43
  have a reason to be doing this. Surely it's the
• 2:46
  case that they're getting a good return on investment,
• 2:48
  and they're seeing gains in the market, and that
• 2:50
  this is going well for them. It's not. None of
• 2:52
  that. Not only do we have senior folks at Microsoft
• 2:55
  putting out a blog post being like, hey, everyone,
• 2:57
  sorry about ruining Windows. We're going to be
• 3:00
  better about that going forward. It's not even
• 3:02
  the first time this year that they said, sorry
• 3:04
  about ruining Windows. We're going to be better
• 3:06
  about that going forward. This is an operating
• 3:08
  system. It's like the base level thing that people
• 3:10
  have on their computer. It's not something you
• 3:12
  just buck around with. And obviously, like, you
• 3:15
  know, Windows sucks, and kind of has sucked for
• 3:17
  a while, and a lot of people just use it for
• 3:19
  gaming, other people use it because they have
• 3:20
  to for work, or what have you, but a lot of people
• 3:22
  just don't. no other systems, and they just use
• 3:26
  Windows machines. And like, that's fine. And
• 3:28
  it sucks that Microsoft is so bad to those people.
• 3:31
  It goes beyond just having AI crap in Windows.
• 3:35
  Because they're Microsoft, and they can't help
• 3:37
  themselves, they recently launched a feature
• 3:39
  on their coding side of Copilot. The feature
• 3:41
  is called Tips. And what it did was insert ads
• 3:45
  into people's software development process. Crash
• 3:48
  Course. I'm gonna make you a software developer
• 3:50
  real quick. When you're working on an app, let's
• 3:52
  say you're adding a feature or fixing a bug,
• 3:54
  the way that that actually works is you do what's
• 3:56
  called checking out a copy of the code base,
• 3:59
  which is to say you have your own version of
• 4:01
  the app, and you work on that and then you eventually
• 4:03
  merge that back in to the actual app. That merging
• 4:07
  process involves a sort of a ticket that you
• 4:09
  open up to basically say like, hey guys, I wanna
• 4:11
  merge in my stuff, can someone review this? That
• 4:14
  ticket is often referred to as a merge request
• 4:16
  or a pull request. Now, here's, that's all you
• 4:18
  gotta know. A software developer was using GitHub
• 4:20
  Copilot and said, hey, can you go make a merge
• 4:22
  request? Just go write something there. When
• 4:24
  they went to go read the merge request that Copilot
• 4:27
  had written, there was an ad in it. It was like,
• 4:31
  hey, hot tip, y 'all. If you want to easily launch
• 4:33
  AI agents, you can use Raycast. Side note, I
• 4:37
  do really like Raycast. I don't really use it
• 4:39
  for AI stuff. It's just like a productivity launcher.
• 4:42
  Raycast is pretty sick. Kind of sucks that they're
• 4:45
  at the center of this story. So if you look at
• 4:46
  GitHub, which is again owned by Microsoft, and
• 4:48
  you do a search for the wording that was put
• 4:50
  into this merge request, you'll find... thousands
• 4:53
  of merge requests with the same ad injected into
• 4:56
  it. Automated gorilla marketing at scale that
• 4:59
  isn't particularly gorilla. Anyway, that's awful.
• 5:02
  Don't do that, Microsoft. That's so obviously
• 5:04
  dumb and bad. If you want to hire me as senior
• 5:08
  executive revoker of terrible, obviously bad
• 5:11
  ideas, I'm available. Anyway, even with all of
• 5:16
  this, Copilot's not doing well. The adoption
• 5:19
  rate is abysmal and is probably mostly just people
• 5:22
  who have to use it because it's what their office
• 5:24
  is making them use. Adoption is around 2 .5 to
• 5:27
  3 % of Windows users and it's losing market share
• 5:31
  compared to other AI assistants like Google's
• 5:34
  Gemini, which I know exactly nothing about. I've
• 5:36
  never used it. Anyway, it's a skill issue because
• 5:38
  I annoy people to install certain software without
• 5:42
  having to be an artificial intelligence. Again,
• 5:44
  I'm available for hire. Hey, thank you so much
• 5:46
  for being here. If you like what I do and you
• 5:48
  want to help me keep this going and not filled
• 5:50
  with a bunch of dumb corporate sponsor stuff,
• 5:53
  you can head to isupport .dev where you'll find
• 5:55
  links to my Patreon, my Ko -Fi. There's a whole
• 5:57
  bunch of ways to support me, either monetarily
• 6:00
  or just commenting and sharing my stuff. Any
• 6:02
  kind of engagement really does help. So thank
• 6:04
  you again for being here. Let's move on. Let's
• 6:07
  talk about war. We're still doing it. We're still
• 6:09
  doing it. We are very much still at war with
• 6:11
  Iran despite what our leadership wants to claim.
• 6:14
  In my limited experience on this planet, having
• 6:17
  a situation that is prolonged where you are exchanging
• 6:20
  munitions and losing service members on both
• 6:21
  sides generally constitutes a war. There's been
• 6:25
  a lot, and the reporting is not great, honestly.
• 6:28
  It's very rare that I'm gonna sit here and be
• 6:31
  like, ah, the mainstream media is hiding this
• 6:33
  from you. Because almost always that's not the
• 6:36
  case. You know, a lot of people rail against
• 6:38
  mainstream media, and they're saying like, oh,
• 6:39
  no one's talking about this, and so on and so
• 6:41
  forth, when in reality, they have articles about
• 6:43
  it, it's just that they're not floating to the
• 6:45
  top of algorithms because whatever reason. That
• 6:48
  reason could be because the algorithms are designed
• 6:50
  to keep certain things suppressed. That reason
• 6:52
  could be because people don't care about the
• 6:54
  story genuinely, and it's not until you find
• 6:56
  out later on, and find out that you didn't learn
• 6:59
  about it in time, that it feels like nobody was
• 7:01
  talking about it. In this case... It's kind of
• 7:05
  different. We are getting a very slim picture
• 7:07
  of what's going on across the world during a
• 7:11
  war right now. And it's very clear that everything
• 7:14
  that's coming stateside is like a week or more
• 7:17
  delayed and is highly editorialized by a US perspective.
• 7:21
  And like, duh, obviously. I don't take the words
• 7:23
  of any state official at face value. US, Israeli,
• 7:26
  Iranian, none of them. I'm trying to navigate
• 7:29
  this as best I can with the understanding that
• 7:31
  a lot of the reporting from US outlets is gonna
• 7:34
  be straight up wrong. But going with what I've
• 7:38
  got, so let's talk about what's going on with
• 7:40
  the war. Five European nations have made a no
• 7:43
  -fly zone for the US. Or at least a no -fly or
• 7:46
  if you're gonna fly it's gonna be annoying zone.
• 7:48
  Essentially five different countries for different
• 7:50
  reasons have said in some capacity, no, you cannot
• 7:53
  use our airspace for your war. I'll go through
• 7:56
  them, and we'll talk a little bit about each.
• 7:59
  Spain says, get the fuck out. Spain's the hardest
• 8:01
  one here. They said, you're not using our airspace
• 8:03
  for this illegal war. Fuck you. They didn't say...
• 8:06
  They didn't say fuck you, but like, in terms
• 8:09
  of geopolitics, they said that. France is playing
• 8:12
  hard to get. They haven't fully shut down their
• 8:15
  airspace, but they are saying like, hey Israel,
• 8:16
  you can't use our airspace to transfer weapons
• 8:19
  from the US, and so on and so forth. So France
• 8:21
  is making it a little bit harder to use their
• 8:23
  airspace. Switzerland! is neutral. I feel like
• 8:28
  I don't even need to say that one. They're doing
• 8:29
  the Switzerland thing, staying generally neutral
• 8:31
  and only letting a few aircraft through. Italy
• 8:33
  is a bit of a will -they -won't -they. They've
• 8:35
  closed the airspace for some cases. They denied
• 8:38
  the US from landing certain bombers there. So
• 8:42
  it's like airspace, but also ground space. And
• 8:46
  Austria's coming in hot. Just recently they were
• 8:48
  like, eh, we're gonna go full Switzerland. They're
• 8:50
  citing neutrality laws and they're saying, yeah,
• 8:52
  no, you can't use our airspace. So that's fine.
• 8:54
  Kind of got to go around. Big ol' hole in the
• 8:59
  map. Speaking of airplanes, some of them went
• 9:02
  down. The Iranian military shot down a US F -15E
• 9:06
  fighter jet. Strike Eagle Jet. There were two
• 9:10
  crew members aboard, a pilot and a weapons boy.
• 9:12
  The pilot ejected, as did the weapons boy. The
• 9:14
  pilot was rescued pretty shortly after ejecting.
• 9:17
  The weapons boy was rescued the next day, after
• 9:19
  what the US would really like you to know was
• 9:22
  a daring rescue mission. The second airman was
• 9:24
  lost for quite some time, and did have to do
• 9:26
  some personal heroics to stay alive. Also, we're
• 9:31
  bombing the fuck out of that country right now.
• 9:33
  It's really hard to sit here and be like, oh,
• 9:36
  this is a wonderful, uplifting story that we
• 9:38
  rescued this service member, because, like, why
• 9:40
  are they there in the first place? During the
• 9:42
  rescue mission, an A -10 Warthog, another aircraft,
• 9:44
  went down, also, but the pilot ejected and is
• 9:48
  apparently safe? According to US officials, other
• 9:50
  aircraft just took light fire and there was otherwise
• 9:52
  just like minor wounds and everybody's back safe.
• 9:56
  Iran claims it was a different situation. Iran
• 9:58
  claims that they shot down more planes than the
• 10:01
  US is saying and they also claim that they took
• 10:02
  out five people. There's not a lot of details
• 10:05
  about that. Could be a lie. But also they shot
• 10:09
  down an F -15 after the US told us that we had
• 10:11
  total air superiority and basically took out
• 10:14
  all their defenses. So like lies are sort of
• 10:16
  the status quo here. Anyway, brace yourself for
• 10:19
  the movie in a decade or so. They're gonna do
• 10:22
  everything they can to make it look like, oh
• 10:24
  man, how could the Iranians have done this to
• 10:27
  us? Pete Hegseth. He is somehow the head of the
• 10:31
  Department of Defense. He wants to call it the
• 10:33
  Department of War. I'm not gonna call it that.
• 10:36
  I've spent my entire life surrounded by people
• 10:39
  who work in the DoD. I'm not gonna not be saying
• 10:41
  DoD. Anyway, dude sucks. I could just say, yeah,
• 10:47
  he sucks. Is that good enough? Do I have to say
• 10:49
  anything else? Alright, I'll say what I got here.
• 10:52
  So in addition to the average run -of -the -mill
• 10:54
  Hegseth -ery that we've been seeing, there's
• 10:56
  been a bit of an increase in bullshit. I'll start
• 10:58
  with the one that doesn't matter as much to me,
• 11:00
  which is still pretty fucking dumb. Pete Hegseth
• 11:03
  personally got involved to get rid of an investigation
• 11:06
  into multiple US service members who flew a helicopter
• 11:10
  by Kid Rock's house for like a photo op for Twitter.
• 11:13
  I don't get it either. I didn't know people liked
• 11:16
  Kid Rock, but this is apparently like their thing
• 11:18
  now, is this one guy. So Kid Rock posted a video
• 11:21
  to Twitter of him waving at multiple army helicopters,
• 11:24
  and he's like, God bless our troops. And then
• 11:26
  the army was like, yeah, that's not, that ain't
• 11:28
  it. That's not good. Those people are now under
• 11:30
  investigation and suspended. Hegseth then chimed
• 11:32
  in and was like, no. I refuse, was his actual
• 11:37
  quote. His quote was, no punishment, no investigation.
• 11:41
  Carry on, patriots. What a cool guy. All the
• 11:44
  while, he has fired a whole bunch of generals.
• 11:48
  During a war. Including, recently, the chief
• 11:51
  of staff of the army. During a war. It's not
• 11:54
  something that you usually do. To top it all
• 11:56
  off, Financial Times reported that a financial
• 11:58
  broker for Pete Hegseth apparently tried to go
• 12:01
  to Blackrock and buy securities from a fund that
• 12:04
  invests in defense manufacturing right before
• 12:07
  the war started. The only reason it didn't go
• 12:09
  through is because the fund wasn't ready yet.
• 12:10
  The Pentagon denies the claim. Shocking. Ow,
• 12:14
  my data center. Iran has been striking data centers
• 12:16
  where US companies are operating. AWS, Amazon's
• 12:20
  web platform, has multiple regions that are just
• 12:22
  hard down right now. What was first reported
• 12:24
  as, like, fires at a facility and, like, structural
• 12:28
  damage has escalated into, hey, why is the entire
• 12:32
  region offline? Let's go back to some definitions.
• 12:36
  Again, you're a software engineer already, so
• 12:37
  you're gonna get this no problem. It's actually
• 12:39
  really simple. AWS, Amazon Web Services. It is
• 12:42
  their internet platform. If you're a company
• 12:44
  that wants to build an internet service, you're
• 12:46
  probably gonna build it on AWS and they have
• 12:48
  like global infrastructure for tech stuff. That
• 12:50
  global infrastructure is located in a bunch of
• 12:52
  different regions so that you can have your stuff...
• 12:55
  near your customers. If you want to do global
• 12:58
  business, you want to have global data centers.
• 13:00
  If you want to do business just in North America,
• 13:01
  you're probably just sticking to a North American
• 13:03
  data center. AWS offers a whole bunch of different
• 13:05
  data centers in different localities, and the
• 13:07
  ones around Iran are currently not working. ME
• 13:10
  Central One and ME South One, which are Middle
• 13:13
  East Central and South locations, are both down.
• 13:17
  And this comes after those structural problems
• 13:20
  and small fires happened. Just taking a quick
• 13:22
  glance at, like, developer forums, you'll see
• 13:24
  people saying, like, hey, I can't connect to
• 13:26
  the data center. What's going on here? Amazon
• 13:30
  says that it's currently just down. There's not
• 13:32
  really a restoration timeline for it. So, like,
• 13:34
  if you had stuff running in these data centers,
• 13:36
  you're just up shit creek. But that's meaningful
• 13:38
  because Amazon is a defense contractor. Amazon
• 13:41
  has dedicated data regions for government utility.
• 13:45
  Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, all these companies,
• 13:48
  they all provide support to the U .S. military,
• 13:51
  either directly in hosting their systems or indirectly
• 13:55
  by way of offering them support. So genuinely,
• 13:59
  like, AWS data centers. are objectively military
• 14:02
  targets. I'll end this story by saying that the
• 14:04
  White House is now saying that for the 2027 fiscal
• 14:07
  year, they want to cut non -defense spending
• 14:09
  by 10 % and increase defense spending by $500
• 14:13
  billion. All right, better news. We went to the
• 14:17
  moon. We didn't go to the moon. We're going near
• 14:19
  the moon. Again, the Artemis 2 mission launched
• 14:22
  on the evening of April 1st. They went to the
• 14:24
  sky. They're gonna go around the moon, come back,
• 14:27
  and sploosh back down by San Diego on April 10th.
• 14:30
  I am not in that spacecraft. The mission is interesting.
• 14:33
  They're just looping around the moon to basically
• 14:35
  be like, can we land on you later? You down with
• 14:39
  that? It's the second mission in the Artemis
• 14:41
  line, the first one being Artemis 1, which was
• 14:44
  an unmanned attempt to just go around the moon
• 14:46
  and be like, alright, can we still do this? We
• 14:47
  still got this juice? Turns out we had the juice,
• 14:50
  so we put four people on an aircraft and launched
• 14:52
  them into space, and they took a really, really
• 14:54
  cool picture. Leave it to an astronaut sending
• 14:56
  a picture back to Earth to make you be like,
• 14:59
  mmm -hmm -hmm -hmm. I am tiny and don't matter.
• 15:02
  It's truly, truly incredibly gorgeous. You can
• 15:05
  see multiple auroras. You can see the atmosphere.
• 15:08
  It's incredible. Of course, no space travel goes
• 15:10
  on without a hitch. In addition to having some
• 15:12
  toilet trouble in the capsule, they were also
• 15:14
  having some technical difficulties with Microsoft
• 15:16
  Outlook. At one point, one of the astronauts
• 15:18
  was flutzing around with the computer and was
• 15:20
  talking to ground control and was like, I have
• 15:22
  two Outlooks and neither of them are working.
• 15:25
  Which is just perfect. Just chef kiss. So a big
• 15:29
  old good luck. Here are the crew members. You
• 15:31
  got Reed Wiseman, commander. You got Victor Glover,
• 15:35
  who's the pilot. Christina Koch is a mission
• 15:37
  specialist. Jeremy Hansen is the good luck Canadian
• 15:41
  and also a mission specialist. I want to note
• 15:44
  on the topic of space travel. I don't much care
• 15:47
  about the space travel part personally. I mean,
• 15:49
  I played a lot of Destiny, so I'm kind of good
• 15:51
  with not going further out into space to see
• 15:52
  what's out there. But, even if you're not somebody
• 15:55
  who just wants to see more space travel, this
• 15:57
  is actually a pretty good thing for humanity.
• 16:00
  In a way. The space shuttle and colonizing space,
• 16:03
  that's not what I'm talking about. These programs
• 16:05
  happen because countries want to do dick -measuring
• 16:07
  contests and the ruling class wants to colonize
• 16:10
  more stuff. But if that's what it takes to get
• 16:13
  a bunch of money to go into research that produces
• 16:16
  some genuinely amazing shit, at least it's a
• 16:20
  silver lining. Aerospace engineering and research
• 16:22
  gets us a whole lot of stuff. Improvements in
• 16:24
  medical technology, improvements in refrigeration
• 16:26
  technology, improvements in desalination and
• 16:29
  water purification, all sorts of stuff. There
• 16:32
  are benefits outside of just going to space and
• 16:34
  like that's cool. It sucks that it's also like
• 16:38
  kind of in the interests of bad people wanting
• 16:40
  to do bad things. Like they're just going to
• 16:42
  space because they want to mine it. That's basically
• 16:44
  it. But at least in the meantime, we have like
• 16:47
  better air conditioning. Lightning round. Oracle
• 16:49
  laid off 30 ,000 employees via email at 6 a .m.
• 16:55
  SpaceX is filing to go public. It may ultimately
• 16:57
  be one of the biggest IPOs in history. Australia
• 17:00
  has formally recognized the cultural significance
• 17:03
  of the infamous Succulent Chinese Meal Democracy
• 17:07
  Manifest video. The National Film and Sound Archive
• 17:12
  has officially preserved it. Gold is now the
• 17:15
  largest foreign reserve asset in the world overtaking
• 17:19
  U .S. treasuries. It probably doesn't mean anything.
• 17:22
  Thank you so much for listening to today's episode
• 17:23
  of Stuff Keeps Happening. Head to SKH .News for
• 17:26
  sources, bonus content, and my review of my time
• 17:31
  on the moon, the last time I was there. My name
• 17:34
  is Endeavorance. We'll talk again soon. Take
• 17:36
  care and be well.