Apparently not, though there seem to be two distinct stories about where it _does_ come from:
> Amazon developers chose the name Alexa because it has a hard consonant with the X, which helps it be recognized with higher precision. They have said the name is reminiscent of the Library of Alexandria, which was also used by Amazon Alexa Internet for the same reason.
> Speaking of this, I also wonder about present and future people named "Claude"
The % of people using Claude Code is minuscule compared to all the french speakers who use claude as a name, not everyone uses or cares or knows about AI coding agents.
“Excuse me. I invented the term artificial intelligence. I invented it because we had to do something when we were trying to get money for a summer study in 1956, and I had a previous bad experience”
(The whole debate is interesting, I would recommend if you like that type of historical things)
I use Linux so I didn't care about copilot stuff. But recently at work I got dell workstation. It costs around 5k usd. The specs are great. But it has single Ctrl key on the left side, copilot button took its place. I can't jump between words with one hand, I have to press Ctrl with my left hand, and use arrow keys with right hand.
This single choice made the machine piece crap
Absolutely. Even worse, the key doesn't have its own scancode, but instead acts as lshift+lmeta+f23, so rebinding it is a real pain. I know about Hanlon's razor, but there's only so much incompetence one can accept...
Pre-USB keyboards used a similarly horrific combination for Print Screen, which was also the only key that didn't report when it was released. This was for the same reason - the key was added after the keycode list was standardized.
My favorite keyboard was one that came with HP PC's ... in the late 90's I think. It had a split space bar. I think the deal was the right half of the space bar was the space bar and the left half was the backspace key.
Using it was like a magic trick. Words would just get a character truncated and merge. I could watch my fingers type and I would know what I had to do and my fingers would just merrily go on and do whatever they wanted.
There was some youtube video about a guy who set up a bike that had the turning backwards - you turned right and the front wheel went left. The funny part was that with a lot of effort the guy managed to teach himself to not be able to ride a normal bike.
I have a laptop with a copilot key, this maps it to right Ctrl on Linux. How well it works depends on how your specific keyboard implements the Shift+Meta+F23 keypress so your mileage may vary. https://github.com/mishoo/exorcise-copilot
It may or may not be easy, depending on your environment, but you can remap keys. I have `input * xkb_options "caps:backspace,compose:ralt"` in my ~/.config/sway/config, for example, plus `input ‹laptop keyboard identifier› xkb_file "~/.config/sway/keymap.xkb"` with that file fixing XF86AudioMicMute (which has key code 256, but X only supports up to 255 and I’m still not quite sure why this was necessary), and now remapping RShift to LCtrl which died early this year.
But… ouch. From https://itsfoss.com/remap-copilot-key-linux/ and other sources, sounds like the Copilot button is LMeta+LShift+F23. Why a combo when using an esoteric key not on anyone’s keyboard anyway? Ugh. That’ll make it harder to sort out, though still possible.
My new car came with terrible tires that have little traction, but I just buy a new set. I don’t say it’s a crap car just because they cheap out with the stock tires on it. I love the car.
Keychron on that workstation and be done with it.
I wish laptops would come with a standard TKL layout. I really need those navigation keys. Ctl-end, ctl-shift-home, ctl-shift-left, all of those things I am constantly using and feel like I'm wearing mittens when using pretty much any laptop.
Well, most of us are no longer able to work without AI.
Not because we can't do the job without AI, rather because there are evaluation requirements for using AI on the job no matter what, and those that can't "upskill" themselves are invited to search something else.
When these came out, I thought, what is the average PC user going to get out of this? Faster image touchups, and...? You can't run an LLM chatbot of any comparison to free cloud models.
> Could’ve added more gpu or cpu or cache and people would’ve been happier.
I actually wonder about this - my regular dev workstation is a Qualcomm ARM laptop - by-and-large my bottleneck for CPU-bound tasks is thermal. Would adding more CPU or cache instead of the NPU help with performance/watt?
Mine is used for background retouches, and possibly speech recognition when dictating (Firefox had to download a model the last time I think...).
The potential is there, software just needs to catch up.
As usual Microsoft messes up marketing and abandons the possibly usable tech before it spreads. Then competitors will be successful with it and Microsoft will lag behind. Good strategy, bad execution, as standard MS practice.
Yes, you can. Of course relatively limited, but you absolutely can run local models.
Based on my own testing, the Windows drivers are a bit restricted to do some more advanced stuff, and it may be due to some security issues in the past? at least that is what I gathered from exploring this issue with GLM 5.3
Did they remove the Copilot button from the keyboard? It is one of the most annoying things. Accidentally pressing the button opens the Copilot window which you then have to manually close. There is no way to configure the button to do nothing. Not without installing apps just for that purpose. So annoying.
For those who don't have Windows, you go to Settings > Bluetooth and Devices > Keyboard (which is itself insane), then change "Customize Copilot key on keyboard" to "None Selected".
You'd think nothing happens when you hit the copilot key, but instead, it... pops up the settings window so you can select what should happen. Not the most awful thing, but really, I want nothing to happen, period. That's why I hit "none selected" instead of "Open an app" or "Search".
> Not without installing apps just for that purpose.
TBF PowerToys is first party, so most companies will accept its installation. It has many other niceties that should really have been baked into Windows in the first place, I genuinely think all windows users that care even a bit should have it by default as one of the first thing they put on their system.
I have a Logitech K400 that I use with my HTPC and the trackpad on it has a gesture that maps to the Copilot button. It triggers accidentally all the time and pops open the settings UI because it's bound to nothing. The K400 predates Copilot entirely!
I personally wrote the program that does all the steps necessary to remap the Copilot key, since it's actually three keys (Left Windows, Left Shift, F23), it's not as simple as it sounds to block all those keypresses while also allowing the real keys through.
You could also call it "I changed your copilot key back to Ctrl".
This program does properly allow you to use the left shift key completely independently of the remapped copilot key, many similar programs do not have this feature.
Sure, but it's something you can run on the NPU, not something you must run on the NPU. Whisper will run just fine on your CPU or GPU as well - as will the decades of offline speech recognition tools before.
So what's the actual feature? Slightly higher performance? Slightly lower latency? Slightly longer battery life? And that for something most people are rarely - if ever - going to use?
We laugh at Google being deadly behind with Gemini but is there a place that has fumbled it like Microsoft? I guess Apple comes close, but with them you get the feeling they were never in it to begin with.
(At the point where Yahoo was in fairly severe decline, it made a large investment in Alibaba at a very low price; Yahoo continued to advance towards complete irrelevance, but the chunk of Alibaba buoyed it up for a while.)
Microsoft will be fine -- insufferably boring and non-innovative, but fine. They will be the AI slop middleware for enterprise. Your average enshittified corporate AI integration will go through Office365, Windows, or some other MS product.
What won't happen is on-device models running on consumer windows PCs (the Copilot+ idea).
It will, just later than MS possibly hoped so. The local dictation, TTS and stuff will be great until then. The marketing oversold it, and the execution strategy was bad, the branding totally messed up, as standard Microsoft. The other day I just told a friend on this topic: There should be about 3 Copilot products.
- Windows Copilot / Copilot Personal: Dictation (in non English also), good voice control for pretty much all OS features. Text to Speech. Local RAG search for documents, images. Lots of place for accessibility improvements for those needing assistive technologies (which could be an important marketing aspect for Windows). Some light image editing maybe. Calendar support? No proper dedicated calendar app anymore in windows though...
- Office Copilot: Proper XLS, Email features. This probably mostly cloud based. Proper calendar support, quota for cloud agentic work where you can offload some tasks, eg. email summarization, teams/slack summarization, calendar meetings organization (for multiple people, it can be a pain when some meetings need to be moved and need to organize for 5+ people)
- Copilot Code / Github Copilot. The one many know here.
Nothing groundbreaking, and clear communication could communicate the value it has.
Hey, Microsoft, no need to thank me, just make Start menu usable once again and do away with the rounded corners and invisible borders... Oh, and add a mandatory window header to the chrome, where windows can be grabbed to move around, plus alt+click i3wm style. VS Code is one of the worst offenders in this aspect.
They are doing a very sensible approach of not trying to be the top AI researchers around, and either hiring or using commodity stuff on their products trying to find an application.
That's what basically all big techs should have done. And Oracle too.
Again, I have no idea if they found any good use for it on their applications, but they are the only one integrating it right.
The problem with CoPilot+ is that it was negative value on a PC because of the way Microsoft entrenched the related (system) services into Windows. I got a mid range laptop (Core Ultra 7, 16GB RAM, integrate Arc GPU) that I would consider ideal in terms of build quality, specs, etc..
That is until Microsoft’s bloatware starts using a ton of RAM and CPU. Something like 10% CPU use doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s massive on a laptop because it destroys the battery life. And all it’s doing is running things I don’t want that consume RAM. I’m talking 16GB of RAM 50% used up by Microsoft bloatware.
Microsoft doesn’t think, or care, about PC users anymore. Everything they’re doing with Windows makes your PC consume more resources with the goal of trapping you into another pay forever service.
They didn’t even make the CoPilot+ stuff “not suck” before abandoning it. Now it’s just another crappy Windows service gunking up your PC. Vendors should have never agreed to it and IMO the degradation it causes is enough that most of the PCs with it fall into the range of false advertising. I can’t imagine anyone’s battery claims are taking the CoPilot+ trash in Windows into account.
I'm still so mad about Intel and AMD and Microsoft colluding together to remove sleep mode.
Horrible for battery life, unfixable, but Microsoft says they need to be able to wake up your laptop every hour.
They just sheepishly copied apple... with the single difference, that theirs is an open platform, where anybody can be a negligent actor, and they also don't put as much focus on the polish. Apple having a single vertically integrated ecosystem, with a narrow set of devices to support can and wills to do this properly. Sleep took 2 decades to become reliable over the fragmented PC ecosystem, so it was pretty much a mature, but dated technology. We have only 15 more until S0 sleep will get sorted out.
Or MS, Intel, AMD could apply pressure on vendors who fuck this up, including themselves, but their stuff is bought even so.
I'll also never buy a Mac again after having been tricked by the mass opinion and forced to work on that hellscape of a UX... while MS works hard to f...up windows it is still way better in most respects. Though they keep copying bad ideas from Mac, and this "modern sleep" is one of those also. But Windows has fractional screen scaling, sane keyboard shortcuts, all UI usable with keyboard, all windows can be accessed purely with keyboard. Built in tiling window manager. Machines with trackpoint... the famously good mac palm rejection is still crap, just slightly better than Synaptics... Oh. and Linux Support. Built into Windows, so the half-assed "UNIX" Apple ships is no longer missing. It is just different enough from Linux and NetBSD to always hurt when I use it anything more arcane then just "npm install", which is the main usecase for it according to the fanboys. Also I can put Linux on an oldish machine not supported by Windows 11 and still use it, with all its features.
Back to the topic: who wouldn't want always-on telemetry? :D
I don’t think so. I haven’t tried it personally, but claims online say it’s part of Windows 11. There are hacks to get rid of it, but supposedly Microsoft is really aggressive about having it running.
The laptop was for a younger person that’s fairly tech-savvy, so it’ll work out. I’d never buy one for my parents now that I know what to watch out for.
Not even for developers, it is only available via the WinRT crappy tooling on top of Win32 (WinAppSDK), still behind what was originally available in UWP.
Microsoft Copilot was dead on the day Apple made their announcement that they weren’t giving Sam Altman/OpenAI any money for AI and the second nail was the announcement that Google was only getting a measly $1 billion refund (for Apple using Gemini) on the $20 billion dollars they were paying Apple for a default search position on Mac OS.
I was unaware that that brand was alive in the first place. Does Microsoft just call _literally everything_ 'Copilot' now? Nadella will be changing his name to Copilot, next.
For testing, yes, but it’s also my primary development system, so for dogfooding, and for providing a local dev environment for the things that we’re deploying from ARM-based CI/CD to ARM-based servers.
This would be really cool and I’m afraid, like my iPhone 13 Mini and numerous other things I like, bought by a small amount of people compared to the masses. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist.
"Copilot" is a term like any other and when I first heard the name, I thought it was an alright, if uninspired, choice.
Now I can't hear the word "Copilot" used in any context without having negative feelings due to Microsoft's saturation campaign.
Speaking of this, I also wonder about present and future people named "Claude", a mainstream name in some parts of the world.
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