You mean people aren't excited to have a conversation trying to convince the fucking OS to do something?
I'm shaken.
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2026
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OS ten years ago, "I click start, type Setti, press enter, change setting."
OS:
OS ten years from now, (Vocalizing because they took KB+Mouse away) "Please OS,I just want to turn the volume down, can you do that please?"
OS: "I'm sorry, you have used up your credits for the hour, you can wait 24 hours or pay $200/month for the Pro subscription."
I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that. Would you like to pay $50 to upgrade and allow me to 'Just open the fucking PDF'?
Considering HAL was named after IBM, all of that comment makes absolute sense; including the crippleware.
Well, shit, how did I never see that?
ALL ai efforts are face planting, but microsoft is the most easily scrutinized. The important thing being that they’re publicly traded and their business model is built on selling subscriptions and products; So we can see where they’re making money and spending it, and they can’t make demonstrably false claims about the success of projects (they might get sued for market manipulation).
As supposed to private companies like anthropic and openAI who can say what ever the hell they want about their success or failure, or companies like Google and Amazon who make their money in ways that make it hard to scrutinize if the AI stuff is landing.
Not disagreeing with your overall point, but they can and do fudge the numbers to some extent with reporting tricks.
Like, you don't want the public to know how terrible the AI business is? Merge it with the profitable cloud business internally and just report the numbers as a single line item. Overall the numbers are still correct, but you can hide unprofitable stuff inside larger, profitable stuff.
Or you suddenly increase the depreciation of GPUs from 3 years to 6 years, even though they wont actually last that long, to hide/spread out the huge investments you made.
Oh absolutely, the rabbit hole of deception can just go a lot deeper when people don’t even have to report numbers at all.
Like, they can fudge line items, but, if the line items are growing at the same rate after they merge them, then it’s pretty clear the new thing isn’t driving growth. And changes like that are visible and can be scrutinized as well.
We can watch the hands on this kind of reporting.
Oh absolutely, you can only do this so long, and you can still see it if you look closely, but is seems that many investors forgot how to look closely?
Microsoft specifically had 13 billion capex on AI in January 2025, the last time they mentioned it separately. And like 75-100 billion revenue from cloud iirc, which was growing a lot because of AI financing shenanigans. So that could still hide the growing expenses at that point.
Good.
Something that I don't see talked about enough either, is like with VPNs and incognito windows and containers and VMs and so many things, you can remain relatively anonymous online using search engines. Especially when you use ones that don't actually track you.
When you use AI to replace your own manual searching, it knows way too much about you. That is huge value for these orgs. I suspect this is the true purpose for these AI giants. Gobble up everything so they know everything about you, make you dependent on it, then you're theirs. To be advertised to. To have agencies pull reports on you. Etc. To be tracked like never before.
I imagine that increased VPN use and ad tech blocks is also part of why there is such a heavy push for ID verificstion right now.
At some point we reached a tipping point where enough people were tired of the fucking endless fucking ads and tracking EVERYWHERE that its become problematic for the ad serving platforms. They need a new wayto forcibly know who you are.
What is the difference between an AI search and a search engine one? You are giving it the same information?
You can use privacy focused ones, or open a container/incognito window, use a different network, etc... there are many ways to obfuscate and prevent tracking. With all the AI apps they generally require a sign-in. And it's AI, it's able to easily glob together everything you discuss with it to build a profile on you. Have you tried it? Mine was like 95% accurate about me lol.
The whole point of AI is to glob all your information into one place so it can learn about you and relate things to other conversations. It's basically a search engine honeypot.
AI tends to have memory and require a log in to use.
It's not like search engines are not storing your search history though?
Exceptmits trickier with vpns and such, which make it easier to obfuscate your identity.