You can operate without a local account - source, I‘m on Windows 11 and I‘ve never had a Microsoft account - but it‘s a massive PITA and takes a lot of playing around and disconnecting from the internet during install, and stuff like that.
You‘re right that 99% of people won‘t know/won‘t bother to go through the hassle and that Microsoft through the years have been making it harder and harder to have a local account, but at the moment it‘s still technically possible.
Yeah, Irfanview is what I use too. Easy to set up, quick & light, and it‘s actually my go-to for converting a picture into a different format.
It‘s perhaps worth noting that the first people the Nazis came for was LGBTQ people. If you‘ve seen photos of Nazi book-burnings, there‘s a high percentage chance that what you‘ve seen is the first book-burning, because the vast majority of photos are from one event. The books being burnt at that event was research from an organisation called Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (the Institute of Sexual Science), which was founded by a gay activist and focused mainly on LGBTQ research and care - including gender-affirming surgery. The Nazis very deliberately tried to wipe out this research and acknowledgement that trans people existed.
If you don‘t care about the current attacks on trans people in and of itself, it should trouble you as a canary in a coal mine. The famous poem‘s first line should be „first they came for the trans people“, rather than „first they came for the Socialists“. Don‘t do the „and I did nothing because I wasn‘t trans“ thing.
It all matters, even if your concern is purely for yourself.
The issue there is that even at that pricepoint, Microsoft is still operating CoPilot at a loss. If they drop it more, they’ll be making even more of a loss. Which is the standard business model for new products these days, but the losses on AI products dwarf things like Netflix and Uber during their “operate at a loss to drive everybody else out of business” phase.
Of course, that would all be fine if CoPilot was some killer product that people quickly found themselves unable to work without. Instead, the feedback shows that workers find that it’s not useful or reliable enough to be worth using, and Microsoft’s own latest advert for CoPilot in Excel contains data which shows that at best operation it doesn’t work 46% of the time, and that figure can be as high as 80%.
I’m not sure these problems are really surmountable - you’ve got an incredibly expensive-to-run product which doesn’t do much that’s useful and is bad at the things that it actually could be useful for. It’s not just Microsoft, it’s the entire tech industry that’s facing this problem.
I wonder if you’ve thought about considering what autistic people themselves think on the subject?
https://autisticnotweird.com/autismsurvey/#cures
Given the way autistic respondents have answered the other questions in this survey, you’ve probably worked out where this is going.
Yep, less than 10% of autistic respondents wanted a cure for their autism, and over 80% did not.
And, because if you’ve read this article all the way through you know how much I love pre-emptively addressing counter-arguments, here’s the bar graph in response to those thinking “yes, but this doesn’t represent those poor nonverbal people with learning difficulties”.
It really was surprisingly how near-identical these two graphs are. Experience told me to predict a similar result but even I didn’t expect it to match up quite this well.
Of course, even then there’s a counter-argument – that people who want to push back even further will argue this doesn’t include autistic people with extremely profound complex learning disabilities who don’t know what a survey is.
Leaving aside the inbuilt ableism in that assumption (and the fact that even if the survey didextract the opinions of those with complex disabilities, some people would still argue against any results they don’t want to acknowledge), I’ll say the same as I did in 2018- that:
To me, it seems illogical to say that just because an autistic person can’t access this survey, their opinions on a cure will suddenly become the polar opposite of their autistic peers.
And there‘s still no compelling use-case for the average consumer. Coders and scientists? Can be. But most people don‘t really have a use for it in most situations, even in business contexts. It‘s mostly a solution in search of a problem, and even then it‘s so unreliable that even things trying to sell you it as a solution have to add the disclaimer that you shouldn‘t use it for anything that‘s remotely important.
So even if the costs were markedly less than they are, there‘s still no real path to profitability because there‘s no real call for it.
The only use I‘ve found as a consumer is using something like Perplexity as a search engine. And that‘s not a testament to how good Perplexity is, but instead a testament to how bad other search engines have become. Perplexity just avoids things like SEO and is mostly quite good at finding sources which aren‘t themselves AI-generated.
And…I really see a near future in which AI-SEO becomes a thing and Perplexity et. al. become just as useless as google.