Copilot key will eventually be required in new PC keyboards, though not yet.
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So now Windows bloat is extending to the physical keyboard itself.
Looking at the Microsoft blog post they haven’t said exactly how they want keyboard layouts to change. So on a full size keyboard this could be either new key entirely, or replace an existing (and arguably more useful) key.
They should put it adjacent to the up arrow key so that when I hit it accidentally, copilot can ask “did you mean to press the up arrow key?”, which will cause me to smash the keyboard with my fists and then I’ll need to buy another one. Sales will skyrocket.
Not particularly relevant, but my friend randomly told me to press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Windows key+L one day. I’m still horrified.
I just tried this. Why does this exist? Why does this need to be a shortcut? Who uses LinkedIn so much that they need to use a 5 key shortcut to get there faster?
For anybody who doesn’t want to try it, this key combo opens LinkedIn in your default browser.
It’s not a setting you can change, the only way to disable it is to edit the registry.
WTF.
Lol Windows is so bad these days. What were they thinking?!
It’s not a setting you can change, the only way to disable it is to edit the registry.
So you are saying the setting can be changed. You can even do it over terminal if you like.
They have an “Office Key” on some official keyboards. Pressing Office+L opens LinkedIn. The Office key is actually mapped to that long modifier shortcut.
Did you think the MS C-Suite does much other than bloviate on LinkedIn in-between (and during) meetings? It’s for them and execs everywhere.
🤢 🤢 🤢 🤢 🤮 🤮 🤮 🤮 🤮 🤮 🤮 🤮 🤮 🤮 🤮 🤮 🤮 🤮 🤮
Damn, that works in Windows 10 as well. Blech.
I mean, they did it before with the windows/super button. Before that you just had ctrl and alt there.
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I always assumed the windows key was a late attempt at copying the “Apple” keys on Macs. then Macs stopped using that, and switched to the clover (called command), then to actual Command text.
I don’t remember the last time I pressed the “right click” contextual menu key, so honestly it’s not like it’ll be too annoying. Unless they do replace an actually useful key, at which point I guess the people making “make Windows actually work good” apps will get to live another year.
I pressed it like, 20 minutes ago? It’s a pretty normal part of a lot of coding workflow, not to mention browsing, accessing context menu keyboard shortcuts without having to move your hand to the mouse for one buttonpress.
Fair enough. Alt used to be that before we decided to have a button to annoyingly pop up the menu strip. And there’s still Alt Gr for that in full sized keyboards if we want to go back that way.
Alt Gr is something else. Non-english keyboards use it all day every day for typing their charactersets.
It could probably replace the right OS key, though.
Yeah and even on many english keyboards it is used to show special characters
Been coding in vim for decades without that key
That’s the key I use as a compose key
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I use the app/menu all the time in Excel.
I use it as a Compose key with WinCompose.
So long Caps Lock/Scroll Lock
I remap Caps Lock to Escape.
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How did you know I am a Vim user?
Same. TouchBar Macs inadvertently forced me to move to a more comfy layout.
Then you had all those “for the web” Windows 95 PCs that had all the extra buttons like the Calculator and Web Browser and Sleep buttons scattered around above the keyboard that I don’t think people tended to use because Windows wasn’t built with them in mind. It seems they’re in the keyboard standard now as if they were any other key.
Yeah there were some wacky keyboard shortcut buttons in the 90s, particularly during the dot com bubble. Perhaps we could bring back the pizza key!
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My keyboard has mail/browser/home/suspend keys in the corner. I use suspend and home (to get to the set main page in the browser) every day.
Swap it with the windows key and put the windows key as the function modified keypress. As long as I can still disable that key, it would be fine.
Before I even read it I knew it was more ads or AI of some sort and yep it’s both. Sure yeah we need more ads. Can I get a Microsoft store button on mouses now? Ohoh a dedicated 2nd screen for ads on every monitor. We must please the share holders and the rich!
I’m plenty fine with all ads consolidated to a dedicated monitor, that would certainly never face the wall on minimal brightness
Attention citizen, your Economic Consumer Activity Monitor has identified error with your system and/or the Citizen Observation Rate to the unit. Your worldwide credits have been locked pending resolution.
You’re joking but that literally exists
I’m plenty fine with an OS that doesn’t try to abuse me in the first place.
Do you remember a few years ago, it came out that some company was working on a new idea that, when you were given an advertisement on a TV, it could require you to say the product name aloud or it wouldn’t continue?
I try not to concede anything related to advertising because everything they want seems so dystopian.
Please drink a verification can.
I remember another one proposing using eye tracking on a phone’s selfie camera to make sure you were watching ads, with the ads pausing every time you looked away.
There was also another patent for a TV with an eye-tracker camera in it to make sure you were actually watching the ads, another one that would unmute itself if it was muted during ads, and one designed to count the number of people in a room to charge you for piracy if you didn’t buy enough tickets for everybody for pay per view shows.
Please drink verification can to continue.
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Hey, finally a legitimate reason for a Realdoll!
You’re right, but you also know the answer to this. Loath as I am to say it, the solution to this is simple: just use Linux.
I’m getting Bixby button flashbacks.
Ho well, my wallet’s gonna cry but I’m sure the mechkeyboard community will welcome my ass
Remember when PC keyboards had two Windows logo keys? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
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I remember when PC keyboards had zero Windows keys.
Mine currently does. Well they’re actually Cooler Master logos, which I don’t really mind. And both of them are bound to Super.
Open your wallet and prepare your credit cards it’s gonna be a helluva ride!
Rebind ftw
I remapped the Bixby button to turn on the flashlight. Best decision ever.
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I requested it, but I was only kidding!
Microsoft learns nothing from their continued pattern of going all-in on a trendy and unproven concept. Windows 8 “live tiles” that were supposed to create one look and feel across devices, Cortana was supposed to be the digital assistant of the future, they even did their own poorly executed folding phone.
OR, hear me out, we just have it mapped to alt+win(meta) key and this will be a nothing burger.
Stop being such a socialist. They need to sell more keyboards, and to make the keyboards you own unique to their brand.
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This is me. Saw a cool keycap set the other day, and before I knew it BOOM! New keyboard.
I only have 4 (working ones) so far, but that’s still probably one too many. xD
True but we’re not interested in adding a dedicated adware/spyware button
I said this above… I’ve had the same Das Keyboard model so long that the USB ports in the side are USB 1.0. And I will use it as long as I can because it’s a great keyboard and I’ve never needed a new keyboard since I bought it even when I’ve needed a new computer. Fuck this shit.
I’m still using a Kinesis Contoured daily with PS/2 connection. Pretty impressed a new motherboard still came with a combo mouse/keyboard PS/2 port.
It’s already mapped on windows to Window button and C.
M$ can get absolutely fucked
Oh cool, another useless gimmick just like the ‘Office Key’
Actually, a dedicated key to open ChatGPT seems convenient. I don’t hate it.
Can’t you go in your desktop settings and bind whatever combination you like to do just that?
Don’t you see? They’re fucking with the denominator. My 60% is already technically closer to 58%. If they keep adding keys, I don’t know how my mech can keep up with the shrinkflation. I can’t become one of those 50% weirdos. Microsoft is just finding more ways to ruin my life.
Yeah and I already do. But why make it a key combo when you could just have a single dedicated key instead?
It’s not like anyone actually uses the menu key or the right Start key anyway. 'Bout damn time Microsoft remaps them to something more useful. Next they should do the Pause/Break key. That one hasn’t been useful since the DOS days.
We should also get a chrome key
And a windows store key
And a Microsoft.com link key
A key to open minecraft
Why not a key for launching the “windows action menu” or whatever they call it
A key to open the control panel
How about a key to open the settings menu?
Why are we limiting ourselves? We should have 500 keys and at least 300 of them should be unique to windows.
Try a stream deck, each key is also a small monitor for customizable button actions.
Because none of those keys are useful. AI is useful and isn’t Microsoft exclusive.
Once keyboards start adding the key, I’d be legitimately surprised if the major Distros didn’t eventually follow suit and integrate AI into their platforms as well. Hell, it might get built right into your favorite desktop environment in a couple years.
I get your point, AI is useful for some people, but what about the rest of us who don’t want it or use it? I genuinely use the menu key and would prefer to keep it functioning as it does and now I’m going to be forced to lose that key and now I have to deal with AI? It has no use for me. I also don’t want something actively watching and “thinking” about what I’m doing. I want my computer somewhat dumb and to only do what I tell it to. If you want a keyboard with a dedicated AI button, get one with a macro pad or something. Don’t inconvenience the rest of us by forcing a nonsensical change
Their point was that you could just assign the scroll lock key (or whatever) to open ChatGPT instead because who the fuck uses scroll lock?
Funny you say that, cause as a FL Studio user I hit that key all the time. (It switches between auto/manual scrolling of playlist, i.e. it locks/unlocks auto scrolling.)
You think you are joking but in the 90’s that was a thing for keyboards.
it had a few hardcore fans, a quick search for RT9450 shows people still trying to get that to work up to about 2020
honestly i wouldn’t mind having another scroll wheel/bar on the keyboard somewhere, in the middle above the function keys might be cool
also fyi that link can be tidied to https://www.ebay.com/itm/363221421164
Im pretty sure you could look up key remappers and do that already
Yes but you’re missing my point entirely. What I’m saying is that I’m happy that Microsoft is making it official, so that I don’t have to remap anything.
MS used to sell a keyboard with a custom button to start your web browser.
Now that web browsing is common but that key has been removed from keyboards, do you still remap a hotkey to bring up Firefox?
I’m ambivalent about all this, but I think the distinction is that a web browser button would simply open a persistent window, and therefore only really needs to be used once or twice per “session”. Copilot is designed to act more like the Start menu, in that it is opened frequently and disappears after each use.
That being said, and as much as I use ChatGPT myself, it’s hard to see this as anything more than an easy way to further the perception of Microsoft as first-class AI company, thereby justifying its high stock price for a corporation with limited new growth opportunities.
Hey! I do use menu key regularly! And same with pause and scroll lock! Print creen is obvious and everyone uses it. Right? Right!? RIGHT?!?
Print screen used to be a good button for screen capture/window capture. But now the various screenshot apps do the job better. Ctrl+Prt Scr is maybe still good for being fast
Pause is usually the compose key (diacritics starter) on Linux desktops. But I’ll agree about Scroll Lock, that one is truly useless.
Excel uses scroll lock to
make people think it’s brokenlock the scroll bars in case you don’t want to be able to see the rest of your sheet
It’s already mapped to Windows Button + C.
You can do Windows Button + C to open CoPilot.
What about the LinkedIn key.
That’s actually a shortcut for ctrl+alt+shift+L… that is an (unconfigurable?) hotkey for opening LinkedIn in edge.
Gee, I imagine this will go the same way as Cortana, but now there will be a key forever visible to be it’s gravestone.
They’re so desperate for AI to be a thing.
AI is absolutely “a thing”, not sure there’s really a debate about that. The desperation here is they want to be the first company to completely immerse itself in Generative AI, but they’re moving so fast they’re just shoving every experiment they can come up with down their customers’ throats.
AI is going to be a huge part of the future, but Microsoft might not be a part of that future if they fuck up with over implementation of nascent tech.
My bad, I should be more specific. They’re so desperate for a fancy chatbot to be a part of everybody’s workflow that they’re going to add a special key that is not needed, or wanted by the vast majority.
I hope this can be remapped to something useful.
You mean the Bixby button? (/s, but I think you can see my comparison of uselessness there)
Yeah, I’m glad the Bixby button was dropped. What a joke. I don’t need an assistant to use my phone, thanks.
I’m surprised people didn’t instantly remap the Bixby button to something else.
On my S10 I had it long press to activate flashlight, and double press to silence my phone. It was really handy.
Wasn’t that impossible for awhile?
Maybe, but I’m trying to remember which model. My S8 and onward I always remapped my Bixby button via 3rd party app (no root) so maybe it was the S7 that wasn’t remappable?
edit: The S8 was the first phone with the dedicated Bixby button, according to Google, so maybe it wasn’t remappable initially. I got it a year+ into it’s life cycle and I never activated Bixby
Tried to look it up: https://mashable.com/article/samsung-will-let-you-customize-bixby-button
That article claims the option came out when the s10 was out. I seem to remember being able to mod it on my phone as well S9. Can’t test it though because while I’ve had this phone for 5 years now I may have not babied it enough. The physical bixby button has fallen into the phone itself so I can hear ot rattle around. If I were speculating, I would assume it either A. became available to all 3 phones during that same software update, or we remember it sooner being part of something like putting the phone into developer mode so we could have further modifications
Wasn’t that impossible for awhile?
The button itself wasn’t bad Have such an extra button on my Sony too and it’s very nice (I have it set to take screenshots).
The problem is when they don’t let you map it to whatever you want.
I agree with you, AI is a thing alright, an overhyped chatbot thing. LLM’s are going to be neutered by pandering, and the true potential will be limited by investor fear and paranoia.
What makes you think they’ll be neutered? You think China is going to stop what they’re doing with them because the US might do something stupid? The genie is out of the bottle.
It’s a trend lately, that potentially sensitive things will be said or output from the models, so you can see an increasingly crazier set of guardrails getting put around the LLM’s so that they don’t offend someone by mistake. I’ve seen their usefulness decrease significantly, but their coding assistance is still somewhat good, but their capabilities otherwise decrease significantly.
I haven’t had those problems with locally run models (stable diffusion, llamafile)
Agreed, but in the context of this post, that copilot key on the keyboard will take people to the most inoffensive and “walled garden” variety of generative AI that will be so one-size-fits-all to the point that its usefulness will pale in comparison to local run models or SaaS hosted style services that give you a hosted model to run off of.
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Why? It absolutely is the case that corporate provided LLMs are neutered to not provide anything that goes against 21 century American corporate norms. Try and get chat GPT to agree with you that capitalism is at the root of most of the worlds problems and it will fight you every step of the way, ask it about how capitalism drives innovation and it will write you glowing praise.
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Obviously they filter that yes, but they also go to huge amounts of effort to shape what comes out to fit their ethics. When chatGPT was new I spent a good half an hour trying to get it to admit that the fact that it was created by a for profit company meant that it would have significant bias towards the status quo and it wasnt having any of it. However asking it to imagine an equal LLM created by another company called chatPGT and all of a suddent it was agreeing with me that it would have pro-capital and anti public biases embeded into to due to who was in control of training it. Clearly it had been trained to not admit that chatGPT would give biased answers.
I use copilot on a daily basis for programming. It has made me much more productive and it’s a real pleasure to use it. Nothing overhyped about it.
Curious to see what it will bring for other domains, e.g. for dealing with emails.
I do agree that there’s a lot of filtering happening. Not a huge deal for more applications. Luckily you can run your own models that are not filtered. I can definitely see a future where you run your own models locally. Afaik Apple recently did some stuff around that.
Why are you talking about what Apple might do, in relation to locally run models, when that’s what Facebook’s already done? And it’s source available, which is more than the Apple one will likely be.
It’s overhyped but LLMs have become basically an essential part of my daily workflow. I can’t imagine developing without it now and I’ve been using them for less than 12 months. The technology is only going to improve, and that’s both cool and scary to think about.
I swear I blinked and suddenly AI was so ubiquitous that I feel like I’m living, studying and writing incorrectly…
We’re in the early hype phase of a new innovation fad. It’ll die down and then we’ll find out what it’s ACTUALLY useful for.
Ugh. Why do keyboards have to have Microsoft logos. I hate it. I want nothing to do with them.
I would imagine this isn’t going to go over very well with a lot of companies. I would bet many already ban employees using copilot or other AI assistants because they don’t want their company’s proprietary data being sent to Microsoft or Google or whoever. Stick a key on the keyboard that, if accidentally hit, brings up copilot (and maybe sends data to Microsoft), and those keyboards might be banned.
Some companies will probably just deal with it by setting up their PCs so that copilot is disabled and that key does something else. But, other companies will either not be technically savvy enough to do that, or will not want to take a risk of someone accidentally reverting to the default behaviour.
I can’t even begin to articulate my hatred for the current Microsoft business model. People used to joke how evil they were but it’s only continued to get worse
The Clippy Key.
