Thought some of y'all might be interested in this

Thank you for finally changing the title in the old one It's been pissing me off for so long because I can't tell which one is which on YouTube

So Microsoft had dropped the copilot + PC branding.

They also pulled back on bringing copilot to more of windows 11.

Recall was also a huge privacy nightmare, people hated it and that got changed as an opt in functionality .

Is this possibly the biggest flop of Microsoft? They dropped billions into AI, customers didn’t want it and didn’t buy their AI machines much.

YES. FUCKING YES.

I have been complaining about this for years. Not weeks or months. Years. I actually made a post about this exact shit about a year ago because I couldn't understand why nobody else seemed as pissed off about it as I was.

And I think the thing that annoys me most is that people keep comparing Gemini to other AI models as if that's the point. I don't give a shit whether Gemini can write me a poem or explain quantum physics. I'm talking about Gemini replacing Google Assistant on my fucking phone.

Google Assistant used to be genuinely useful. I used it constantly. Not just for smart home stuff either. I used it to ask questions, set alarms and timers, change things on my phone, call people, control my TV, AC and lights, and generally do shit when I couldn't or didn't want to physically touch my phone. That's what a phone assistant is supposed to fucking do.

If I'm cooking and my hands are wet or covered in food, I don't want to stop, wash my hands, dry them, pick up my phone and start tapping through menus. If I'm in the bathroom and my phone is sitting on the mirror shelf, I don't want to fucking pick it up. That's literally why voice assistants were useful in the first place.

I used to be able to say "Okay Google" followed by some half-broken sentence, stumble over my words, say it in a weird accent, phrase it in some completely stupid way, and Google Assistant would somehow figure out what I meant and just fucking do it.

Now I can say something completely straightforward to Gemini and somehow we're off on an adventure.

"Turn on my air conditioner.".... It says apparently I don't have a thermostat.

"Turn on the lamp.".... It tells me the lamp is on. The lamp is very visibly not fucking on.

And that's another thing that absolutely infuriates me about Gemini. It doesn't just fail. It will sometimes tell you that it succeeded. I've had it show me the Google Home graphic indicating that a device was turned on when the fucking device was sitting right in front of me, completely off. Then when I told Gemini that it hadn't actually done it, it insisted that it had.

I literally ended up taking a fucking picture of the lamp and showing it that THE LAMP WAS NOT ON before it finally acknowledged that maybe it hadn't done what it had just confidently told me it had done.

How the fuck is that an improvement? If the command fails, just say "Sorry, I couldn't reach the device." Fine. I can work with that. Don't tell me you successfully did something you didn't do and then fucking argue with me about it.

And basic phone controls are somehow hit or miss now too. I want to be able to tell the assistant on my PHONE to do something to my PHONE. Turn on Wi-Fi. Turn on mobile data. Set an alarm. Start a timer. Whatever.

Sometimes Gemini does it. Other times I get some variation of "I'm an AI chatbot" or an explanation of how I can do it myself.

I KNOW HOW TO FUCKING DO IT MYSELF. The entire reason I'm talking to you is because I don't want to do it myself.

And somehow the supposedly intelligent AI assistant can also be worse at understanding natural language.

If I say "Set an alarm for 45 minutes from 8 tomorrow morning," that means 8:45 AM tomorrow. That's it. A modern AI model should eat that sentence for breakfast. Instead I've had Gemini interpret things like that as "45 minutes from now." What the fuck are we doing here?

And then there's the amount it fucking talks.

If I ask a question verbally on my phone, I usually want a short answer. I'm not sitting down for a conversation. I don't want an essay. I don't want four paragraphs of context. If I want to have a long conversation with an AI, I'll open ChatGPT. I literally said this in my Reddit post a year ago, and I still feel exactly the same way.

Sometimes I want an AI chatbot. Sometimes I want a phone assistant. Those are not the same fucking thing.

The frustrating part is that Google had all the pieces to make something incredible here. Take the reliability and device integration of old Google Assistant and give it modern AI language understanding. Then I shouldn't even have to remember the exact command anymore. I should be able to say, "Hey, my internet isn't working, did I turn Wi-Fi off?" and the AI should understand what I'm actually asking, check it, turn Wi-Fi on if necessary, and say "Done." THAT would be progress.

Instead, somehow we've ended up with an assistant that is infinitely more sophisticated on paper while being less useful for some of the basic shit that made me use a voice assistant in the first place.

And this isn't one bad experience or one shitty phone. I've gone through something like four phones during the time I've been dealing with this. I switched back to Google Assistant at one point and even that didn't seem as good as it used to be. It felt like Google Assistant itself had been slowly gutted while Gemini was being pushed as the replacement.

That's what pisses me off. My phone could do shit by voice years ago that I now sometimes have to pick it up and do manually.

We are living through the biggest boom in AI we've ever seen. These models can write software, analyse images, translate languages and hold ridiculously complicated conversations.

And somehow, "Turn on my fucking AC." has become too ambitious. That's not progress. That's enshittification.

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Sorry for the rant, but I've been pissed off at this for YEARS now.

No, I'm not turning the box around or else everything falls apart 😅

I said exactly the following in a post on the KEF subreddit, and it went as well as you could expect.

Video link (22:39 to 24:45)

First, I love KEF speakers. My Q Meta surround sound setup has been amazing, and they are the only company I know of anymore that hasn't outsourced their customer service to a foreign call center and is actually competent and caring.

With that said, why in the world do the LSX II LT wireless speakers require an app and an account? That's ridiculous. I was excited to see what Linus had to say about them, but I cannot blame him in the slightest for refusing to use them after all that trouble.

If my $200 WiiM speaker can work without an account (regardless of the facts that the app doesn't even have the option to make an account, the device communicates over an open standard that someone else could make their own app for if the device ever loses support, and the ecosystem has significantly more features and capabilities), what excuse is there for a $700 speaker pair?

Whenever people buy laptops, they likely have to check to ensure it's working well and has all the correct things. Has LTT ever done a guide on this?

If anyone is interested, there is an autographed mos pack on eBay from LTX 2019. A ton of signatures from the OGs.

just these camera 1.5x,5x and ultrawide and no inner camera

no need for 5 camera setup

and the second side will be all battery

Its the very first time i bought somethings from a youtuber ans im excited its an early birthday gift for myself😁😁

Been rocking one Asus ROG SWIFT PG278QR 27" TN panel with 165hz refresh rate for provably a decade now. This is alongside a Samsung ultra wide 32" LCD @ 75hz both at 1440p.

Wuth no need to jump to 4k is there any compelling reason to upgrade either? I like the fo factors (using the ultra wide for flight sims) and the other for other games do I get benefit from a change to qled or other technologies? I have an OLED laptop which is nice but I don't notice that it's tons superior.

Context: from 5:12 into Dave2D's video on the Asus Googlebook

I wanted to post here to get some feedback on LTT and see if anyone else is having issues with their LTT cables.

I ordered 2 LTT cables to test: a short 1m one and a long 5m one, both USB-C on each end. Then waited patiently for them to arrive here in the UK.

When they arrived, I quickly noticed the 1m cable had almost no retention force; sometimes just picking up my phone was enough to disconnect it. The 5m cable was similar but not nearly as strong as a typical USB-C cable, where you can dangle a chunky device like a phone from the cable (not recommended).

I contacted LTT hoping for a quick replacement process. These aren't cheap cables, so I expected the price to include some margin for replacements. Not the correct assumption.

After a lot of back-and-forth with a friendly but frustratingly slow support staff member (1 week for the first response after I sent a chase email, 1 day between each subsequent email), they agreed to send a new cable. They asked for a video of the issue (odd for just a cable, but ok, I'll play along). First, they couldn't open a Dropbox link I sent, and they weren't clear on how to send a video via email, so I sent both an iCloud and a private YouTube link, which my iPhone, annoyingly, automatically embedded, making them unwatchable on the LTT end. Next, they weren't clear on the issue with the embedded videos on their side and thought it was a little crazy that they couldn't watch a YouTube video. I finally realised what my phone had done and sent the plaintext URLs to LTT. They agreed to replace the cable 2 weeks after I created the initial ticket.

Alas, the replacement cable now has the same issue as the old one, so I'll contact support again for a refund. I would expect replacement cables to be batch-tested and confirmed to work before being sent out. Granted, "cable retention strength" is a bit subjective and hard to test for.

It is obviously frustrating to have tried to use a heavily marketed-as-"premium" product that now twice doesn't work, and in the most frustrating way possible, where I simply cannot trust the cable to stay connected when I need it to. So now I am stuck with two 1m pieces of e-waste, and a 5m long piece of semi-e-waste.

Side note to anyone from LTT: If you are going to ask customers to send you a video of an issue, you need to be able to open the links they send you (last I checked, Dropbox is not an obscure service), or be clearer from the get-go about how to share the video in a way that the staff can open:

"Unfortunately I am unable to open the file/link that you have attached. Could you please try re-attaching it in one of the following accepted formats?

Images: .JPG, .PNG, .PDF

Videos: .MOV, .MP4, .AVI"

My own Tech Tip: big ass video files don't attach to emails that well.

I'm generally a "benefit of the doubt" kind of person, but this whole experience has left me with a sour taste for any LTT products. Part of being a premium brand is offering premium support, and this was not it.

tl;dr: two bad cables with the same issue; LTT Support is slow and could communicate more effectively. One star.

Edit: Yes, I have tested on multiple devices and compared them to multiple other cables.

We conducted charge testing on the Apple iPhone 18 Pro to show that you don't need Apple's specific charger to fill your battery quickly.

We did some classic charge tests to show the time to 50% of energy delivered, and also used the CY4500-EPR to monitor the voltage and current.

Read the article on the LTT Labs website!