I've been on Xbox Live since the service first started- I believe I was in some sort of preview beta. I jumped on GamePass right when it started and now I have 4 separate accounts (3 for my kids, and 1 for me).

They just raised the price for GamePass Ultimate to $30/month, up $10...

$120 per month for gaming is way too much for me. I need to drop all of my accounts, and there is no way I will go to an ad-supported tier. Also, I was planning to upgrade one of my Xboxes to a Series X, but they just raised the price on that too, so that is a no-go.

I'm not even a curmudgeon. I am very much a Microsoft/Xbox fanboy (check my comment history). They have managed to lose me completely after 24 years, which is amazing. I've got 4 Xboxes now, but this isn't the first time I've had that many. I had 4 360's just so I could have people over for multiplayer.

Now I will just play Balatro on my phone.

I started a small a plant nursery in the last year, and at the onset I decided I was going to use AI (I use Copilot) as much as possible to help me out.

Honestly, it's been awesome.

One of my first ideas was to use it to manage inventory, and frankly that bombed. After a month of inputting data, I started asking it to give me reports. I could ask it for the same information 3 times in a row, and get 3 wildly different answers. So, it absolutely cannot function as a database.

But it absolutely excels in assisting me in understanding different requirements such as permitting and certifications. I am in a regulated industry, and I needed 5 different certificates/licenses to get off the ground- and Copilot directed me through that and made things VERY easy. I was able to get everything I needed in very little time.

I also do a lot of guesstimate style math. Filling irregular containers with irregular material. Honestly, I have been doing this work long enough that I can provide a fairly good guess- but Copilot took it way further, and provided things to be more accurate. I love the feature where I can go to a webpage with a product, and start asking questions about that. I can be looking at a tapered cylinder, and ask the volume and get an answer pretty quick.

It can also help me with scheduling different processes. I can take a picture of some information about seeds and say, "When should I plant these if I want them to be mature on date X". This is not some breakthrough stuff, but man, it really, really helps me out. I get tailored information because Copilot knows where I live, what the current weather is, etc.

Anything to do with data retention- I give it an F minus. I learned I cannot rely on it knowing something repeatedly, or long term. it just gets confused. But for planning, organizing, and just bouncing ideas off- I give it an A+. I've worked with horticulturists for the last 25 years, and I would say that Copilot is a better assistant than most people who have a Masters degree in horticulture without having the real world experience. In fact, that is what this is like- someone who is educated, but does not have experience. My job is to bring the experience, Copilot is there to bring knowledge and math skills. I love being able to give it tough word problems and get the answer, along with the step by step breakdown.

But to get back to your comment- the rubber duck idea is a large part of this. I can start typing something out and have a 'conversation' with a fairly knowledgable entity. I can make any decision I choose, and Copilot never gets upset that I don't take its advice. And that is another problem with people with Masters degrees in horticulture without practical knowledge- they get upset when you take their advice.

Overall my satisfaction with Copilot is pretty high. I think that it helped me out in some areas where I don't have the knowledge, or don't want to take the time, to do the job. And those are important jobs!

I wish I had this the last time I owned a business. That endeavor failed because I was too caught up in the process of doing the work, and didn't take enough time to decide what I wanted to do. Copilot takes care of the administrative tedium that I would prefer to ignore.

Maybe that is how you work- but that is not what I am referring to.

Where I work, we have a big deadline tomorrow at 9:00 am. All the developers and QA were going through the system today making last minute changes, updates, fixes, etc.

The key was the immediate communication that we had. Everyone knowing what was going on, even in areas that they were not specifically part of. This made everything faster and better. If we were not in the same location, we absolutely would not have had the same level of communication.

I know people who have been out of the office for 5 years. They are lost now. They missed out on a lot that has happened, and now they are out of sight and they are not part of the group discussions. Sure, we can meet via Zoom, or use Slack, but that isn't even close to being the same.

If remote work is good for you- great, go for it. But where I work there is a huge difference between the people who never did work from home, and those who did. After 5 years the gap is huge. The people on-site have become more valuable, and the WFH people are becoming less relevant.

We are all professionals who don't need to be babysat. We just need to communicate, and in-person communication is much quicker and more effective than electronic.

Did anyone take a pay cut when they were working from home instead of going into the office? I don't think so.

I can imagine that Microsoft maybe should compensate employees if they change the location of their office- but not if people are going back to the same general area. I mean if they tell an employee that their office is now in Indiana, instead of Seattle- sure.

I worked with a lot of people (non-Microsoft) who worked from home for the past couple of years. Honestly- they have all stopped progressing in their work. Bringing them back to the office will get everyone up to speed.

Yes, I do know that I get false information at some point, and I am okay with that. It disappointed me at first, then I realized how to work with it. You need to remind AI of some things, and you need to keep it on track. Humans are a lot worse in this regard.

I treat it largely like I would treat a highly qualified human assistant. This is also where I find the conversations to be very important. Every once in a while I just tell it to review the entire conversation and that will steer it back the right way. Copilot also has the concept of 'pages' which can be a big data dump- that works too.

I also like to change the context of the responses I get. Sometimes I will say, "In this conversation, answer everything from the perspective of a business consultant with an MBA". Other times I lead with, "For this conversation, I want you to be in the role of a marketing consultant, with an eye toward the greatest exposure possible while keeping within the budget." And I have another one where I have talked about production efficiencies.

I haven't found a human assistant that can fill these three roles with any sort of quality in their responses. Also, for 3 humans I would spend a lot of time meeting with them to bring them up to speed. Telling the AI to review the conversation as a reminder take a few seconds, rather than 45 minutes to bring a human up to speed.

If you treat AI like a calculator, you will be disappointed- use Excel for that or go with Salesforce if you hate yourself. I treat AI like an assistant, and I am very satisfied.

I use it all the time, and it's been awesome.

I am starting a small business. Not only does ChatGPT (via Copilot) answer a lot of my questions, but I also am keeping lots and lots of records in the system.

In the past, I would have used something like Excel, and had a fairly rigid data entry format. It works of course, but data entry is more work that way. Now I just 'tell' Copilot what I am doing, while I am doing it. At the end of the day/week/month I can ask for a recap, and everything is formatted nicely. And when I do need a specific report, it's always available.

I am a developer, and I have spent the last 12 years creating a pretty robust web app that holds much of the same data as my side business. And while I am using it, I think to myself, "This is such a better way to do things!"

I know that some people believe that I am letting AI do my thinking for me- but that's not it. AI is really just a fantastic assistant who remembers everything I say, and will keep me on track with what I need to do. It's the flexibility that is the most important thing for me. I can have a 'discussion' about 5 or 6 different topics, then two days later ask, "What was I going to do this weekend?" and get a good summary of the points that I said I wanted to take care of.

I know a lot of people are against using AI- and that's fine. I know that I've started a few businesses in my life, and I've also organized a lot of large projects. I have never had an assistant that is as useful and helpful as Copilot/ChatGPT has been in the last few months.

Are there problems? Yes- absolutely. And in most cases I can easily figure out how to get around the issues. For instance, it has an odd sense of time, which I haven't figured out yet. Things are off by strange amounts of time. At first I assumed, 'oh, there servers are set to a different time zone' but when the discrepancy is 37 minutes, or 2 days and 45 minutes...I'm not sure what is going on there.

Also- there is the matter of learning how to use the system. For me it is all about keeping the 'conversations' separate. Before I did that, it seemed to get confused often. But now I have had 4 conversations, all going for about 3 months, and things are going very well. I can get up to the minute reports anytime I need them.

It is a very, very useful tool to help me stay organized.

Each endpoint had a different save. I am guessing this was to keep the saves separate in the case of the game running on more than one device at a time. I don't know how they handle it now, but I believe that was the issue. My kids play a lot of streamed games, and they knew that their progress on their laptop was different than the progress on their Xbox.

But as an aside- I just switched Xboxes with one of my sons this past weekend. He was very happy that all of his game progress moved over when he logged in. To all of us here on Slashdot that is the obvious way this should work- but for a typical consumer (my son) he was amazed and thrilled that it 'just worked' when he signed in on his profile. And- the games themselves from my profile were still there for him, but he had to download anything that I didn't already have saved to the local drive.

Their cloud integration is pretty good. I'm glad we all kept our saves in the cloud, otherwise we'd be dealing with a huge hassle.

For people who do not work at a large university in a liberal state- you don't really know what is going on. (I don't mean, you, I mean the people responding to you) I also work at a university (in the top 20 of research universities in the US) that is a recipient of a lot of federal grants. Diversity has been identified as the TOP priority at our university. Everything we do has to have a diversity angle to it.

Overhead on grants can be up to 50% of the award. And, since the university has identified DEI as the top priority, a lot of that money goes to support DEI effort.

For many years I have heard people complain about this. Outside funders (non Federal) have complained about this directly. Employees have complained about it. When a funding agency has $5 million to give to research, they know (they are notified) that $2.5 million will go to university administration, and a large part of that goes to the diversity office.

This isn't the grumblings of some red-had MAGA. This is the real world. And when people online try to trivialize the complaints it's obvious they don't understand. The people doing the science see their research dollars being spent on programs that can't demonstrate their effectiveness at all (the demographic numbers haven't changed) but they are constantly pushed as the most important thing we do. I go to meetings where farmers see their money used to support trans-kids movie nights, and they are asking "Isn't this money supposed to be used to develop new plant varieties?" Nope...this money is going to support movie nights- and you don't get a choice. Thank you for your support.

The people funding research are tired of spending half of their money to support the social programs the university is pushing. They want science, but they are getting feel-good politics.

I am also liberal, but the DEI thing has just gone way, way too far. The people doing this work see what's happening, and we are not happy. And with all of this, the university just continues to double-down on their insistence that diversity is top priority. They may change their tune a little bit when we come up empty handed in the next round of funding...but without any financial pressure, research is going to get overshadowed by social programs anyway. I think the university deserves to be in the position they are now- scared for their funding. Because they have been mis-using the money for far too long.

I also work at a place where the building systems are running on Windows 2000, using RS-232 interfaces.

By leaving it off the network, things are 'safe'. Now I need to figure out a way to put data onto the network, so we can monitor remotely.

I have a decent site on Squarespace- it costs about $16 per month. Totally ad-free. $16 is a reasonable price to cover all the costs involved. Once upon a time I had a server at a colo facility which cost a lot more, so the $16/month is fine.

Having a small fee to push my content out the world makes sense.

But if this ruins Buzzfeed, because people stop clicking on their articles due to AI telling them the 'one small trick', then I am all for it.

I actually started paying for an AI service.

Not because I'm a heavy user, or that I rely on it. But because I would rather that they have a subscription model, than an ad-supported model.

I'd rather pay $20 a month for a service designed around my needs, than get a service for free that is designed around advertisers.

In the whole, "If you get a product for free, then you are the product" way of thinking, I would much rather pay for a service I use, rather than being used by people who are serving me ads for free.

On the other hand- I generated about 100 images yesterday for a presentation I was creating. I was able to get exactly what I needed, and pretty quickly. Totally worth the $20 just in one afternoon.

As a developer whose sites were forced behind Cloudflare by our security group....Cloudflare sucks. The number of communication errors I get has gone from zero prior to Cloudflare, to a couple times a month that I see problems- not counting the visitors to our sites.

We updated all of the host files for our local users to bypass Cloudflare, just to make things work better. They had some problem where they would occasionally flag image uploads as dangerous files. Image uploads are a large part of our system, and 5% or so were getting flagged by some filter they run. I don't pretend to know why it happened, but I do know that bypassing Cloudflare solves the problem.

How many recipe sites does Cloudflare serve up? That's their speed- overbloated garbage designed to make money for the creators, not something useful for the users.

So maybe the web will return to more of the state it was in back before 2000.

Back before every website was filled with ads. Before everything was paywalled.

I am very happy to get my AI answers rather than going to a site with pop-ups, ads, and a paywall. But I will gladly visit a site that is designed for USERS rather than advertisers.

Cloudflare makes money by serving companies that have enshittified the web. If they all go away, and the web goes back to a place where people create content designed for users, I am all for it.

Does anyone have any sympathy for the decline of the enshittified, google-ified, ad-supported web?

The performance needs to be at LEAST the Series S.

For me, it's all about the super-fast storage. Once I moved from One X to even the Series S, the fast storage is what made me really appreciate the upgrade.

Just last week I installed a game from ~2021. As part of the intro video they told me how great it was that my character could be any gender or non-binary. I would have full freedom to express myself, etc. etc. That was the top feature they mentioned.

That really was a time where DEI was the most important thing in gaming- rather than the gameplay. It wasn't imaginary boogeymen, it was what was really happening.

Even just 3 years later it seemed horribly outdated. I wonder how the developers feel about that game now.