#69: Thinking Deeply

Posted on March 28, 2025 by ewand

It’s a little over 47 years since the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy was first broadcast on the radio, followed by the publication of the written work the following year. It took the most powerful supercomputer, “Deep Thought”, 7.5 million years to come up with the Answer to the Ultimate Question.

Who knows in the modern era how long it would take? Things have changed a lot over the last 50 years, and surely Google et al could manage a reply quicker than that.

It seems that the answers to many important but previously impossible questions are only a moment’s search away.

A screenshot of a web page

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Copilot’s Getting Deeper

Microsoft quietly unveiled an additional feature to its main Copilot offering – i.e. the free, web thing or Copilot app on PC or mobile (as opposed to the paid-for Microsoft 365 offering, or any other app’s Copilot-branded functionality).

Go to copilot.ai and just below the prompt, select the drop-down to change the mode – with a single click on the flower-like icon (which is not at all like the OpenAI logo), you can get it to Think Deeper.

This feature uses the fairly recent o3-mini (high) model from OpenAI (which runs on Azure, don’t you know… well at least most of it does), giving additional insight into whatever you’re asking. It doesn’t take much longer to answer compared to the regular reply so you might just think about using it all the time for questions of moderate complexity. And it’s free.

ChatGPT itself has a “Deep Research” function which is available to paying users (Plus or Pro), and Microsoft has also unveiled a forthcoming “Researcher” capability that will be part of the Microsoft 365 Copilot commercial offering, alongside some deep reasoning stuff for agents built in Copilot Studio. It’s all getting really deep, man.

Wannabe Record Breakers

As well as Copiloting-everything (mostly based on top of OpenAI stuff), Microsoft has been looking further afield and building its own AI technologies. There’s still plenty of Ayy Eye noise coming from Redmond, and an AI Skills Fest virtual event starting in April is going to keep the foot on the gas.

It might have one of the more obscure Guinness World Records, too…

A group of people looking at a glass board

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Let’s not get too excited now, kiddies. There are plenty of strange records to aspire to.

#68: It’s all about the prompt

Posted on March 21, 2025 (Updated March 18, 2025) by ewand

When internet search engines took off in the mid 90s – remember Alta Vista? – and Google exploded into the public consciousness in the early 2000s, it became increasingly apparent that getting good search results were helped by being able to ask your question correctly.

Savvy searchers might use a combination of quotes and other “operators” to specify an exact phrase, or guide the search engine to include only certain terms or results from a particular website (such as site:tipoweek.com onenote). Google and Bing both tend to use the same operators (so, as Scott Hanselman would say, you could “Google with Bing”).

Prompting Today

A screenshot of a computer screen

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

When using some of the many AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini etc, you can get very relevant results by being quite specific in what you ask it to do. As an example, one of the best ToW banner images was created using Microsoft Designer with the prompt, “a serene image of a young boy sitting at an old laptop (with Windows 10) but lurking in the dark background is the grim reaper”

A child sitting in a chair with a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Or, getting much more detailed, see Kat Beedim’s detailed 200+ word instructions to create consistently-formatted notes from meeting transcripts.

Being much more verbose and directional than you’d ever try in a regular search engine can give some quite remarkable results. The order of what you ask might vary the emphasis given to certain parts of the response, and the general advice is to be positive – i.e. ask for things you want, rather than telling it what you don’t want.

It seems that AI can suffer from a variant of Dostoevsky’s “White Bear Problem”; ie. Asking it not to do something increases the likelihood of doing it. Not long after Microsoft went big on Copilot and Designer, here’s one example when Copilot was asked to draw an image on a particular topic…

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The idea was to convey a background threat with those hooded figures, not the feeling that the poor girl was in imminent peril. The figures lurking in the background might be a mite less sinister if they weren’t armed, so clarification was called for…

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Maybe DALL-E 3 at that time was just fixated with firearms, or asking it not to do something was a step too far. We’ve gone from “some guns” to “pointing guns at her”. Hmmm.

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Trying the same prompt in Designer seemingly gets a little less gun-heavy now, but still has the odd one creeping in. Trying to be more explicit doesn’t appear to work… adding to the end of the prompt, “The sinister hooded figures are not carrying guns of any kind”.

You might think that instruction is simple enough, but no. It seems to be interpreted as “you want more guns? Gotcha”.

A person sitting at a desk with a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

#67: Are you sitting comfortably?

Posted on March 14, 2025 (Updated March 13, 2025) by ewand

Regular readers of ToW might have spotted the caption under the main image of last week’s missive: it was a photo of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, for a 1991 article in Fortune magazine written to celebrate the 10^th anniversary of the PC. Taken at Jobs’ house, the image shows supposed soap-dodger Steve barefoot astride a lounge chair, with Bill perched on its footstool, or “ottoman”.

There are no official online archives of this article (at least, not easily found) however physical copies pop up at auction on occasion and there is at least one downloadable scanned copy.

The chair / stool in question is an iconic shape, known as the Eames Lounge Chair and designed in 1956 by couple Charles and Ray Eames for the Herman Miller furniture company. You may remember Herman Miller from the ubiquitous and not-inexpensive Aeron office chair.

Buying a genuine Herman Miller Eames chair in the US will cost a pretty penny (even old ones running to thousands), though licensed versions were made in Europe and Asia. Vitra still sells their version now, though be sure to be sitting down before you look at the price.

If you’re keen to add a bit of mid-century chic to your home without further ruining your financial future, knock-off versions are available on eBay. Or, especially if based in the UK, look at Iconic Interiors, who produce a high-quality replica at a fraction of the price of the official one.

So that’s the comfy seating for putting the world to rights taken care of; what about the day-to-day seating for getting the work done?

The Desk-jockey

Deskbound office workers are reckoned to spend between anything up to 9 hours a day slouched at their desk, leading to more than 2 months a year of being officially “sedentary”. Businesses insisting on staff returning to the office for much or all of the working week could trumpet the benefits on their physical and mental wellbeing compared to the WFHers, though perhaps they should make sure they have an environment that can accommodate everyone.

Having a sit/stand desk is one way of avoiding the doldrums as long as you remember to actually use it standing up occasionally. If you’re a hybrid/home worker, FlexiSpot do a decent range that’s not shockingly expensive, in case you’re looking for recommendation; also available in the UK. Why limit yourself to merely sitting or standing, when you could do so much more at your desk?

Should your employer decide that you need to be in the office all the time, they do have some responsibility in making sure the workspace isn’t going to cause harm. The UK’s Elfin Safety executive even has published requirements, which could be handy if you’re trying to persuade your employer that sitting at a cafeteria table all day isn’t good enough.

How to sit at your desk

Sit up straight. Shoulders back, don’t slouch. Feel on the floor and don’t cross your legs. Keep your elbows at 90 degrees. Raise the height of your chair. That screen needs to be higher. You might have seen these pieces of advice before, but not all are necessarily correct, and you can certainly find plenty of supporters for and against.

One view is that you need to keep your feet behind your hips. This could stop your back from curving as you sit at the desk. Others would say, don’t sit straight, instead recline your chair. It’s quite probable that your seat is too low – many office chairs just don’t even adjust high enough, or may have large armrests that stop you sitting close enough to the desk.

The UK’s HSE recommended posture follows fairly conventional groups – sit straight, have your chair at a height where your elbows are level with your hands, and have the top of your monitor at eye level.

If you have a laptop, ideally use an external keyboard and put your PC on books or a dedicated stand to raise it up so the screen is high enough to not make you stoop or bend your neck down. Working in the typical laptop hunch is bearable on a train or plane, maybe OK sitting at a temporary desk for an hour, but should definitely not be the norm for whole days at a stretch.

There are extremes you could go to in trying to perfect ergonomics, but if all you do is sit with elbows level to your keyboard and eyeballs level with the screen, you’ll be going in the right direction.

#66: A computer on every desk?

Posted on March 11, 2025 (Updated March 11, 2025) by ewand

“A computer on every desk, and in every home, running Microsoft software” – was an early and, at the time, unbelievably ambitious goal for a small company from Albuquerque which later moved up to Bellevue, WA.

Things have moved on radically since Microsoft was founded nearly 50 years ago; now, everyone who needs a computer on a desk has one, and billions more have one on their lap or in their hand. SteveB talked recently, in a retrospective “Alumni Voices” interview, about the early days.

Thinking about PC usage (for Windows and Macs); laptops overtook desktops some years ago (notebooks outselling desktops 4:1). Laptop manufacturers evolve them more quickly, with better screens, longer battery life and now, ramming in AI features, often refreshing their ranges regularly.

But if you sit at a desk most of the time, and all your data is in the cloud anyway, shouldn’t your primary computer be a desktop? Maybe you could have a medium-spec laptop for when you need to be mobile, and a comparatively high-end desktop for the rest of the time?

If you’re using a laptop for work and spend much of your work/life in one place, at least make sure you get a proper monitor.

I found this image at the top when searching, “is it OK to sit on the ottoman of an Eames chair?” – the answer was captioned, “it is, if you’re Bill Gates”

Moore’s law

The oft-mis-quoted effect (that stuff gets faster/cheaper/bigger all the time) of Moore’s law could be applied to the growth in laptop usage; there’s more to be gained from miniaturization when you’re carrying a machine around, as well as advances in battery and display technology.

Desktops have tended to be left behind; there’s no built-in screen (unless they’re an all-in-1), they don’t run on batteries and they often sit out of sight, with the user interacting through a separate mouse, keyboard and looking at a desktop monitor. Old PCs were boring to look at, sometimes quite noisy and clearly fixed in position.

Now, many new home desktops are sold as gaming PCs with high end graphics and are often adorned with elaborate cooling, colourful lights and the like.

Acer Predator Orion 5000 (2024) review

The rise of the Mini

Around 20 years ago, capable desktop PCs started to shrink in size – it wasn’t uncommon to see demos being run from a “Shuttle Box”, which had way more storage and CPU horsepower than could be gotten from a laptop of the time, so it was possible to run servers in VMs on Virtual PC or similar.

Mac Mini and other small-form devices followed, but were often relegated to secondary use.

Julian Datta and Brett Johnson, posing in 2007 with a Shuttle which worked so hard it was literally smokin’

Desktops for today

If you’re running a laptop from a home office and sit at a desk 90% of your day, it’s worth looking at getting a modern, small form desktop. They’re quiet, can be much neater than a laptop with loads of cables or a docking station, and can be surprisingly cheap.

An Dell Inspiron with Intel i5 10-core CPU, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD can cost £650 (eg Dell Inspiron Desktop with the Latest Intel Processors). If you’re using an existing screen setup from an older laptop, you might need to buy a webcam too. A broadly comparable laptop might cost £100 or more extra, though it might last a good bit less time than a well-spec’ed desktop.

Desktops are generally more self-upgradeable and repairable than laptops, though that tends to change when you get into highly miniaturized machines. Framework, who build laptops that are sold as being fixable rather than disposable, recently unveiled their first desktop too…

Framework | Configure Framework Desktop DIY Edition (AMD Ryzen™ AI Max

#65: Enshittifcation 2025 pt 1 – progressing well

Posted on March 5, 2025 by ewand

The “word of the year” for 2023 was “Enshittification” – as defined by author Cory Doctorow:

“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”.

Similar concepts have been written about previously.

An Australian dictionary summarized it nicely in 2024 as “The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”

There are numerous variants of enshittification which we’ve all observed, usually concerned with improving revenue streams for the service provider at the expense of the quality of the service or organizations failing in some way.

· Changing the business model of the service because the original premise isn’t sustainable

· Killing products or removing features which cost too much to provide

· Failure to adapt with technology, stifling innovation, leading to stagnation and irrelevance

· Decline of a service or community due to poor leadership, user behaviour or rise of another

· Trapping customers, making it inordinately difficult to cancel or migrate from the service

Sometimes these moves are long planned – capture the market by operating at a loss then pay back your investors later by reaping the rewards of early market advantage, potentially even turning the screws on your customers (see Amazon, Netflix). Companies might be overaggressive competitors, looking to quash alternatives (Amazon, Microsoft), and it’s just a fact of life that some things don’t work and walking away from them angers or disappoints customers who used them (see Google, Microsoft, many others).

2025 In

This year is barely 20% over but we’ve already seen numerous changes to popular online services. Netflix is cranking up subscription pricing again (among others); Microsoft has added Copilot features to Personal and Family plans, jacking the cost up significantly to pay for it. Spotify has been teasing a lossless service for years, but might get around to launching it this summer. Hands up who thinks it will be an extra cost over the standard tier?

Even if a service provider puts out notice that they’re going to make some degrading change (or if, as WindowsForum.com does about all the upcoming Microsoft cuts, others collect the news and report it), it can still feel like a shock when you notice it’s not there any more. Microsoft calls it “deprecation”.

As mentioned in ToW #62, there are lots of occasions where a feature changes very much for the worse (from a user’s perspective) but there’s nothing much you can do about it other than seek an alternative.

Search caching

One relatively quiet change that happened in both Google and Bing during 2024 was the removal of cached pages in search results. This was a handy way to find a web page which, for whatever reason, wasn’t online any more … though could be used to find out how a page looked before some recent change. “Link Rot” means that lots of pages link to sites that have disappeared.

Both Google and Bing used to have cached copies of pages that could be viewed by clicking an icon next to the item in search results.

A screenshot of a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Google discontinued it without notice in February 2024, so people who noticed would turn to Bing, Yahoo or Baidu as they all still offered the cached feature. The reasons for removal? “It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.”

Bing followed suit in December, saying, “This week, we’ve removed cache links from Bing search results. As the internet has evolved for better reliability, and many pages aren’t optimized for cache viewing.”

Both reasons smack of “we’re doing this because it makes your life simpler and the feature wasn’t needed any more anyway”, but in reality there will be cost savings and potentially legislative reasons too. Why offer the service if you can’t monetize it? What’s next?

Google has since wired in a link to the Internet Archive – a free, useful resource though sometimes a bit slow and not always complete – if you click the “:” to the side of a search result, then click through to “More about this page ->”.

A screenshot of a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Turn to specific addins

One of the use cases for looking at cached results is to see how something was previously described before it was updated; or maybe to see how much something was being advertised for, previously? Have you ever seen a product marked as “SOLD” and wondered what it had priced at before?

It may be worth looking at the various extensions / app stores to see if there’s an enterprise developer who’s built something that might help. One such is the excellent AT Price Tracker, for the UK Autotrader website.

A screenshot of a car

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Who’d want to be trying to sell luxury 3-ton EV-SUVs at the moment?

AT Price Tracker will show a summary of what the same advert has been listed at previously; traders could remove it entirely and re-post to fox the logic of the app, but it’s presumably under the radar enough for most not to even notice it.

Unless Autotrader decides to get some enshittification in and block whatever access the addin has.

Month: March 2025

#69: Thinking Deeply

Copilot’s Getting Deeper

Wannabe Record Breakers

#68: It’s all about the prompt

Prompting Today

Further reading

#67: Are you sitting comfortably?

The Desk-jockey

How to sit at your desk

#66: A computer on every desk?

Moore’s law

The rise of the Mini

Desktops for today

Further reading

#65: Enshittifcation 2025 pt 1 – progressing well

2025 In

Search caching

Turn to specific addins