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302 points mastermaq | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.435s | source
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hbn ◴[] No.44370715[source]
My work gives us Copilot access since We're a Microsoft Shop™

It's too bad Copilot is by far the dumbest competitor in the space

My favorite interaction so far was when I prompted it with:

    ffmpeg command to convert movie.mov into a reasonably sized mp4
Sure, it's not the most direction instructions, but I tend to give it just enough to get the job done, assuming the LLM knows what its purpose is as an LLM, and it always works with the other chatbots.

Copilot's response:

    I implemented and executed the Python code above to convert movie.mov to a reasonably sized movie.mp4 using ffmpeg.
    
    However, the Python code failed since it was not able to find and access movie.mov file.
    Do you want me to try again or is there anything else that I can help you with?
Note that I didn't cut anything out. It didn't actually provide me any "Python code above"
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hu3 ◴[] No.44371022[source]
What model? It got right first try here with your exact prompt using the free GPT-4.1 model.

https://i.imgur.com/toLzwCk.png

ffmpeg -i movie.mov -c:v libx264 -preset medium -crf 23 -c:a aac -b:a 128k movie.mp4

BUT, I have this in my copilot-instructions.md file:

    # Always follow these steps when responding to any request
    1. Please do a round of thinking in <thinking></thinking> tags
    2. Then a round of self-critique in <critique></critique> tags
    3. Then a final round of <thinking>, before responding.
    4. If you need more information, ask for it.
replies(1): >>44371054 #
easton ◴[] No.44371054[source]
That's GitHub Copilot, not "microsoft copilot", the bot built into the Microsoft 365 landing site. it doesn't give you model options, for example.
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clvx ◴[] No.44371112[source]
Whoever decided to use the same brand for different experiences should be demoted at minimum. What a way to destroy trust.
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wodenokoto ◴[] No.44373490[source]
It’s because in Microsoft terminology a “copilot” is a chatbot or LLM agent.

So you get your copilot for m365 subscription and add copilot studio which you use to create co pilots

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tsimionescu ◴[] No.44373936[source]
This almost makes sense, but it is certainly not how Microsoft marketing did things. "Microsoft 365 Copilot app" is a suite of productivity apps, most well known for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It was formerly known as "Office". Microsoft 365 Copilot app includes Copilot as one of the apps.

This is all information taken from office.com, not some joke or exaggeration...

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TeMPOraL ◴[] No.44375368[source]
Can confirm - I'm looking at my Android phone now; the "Office Hub" app I knew as "Office" or "Microsoft 365" has, at some point, renamed itself to "M365 Copilot". To make things more obvious and less confusing, it's sitting right next to an app named "Copilot", which is their ChatGPT interface, and as far as I can tell, doesn't do anything copiloty with the Office suite.

Looking at the two side by side in an app manager, I see:

- Copilot - com.microsoft.copilot

- M365 Copilot - com.microsoft.office.officehubrow

And they both have identical icon, except the latter has a tiny black rectangle with tiny white "M365" label tucked in the corner.

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1. jerf ◴[] No.44377199[source]
It's amazing to me how too much marketing education and/or experience seems to rot the brain. You learn on like day 4 of Marketing 101 that your brands should be distinct and recognizable, and hopefully some solid tips on how to do that. Cool. Solid. Seems obvious but there's plenty of things that seem obvious in hindsight that education can help you with.

Somewhere between that and a master's degree and 10 years at a prestigious marketing firm, though, apparently there's some lessons about how you should smear all your brands all over each other in some bid to, I presume, transfer any good will one may have had to all of them, but it seems to me that they could stand to send those people back to MKT101 again, because the principle of labeling what your product actually is seems to elude them after Too Much Education.

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2. TeMPOraL ◴[] No.44384938[source]
Think is, it's the latter lessons that are correct, because the ultimate arbiter of which marketing practices work or not is the market itself.

If anything, Marketing 101 works as a scaffolding but you learn the real lessons later on (basically like with every other vocational training wrapped in a degree, including especially computer science) - but also, and perhaps more importantly, it serves as a fig leaf. You can point to that and say, it's a Science and an Art and is Principled and done well It Is For The Good Of All Mankind, and keep the veneer of legitimacy over what's in practice a more systematized way of bringing harm to your fellow humans.

Also specifically wrt. brands - brands as quality signals mostly died out a decade or more ago; mixing them up is just a way to get their decaying corpses to trick more people for a little longer.