I love/hate that this is a common experience. Someone did this to me too, although this was sort of a work friend taking the piss.

I have straight up backhandedly implied people senior to me who get paid 5x more than I do are throwing any possible expertise they might have out of the window. To their face. My stance on these slop extruders is well known among my colleagues.

I’ve even told people who used them in front of me, in a gentle but unflinching way, that their willingness to use them uncritically is a red flag for me and that comparing my genuine work to general machine output is something I can’t simply decide not to take as an insult. Including people who are supposed to review my work. As a professional I have to do something that exceeds the first page of Google in specificity. I do the long yards. Why is that suddenly a problem? If our work was this simple why are we getting paid to do it?

Some of these people trust me enough that they’re getting queasy about the whole AI thing after initially giving in. Yeah it’s decent at summarizing mass emails from corporate. Summarizing mass emails from corporate is not our fucking job. At least two people were paid subscribers to OpenAI’s product and no longer pay for chatbots. Proselytizing against the death of critical thinking is not a lost cause.

I have to get the fuck out of corporate.

I love having a search box on my taskbar. I want it to search my PC for installed apps and files and nothing else. I certainly don't want to do a fucking Bing search for "Settings"

When I'm imagining some Win3.11-style UI, like in Star Wars: Rebellion game, I feel that a search box in the taskbar would be fine. The results should come up in a new normal separate window, of course. Not in a poisoned version of star menu.

The issue is not with having a control element in the taskbar. The issue is with those control elements being very hard to use. The response times are bad. The elements are not clearly separated. The results coming up are hard to navigate. It's as if you were badly drugged and trying to find something in a heap of black sheets with luminous text in a dark room.

And also dynamic search on every change of that field is idiotic. They might do auto-completion if it's fast.

Yeah but you can do the same with Google as well (just can't be arsed to change the search settings on my work PC), it's the principle of the thing.