PCWorld reports that Microsoft's latest Windows 11 preview update brings AI text generation and improvement tools to Notepad, similar to chatbot functionality. The update also expands Markdown support for easier formatting and adds AI-generated coloring book pages plus a smarter Fill tool to Paint. These AI features remain optional and can be disabled in settings, requiring a Microsoft account for users who choose to enable them. Microsoft has released a preview update for Windows 11 Insiders that adds AI features and easier formatting options to Notepad. The otherwise stripped-down text editor has also been given a new welcome screen that describes the app as "the essential text editor, enhanced."

Though it's intentionally simple and there are some excellent alternatives, Microsoft's humble Notepad text editor has gained a massive following through sheer ubiquity. Today it finally gets a feature that even the best writers (and also I) can't live without: spell check. The feature is now live in the latest Windows 11 Insider build. According to Wikipedia, the Notepad program is actually older than Windows itself, going all the way back to the Multi-Tool Notepad program that was included in the MS-DOS update which introduced mouse support in 1983. Then, as now, it was a faster and less resource-intensive alternative to Microsoft Word -- and the fact that it was free with the operating system didn't hurt. It's since become a feature in every single release of Windows.

Thanks to their generative capabilities, large language models (LLMs) have become an invaluable tool for creative processes. These models have the capacity to produce hundreds and thousands of visual and textual outputs, offering abundant inspiration for creative endeavors. But are we harnessing their full potential? We argue that current interaction paradigms fall short, guiding users towards rapid convergence on a limited set of ideas, rather than empowering them to explore the vast latent design space in generative models. To address this limitation, we propose a framework that facilitates the structured generation of design space in which users can seamlessly explore, evaluate, and synthesize a multitude of responses. We demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of this framework through the design and development of an interactive system, Luminate, and a user study with 8 professional writers. Our work advances how we interact with LLMs for creative tasks, introducing a way to harness the creative potential of LLMs.

I've touted Windows' ability to type with just your voice for years, so I finally decided to put my money where my mouth is: I used Windows' Voice Access and Windows Dictation to "type" this entire story. It was easier than I thought… and, weirdly, harder. Windows 11 contains two methods to control a PC with your voice: Voice Access and Windows Dictation, whose original version debuted in Windows 10. Voice Access allows you to navigate within your PC using just your voice, while Windows Dictation allows you to dictate text into a document. While they were both designed for accessibility, they might--potentially?--improve

To get good output from ChatGPT or another LLM, you usually have to feed it several prompts. But what if you could just give your AI bot a set of fairly broad goals at the start of a session and then sit back while it generates its own set of tasks to fulfill those goals? That's the idea behind Auto-GPT, a new open-source tool that uses the OpenAI API (same LLM as ChatGPT) to prompt itself, based on your initial input. We've already seen a number of Twitter users talk about how they are using Auto-GPT for everything from creating marketing plans to analyzing market data for investments to preparing topics for a podcast. Based on our hands-on experience, we can't say that it always works well (we asked it to write a Windows 11 how-to and the result was awful), but it's early days and some tasks may work better than others.

ChatGPT and its AI powers could help writers and office workers improve their writing quality and decrease the time spent on tasks, cutting out busy work in favor of better, more productive work. However, the MIT study that suggested these conclusions also warned that employers could use AI to increase layoffs, too. The paper, "Experimental Evidence on the Productivity Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence" by Shakked Noy and Whitney Zhang of the economics department at MIT, is considered a working paper and has not been peer-reviewed. Still, the conclusions it found about ChatGPT's AI chatbot technology are both fascinating--and troubling, especially when the study factored in how it affects workers. The two doctoral students split 444 college-educated professionals into two groups, and assigned them to write press releases, email, short reports, and analysis plans--a normal workday for many people.

On the last day of February, NYU professor Gary Marcus published an essay entitled "The threat of automated misinformation is only getting worse." He warned about the easiness with which you can create misinformation backed by fake references using Bing "with the right invocations." Shawn Oakley, dubbed by Marcus as a "jailbreaking expert" said that "standard techniques" suffice to make it work, providing evidence that the threat of automatic AI-generated misinformation at scale is increasing. Marcus shared his findings on Twitter and FoundersFund's Mike Solana responded: My interpretation of Solana's sarcastic tweets is that claiming that an AI model is a dangerous tool for misinformation (or, more generally, harm of some kind) isn't a good argument if you've consciously broken its filters--he implies the problem isn't the tool's nature but your misuse, and thus you're to blame and not the company that created the tool. His "analogy" between Bing Chat and a text editor misses the point (i.e., language models can generate human-sounding misinformation at scale--you can't do that with Microsoft Word but can with Microsoft Bing) but, even if Marcus is right, there's some truth in Solana's implied stance.

So, I am a writer / a technical writer to be precise and if you guys have read my articles ever before you might now I love to make crazy AIs just for fun. So, there is this website called…

Vim is a widely used, open-source Unix text editor. Learning to use Vim commands is a matter of practice and experience. That is why it is handy to have a helpful reference sheet while mastering them. In this tutorial, you will find the most important Vim commands as well as a downloadable cheat sheet. You can move the cursor within a file by single characters, words, tokens, or lines.

Like many nerds before me, I spent a goodly portion of my life searching for the perfect computing system. I wanted a single tool that would let me write prose or programs, that could search every email, tweet, or document in a few keystrokes, and that would work across all my devices. Augment, to achieve the enlightenment of a properly orchestrated personal computer. Where the software industry offered notifications, little clicks and dings, messages jumping up and down on my screen like a dog begging for a treat, I wanted calm textuality. The purpose of configuration is to make a thing work with some other thing--to make the to-do list work with the email client, say, or the calendar work with the other calendar.