New Windows AI feature records everything you’ve done on your PC : techtakes

[-] Architeuthis@awful.systems 19 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

So LLM-based AI is apparently such a dead end as far as non-spam and non-party trick use cases are concerned that they are straight up rolling out anti-features that nobody asked or wanted just to convince shareholders that ground breaking stuff is still going on, and somewhat justify the ocean of money they are diverting that way.

At least it's only supposed to work on PCs that incorporate so-called neural processor units, which if I understand correctly is going to be its own thing under a Windows PC branding.

edit: Yud must love that instead of his very smart and very implementable idea of the government enforcing strict regulations on who gets to own GPUs and bombing non-compliants we seem to instead be trending towards having special deep learning facilitating hardware integrated in every new device, or whatever NPUs actually are, starting with iPhones and so-called Windows PCs.

edit edit: the branding appears to be "Copilot+ PCs" not windows pcs.

[-] gnomicutterance@awful.systems 11 points 6 months ago

Since this isn’t really even related to GenAI at all, in our house the theory is:

MS has been trying and failing to push ARM in PCs for a while
Now they take one with an NPU and rebrand it as Copilot+™️®️ PCs
They have market research that says initial sales are going to be soft and they panic because early soft sales create a bad vibe
So, without doing any of the usual build up of exciting the tech press, without hyping trade show buzz, they rush an unfinished, insecure, unwanted product to market in the hope it will be the killer app at last for high-battery life ARM on Windows.
They use lot of AI hype language to capitalize off the hype cycle, even though besides the OCR it seems to be pretty limited in its relationship to anything machine learning at all.

[-] Oggie@woof.group 7 points 6 months ago

@gnomicutterance
I kind of wonder if part of this isn't literally 'so we can siphon up all the things you type for more training data', and literally everything else is just to walk around that.

So just a straight leverage to get everything everyone types!

It's sure an awful way to do it...

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

This might be the case, but at least the first I heard about the Copilot+ launch was that it was finally a "Macbook Air" killer - which I suspect would already be a strong selling point (at least if MSFT solved the backwards compatibility issue). Yet right after they announced the Recall stuff, and at least from what I have read it was received very negatively. So now they have the story that if you want the latest fast, efficient windows machine, you need to allow it to spy on your screen. Not the best marketing imo.

[-] cstross@wandering.shop 9 points 6 months ago

@gerikson Heh. Am waiting for the next Apple ads—"It's a bit like Microsoft's ARM laptops, only better and there's no spyware."

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 6 months ago

I've seen that take somewhere too, and personally I don't think it holds water. I'm a mac/*nix user and the hardware is only part of that. not fucking using windows is a hell of a massive part of my choices. and there's basically nothing that they can do there to make a real dent

there's definitely a lot of people out there that have web-heavy/-only workflows and on paper that group could move over, but in reality fucking windows is still fucking windows and the related problems that have plagued it[0] for years won't just magically evaporate because of switching to a new arch

nevermind all the other crazy shit they've been pushing lately

[0] - think stuff like cruft buildup, spy-/track-/push-ware, etc etc

[-] gnomicutterance@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago

Yeah, I’m a windows user and agree with you completely. People choose operating system, not battery life.

I would love if they solved the problems that made windows on ARM not ready for prime time, even though I’m enough of a power user it will probably never be for me. But this is not the way.

Part of this is still trying to make a combination full featured windows laptop that’s also a Chromebook equivalent that’s also a tablet that’s also a dessert topping, when those should be separate devices with different ecosystems. UWP Metro apps were tablet-first when they first launched, sucking on desktop. The tablet pushing in Windows 10 initially broke accessibility. 2-in-1 Surfaces are way too heavy to be good tablets, because they’re still full featured PCs.

I do not want to mix this duck sauce with that chocolate bunny.

[-] gnomicutterance@awful.systems 8 points 6 months ago

Yeah but they’ve been marketing Windows on ARM as a Macbook Air killer for a few years now. This is more of a rebrand of that effort.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 6 months ago

OK, I didn't know that (mslty because I don't follow PC news, it's aggressively boring). FWIW the only tech podcast I do follow (all mac people) did single out this release as "this time MSFT proabbly got it right" - but they're mostly interested in Apple getting some competition.

[-] Architeuthis@awful.systems 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

this isn’t really even related to GenAI at all

Besides the ocr there appears to be all sorts of image-to-text metadata recorded, the nadella demo had the journalist supposedly doing a search and getting results with terms that were neither typed at the time nor appearing in the stored screenshots.

Also, I thought they might be doing something image-to-text-to-image-again related (which - I read somewhere - was what bing copilot did when you asked it to edit an image) to save space, instead of storing eleventy billion multimonitor screenshots forever.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago

The NPU requirement has already been proven to be circumventable, as well as a number of other problems found: https://awful.systems/comment/3492449

[-] Architeuthis@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago

That you can jailbreak recall and run it on non compliant hardware seems to be the least concerning thing in that article, recommended reading.

[-] mii@awful.systems 17 points 6 months ago

There’s a MacOS app around that does pretty much the same thing called Rewind AI, but it’s a stupid subscription service as usual and for some inexplicable reason some people actually want this.

While half of the reactions were “this is a the top of apps I wouldn’t install on my machine ever”, the other half was celebrating it in the name of our lord and savior productivity, going as far as saying this is a nice way to remember passwords …

[-] Architeuthis@awful.systems 21 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Nightmare blunt rotation in the Rewind AI front page recommendations:

Recommended by Andreessen, Altman and Reddit founder

Also it appears to be different than Recall in that it's a third party app and not pushed as the default in every new OS installation.

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 14 points 6 months ago

I shouldn't be surprised at the quantity of Microsoft stans posting to excuse Recall, but holy shit

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 15 points 6 months ago

relatedly: msft turned semi-good for a couple of years (making tooling more accessible across platforms, actual foss work, etc), and then seems to have an internal about-turn on this, and seem intent on speedrunning being most-hated again. stiff competition too, that's why they're trying so hard

[-] ret@furry.engineer 14 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

@froztbyte @dgerard @patterfloof I think the reality is that Microsoft hasn’t changed at all. It always does what will make Microsoft the most money. It’s just that over the last couple of years that has happened to be “good” (or at least semi-good) for us in the developer space.

Now, an opportunity (“AI”) has presented itself to shit all over that and instead sell to people in a very different space. People who will enjoy the convenience of their computer becoming a panopticon and disregard or simply not know the consequences of that.

[-] gnomicutterance@awful.systems 13 points 6 months ago

They have had hands down the best accessibility in desktop markets for 20 years, no contest. Overwhelming market share for many assistive techs. Which is why I’m absolutely livid at them now. If they break Windows I have nowhere else to go. Garbage people making garbage choices.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 12 points 6 months ago

They have had hands down the best accessibility in desktop markets for 20 years, no contest

yeah I'm passingly familiar with some of it (and also with how it compares on other platforms, in part because of having to touch the sharp edges there occasionally), and I can entirely understand your position

and it's also not just the OS - it's everything else built on that that you use and depend on

I'm hoping this mania can end sooner rather than later, so we can get things everywhere back onto a path that isn't this fucking batshit

[-] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 5 points 6 months ago

If you really need Windows, then there is Windows 10/11 Internet of Things, Long Term Servicing Edition.

It's Windows, for enterprises, without any of the bloat they force upon consumers normally.

It doesn't even come with the Windows store, but that is trivial to reinstall, like only a single powershell command.

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago

Microsoft was never good, they just felt constrained. Those are different.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 5 points 6 months ago

A corporation can never be good, it can only be properly constrained.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 6 months ago

I used to argue with people that from all of the giants (the FAANG nonsense) MSFT was "the good guys" because they were doing god's work with FOSS. I still think .NET is an amazing technology and everyone working on it should be praised.

But then I got actually hired by MSFT and... you quickly realise this is just surface level shit. No one in management could give less of a fuck about open-source, or anything other than Growth™ for that matter. I speedran disillusionment and quit after little more than a year. In the end, it's just a big corpo doing big corpo shit. It has no values. It has no morals. It has no vision, other than that of a high $MSFT number.

If MSFT did anything good it's despite internal pressures and incentives, not thanks to them.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 12 points 6 months ago

It's not a HN thread about a controversial new MSFT feature without some complaining about how nerds running Android are discriminated against in the dating market:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40541675

[-] gnomicutterance@awful.systems 17 points 6 months ago

This green bubble/blue bubble thing is so exhausting. It’s like this is the first walled garden these whiny toddlers (and the DOJ) have ever encountered. Not using gmail for personal email hurts me both socially and professionally, & has probably kept me out of the running for jobs. Back when people used Facebook, there were social events I wasn’t invited to because I wasn’t on Facebook. None is this is new, and it predates computers. (Ask a teetotaler or sober person about their dating opportunities, why don’t you?)

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 3 points 6 months ago

Not using gmail for personal email hurts me both socially and professionally, & has probably kept me out of the running for jobs

Wait, I'm sorry, what? Can you elaborate on this?

[-] gnomicutterance@awful.systems 6 points 6 months ago

I’ve had interviewers send me google docs locked to a google account, sent to my personal email which they probably assume is a redirect to Gmail in the background. And then when I write back and say, hi, thanks, could you share this a way that I don’t need a google account, they get extremely skeptical. These days I have a stub Google account I keep around specifically for places that are going to force me to use Google, but even then I have to write back and say “could you provide access to this email address and not that one“, and again, the interviewers get weird and sometimes don’t write back.

[-] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 17 points 6 months ago

I think you are missing the first half the modern male reproductive lifecycle. What you are saying increasingly applies to 30's onward (when males are looking for long term family relationships) but for the 20 somethings many are looking for these shallow, vacuous women because they often can be convinced into meaningless sex. It's a pretty sad state but it appears to be this way now.

Wowsers. I don't think you're supposed to say this out loud.

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 12 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Yeah for the people not in the know this basic misogynistic red pill bullshit. Alpha fucks, beta bucks. (Which also has a secondary explanation (which also sucks)).

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