The only reason Microsoft can push this as a ‘service’ now is that 90% of users do not care about, let alone understand any of the technology they use. Doctors, lawyers, CEOs, politicians, even most engineers, have no fucking clue what an operating system is, what “AI” is or why it would be a bad idea to feed 100% of your activity into a black box controlled by a megacorp. And good luck trying to explain to them why something like this might be bad, you need to lay out so much groundwork that by the time you get to training data privacy concerns they have already scrolled though 500 shitposts on TikTok.
It continues to blow me away that these projects get implemented as the only people who can do the work must also understand why it is a bad idea.
Someone yesterday posted the spec requirements for this service and it doesn’t appear to be meant for everyday users. It requires massive storage space on a fast SSD and also an NPU (Nueral Processing Unit).
Right, it needs the NPU because the data is stored and processed locally. Guess what, your computer/OS already knows everything you do.
Yet another nothing-burger for the internet to rage about.
I don’t use Windows for other reasons, but every useful application I use on a daily basis has some sort of history. Browsers remember pages I’ve visited, my editor has undo levels, terminal has a searchable scrollback buffer, my shell can recall pretty much every command I’ve ever run.
And yet none of them work together. I’ve been thinking about Recall though, and I think the only use case I would have would be to have it summarize my daily activities on a work machine. Quite often I join morning standups, or a standup after a long weekend, and I’m like “wtf did I do yesterday?”. I’d love to have an AI remind me I spent 3 hours on Teams dealing with a co-worker’s issue, or how long I spent researching something in order to reply to an e-mail.
Or when you notice you have a follow-up meeting on your calendar and you’ve completely forgotten what the action items you were supposed to handle from the meeting 2 weeks ago.
Basically there’s a ton of QOL activities computers could be doing that require some sort of artificial intelligence to index and retrieve in order to be useful. That involves allowing some sort of local AI access to that data, but as long as the crowd of smooth brained luddites keeps whining that goal is getting further away…
It’s a little bit more than “your os knows everything you do”.
Copilot for Windows isn’t the same thing as Copilot for 365, although it’s similar, and the system requirements only apply if you tell it to process locally. My understanding of the docs is Copilot is cloud based by default.
The issue isn’t smooth brained luddites, it’s smooth brained casuals giving condom over their personal information to a corporation that has a fiduciary responsibility to profit and grow.
I think this may either make me stay on 10 or actively switch over to something free and open source. This is wild, I can’t believe people would want this type of “feature”. Yeah I can see it being helpful but it is not worth the privacy concerns.
Whats the end of life strategy to force users off of 10? I have it on one machine just for SteamVR (I can’t get most games to run well under Linux), and I would like to keep it going as long as possible.
Yeah but by “connected” I’d assume that at least means with a public IP. Running a stock Debian 5 or 6 system with SSH vulnerabilities could result in the same thing.
That isn’t too say that you SHOULD run an old winXP system, but absent allowing a way in or out going somewhere bad the still needs to be a way for the malware to initially interact with the machine
From my understanding, its only that bad with windows XP without any service packs, with firewall disabled, and without using any sorta of router that would also have security measures built in. I don’t think its even reproducible on XP SP1, much less 7 or 10.
Of course I’d be surprised if there weren’t people who stockpiled vulnerabilities in the leadup to the discontinuation of windows 10 security updates, so seems like a good idea to update if it has an internet connection.
Hopefully better VR support on Linux becomes a thing in the near-future. From my understanding, non-VR games are generally pretty good nowadays (bar a few games with extremely invasive anti-cheat malware that you probably shouldn’t be running anyways), but VR is still lagging behind.
Will that be an option? We found out this week that “deleting” photos from your iPhone only makes them inaccessible to YOU, they live forever on Apple’s servers. Why would MS operate any differently?
You can literally kill off anything in windows, albeit with some effort in certain cases. Right down to their telemetry services everyone hates.
Beyond that though, such a system would be quite a lot of load on the hardware running it. In fact, many low end hardware combinations that support 11 likely won’t be able to support such a feature. Not including an off button would be silly. In fact, not making it opt in, similar to gaming clip systems, would be a terrible idea.
Comparing it to a locked down OS with a cloud service tie in I’d like comparing oranges to cars. All signs point to this feature being fully local. What are they going to do, hide gigabytes of video from you just to waste space?
You can literally kill off anything in windows, albeit with some effort in certain cases. Right down to their telemetry services everyone hates.
For now. The only reason Microsoft doesn’t prevent you from removing or disabling components of Windows is that it is still an extreme edge case. Only a very small fraction of users actually take part in that kind of activity, if it were to become more popular Microsoft will start baking it in harder.
Comparing it to a locked down OS with a cloud service tie in I’d like comparing oranges to cars.
Windows is already headed down the road of locked down cloud dependency, and minimum specs are a user problem. Remember the thing with TPMs and W11?
What are they going to do, hide gigabytes of video from you just to waste space?
Have you looked at how much space Windows already takes up on your disk?
Decades of history exists in M$ not stopping users from modifying their systems however the hell they want. Your argument against that is “they might eventually.”
How exactly is TPM requirement at all related to cloud anything? They absolutely aren’t moving to cloud dependency, the closest anyone has heard on that is them moving certain enterprise options to subscription, and rumors from unreliable sources. Again, your argument boils down to “they might eventually.”
And what does their current install disk space have to do with anything? 20 gigs for an install is leaps and bounds different than an extra 50+ gigs being used out of nowhere.
Fair, but that’ll usually be a “fuck no” on their part, not a forced yes.
That said, if your enterprise policies are going to enforce this, they already have something worse enforced as well such as screenshots being uploaded to a centralized database every x minutes. (I’ve personally experienced this.)
obvious privacy concerns aside, who the hell actually needs this?
If something I do is important enough to remember later, I do save it (bookmark, screenshot, screencast, whatever). This doesn’t need to be automated, esp. since it seems to require 25-50 GB of diskspace to do anyway.
For users, this is a solution seeking for a problem. For megacorpo this is just more data harvesting, even if it’s “only local” for now. Hard pass, nopety-nope-nope, also arch btw and so forth.
As someone willing to switch to Linux now that I’d be forced into using Windows 11, shut up. Linux is, unfortunately, not ever perfect. Windows has become functional enough for the average user, Steam OS has a corporation behind it and still requires command line and other hacks to function.
Unfortunately, we’re fucked unless we start taking more drastic actions against big tech. The only way this will be fixed is public demonstration demanding that OSes and other critical IT software be open source, whether that demonstration is peaceful… or not so peaceful.
I think you’ve misunderstood; I was laughing at them claiming Arch is less functional than Windows. It was stated so factually, when in actuality it’s nothing more than an opinion (and a debatable one).
With that said, my partner has been using a Steam Deck for a little over a year now, to date they haven’t needed to use the console once(or “hack” anything). You’re being disingenuous or doing it wrong.
Good luck with your peaceful / not peaceful demonstration and let me know how it goes; the image of a small group of people with placards protesting against “OSes and other critical IT software” gave me a good giggle.
You misunderstood. I’m a power user… on Windows. I don’t have a choice but to switch to a Linux distro now, but I have found 3 different issues requiring use of the command line to fix over the course of trying to shift to linux over the past 6 months. I understand a command line, what I don’t know is the lingo. Without experience in that lingo, I literally cannot properly figure out many features I could access in windows purely using mouse and keyboard shortcuts, even if it meant navigating an extensive menu system.
Now imagine someone who uses windows because they have dyslexia trying to use the command line. Or how about VR? If I’m understanding discussion from another site I frequent, Wayland or some other critical code for VR is not able to be handled by Linux and even if you run a windows install on the side it’s now going to be windows-fucking-11 bullshit until someone gets VR working on linux, and I do not have the coding knowledge to fix that myself because I don’t have 30 fucking years to become an expert in that shit. I’m not saying windows is good or that linux is bad, I’m saying this whole situation makes me want to fucking burn Redmond to the ground becausae it literally is holding my LIFE hostage. I live on the internet, I don’t interact with “reality” because I’m fucking sick of how things have unfolded over the past ~15 years (2008+) and if you force me to do so, I do in fact become physically violent. Don’t take away my circus or there won’t be anyone left to worship big brother, I’ll fucking kill you all.
I didnt try it once, I did Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, PopOS, and prob Fedora. Every time a drive wouldn’t work, dependencies conflicted, programs had less features, so on.
Intel Management Engine was on the local machine too, and oopsie hackers could gain access by sending a null password response and have full access to the machine hardware
Presumable most software is compressible. The more services you have, the higher the risk, but that is not unique to any particular feature in windows.
Just saying, even a security device addition like IME was hacked, so user based stored snapshots of your screen and activities is going to get breached. Even microsoft leaked all their Internal teams data. security attack vectors increase with more services so this one is a disaster waiting to happen
I also hate every part of this and will turn it off as soon as it shows up.
But in terms of who actually wants this. If an AI assistant were to exist, and if it was actually going to be useful to someone, it would need to know just about everything in your life. At least in theory… In order for an assistant to be useful you would want to be able to ask it “what was Italian restaurant I was thinking of trying” and you would want a response.
I’m not sure this privacy nightmare of an implementation is the correct path to that, but that’s roughly what I suspect the desired outcome is.
For my work PC I feel like this could be really handy honestly. If it actually worked. Which AI never reliably does (nor Microsoft for that matter). AI feels like a pyramid scheme to me at this point, I mean this is bad and I get that, I’m just being honest. But I’ve never been able to get it to do something I actually wanted to that wasn’t more than a simple task.
But then all this said, any desire is immediately cancelled when I think about stuff like my work could probably use this to spy on me, and I’m pretty sure this means somebody could spy on my work, so I’m not so sure they’d be super for this tech either.
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