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Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders

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Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders

#261
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other day I installed Windows 7 on a VM for fun.. it was not fun at all. I got weird wave of nostalgic sadness, like being teleported back in time, I felt/remembered how things were back in ~2010, the culture, my university life, how things were with an ex gf, ALL of it. The OS is engrained in my mind and it was gorgeous seeing those aero effects and hearing the startup sounds again. It is so simple and easy. It…

> and it won't change by itself for months That’s… not a good sell at all Promise me a decade and I’ll bite. (Joke’s on me, I’ll need to get out of this windows shithole asap)

If you want years, just choose Debian.

Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders

#262

Microsoft has gone full-blown evil corporation again. No customer validation on any of the AI cruft. No full OPT OUT. Office products are bastardized with copilot buttons everywhere. I've been a Windows user from day one and I now see a future without it. Satya had been a bright spot in Microsoft, but this blind lust for AI, especially in bed with Altman who is pure con artist, is unforgivable. Some of the investment…

> Satya had been a bright spot in Microsoft What? How? From a user's perspective, everything has gotten steadily worse under his reign. Solitaire is now a subscription service. I long for the halcyon days of Windows 8.

> Solitaire is now a subscription service

That is a joke, right? Right??

Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders

#263
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shown they don't respect the user when they force shutdown for system updates Are you familiar with the prior state of things that explicitly motivated this change?

i dont want a device to tell me when i need to restart it, thats my decission.

Same on boot. Usually when I boot a computer I am not ready to wait for it to install several updates, unasked.

Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because at some point it won't be opt in

Everything about modern Windows is coercive, or ends up being coercive. You can't even shut down your PC without it forcing you to update Windows. It lets you skip for a while, then after some time, the only options are to Update and Reboot or Update and Shutdown. Totally disrespectful of who the actual owner of the computer is. You have to yank the power plug out to shut down your computer safely.

Run it in a VM and just roll the update back.

Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders

#265
post #41

I don't want this feature. I have LaTeX documents on my computer containing my personal thoughts. Some of them I want to keep to myself. And some of them contain my own ideas that I find embarrassing. I don't want to hand those documents over to Microsoft servers, nor do I want them used for AI training. I want them to know that these deeply personal thoughts are mine.

Then don't use Microsoft but anything else that respects your privacy.

Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders

#266

Microsoft has gone full-blown evil corporation again. No customer validation on any of the AI cruft. No full OPT OUT. Office products are bastardized with copilot buttons everywhere. I've been a Windows user from day one and I now see a future without it. Satya had been a bright spot in Microsoft, but this blind lust for AI, especially in bed with Altman who is pure con artist, is unforgivable. Some of the investment…

I don't know if it's evil. It's more like desperate and stupid. They are rapidly losing their gaming dominance thanks to Valve. They've been losing the console wars. There doesn't seem to be a single person using Windows 11 that isn't being forced to in one way or another. Now they are forcing online accounts and injecting AI where it doesn't belong. How they still have willing customers is beyond me.

Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders

#267
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the critics always complain about what bad thing Microsoft will do in the future, rarely about what they are actually doing secureboot was supposedly an evil conspiracy to block running linux on computers. secureboot is everywhere now, and Linux still runs on personal computers

Except that one line of Microsoft PCs that only run Windows because secureboot enabled Microsoft to make it so.

yeah, but the argument was that all PCs built by anyone will be blocked from running Linux.

Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders

#268

Imagine a new version of Windows being released called "Windows Optimal" In addition to Home, Professional and Pro you get to buy Optimal. The catch is that it is priced 4x the home version. You wonder why? Optimal is exactly what you think it is. A ground up 0 bloatware, 0 telemetry, 100% easily tweakable privacy and performance settings from a single screen with 0 AI features, 0 Edge and 0 games. Imagine getting yo…

You are describing Windows 11 LTSC which is a product that exists because Microsoft knows people want to turn this crap off. It is of course only available in volume licensing to keep it away from normal users. Only businesses get to control their computers.

You can find some licenses sold online; it costs about 3x the price of Home. But I am not sure if it's legal; I have already bought some and then realized it's just keygenerated.

Normal, reputable websites never sell single LTSC licenses. So go figure

Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders

#269

This is why I format any Windows 11 pre-installed machine and install Windows 10 on it (Windows 10 is much leaner and has less bloatware than Windows 11).

And still is full of telemetry, background tasks that waste resources, forced updates and so many many anti patterns to get you to click the upgrade or online something.

Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders

#270
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I opened my outlook android app today to find they'd replaced the archive button in the bottom toolbar with a "Summary by Copilot" one. It wasn't enough that the only colourful button is the Copilot one on the right. Thankfully they still let you reorder the buttons, so I moved archive back and hid that unwanted summary in the overflow menu.

Once your coworkers start using copilot to turn what should be a single sentence email into six paragraphs, you'll need that to summarise it into a sentence. Progress!

Yeah, but it will be very polite and full of corpospeak, which means that it is very insightful.
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