I’d pay good money to disable that feature and keep my pc as is. Or I’ll have to swap to Steam OS
Just do it really. Most people just say it, and will be back for the next feature to complain again
Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders
271–280 of 657 posts
Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders
#272I am leaving Windows now because of this, the Windows 11 push, and the cloud enforcement. I have been far too patient with Microsoft, I should have made the jump years ago. This is the last straw. The trend for the last many years has been disempowerment of the computer owner. It coincides with Satya Nadella being CEO, but that might not have anything to do with it. You get the same treatment from the rest of Big Tech.
Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders
#273> AI agents [...] work on your files in the background while you keep using your normal desktop
I heard you like merge conflicts, so we put an agent in your user agent so you can generate merge conflicts while resolving merge conflicts.
Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders
#274I think that's great. More people leaving Windows is a good thing!
Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree that the headline is clickbaity. It's true. The agents run in the background and have access to your personal data. I don't care how "auditable" an agent is, I don't want my personal information slurped up by AI and shipped out to microsoft's servers. Full stop. This is just another spying data exfiltration but with a hype con built into it. Just because I can see what it read and shipped off, doesn't mean…
This should be an installable application for those who want it, not part of the operating system. This is exactly why I'm switching every one of my computers over to Linux, and I'm going to recommend others do the same.
Do it and don't look back.
The ecosystem over here is much greener anyway.
Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders
#276This 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.
Yes, also Windows 10. You need to use way too much time to turn it off and limit it, as much as can be done. Every time you run an update, settings might have reverted, so you need to check for that.
Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders
#277I am leaving Windows now because of this, the Windows 11 push, and the cloud enforcement. I have been far too patient with Microsoft, I should have made the jump years ago. This is the last straw. The trend for the last many years has been disempowerment of the computer owner. It coincides with Satya Nadella being CEO, but that might not have anything to do with it. You get the same treatment from the rest of Big Tec…
Have you heard about our Lord and Saviour, Linus Torvalds?
Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders
#278Moral implications aside, It's funny to see that MS (and AI companies) sees the future of agentic AI as ChatGPT creating screenshots and clicking and scrolling around the UI.
There are tools like MS Active Accessibility and UI automation which are designed for helping impaired people use the computer, as well as very useful for testing.
UI automation in particular is designed for semantic understanding instead of representing the UI in the runtime control hierarchy, and can do things like query offscreen elements or check out whats in a combo box without having to open it.
Credit where it's due - Microsoft used to really invest heavily in making Windows accessible to the blind and impaired, I've had blind acquaintances praise them for being able to use the computer fairly well (my friends grandma was a math teacher, super smart, but sadly she went blind in old age, it's really hard to overstate how much being able to use the computer meant to her.)
Not sure how well it works nowadays, with most apps being not Windows-native.
I'd have recommended people to check out UISpy which was a neat little tool that allowed you to check out your apps in a semantic way, but turns out it was folded into Power Automate, which in turn was made a part of Office 365. I see Microsoft still working tirelessly to undo all the goodwill they have rightfully earned.
Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the funniest thing, considering it lacks 90% of the features included freeware text editors written in some student's spare time back in the 90s. It's basically a fancy textbox. Microsoft's own people can't use the toolkits they write, as evidenced by the React component in the start menu(!)
They can, the problem is that apparently they aren't able to hire people nowadays with Win32 development experience, so they get interns that have grown in US universities with macOS and Linux, which sundenly have a Win32 developer role. That is how you end up with web garbage in what was supposed to be native code, or .NET. I think this is also a reason why WinUI efforts went down the drain.
They laid off a lot of people with Win32 experience in the past couple of years. If that was really a problem they could just hire some of them back (or, I dunno, keep them in the first place).