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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

#431

Post by type0 »

renegade-otter wrote: post #61
dobong wrote: 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.

Microsoft once pushed an update that started uploading my data to OneDrive. I had no idea until I was kindly informed that my cloud storage was out of space. At this point I would ALWAYS assume that anything I do on a Windows system is not completely private, and the only true way to make a PC secure from Microsoft is to air-gap it. Also, this is completely ridiculous.

I have some relatives that assured me that they won't upload some embarrassingly drunken pictures of me to the cloud. Guess what they didn't, but One Drive was happy to share those anyway. Wouldn't even surprise me if Windows posted it to Linkedin with automatic face detection to help me find "new work places". And we can we be sure that agentic AI will solve those problems for me

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

#432

Post by mapontosevenths »

hulitu wrote: post #206
mapontosevenths wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware that MS already sells an operating system that can install patches without rebooting? Are you also aware that Linux can do the same? Why can't a supposedly mature 40 year old operating system do the same? Do you have any concept of the number of man-hours it would save globally? The amount of lost work? The impact on patching compliance and security? My guess is they don't actually believe they have any…

> Are you aware that MS already sells an operating system that can install patches without rebooting? No. Which OS is that ? Even to update Office they throw an annoying popup and then another one to start the update and a dark pattern (close button accesible with a hidden scrollbar and no window controls) one to tell you it is finished.

Server 2025. They upsell it as a subscription because they can. Before that it was also available in Azure.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/blog/2025/04/...

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

#433

Post by phito »

pjmlp wrote: post #241
torginus wrote: post #204

Earlier 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.

But who is letting interns with no experience take architectural and technological decisions for a core feature such as the start menu? These are the people that should be blamed.

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

#434

Post by mapontosevenths »

testartr wrote: post #142
mapontosevenths wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware that MS already sells an operating system that can install patches without rebooting? Are you also aware that Linux can do the same? Why can't a supposedly mature 40 year old operating system do the same? Do you have any concept of the number of man-hours it would save globally? The amount of lost work? The impact on patching compliance and security? My guess is they don't actually believe they have any…

every week when I login into my Ubuntu with unattended updates enabled I see this: "system restart required". the hot patch feature you mentioned is paid

It is also paid for windows. It shouldn't be.

Off topic, but I'm pretty sure that Ubuntu's livepatching is just kpatch under the hood,

https://ubuntu.com/blog/an-overview-of-live-kernel-patching

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

#435

Post by kevincox »

torginus wrote: post #278

Moral 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 rep…

The optimistic view would be that the people who wrote the agents just weren't familiar with accessibility technologies so they made it work how they are used to working.

But the more likely reason is that they realized that accessibility is usually poorly done and unreliable. Using vision and mouse lands then in the "happy path" of basically every website and avoids accessibility gaps and bugs.

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

#436

Post by mapontosevenths »

BikiniPrince wrote: post #178
testartr wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

every week when I login into my Ubuntu with unattended updates enabled I see this: "system restart required". the hot patch feature you mentioned is paid

Not to derail but there are issues with kernel patching. If it does work you start building a very large matrix of various levels of hot patches and then sometimes it just doesn’t.

If my company was worth a trillion dollars and an entire multi-billion dollar industry (cybersecurity) had grown because of my security inadequacies I would figure it out.

In fact, they already figured out hotpatching and will sell it to you for server 2025.

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

#437

Post by neya »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #127

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…

> Microsoft has gone full-blown evil corporation again

You lost me here. They ALWAYS have been evil and disrespectful of their customers. It's not just paid products, even their so called "open source" products like VSCODE and Github Desktop randomly add helpers to run in the background constantly (even on Mac) under the label Telemetry. They paid good money for OpenAI, they want to make full use of it. RIP to all their customers who have to use their Office 360 suite. They will probably pull off an Adobe at some point :(

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

#439

Post by GrinningFool »

logicprog wrote: post #284
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OpenAI enabled its users to have a sext conversation. Considering that this is only with verified adults, how is this "evil"? I find it more evil to treat full grown adult users as kids and heavily censor their use of LLMs. (Not to detract from the rest of your post, with which I agree).

Yeah the disapproval/disgust I'm seeing everywhere, from pretty much every side that I keep my eye on, about OpenAI enabling erotica generation with ChatGPT is so frustrating, because it seems like just Puritanism and censorship, and desiring to treat adults like children as you say.

The issues that these pseudo-relationships can cause have barely begun to be discussed, nevermind studied and understood.

We know that they exist, and not only for people with known mental health issues. And that's all we know. But the industry will happily brush that aside in order to drive up those sweet MAU and MRR numbers. One of those, "I'm willing to sacrifice [a percentage of the population] for market share and profit" situations.

Edits: grammar

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

#440

Post by Neil44 »

bondarchuk wrote: post #340
Neil44 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason I use Notepad is that it opens instantly. A fancy think with loads of features that's slow to open should be a new product.

That was WordPad, right? Except it also loaded instantly, probably.

Wordpad was good for some stuff, I forget what, iirc it loaded in 0.1 seconds vs 0.01 for notepad.exe
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