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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

#531

Post by insane_dreamer »

kakacik wrote: post #525
GrinningFool wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

That's kind of patronizing position or maybe a conservative one (in US terms). There can be harm, there can be good, nobody can say at this moment for sure which is more. Do you feel the same about say alcohol and cigarettes? We allow those, heck we encourage those in some situations for adults yet they destroy whole societies (look at russia with alcohol, look at Indonesia for cigarettes if you haven't been there).…

We did finally come around to the point of restricting advertising and sale of cigarettes, and limiting where you could smoke, to where it is much less prevalent in today's generation than earlier generations.

The issue is it becoming ubiquitous in an effort to make money.

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

#532

Post by 59nadir »

masfoobar wrote: post #376

Glad I am off Windows (officially) I've been a Linux user since 2006-7 but still had a Windows PC around just incase I needed it. The odd games or in relation to work. Windows 11 was just sloooow. It would take 5-20 seconds to load some of my popular programs and I never understood why. I am open to accepting there could be other factors at play rather than claiming "It was Windows" but considering all the other fluf…

For what it's worth my experience with Windows 11 is that it's slower than Windows 10 for whatever reason, even though I'm doing exactly the same things in exactly the same ways, so it definitely echoes your assessment.

I personally think Windows has historically been the best OS for native development but I'm out. I've used Linux a ton before on/off since ~2003 but at this point it's looking more and more like there'll be no reason to ever install Windows again. I don't get who Windows 11 and all of these AI features is actually for but I know for a fact it's not for me.

Now I have to figure out how to actually get my Nvidia card to actually behave on Linux, or I'll just have to buy an AMD one again. Eventually I might actually start using the Steam Machine as a devbox; we'll see.

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

#533

Post by wolvesechoes »

kakacik wrote: post #502
wolvesechoes wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it comes down to FOSS/freeware stuff I am actually quite fond of Windows ecosystem. Foobar2k, Paint.NET, Notepad++, IrfanView, WizTree, Ditto, TotalCommander, NAPS2 etc. Linux has many options for any of those, but I always had a feeling that those options have less polish, or are less stable, or their UI is an afterthought etc. On Windows you have basically a single option for each application that most people go…

> Foobar2k, Notepad++, IrfanView, TotalCommander Without those, especially last one my productivity at my corporate work would be half at most. Editing a file in an archive within another archive directly, doing quick file comparisons of 2 files, syncing different dirs, fulltext recursive search... all with much better UI than Unix console counterparts (which I use too). And much more. Simply the best tools on the wh…

I forgot about 7zip as well.

There is something magical about those specialized, no nonsense tools using WINAPI, not chasing cross-platform, and maintained for decades, some of them since 90s. Snappiness, intuitiveness, stability, discoverability etc.

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

#534

Post by megous »

auggierose wrote: post #262
AlexandrB wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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??

Well, you can have a subscription for switching a relay in your car, so that current flows from the battery to some wire, so that your seat heats up.

It's a sign of the times...

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

#535

Post by npteljes »

tetrisgm wrote: post #530
npteljes wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LTSC is basically a trimmed-down version of Windows. Whatever is possible in Home, Pro, Enterprise etc, is possible in the LTSC as well. Most of the LTSC surprise comes from the lack of features. For example, I installed the "LTSC N" version back in the day, and that didn't even had codecs, so when I opened Reddit in Firefox, the videos didn't play. But even that was easily amended by just installing a specific updat…

Thanks! If you have any extra pointers I’ll definitely explore. Turns out all the Xbox UI stuff require the latest windows insider. If there’s an LTSC version that covers that, it’d be absolutely perfect for my use case!

https://www.reddit.com/r/WindowsLTSC/ for sure, massgrave.dev for activation (or vlmcsd, which I use, but now I'm reading that it's EOL). Unfortunately I cannot help with the Xbox stuff, but I'm sure there is help on the internet somewhere, people like to tinker with this system. I wish you luck!

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

#536

Post by whilenot-dev »

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…

I don't think any company actually sees some future there, at least not with current agentic AI as is. Agentic AI is just in this sweet legal gray area at the moment, where companies make use of their free pass to scrape all the necessary user data they'll ever need. That's my own interpretation on why it's shoved into every existing product out there, as fast as humanly possible, at least.

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

#537

Post by lostmsu »

larrybud wrote: post #488

Is ANYONE reading the article or going to the source prior to posting with outrage? Source: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/experimental-age... (the original article is not available at the moment due to the ongoing Cloudfare outage) What I see is that the AI agent is an optional, experimental off-by-default service that is configured to only have access to the folders you specifically choose. From the MS…

Funnily enough this is exactly how I ended up setting up CLI coding agents. E.g. made a separate user account, granted it RO or RW access to some of my projects, et viola

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

#538

Post by Scharkenberg »

bayindirh wrote: post #454
jpalawaga wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird. My windows PC updates like your Linux machine. How often do update vs your parents? Maybe they had some larger “half” releases pending (I.e. closer to a major macOS release, which also take time)

The machine is on standby all the time. So it updates whenever it wants. In this occasion the machine was turned off for a couple of months, but the updates were not the "half release" updates. The list was .NET runtime, intel graphics drivers, some dynamic update support and the like. I was watching the machine all the time. Funnily, dynamic updates support installation failed after all the kicking and screaming, an…

Upgrade that PC's OS drive to a NVMe. Seriously. We manage thousands of PCs at work and ever since we got laptop models with NVMe drives, updates are a breeze with 6 ± 3 minutes of total downtime.

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

#539

Post by bayindirh »

Scharkenberg wrote: post #538
bayindirh wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The machine is on standby all the time. So it updates whenever it wants. In this occasion the machine was turned off for a couple of months, but the updates were not the "half release" updates. The list was .NET runtime, intel graphics drivers, some dynamic update support and the like. I was watching the machine all the time. Funnily, dynamic updates support installation failed after all the kicking and screaming, an…

Upgrade that PC's OS drive to a NVMe. Seriously. We manage thousands of PCs at work and ever since we got laptop models with NVMe drives, updates are a breeze with 6 ± 3 minutes of total downtime.

Oh, OK. It's a PEBKAC case, then, my bad.

I'd rather teach my parents to use Linux instead. Updates will be a breeze with 3±2 minutes of total background work without any interruption and 30 seconds of occasional downtime.

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

#540

Post by p_ing »

chungy wrote: post #180
p_ing wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone forgets how long Windows 2000 took to boot ;-)

A heck of a lot faster than Windows XP or newer versions, that's for sure.

It was much slower than current OSes. Windows 2000 initialized Windows Services in a serialized order which caused lengthy boot times, even for an OOTB copy.

XP changes this to a parallel + delayed service start up, but 7 and 8 really focused on boot times.

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