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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

#561

Post by kenjackson »

a2128 wrote: post #560
kenjackson wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn’t seen Linux do that. How do they fully do it without ever locking or rebooting the system?

When you run apt upgrade or pacman -Syu that's exactly what you're doing. The files are replaced on your drive while everything else continues running. Generally it won't affect execution of existing software, because they're all already loaded into memory, but some software might crash or get weird behavior as they try to access their files on the drive and those files have been updated, and newly launched programs…

The immutable distro doesn't work for Windows most likely due to disk space. As someone who has informally supported a lot of Windows devices in enterprises it was surprising to me how many Windows problems are a result of running out of HD space and how often updates can't happen (the old fashion kind) simply because there isn't enough HD space for the update. I wouldn't be surprised if something like 5% of updates couldn't happen due to this.

Windows does do hotpatching, but there's a lot of things that aren't hotpatchable. Do you really think that Windows is like "naw, we could do zero reboot updates, but prefer not to because we are so dominant in the OS space"? This would be an incredible feature for the enterprise. In fact the enterprise version added a bunch of new hotpatch support just last year, but still requires quarterly updates and only does security updates. You really think that they did all that, but decided to not do the rest because they're comfy?

Again, I haven't seen Linux or Mac solve the problem fully either, nor iPhone or Android. AFAIK even every cloud provider has to do a reboot. Would Google or Amazon or Oracle have figured this out if it was so easy? How is it that there is no actual software engineer in industry that knows how to do this, but everyone on message forums seems to? Why don't these companies just hire people from message forums?

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

#562

Post by anthk »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #403
serf wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, and it's still one of things in Windows that is a pleasure to use when you need it.

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…

MPD, Krita, Vim/Emacs/Scite,NSxiv with scripts, any diff tool since the 90's, any file manager since Midnight Commander and so on...

Less stable? MPD supported damn state supported popular science radio streaming channels in Spain like nothing...

Also vidir, entr and jimtcl/awk scripts p0wn your setup any time... I can just remote-mount FS's anywhere and use any local tools as if they where there. I can just spawn builds on directory changes and spawn an editor with a REPL in miliseconds. GUI? Everything it's composable. I can use a mega-complete GUI for MPD that makes Foobar2k blush. I can output audio to an streaming socket (or to plain Icecast) from MPD and plug any audio FX' and whatnot with MPD plugins.

I can push the whole graphical environment down and I could keep playing my music and control the whole music daemon from my phone. Add songs, add radio stream, play/skip, volume up and down... from my damn bathroom.

And OFC I can still code under VTY's and even read PDF's/CBZ's/EPUB's and even watch videos play any game or emulator which uses SDL (a ton of source ports, emulators like mednafen, Doom/Quake ports, Scummvm, DOSBox, PCSXR, PPSPPP)...

That without touching a mouse or switching between GUI's. No RSI, no headaches, no remote GUI tools to mount any crap requiring thousands of click and hurting your wrists and forearms. Everything it's under a directory and managed as it if were part of my hard disk filesystem.

I can edit directory listings with my text editor with the vidir tool, they will show up as a text file. You delete a range of lines, these files are gone. I can search and rename files at crazy speeds and, well, I can spawn any tool with find and iomenu and have a quick search for a file. File managers? Forget it, you keep typing and the fuzzy-finding tool with match the file in milseconds and open the registered tool for that extensions. And this is done with tools that could probably run in the 80's and early 90's. Go figure, I'm computing as if it was in 2040 but with 'prehistoric' tools.

Ah, don't forget that most CLI and TUI tools are scriptable... so you can just forget of even using a computer, 90% of the tasks can complete themselves via cron, the time scheduler under Unix.

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

#563

Post by krige »

int_19h wrote: post #295
krige wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't. Case in point is my spare late 00's laptop running mint and early 00's / late 90's games. Some (Age of Wonders 1) don't work at all under wine/proton. Others (Age of Wonders SM, dosbox games, Majesty) technically work but keep hitting snags like midi just flat out not working, display resolution being read and set incorrectly, visual artifacts. Everything tested worked perfectly fine under Win7 and Win10.

Age of Wonders 1 used to work. That patch that you need to get it running on Win10+ was originally made for Wine: https://aow.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/forums/display.cgi?actio... Is that not sufficient these days? I might take another look; this is one of those games that I intend to keep running one way or another until I die.

Aight so when using Wine, AoW1 just instantly fails silently upon launch, no error message to see. When using proton it technically works - clicking randomly I launched the tutorial, judging by the sounds - but the screen is black all the time and shutting down alt-f4 it throws an error:

Exception EWin32Error in module VCL30.dpl at 00010E4F

Win32 Error. Code 1400. Invalid window handle.

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

#564

Post by Delk »

iamtedd wrote: post #342
Springtime wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this W11 version of Notepad takes longer to open than Sublime Text and about equal to Firefox. On NVMe. It used to be instant , which is something you really notice the difference with when it changes.

The fucking start menu used to be an actual windows component that opened instantaneously. It's a web app now, sometimes taking seconds to open. I also noticed a lot of the time windows just ignores me double clicking on things in file explorer, leaving me to sit there wondering if I have to do it again.

Now that we're ranting, I wonder what's up with the right-click context menu in Windows 11 on my machines. It literally takes a noticeable fraction of a second (in the order of several hundred ms) for the menu with fewer than ten items to appear. (The first time might take around a second, I'd suppose due to disk I/O. But subsequent clicks also have a noticeable delay.)

All the computers with Windows 11 that are available to me are fairly similar so I don't know if it's just these particular software/hardware setups. But it seems absurd that a device capable of billions of operations per second even on a single core somehow takes hundreds of milliseconds to display a few menu items.

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

#565

Post by bayindirh »

Scharkenberg wrote: post #556
bayindirh wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have no idea how you got to "Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair" given that I literally blamed the slow OS disk drive inside the computer based on thousands of data points on my end.

Hey, no, I don’t dispute your data points at all. A bog standard NVMe can handle ~1MIOPS these days, and it’s above and beyond what SATA SSDs can provide.

What I’m against is tolerating a bad OS design with more capable hardware and allowing Microsoft to worsen the experience. This is a pattern of Microsoft since forever.

Oh, that particular PC has no NVMe support anyway. I don’t know why that M.2 port is SATA only.

Especially when every other major OS can handle this more gracefully. I can version upgrade a fully loaded Debian installation in less than 6 minutes, reboot included, on a SATA disk, for example.

Also, while tangential, Windows providing the worst update experience, and calling Linux a major, mainstream OS superior in some ways feels unbelievable when I look back a decade.

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

#566

Post by Surac »

seems i have manged to the off the "windows drug" just in time. i had waited long time because of gaming, but seeing MMO run on Linux mint with no problems it was time for me. do not regeret it. only thing i am missing is visual studio and windows.from. im actualy searching for a good alternative

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

#568

Post by Delk »

haspok wrote: post #396
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So its gonna sound weird, but some companies really have strict policies and notepad there is ok, but notepad++ isn't. Usually, there is some way to get exceptions, but those tend to require more effort than it is usually worth it. I guess what I am saying it: it is not always by choice:D

I've worked for banks in the past (actually, working for one right now), and they always had Notepad++ available - at least for me, as a developer. There are no licensing issues, no fees to pay, no support to pay. It really is free, even in a commercial environment.

Lots of organizations have a blanket ban on any third-party software that wasn't specifically approved by IT. Being free might help it get cleared but that's nowhere sufficient. Since Notepad comes with Windows, it's probably always there and never banned. (Although of course the cloud-based LLM integration might actually be a problem.)

With that said, I think I've also had NotePad++ made available by IT at all employers and clients that had me use Windows even when the desktop setup was otherwise quite restricted. It's a rather established tool after all and probably considered a safe and reputable bet even by somewhat conservative IT leadership.

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

#569

Post by p1necone »

nandomrumber wrote: post #75
p1necone wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imo if you just have a regular desktop PC, use Ubuntu/Fedora, not a dedicated 'gaming' distro. Bazzite's good as a stand in for steam os on non Valve handhelds, but Steam and Proton work just fine on a regular boring Linux distro.

Debian / Fedora are riddled with features gamers will never need.

I'm making an assumption that most HN commenters aren't using their PC only for games.

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

#570

Post by inejge »

Neil44 wrote: post #440
bondarchuk wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

IIRC Wordpad was the only always-installed program which could open text files with Unix line endings and display them properly. Until at least Vista, Notepad would treat them as if containing a single line.
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