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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

#571

Post by torginus »

kevincox wrote: post #435
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.

Man I would be so happy if Microsoft pushed building accessible, screen-reader friendly apps as 'preparing your applications for the agentic future'

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

#572

Post by LooseMarmoset »

p_ing wrote: post #541
LooseMarmoset wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall it booting more slowly than 98 or ME, but I don't recall it being obnoxiously bad. I do remember disabling a lot of services I didn't think I needed, though.

The serialized service startup is what caused the slowness. Disabling services would have improved boot times.

well it has been a couple years since I've used it ;)

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

#573

Post by GrinningFool »

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).…

I'm really not suggesting a ban, there's no way that would fly.

I'm suggesting restraint and responsibility on the part of the organization pushing this. When do we learn that being reactive after the harm is done isn't actually a required method of doing business? That it's okay to slow down even if there's a short-term opportunity cost?

This applies just as much to the push for LLMs everywhere as it does OpenAI's specific intention to support sexbots.

But it's all the same pattern. Push for as much as we can, as fast as we can, at as broad a scale as we can -- and deal with the consequences only when we can't ignore them anymore. (And if we can keep that to a bare minimum, that would be best for the bottom line.)

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

#574

Post by tencentshill »

Delk wrote: post #564
iamtedd wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 avai…

Your clicks need a round-trip to Redmond so they can sign off on it. It's for the greater good you see.

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

#575

Post by eboynyc32 »

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…

You only have yourself to blame. MS has been doing this for ages.

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

#576

Post by wartywhoa23 »

close04 wrote: post #481
npteljes wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft was never not a full-blown evil corporation. What they had, at their peak, is some software that worked well. In the background, same evil corporation as ever. I can't even write a top example why. Just take a glance at the documentation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft

There was a time when it looked like they were less "evil". There was a period punctuated by less anticompetitive behavior, embracing open source, no significant user-hostile moves, etc. and naively it did look like they are focused on the product not on abusing competitors or users. Can't say if this was a step in a carefully crafted plan, or just made business sense to be like this at the time. But Microsoft did lo…

> embracing open source

They needed to grab as much free code as they could to train their AI, so what better way could there be than setting up the GitHub honeypot for this sole purpose, evangelize The Greater Good Of The Open Source, and play along a bit as in "we do open source too, don't be shy to show your code to our gradient descent, erm, we mean world!"

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

#577

Post by tavavex »

dspillett wrote: post #359
luke727 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Office products are bastardized with copilot buttons everywhere. They put copilot in notepad. NOTEPAD.

> They put copilot in notepad. NOTEPAD. Every time I see a new CoPilot button, or a toast nagging me because I've not clicked any of them and they think I really should want to, a phrase crosses my mind… “Thank you the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation”

> “Thank you the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation”

I pasted this into Google to see what you were referencing, and was met with this full-screen, front page, all-important "AI Overview" (that of course takes precedence over actual search results)

> You're very welcome! If you have any questions about the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's products, their marketing strategies, or need assistance with anything else, feel free to ask.

Full circle.

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

#578

Post by ewoodrich »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #51
wvbdmp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they do this? Is HN such a worthwhile target for astroturfing that people farm reputation with AI comments? And if so, why not add some instruction to get rid of that obnoxious style?

HN readers are, as an average, high on technical know-how and bad at social skills and reading the room. What you're seeing is the natural outcome of that.

The very light moderation (that even shows dead comments from banned accounts) and clean, minimal frontend with essentially no restrictions on creating throwaways also makes it pretty attractive for "my first AI app" experiments. Ever since GPT 3 was released I see a graveyard with a scattering of dead, green, obvious LLM replies on most articles, sometimes with account names like "accounttest14" that don't even try to hide it.

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

#579

Post by nikanj »

eimrine wrote: post #551
nikanj wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which one is which?

Which case is 100% FOSS and which one is a proprietary obfuscationware? Which case has been heared by you just because it is good and which case has been heared by you just because some adware? Which case is from human to human and which one is from alien for hunter (or from hunters for aliens)? Which case has been made to make the humanship rich and which one has been made to make the maker rich? Sad you can even co…

But which one is which?

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

#580

Post by spacechild1 »

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.

> The fucking start menu used to be an actual windows component that opened instantaneously. It's a web app now

This is disgusting! Who even comes up with ideas like that?

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