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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

#581

Post by wolvesechoes »

anthk wrote: post #562
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…

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 bu…

I am not sure why you've put so much effort, but thank you for confirming my views on Linux people.

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

#582

Post by Arainach »

EagnaIonat wrote: post #327
Arainach wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse because they're exposing these features to the kind of people who aren't running agents now.

It literally says in the article: "This feature is completely optional and is never turned on by default." Reading the full article this is just a power user feature and in beta at that. I can see where it could be useful and the fact it puts further restrictions on how each agent works mitigates security issues.

For now. Features that are opt-in in developer preview have a way of becoming defaults later.

Fundamentally, having a model that makes it easy to give access to an entire library instead of requiring explicit tight scoping of access to individual files is dangerous and teaches people to make mistakes that can lead to data misuse and leaks.

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

#583

Post by tapoxi »

krige wrote: post #176
tapoxi wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://bazzite.gg/ Should work out of the box, no configuration needed. The only caveat is games with kernel based anti-cheat, but I don't play many of those. Arc Raiders works just fine, for example.

I'm sorry but linux gaming absolutely does not support "support everything from 90s to cutting edge modern games without hiccups" I'm sure for some users it's acceptable, solid even, but I know several people, including myself, that keep hitting edge cases and invisible walls when on Windows these games "just work". And no, it's not about kernel anti-cheats or any other DRM.

I've had a pretty opposite experience. I was able to get an old adventure game (Titanic: Adventure out of Time) working just fine on Wine and it refuses to run on modern Windows.

If Wine doesn't work I'll run it in 86box.

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

#584

Post by ikr678 »

rocqua wrote: post #308
malfist wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does that matter? I should be allowed to explicitly chose the risks I want to take. Not microsoft. Especially not for microsoft to decide, no matter what I'm doing, or what I have open and unsaved on my computer, now is the time they think my risk is too great and tuesday has passed, so reboot reboot reboot.

The automatic reboot has made the world a better place, because too many people were incredibly bad at making this risk tradeoff. It might still be bad thing for taking away agency. But it was also a massive improvement to society.

I think it wasnt just reboot inconvenience, I feel like there was a period of time where some software updates would break or make your software experience worse.

I have vague memories as a teenager of running older versions of MSN messenger in compatability mode because after a certain version it was full of ads.

Android phone software is also very good at this now, I still hestate to update my pixel because each update somehow makes my phone worse to use.

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

#585

Post by [deleted] »

Numerlor wrote: post #495
anonym29 wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"optional, experimental off-by-default service" is Microsoft-ese for "1-2 years away from being always on and unremovable"

Then the outrage can come when that happens? This comment section is 50% people that haven't used windows in 10 years complaining

[deleted]

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

#586

Post by tavavex »

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…

There is nothing inherently bad about LLMs, and there is nothing inherently good about blockchains. What matters is how the technology ends up being used. I thought it would be obvious to someone who loves one of these modern technologies enough as to think that it's a "cultural cornerstone" (what, like music or something?). There are local, non-megacorp LLMs, ones that are put to niche, but acceptable uses, just like there are blockchains that are created solely for hosting useless cryptocurrencies whose sole purpose is shuffling around money and hosting a pump-and-dump.

What the parent comment is ridiculing isn't the "best case use scenarios" that proponents see with sparkles in their eyes. It's the myopic focus of the tech industry on the big new thing, and the insane obsession with stuffing the big new thing into absolutely everything. It doesn't even matter if you use the big new thing, you just need to seem relevant enough to it for investors to start buying in. If today we're getting "AI-powered" vacuum cleaners, 8 years ago you'd have a blockchain-powered vacuum cleaner. (Maybe to a lesser extent, because the hype on that never reached the heights that AI is reaching today - but the point is clear either way).

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

#587

Post by rocqua »

malfist wrote: post #461
rocqua wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The automatic reboot has made the world a better place, because too many people were incredibly bad at making this risk tradeoff. It might still be bad thing for taking away agency. But it was also a massive improvement to society.

That's quiet a bit of stretch to equate forced update reboots to massive societal benefits

The point was about security updates. Without forced upgrades the whole ransomware thing would have been so much worse as just a singular example.

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

#588

Post by Jenk »

wartywhoa23 wrote: post #576
close04 wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

It started long before that. Cloud meant they were under drastic threat of being abandoned, because the cloud was (and still is) dominated by linux compute.

DotNet were shook, and shook bad. They went all out to make their runtime "cross-platform" because they faced an existential thread from lamdba+node.

The rise of the MBP also saw their dotnet ecosystem under thread from the other end of the stick - the developer end. Visual Studio cannot run on macos, so competitor IDEs that can were rising in their numbers. Hence the push for VSCode to try and claw back some IDE market.

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

#589

Post by anthk »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #581
anthk wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bu…

I am not sure why you've put so much effort, but thank you for confirming my views on Linux people.

Is not about Linux, I don't use that Unix branch. I don't click neither on menues nor buttons. It's about usability and automation, something utterly lacking under Windows. Once you can use any remote or local filesystem seamlessly with your own scripts spawning at events, you are 90% done.

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

#590

Post by int_19h »

hat_monger wrote: post #523
the_other wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get them working on interesting projects building things customers/users/peers will value.

> building things customers/users/peers will value. AI. Customers want AI, users want AI, peers want AI. If anyone says otherwise, they’re a Luddite and possibly a dangerous political radical.

I'm no longer at MSFT, but according to the people that are, the leadership is straight up saying that anyone who doesn't like AI coding has no place in the company now.
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