New Windows AI feature records everything you’ve done on your PC
New Windows AI feature records everything you’ve done on your PC
Recall uses AI features "to take images of your active screen every few seconds."
somehow I managed to miss this until now
So LLM-based AI is apparently such a dead end as far as non-spam and non-party trick use cases are concerned that they are straight up rolling out anti-features that nobody asked or wanted just to convince shareholders that ground breaking stuff is still going on, and somewhat justify the ocean of money they are diverting that way.
At least it's only supposed to work on PCs that incorporate so-called neural processor units, which if I understand correctly is going to be its own thing under a Windows PC branding.
edit: Yud must love that instead of his very smart and very implementable idea of the government enforcing strict regulations on who gets to own GPUs and bombing non-compliants we seem to instead be trending towards having special deep learning facilitating hardware integrated in every new device, or whatever NPUs actually are, starting with iPhones and so-called Windows PCs.
edit edit: the branding appears to be "Copilot+ PCs" not windows pcs.
Since this isn’t really even related to GenAI at all, in our house the theory is:
- MS has been trying and failing to push ARM in PCs for a while
- Now they take one with an NPU and rebrand it as Copilot+™️®️ PCs
- They have market research that says initial sales are going to be soft and they panic because early soft sales create a bad vibe
- So, without doing any of the usual build up of exciting the tech press, without hyping trade show buzz, they rush an unfinished, insecure, unwanted product to market in the hope it will be the killer app at last for high-battery life ARM on Windows.
- They use lot of AI hype language to capitalize off the hype cycle, even though besides the OCR it seems to be pretty limited in its relationship to anything machine learning at all.
@gnomicutterance
I kind of wonder if part of this isn't literally 'so we can siphon up all the things you type for more training data', and literally everything else is just to walk around that.So just a straight leverage to get everything everyone types!
It's sure an awful way to do it...
This might be the case, but at least the first I heard about the Copilot+ launch was that it was finally a "Macbook Air" killer - which I suspect would already be a strong selling point (at least if MSFT solved the backwards compatibility issue). Yet right after they announced the Recall stuff, and at least from what I have read it was received very negatively. So now they have the story that if you want the latest fast, efficient windows machine, you need to allow it to spy on your screen. Not the best marketing imo.
this isn’t really even related to GenAI at all
Besides the ocr there appears to be all sorts of image-to-text metadata recorded, the nadella demo had the journalist supposedly doing a search and getting results with terms that were neither typed at the time nor appearing in the stored screenshots.
Also, I thought they might be doing something image-to-text-to-image-again related (which - I read somewhere - was what bing copilot did when you asked it to edit an image) to save space, instead of storing eleventy billion multimonitor screenshots forever.
edit - in the demo the results included screens.
The NPU requirement has already been proven to be circumventable, as well as a number of other problems found: https://awful.systems/comment/3492449
That you can jailbreak recall and run it on non compliant hardware seems to be the least concerning thing in that article, recommended reading.
Microsoft has made windows noncompliant for so many places
ISSOs everywhere hitting the Tums, I bet.
Personally, I just penguined up for the first time in years. Net-installed Debian 12 last week, no ragrets.
There’s a MacOS app around that does pretty much the same thing called Rewind AI, but it’s a stupid subscription service as usual and for some inexplicable reason some people actually want this.
While half of the reactions were “this is a the top of apps I wouldn’t install on my machine ever”, the other half was celebrating it in the name of our lord and savior productivity, going as far as saying this is a nice way to remember passwords …
Nightmare blunt rotation in the Rewind AI front page recommendations:
Also it appears to be different than Recall in that it's a third party app and not pushed as the default in every new OS installation.
I shouldn't be surprised at the quantity of Microsoft stans posting to excuse Recall, but holy shit
relatedly: msft turned semi-good for a couple of years (making tooling more accessible across platforms, actual foss work, etc), and then seems to have an internal about-turn on this, and seem intent on speedrunning being most-hated again. stiff competition too, that's why they're trying so hard
@froztbyte @dgerard @patterfloof I think the reality is that Microsoft hasn’t changed at all. It always does what will make Microsoft the most money. It’s just that over the last couple of years that has happened to be “good” (or at least semi-good) for us in the developer space.
Now, an opportunity (“AI”) has presented itself to shit all over that and instead sell to people in a very different space. People who will enjoy the convenience of their computer becoming a panopticon and disregard or simply not know the consequences of that.
They have had hands down the best accessibility in desktop markets for 20 years, no contest. Overwhelming market share for many assistive techs. Which is why I’m absolutely livid at them now. If they break Windows I have nowhere else to go. Garbage people making garbage choices.
I used to argue with people that from all of the giants (the FAANG nonsense) MSFT was "the good guys" because they were doing god's work with FOSS. I still think .NET is an amazing technology and everyone working on it should be praised.
But then I got actually hired by MSFT and... you quickly realise this is just surface level shit. No one in management could give less of a fuck about open-source, or anything other than Growth™ for that matter. I speedran disillusionment and quit after little more than a year. In the end, it's just a big corpo doing big corpo shit. It has no values. It has no morals. It has no vision, other than that of a high $MSFT number.
If MSFT did anything good it's despite internal pressures and incentives, not thanks to them.
It's not a HN thread about a controversial new MSFT feature without some complaining about how nerds running Android are discriminated against in the dating market:
I think you are missing the first half the modern male reproductive lifecycle. What you are saying increasingly applies to 30's onward (when males are looking for long term family relationships) but for the 20 somethings many are looking for these shallow, vacuous women because they often can be convinced into meaningless sex. It's a pretty sad state but it appears to be this way now.
Wowsers. I don't think you're supposed to say this out loud.
Yeah for the people not in the know this basic misogynistic red pill bullshit. Alpha fucks, beta bucks. (Which also has a secondary explanation (which also sucks)).
This green bubble/blue bubble thing is so exhausting. It’s like this is the first walled garden these whiny toddlers (and the DOJ) have ever encountered. Not using gmail for personal email hurts me both socially and professionally, & has probably kept me out of the running for jobs. Back when people used Facebook, there were social events I wasn’t invited to because I wasn’t on Facebook. None is this is new, and it predates computers. (Ask a teetotaler or sober person about their dating opportunities, why don’t you?)