Submitted 1 day ago by zaxvenz@lemm.ee to technology@lemmy.world
“We set out to solve one of the most common frustrations we hear — finding and changing settings on your PC — using the power of AI agents,” Navjot Virk, corporate vice president of Windows Experiences at Microsoft, said in a blog post on Tuesday. “An agent uses on-device AI to understand your intent and with your permission, automate and execute tasks.”
Quick! I need a guide on how to disable this.
Pop_OS or Bazzite, IMO.
Unfortunately, Ubuntu is corporate bloatware these days.
There isn’t a settings switch to turn off?
Glad to be using Linux on all my computers
Looks like this isn’t ripe for abuse in any way… sarcasm
I am pretty sure Microsoft doesn’t need an AI agent to access your settings.
However, that AI agent might be a new attack vector for someone else.
If this literal malware (I say that because again, what MS is proposing here is what some actual viruses used to do) gets ported to the Enterprise and IoT SKUs, the people who work on this stuff for a living at the local call center or public school district are going to have a nightmare on their hands.
Surely there would be no way scammers or hackers would take advantage of this with some crafty prompts that somehow get feed into the agent…
Oh no you don’t
[deletes wuaueng.dll because windows update has turned itself back on like 5 times]
Or just make settings that aren’t total dumb bullshit for which you need Ai to find anything.
But that would cost money and *gasp* empower users! What are you, some kind of communist?
We can only hope that the windows de-bloating tools are updated so we can disable or remove this feature.
easy, just get a debloating AI agent, what could go wrong
Group Policy is your friend.
I hope the AI agent will cover this use case.
Pro edition and up, unless copilot can be convinced.
The amounts of copium that Windows users are willing to swallow to avoid changing are reaching stratospheric levels. Inertia is one hell of a drug.
At this point to Debloat you’d be better off just removing windows. Save yourself the fight and frustration
This is the TYPICAL AI use case :
It seems that people keep forgetting we just, did stuff. Changing most system settings wasn’t an incomprehensible chore reserved to the most elite of people. And changing the fringe ultra rare and hard to find setting only happened with half-decent competent people. No need to throw AI at that… unless you dismantle everything that works before, of course.
I swear, it’s not long ago that people were touting that we could finally have decent microtransactions in games thanks to blockchain, despite microtransactions being a very lucrative thing for decades before. And don’t get me started on people saying “but it’s the only way artists can get paid”.
As a collective, humanity is dumb.
I swear, it’s not long ago that people were touting that we could finally have decent microtransactions in games thanks to blockchain
Sorry that this is really what caught my attention, but when did anyone ever think this?
When NFT started getting popular. Forums were full of idiots saying “now I can really BUY something and HAVE it!” as opposed to, say, game publishers having their server with user accounts on it and their item there. There’s even people that touted “we will be able to bring items from one game to another!”. Pointing the silliness of the idea to them was a lost cause.
And, since that’s not how any of this works, it crashed and aside from some big publisher being incredibly late to the party, the idea is now buried deep and forgotten.
Not that long ago. Many still do, although you’ll primarily find them in more niche spaces within the overarching crypto community.
In fact, just a few years back, I used to be one of them. Of course, later on I became disillusioned with the promises of crypto after learning more about socialism, thinking more closely about how the system fundamentally worked, and realizing that it was effectively just a slightly more distributed variant of capitalism that would inevitably fall to the same structural failings, that being capital accumulation.
To clarify the reasoning that was often used, including by myself, the reason people specifically thought blockchains would make microtransactions better is because they thought that it would lead to more user freedom, and open markets. If you can buy a skin now, then sell it later when you’re done with it, then the effective cost of the skin is lower than in a game where you are unable to sell, for instance.
Obviously the concept of selling in-game items isn’t novel in any way, but the main selling point was that it could be tradeable on any marketplace (or peer-to-peer with no marketplace at all), meaning low to no fees, and they items could be given native revenue-share splits, where the publisher of a game would get a set % of every sale, leading to a way for them to generate revenue that didn’t have to be releasing new but low quality things at a quick pace, and could then allow them to focus on making higher quality items with a slower release schedule.
Of course, looking back retrospectively:
There are a small subset of people who legitimately just don’t understand game development fundamentals though, and they actually believe that things would just be fully interchangeable. As in, you buy a skin in Fortnite, and you can then open up Roblox and set it as your player model.
Those ones are especially not the brightest.
MS never finished porting Control Panel, now they think AI will help?
Easy way to automatically set settings that are convenient for them and disguise it as AI being AI
Worse - easy way to set the settings then gaslight the user to say they asked for it that way.
How much you wanna bet that it makes those changes in a way that is generally indistinguishable from as if it was done by the user’s own credentials? (Except save perhaps in recall’s own logs)
I’ll tell my AI agent to go into the registry and disable itself.
Sorry, Dave, I can’t do that.
WTF! Just keep it!
You know that friend who wants to sell you his laptop but keeps showing you know it works instead of letting you try it? That Microsoft. So I say fuck them, just keep the fucking thing if they love it so much that they can’t let me use it the way I want to use it -> Linux.
just a simple search feature works.
They really are trying hard for people to switch to Linux huh
Because coming up with a UI that doesn’t suck is too much work
Ok let me play devil’s advocate and preface this with I’m not a big windows fan at all since I primarily use MacOS and Linux, but I could see this as moderately useful but used in a slightly different way. I don’t want the AI to actually make the changes by itself, even with my permission. But being able to ask it a natural language question about how to make a specific change and then walking me through how to make those changes, like showing me where in the the menu or OS that setting is hiding could be very useful. In the long run it could help teach the end user more about the OS and how things are organized and setup.
Just my 2¢
That already exists. Do a search on the web and follow someone’s steps. You don’t need an AI to do it. An actual intelligence has already created a guide for you.
Microsoft would absolutely love it if people had zero computer literacy and had to ask an AI for help to perform even the most rudimentary of tasks.
Because then the AI becomes indispensable.
And available for only $9.99/month! Part of the Copilot Suite of tools coming 2027!
Never learn about computers ever again!
Now you can just prompt engineer windows defender to deactivate and disable the firewall. Nice! Script kiddies rejoice!!
trying to format C: to install linux
I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave
Thanks Microsoft for admitting that Wimdows sucks. You didn’t even try really.
Just put the search results in under the search bar, bro.
Blackmagic please, for the benefit of all editors, make DaVinci Resolve work properly on Linux. I’d switch tomorrow.
What’s wrong with it? Works fine for me. Ubuntu 24.04
The AAC issue and working directly from a NAS. It’s adding a lot to the workload to work around AAC. NAS could be a me issue, but other programs have no issue with accessing it and working directly from it.
Idk what I did and Im sure it was my fault, but it bricked my linux mint when I tried to install it
About 20 years ago I would handle my email, IRC, watching movies and web browsing on Linux and each time I wanted to play Counter Strike I would reboot and switch to windows. After I was done with CS I would boot back to Linux. People who say they can’t use Linux because X doesn’t work there are just lazy.
I get where you’re coming from, and I tried this. The point is to get away from windows, and if the main program I use my computer for lacks essential features that affect my work, then I can’t switch.
Honestly, calling people lazy without context just makes you another Linux bro and doesn’t help bring people over.
Works fine on bazzite for me.
Organise Settings better, put common features front and centre?
Why is finding my IP address so hard on a Windows machine? Its either open settings app and click down 3 layers deep or open a pwsh prompt and either ipconfig or Get-NetIPAddress.
Linux click network applet in most desktop environments. Even MacOS option + click network icon
linux time.
When I was a child I actually learnt quite a bit about my computer by reading all the settings of Windows XP and customizing them.
I hope this doesn’t prevent someone from the next generation to do the same thing…
It will. It’s already happening with phones. Younger people know nothing about how computers work.
It feels like Microsoft is really going all in on this AI trend. Probably because they are well aware that they missed/were late to every major trend since the 90s (e.g. the Internet, music players, smart phones, gaming consoles,…) and they don’t have that much to lose any more with Windows’ inferiority becoming more and more apparent. So they are probably going for the high risk, high reward strategy where they will either lose the desktop OS market completely (in the likely case AI turns out to be just a regular hype cycle) or win big by being early (in the unlikely case that AI turns out to be much better than it looks like right now AND having expertise with this will help with better versions of this once they show up).
Magic creates a need for wizards
How much would setting the main registry file to read-only break on Windows 11? Someone may be about to attempt the experiment . . .
worse they make windows, more people want to switch off from it and alternative become more popular and thus get better support for stuff.
So maybe one should be all for the ai bullshit they force down their users throats. Maybe they will eventually really break the camel’s back.
ohshit604@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
It’s unlikely but I’m hoping my company switches to Linux based operating systems.
kerntucky@infosec.pub 1 day ago
!linuxmigration@lemmy.world
underline960@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
For people who want a real link to help them with Linux migration, end of 10 might be worth checking out.