this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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[–] NegativeLookBehind 250 points 6 months ago (10 children)

How this usually goes:

  1. Introduce new controversial feature

  2. Backlash

  3. Postpone deployment

  4. Soften public opinion with marketing, rename product, change minor features, etc

  5. Deploy product regardless

  6. Enshittification complete (Until next time!)

[–] [email protected] 98 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You forgot put the option back in a random windows update without prior knowledge

[–] NegativeLookBehind 20 points 6 months ago

Yup, you’re right. I had a bullet for that originally, but changed it.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

You are absolutely correct. All the focus groups and consultancies that were surely involved in something like this and we're supposed to believe the backlash was a surprise?

This is what is happening at Redmond right now:

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

This is hilarious.

I love the faith, too. Like, of Microsoft, of all people. The "your Xbox is your cable box now" Microsoft. The "Here's mandatory Kinect, the Wii killer" Microsoft. The Windows Me Microsoft. The "Windows 8 is now a touch OS" Microsoft.

I gotta say, you guys really give tech companies the benefit of the doubt. I've seen too much, perhaps.

In that vein, let me propose a more accurate picture: https://img.movieboom.biz/movie/screen/681/19.jpg

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I love the faith, too. Like, of Microsoft, of all people. The “your Xbox is your cable box now” Microsoft. The “Here’s mandatory Kinect, the Wii killer” Microsoft. The Windows Me Microsoft. The “Windows 8 is now a touch OS” Microsoft.

The EEE Microsoft...

In that vein, let me propose a more accurate picture:

Unless not attaching one was your punchline, I think you forgot to attach one. :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

No, I did. I can see it.

Welcome to the Fediverse, where me attaching a picture and you seeing the picture are not necessarily the same thing.

Hey, I am an equal opportunity criticiser. Fedia/Kbin/Lemmy suck at this.

I added a text link, at least, but that's already way too far to go for that joke.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Entire tech industry does this over and over again. The only way to stop dancing along is to switch to Linux instead of praying to Microsoft or Apple corporations.

[–] NegativeLookBehind 5 points 6 months ago

All hail Linux, the One True King

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (1 children)

At some point I'm gonna get bored of reminding people of this.

Hey, remember Timeline?

That's how you know this isn't how it works.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Did MS derive any particular benefit from Timeline? It was a lot more localised as far as I recall. Recall seems geared to give them a lot more data that they could monetise.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (6 children)

Nope, it's the exact opposite. Timeline looked a lot more like Apple's Recall equivalent they're rolling out. It monitored your activity, not just your screen, and then stored the output on the "cloud" so it could be shared across computers.

I don't want either, but if you ask me if I want my screen recorded on-device or my logged activity shared across all machines and stored on MS's servers I'll take Recall any day.

So my point is, Timeline didn't "soften" anything. It went away on the launch of Win11. And nobody was "softened" because when it resurfaced as "Recall" everybody freaked right out immediately all over again. Bad ideas are bad ideas. You can wait for people to get over minor inconveniences or tradeoffs, or just live with whatever percentage of people find something to be a dealbreaker if the value you extract from it is way higher than the business you lose. But a bad idea is a bad idea.

Also my point: people here don't know how to take a win. Recall is gone, I'd expect it to never come back, unless Apple does MS's job for them and when it resurfaces it works exactly like the Apple feature that works exactly like Recall without anybody freaking out about it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Lol, apple is not logging what your doing, the apple AI just has access to that data directly, no need to copy data from apps you already Control. AppleAI is just a Process that has Access to a lot of data, un fact, any data that any app offer through the API Apple Designes. So that means the AppleAI sees only what the dev of the app want the AppleAI to see. Best case, you can set what you want to give appleAI access to in each app.

I want to ask you, where do you see the difference to Spotlight? Spotlight is also a Process that scanns all your data..

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

For the record, MS also had stated that users can exclude specific applications from Recall and devs can exclude specific screens or content from being recorded.

I'm not sure that "Apple already indexes and has unfettered access to all your granular data" isa good defense, either. That's... worse. Although for what it's worth it does seem like this AI thing is way more intrusive than Spotlight, in that it's not just searching keywords inside files it can parse, it is connecting data from multiple sources to generate context about you, some of which is being processed off-site. I don't think it's as easily expoitable as the 1.0 version of Recall MS described, but if your concern is with an AI or a corporation having access to information, or to compromising information being accessed through easy search by anybody with local access... well, yeah, it's all degrees of bad here.

Didn't you and I already litigate this in a different thread? I'd rather not rehash that.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)
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[–] Linkerbaan 3 points 6 months ago

And they will be sure to make every "mistake" people warned them about in stage 2 when they reach stage 5.

[–] NutWrench 2 points 6 months ago

5.1 Toggle the customer's opt-out setting back to opt-in every time there's a Windows update.

5.2 Remove the opt-out setting completely.

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[–] [email protected] 83 points 6 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago

In a few years time we will recall when Microsoft recalled Recall, but we will have to wait for a a few decades longer to get to Total Recall.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

A small conspiracy theory of mine is them trying to disassociate the term windows recall with negativity. But it backfired hard lol.

[–] capt_wolf 68 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Next update: Well, we never actually removed the feature because it's already irrevocably engrained in the file system. It can't be turned off or opted out of because it'll cause your hard drive to explode. Instead, we've buried it so deep that only hackers, malware, the government, and Facebook will be able to make use of it.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago

Microsoft: we can't turn the always online feature on the Xbox One off.

They never learn

[–] tigerjerusalem 47 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

Not good enough, it should have cancelled the feature altogether.

[–] Gradually_Adjusting 47 points 6 months ago

The tech industry is so invested in "AI" at this point that if it admits defeat, the bubble will pop.

[–] seven_phone 43 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Even the cancellation is not good enough. The fact that this was even entertained shows how disconnected Microsoft is from the real world. If they can get this so wrong what else are they getting wrong.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That's never really been a priority for them. Can you get something wrong that you weren't trying to get right in the first place?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

They did tell their employees to prioritize security above all else, right before not doing that.

[–] seven_phone 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

So by implication they have not been telling their teams that since when, Windows95?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Yeah, that was basically my reaction, too. There was also some news that the CEO would now be taking responsibility for security, which had me similarly questioning what the hell they were doing so far.
Surely, the CEO is responsible for everything. So, did they just completely forget that security is also part of that?

[–] mojoaar 7 points 6 months ago

Could not have said it better myself.

[–] homesweethomeMrL 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It’s hard to appreciate how much like catnip/crack AI is inside micro$oft.

They think they’re going to corner the market on AI before it ever actually does anything. No matter that 90% of people want absolutely nothing to do with it. As our de facto tech lords, they’ll tell us what we want. lol

[–] seven_phone 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

But even if that is their semi-delusional master plan why scupper it by association with such a bad idea. There was not one person in all the hours of talk they must have spent on this that wondered if every device taking a screenshot every few minutes was a good idea. No matter the security it will be breached and this feature could be astoundingly destructive.

[–] homesweethomeMrL 3 points 6 months ago

That’s the crack effect. AI is a helluva drug. For every 10 developers and team leads who pointed out what a horrifying clusterfuck it would inevitably become, there were two senior directors or one VP who thought they could advance up the ladder by supporting it.

I don’t doubt that the majority of M$ employees are properly embarrassed about the whole thing. Not that that has ever mattered with regard to corporate direction.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Welp the wake up call already pushed me to linux, finally

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 6 months ago

I fully expect it to be running in the background with the interface part the user can see turned off.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (1 children)

As we say in Germany: 'Aufgeschoben ist nich aufgehoben!'

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago (1 children)

And for those that don't sprechen die Deutsch, "postponed is not canceled!"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

Ah, neat! The wordplay is definitely stronger in German, which I’m sure is why it became an idiom in the first place.

[–] Matriks404 10 points 6 months ago (3 children)

The fuck are Copilot+ PC's? Are they regular PC's with Copilot+ branding?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago

pcs with enough NPU compute power to run copilot locally in a reasonable performance level.

e. g with AMDs current laptops, the 7840 can do 10 tops, the 8840, which is core config/gpu wise, effectively the same cpu but with a larger NPU, pushing it to 16 tops for AI use.

outside of ai use, the one benefit to ai is that igpus are better and more of a focus, so expect low end laptop gaming to get a lot better.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago

They are PC that have NPUs (Neural Processing Units) in the CPU/SoC, and a few other requirements.

Here are the specs required.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

They are ARM based

[–] tootoughtoremember 7 points 6 months ago

Nope, Windows will still not be my next PC. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, you can't get fooled again.

[–] cheese_greater 5 points 6 months ago

Its kinda funny this happened with iCloud e2ee. Backlash, then much of it now is convergently encrypted but they still have the filenames and checksums/hashes for everything (which is emphatically not e2ee or at at least zero-trust as implied by the designation) and they never really needed the contents anyway. All the deets are in the metadata which is only "standard" (un)protected.

[–] vegaquake 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Good, now keep it that way

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago
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