This will be preaching to the choir for some readers, as you didn't exactly need another reason not to use Windows right? Microsoft's new Recall AI will take screenshots of everything you do and that sounds truly terrible.
The only reason Microsoft can push this as a ‘service’ now is that 90% of users do not care about, let alone understand any of the technology they use. Doctors, lawyers, CEOs, politicians, even most engineers, have no fucking clue what an operating system is, what “AI” is or why it would be a bad idea to feed 100% of your activity into a black box controlled by a megacorp. And good luck trying to explain to them why something like this might be bad, you need to lay out so much groundwork that by the time you get to training data privacy concerns they have already scrolled though 500 shitposts on TikTok.
It continues to blow me away that these projects get implemented as the only people who can do the work must also understand why it is a bad idea.
Someone yesterday posted the spec requirements for this service and it doesn’t appear to be meant for everyday users. It requires massive storage space on a fast SSD and also an NPU (Nueral Processing Unit).
Right, it needs the NPU because the data is stored and processed locally. Guess what, your computer/OS already knows everything you do.
Yet another nothing-burger for the internet to rage about.
I don’t use Windows for other reasons, but every useful application I use on a daily basis has some sort of history. Browsers remember pages I’ve visited, my editor has undo levels, terminal has a searchable scrollback buffer, my shell can recall pretty much every command I’ve ever run.
And yet none of them work together. I’ve been thinking about Recall though, and I think the only use case I would have would be to have it summarize my daily activities on a work machine. Quite often I join morning standups, or a standup after a long weekend, and I’m like “wtf did I do yesterday?”. I’d love to have an AI remind me I spent 3 hours on Teams dealing with a co-worker’s issue, or how long I spent researching something in order to reply to an e-mail.
Or when you notice you have a follow-up meeting on your calendar and you’ve completely forgotten what the action items you were supposed to handle from the meeting 2 weeks ago.
Basically there’s a ton of QOL activities computers could be doing that require some sort of artificial intelligence to index and retrieve in order to be useful. That involves allowing some sort of local AI access to that data, but as long as the crowd of smooth brained luddites keeps whining that goal is getting further away…
It’s a little bit more than “your os knows everything you do”.
Copilot for Windows isn’t the same thing as Copilot for 365, although it’s similar, and the system requirements only apply if you tell it to process locally. My understanding of the docs is Copilot is cloud based by default.
The issue isn’t smooth brained luddites, it’s smooth brained casuals giving condom over their personal information to a corporation that has a fiduciary responsibility to profit and grow.
The only reason Microsoft can push this as a ‘service’ now is that 90% of users do not care about, let alone understand any of the technology they use. Doctors, lawyers, CEOs, politicians, even most engineers, have no fucking clue what an operating system is, what “AI” is or why it would be a bad idea to feed 100% of your activity into a black box controlled by a megacorp. And good luck trying to explain to them why something like this might be bad, you need to lay out so much groundwork that by the time you get to training data privacy concerns they have already scrolled though 500 shitposts on TikTok.
It continues to blow me away that these projects get implemented as the only people who can do the work must also understand why it is a bad idea.
It’s baffling it’s legal to be honest.
Lawmakers literally do not understand why it could be a problem.
Someone yesterday posted the spec requirements for this service and it doesn’t appear to be meant for everyday users. It requires massive storage space on a fast SSD and also an NPU (Nueral Processing Unit).
Right, it needs the NPU because the data is stored and processed locally. Guess what, your computer/OS already knows everything you do.
Yet another nothing-burger for the internet to rage about.
I don’t use Windows for other reasons, but every useful application I use on a daily basis has some sort of history. Browsers remember pages I’ve visited, my editor has undo levels, terminal has a searchable scrollback buffer, my shell can recall pretty much every command I’ve ever run.
And yet none of them work together. I’ve been thinking about Recall though, and I think the only use case I would have would be to have it summarize my daily activities on a work machine. Quite often I join morning standups, or a standup after a long weekend, and I’m like “wtf did I do yesterday?”. I’d love to have an AI remind me I spent 3 hours on Teams dealing with a co-worker’s issue, or how long I spent researching something in order to reply to an e-mail.
Or when you notice you have a follow-up meeting on your calendar and you’ve completely forgotten what the action items you were supposed to handle from the meeting 2 weeks ago.
Basically there’s a ton of QOL activities computers could be doing that require some sort of artificial intelligence to index and retrieve in order to be useful. That involves allowing some sort of local AI access to that data, but as long as the crowd of smooth brained luddites keeps whining that goal is getting further away…
It’s a little bit more than “your os knows everything you do”.
Copilot for Windows isn’t the same thing as Copilot for 365, although it’s similar, and the system requirements only apply if you tell it to process locally. My understanding of the docs is Copilot is cloud based by default.
The issue isn’t smooth brained luddites, it’s smooth brained casuals giving condom over their personal information to a corporation that has a fiduciary responsibility to profit and grow.
Im sure lots of corporations will have a problem with this when they realize all company data is compromised.
It will likely be protected in those cases behind the 365 environment which encloses copilot and prevents training on company data. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot/privacy-and-protections