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Windows Is Adding AI Agents That Can Change Your Settings

www.cnet.com

Windows Is Adding AI Agents That Can Change Your Settings

"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."

174 comments

  • I remember when MS made the perfect control panel in Win 2k and XP then spent the next 20 years making it worse and worse just because.

    And here we are.

  • MS never finished porting Control Panel, now they think AI will help?

  • This is the TYPICAL AI use case :

    • have situation that's not perfect, but works fine and is understandable (old control panel and some hidden settings)
    • improve on the old control panel, create subsections that makes sense, make it searchable, everyone is happy
    • someone decides that "control panel" and "old looking UI" have to go, create a cluster-a-doodle-fuck of a garbage mess labeled "Settings", put only half the old settings in there, and half the time conflicts with other well-established ways to do things
    • keep pushing the new thing despite it being so horrendous a kitten litter dies every time it is used
    • pretend "there is a problem with settings, but we can solve it with AI"
    • ???
    • nothing, whatever, definitely not profit

    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?

      • 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:

        1. Financializing games more just means people play them more for money than for enjoyment
        2. This increases the incentives for hacking accounts to steal their items/skins
        3. Game publishers would then lose profits from old accounts being able to empty their skins onto the market when they quit the game instead of those skins being permanently tied to that account

        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.

  • Now you can just prompt engineer windows defender to deactivate and disable the firewall. Nice! Script kiddies rejoice!!

  • Oh no you don't

    [deletes wuaueng.dll because windows update has turned itself back on like 5 times]

  • Windows XP's UI philosophy was great: one could always find what they needed within a two-clicks distance. Everything just went downhill after that. If they ever fix Windows, it will probably look a lot like XP again.

  • Hey Windows, set my taskbar to run vertically along the left side of my screen. 🖕

    • Can’t you just drag it? That worked the last time I used a Windows computer

      • Windows 11 ended support for vertical taskbars and the default setting is along the bottom with the tasks centered. You can change the “taskbar alignment” setting to “left” but that just aligns the tasks to the left side of the bar. There apparently was a registry hack that allowed you to move the taskbar, but that got patched out by the time my work updated my workstation

  • Well, that's one way to create a murderous AI. I suddenly understand why Hal wanted to kill everyone. I would, too.

174 comments