More privacy setting changes that will default to spying on you and sending everything you do and all you data to Microsoft. I wish I could look at this kind of announcement and see something positive, but it's all just thinly veiled espionage.
I can't agree more, totally opaque data will almost certainly be sent to an ever growing number of locations. If I so much as ask about it I'll be labelled a nutter.
Even in Win7 it wasn't particularly fast. I don't get how that one random person working on that "Everything" search utility was able to build instantaneous search on Windows, but Microsoft themselves couldn't figure it out.
In fact, if you disable web search via a registry value or group policy (don't remember which), it becomes a lot faster. Not Everything fast, but significantly faster nonetheless.
It’s the next great thing about surfacing semantically relevant bing ads in your start menu and sending Microsoft summarized “diagnostic data” about everything you do and read to “improve their product experience.” Enjoy!
I'm 100% in for this purely for the fact that it looks like it will actually tell you / provide a button to perform the action. I am a Windows fan and use it as my primary operating system, but I cannot tell you how irrationally angry I get when I end up in the new control panel and there are links like "find out how to do X" which just dump you into Bing search. Microsoft already knows the answer, that answer is potentially relevant to the specific version of windows I'm using, but they need to pump up Bing's numbers so they send me there and honestly the results aren't always that helpful.
I honestly don't see any benefits to the Dev Home app as is besides Dev Drive, which could be cool if it is that simple to just create a drive that is sandboxed.
Perhaps the community will whip up (most likely not), extensions for stuff like Sentry or CI/CD. Could be a neat thing then.
> We have added native support for additional archive formats, including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and many others using the libarchive open-source project. You now can get improved performance of archive functionality during compression on Windows.
This is easily the most exciting part of the whole announcement.
The wiki page is just out of date. It's been supported in libarchive for several years, though it's optional at compile time, so this new Windows build might not have it (I didn't check).
Wonder if it includes support for encrypted 7zip/rar archives, including support to add/modify. From libarchive notes it looks like zip format encrypted archives are supported.
This might actually be a better UI for finding settings than their real settings app cause I swear I can never find anything in it and they move stuff around and rename things every other update
Would be great if it can help you find how to do things in Office apps too, because it's the same problem. Those apps have had so many redesigns over the years, Googling for anything more complex than the most basic of usecases is impossible.
I'm pretty sure I won't get this offered since I am not signed into any Microsoft account on my Windows 11 installation. Or, I get it offered, but requested to sign in.
I have zero issues with signing GitHub Copilot into my GitHub account to use it with Android Studio or VS Code, I just don't want the OS to be logged into a cloud account which I don't really own and where I don't know what's getting synced to it.
Why does it matter if you are signed in? I mean, it's not like not singing in into microsoft account somehow prevents them from collecting telemetry. It's might be /slightly/ harder for them to match your profile, but we are talking about data collection scale that this is arguably irrelevant anyway
We need something like this on Linux, maybe powered by Vicuna. I’m not sure if the current batch of LLaMA variants is coherent enough to work as a digital assistant, but my gut feeling is that a little fine tuning on tool use might be all thats needed.
The hard part I think will be integrating the LLM closely enough with the other programs on your machine that it's actually useful in that context, and not just a glorified chat window or a text interface to do things you can already do more easily with a KB+Mouse.
In a perfect world you give the LLM a python interpreter and it does the rest.
Realistically, with the LLMs we have today, the right approach is probably to curate a set of APIs it's allowed to interact with. Some basic file system access and FFmpeg support would be extremely useful on it's own.
Linux is fundamentally not monolithic like Windows, but maybe some DEs could expose hooks for LLMs to use.
There is also the performance issue. Right now the task energy/memory usage of llama implementations is very high, and it takes some time to load into RAM and/or VRAM. It seems Microsoft is getting around this with cloud inference, and eats the hosting cost (for now).
> little fine tuning on tool use might be all thats needed.
Maybe I am interpreting this wrong, but LORA finetuning is extremely resource intense right now. There are practical alternatives though, like embedding databases people are just now setting up.
The compute requirements are reasonable, but the memory requirements are extremely high, even with some upcoming breakthroughs like 4 bit bitsandbytes.
There's a section in the linked article about improvements to the taskbar, including the following:
> You can now quickly identify and access any instance of each app housed in the taskbar with just one click. All instances of the app are ungrouped with labels on the taskbar.
It makes it sound like you need to click a group first to ungroup it, but maybe there's an option to keep them ungrouped by default. I guess we'll see. You can catch a glimpse of what the labeled windows in the taskbar looks like in the Dev Home video embedded in the article.
Oh yes. This is going to be glorious to watch. Before, prompt injections were mostly a joke. With this, they will truly become a proper, new type of attack vector.
Having spent most of my ChatGPT time trying to get it to correctly write powershell/batch scripts to do different things in Windows, I will be fucking amazed if this button actually does half the things you tell it to.
This sounds like a massive security hole to me, especially if this runs in the cloud.
Is this thing sending _all_ context of the programs on your windows computer to MS?
I'm also a bit curious how they will actually pay to have millions of these LLMs running and how much co2 it will output. This doesn't exactly fit their narrative about the new power saving features in their consoles.
In the video the user drag&drops a file into the copilot window. How do you know that it can see your screen? I believe "works with all apps" only refers to the third party plugins.
You: Clippy, Open the CMD window please.
Clippy: I'm sorry, I'm afraid I can't do that. This integration is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
> AI-Generated review summary: We are making it faster and easier for customers to scan reviews for apps by using the power of AI to compile thousands of reviews into a simple summary, enabling customers to discover new content with ease.
Would be cool to have an option to actually read those reviews. If I open Firefox page in the Store app it says 420 ratings but I can only read a single review. If I press 'See all' it just shows an empty page. If I open Firefox store page[0] in the browser it says 'No one has reviewed this application yet. Be the first to add a review.' Reviews seem to be split by country or by some other criteria for no good reason.
My issue with this is that it feels less like a new toy to play with and more like a new worm that is meant to hook me, my workflow, and my data into their silo. I'd like to see better demarcation in windows tooling when it comes to how they're managing user data. Similar to how developers tend to colour code DEV and PROD environments so that they don't accidentally alter PROD. I'd like to see colour coding on microsoft tooling that delineates "local data that is processed locally, and is 100% private" processes from "local data that will be processed in the cloud and possibly stored for training later without you being able to know" processes. The moment data leaves my local network, I assume it is compromised, so having clearer delineation will help me know what tools to avoid.
I don't know if I'm quite willing to go there yet, but LLMs are barrelling towards a level where, if the pace continues, they will easily be looked upon as the most import advancement of computing.
The fact that training a statistical model on terabytes of text can lead quite naturally and obviously to what is shown in the video in the webpage is shocking. The shocking part is how natural it feels, and how I know this is something that can work.
Congratulations to the teams that have been going down this path, this is wildly impressive stuff.
Note namechecking every non-Apple CPU vendor and NVIDIA - but not mentioning AMD/Intel GPUs. Another note: Lots of small improvements, but not allowing users to move the Taskbar (to Microsoft, some things are important). Oh, and they haven't abandoned ReFS - so will it be available without Windows Professional for Enterprise etc.? I can't see many devs paying for that alone.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] thread(edit: tbf while I don't have Windows 11, this feels like a safe presumption)
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/restor...
Perhaps the community will whip up (most likely not), extensions for stuff like Sentry or CI/CD. Could be a neat thing then.
This is easily the most exciting part of the whole announcement.
2. Ads in the rest of the OS.
Update: looks like no: https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/wiki/LibarchiveForm... :(
Where is zstandard or lz4 on ntfs? Meta and data checksumming and autorecovery? New and improved filesystems?
Would be great if it can help you find how to do things in Office apps too, because it's the same problem. Those apps have had so many redesigns over the years, Googling for anything more complex than the most basic of usecases is impossible.
>now with AI
Now you can actually talk to Big Brother!
I have zero issues with signing GitHub Copilot into my GitHub account to use it with Android Studio or VS Code, I just don't want the OS to be logged into a cloud account which I don't really own and where I don't know what's getting synced to it.
Thanks but no thanks, it is a long time ago I took a different path which leads to a different future, one which is not likely to be extinguished.
Realistically, with the LLMs we have today, the right approach is probably to curate a set of APIs it's allowed to interact with. Some basic file system access and FFmpeg support would be extremely useful on it's own.
There is also the performance issue. Right now the task energy/memory usage of llama implementations is very high, and it takes some time to load into RAM and/or VRAM. It seems Microsoft is getting around this with cloud inference, and eats the hosting cost (for now).
> little fine tuning on tool use might be all thats needed.
Maybe I am interpreting this wrong, but LORA finetuning is extremely resource intense right now. There are practical alternatives though, like embedding databases people are just now setting up.
> You can now quickly identify and access any instance of each app housed in the taskbar with just one click. All instances of the app are ungrouped with labels on the taskbar.
It makes it sound like you need to click a group first to ungroup it, but maybe there's an option to keep them ungrouped by default. I guess we'll see. You can catch a glimpse of what the labeled windows in the taskbar looks like in the Dev Home video embedded in the article.
A new permanent taskbar button opens an OpenAI LLM trained to use Windows 11.
You ask the LLM to do what you want -- "summarize this email and send the summary to my boss."
It works with all applications. It sees what you're seeing.
As a longtime Linux user, it pains me to say this:
It's... beautiful.
...
But it's also scary, because it's not under your control. Ultimately, it obeys only the bureaucracy at Microsoft.
In that sense, it's like "MOTHER" in Ridely Scott's Alien and "HAL" in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Sounds like it will also see prompt-injection malware hidden in plaintext documents.
https://greshake.github.io
https://kai-greshake.de/posts/in-escalating-order-of-stupidi...
perfect summary of modern Windows
I'm also a bit curious how they will actually pay to have millions of these LLMs running and how much co2 it will output. This doesn't exactly fit their narrative about the new power saving features in their consoles.
Follow it up with "And send out my resume, because I can apparently be replaced by a computer."
Does it also snitch on you to your boss? "Here is my assessment of the work habits of cs702 for this week."
In the video the user drag&drops a file into the copilot window. How do you know that it can see your screen? I believe "works with all apps" only refers to the third party plugins.
Would be cool to have an option to actually read those reviews. If I open Firefox page in the Store app it says 420 ratings but I can only read a single review. If I press 'See all' it just shows an empty page. If I open Firefox store page[0] in the browser it says 'No one has reviewed this application yet. Be the first to add a review.' Reviews seem to be split by country or by some other criteria for no good reason.
[0] https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/mozilla-firefox/9NZV...
I hope it's possible to remove the AI controls (especially the copilot button) from the UI.
The fact that training a statistical model on terabytes of text can lead quite naturally and obviously to what is shown in the video in the webpage is shocking. The shocking part is how natural it feels, and how I know this is something that can work.
Congratulations to the teams that have been going down this path, this is wildly impressive stuff.
Note namechecking every non-Apple CPU vendor and NVIDIA - but not mentioning AMD/Intel GPUs. Another note: Lots of small improvements, but not allowing users to move the Taskbar (to Microsoft, some things are important). Oh, and they haven't abandoned ReFS - so will it be available without Windows Professional for Enterprise etc.? I can't see many devs paying for that alone.