Microsoft lost my trust a long time ago. For the last 10-15 years, my only relationship with them is, “how much sh*t am I willing to put up with before I switch to something else?”
“We won’t turn it on and will never use it to spy on you” says government backed surveillance monopoly know for sneaking spyware into products and making it impossible to remove.
Opt-in but you get an annoying full screen popup every boot, like for the windows11 upgrade. It’s only a matter of time, til they sell AI recall features as Win12 and then beg you to upgrade for free, pretty please!
Outside of the “Microsoft bad” comments, this is a prime example of why big tech companies need to stop promoting AI leads to a position where they are able to have influence over initiatives outside of AI.
The worst thing to happen to basically every product/service in tech right now is AI. It’s made Google unreliable in the eyes of normal people for the first time in decades, it’s destroying trust in Amazon content across reviews and Kindle, it’s adding features to Facebook that no one ever wanted, etc.
And the annoying thing is, this tech can be exceptionally useful when it’s actually been implemented thoughtfully.
Effortlessly cleaning up audio recordings using AI tooling is incredible, for example. There are audio recordings that I’ve been able to make sound great that previously would’ve required me to make some calls and ask for a bunch of re-recordings and added days of delays to a project.
AI in image recognition to vastly speed up medical imaging diagnosis, or analysing lab work? Amazing. Asking unpaid medical students to laboriously pore over thousands of images sounds like a nightmare.
Better offline translation? Sign me the fuck up.
Image description for the visually impaired, like my sister? Genuinely life changing. A lot of content online isn’t properly tagged, or has zero attention placed on accessibility.
The list goes on. Unfortunately, with big tech being as they are, their first thoughts turn to “which implementations of AI will aid us the most in scraping userdata and showing ads?”
The list goes on. Unfortunately, with big tech being as they are, their first thoughts turn to “which implementations of AI will aid us the most in scraping userdata and showing ads?”
Don’t forget making sure the peons can squeeze out more productivity for the 1%.
There have been several instances where people have released ebooks that are fully AI generated, and are basically scams with no real content or information.
Yeah bur for the non tech oriented user it’s still difficult . Most devices bought come with OEM install.
Even for a regular user it’s going to sound like There is a virus that reads and remembers everything on your computer but you can turn it off and trust us it would be off.
Even for PCs that come with Windows preinstalled, there’s still the need to set it up at the first start (account, privacy and such), so I think that the option to enable Recall will be there.
I guess if you want to verify the truth of this statement, look at Unity. They walked back their per-install system, but the indie community still moved away from them because it seemed clear they might try to do that at some point in the future.
It’s what they should have done from the beginning, there must be a horde of MSFT employees holding back the urge of saying “told you so” to their boss right now lol
I really hope the damage is done. They need to be knocked down a peg. This all should have been done first. Whoever thought this was a good idea is horrible.
They’ll always play right on or just over the line to see when/how people push back. They knew what they were doing, they started at a 9 intentionally so that people push back to and live with a 7
I mean… Yeah? That’s kind of the point isn’t it? Test the waters and figure out just how far they can push it? Find the limit of acceptance and ride that?
OH, it was been a long time coming seeing this type of headline again, it’s…glorius!
Microsoft is most years a #1 and sometimes a #2 Funder of: Rust, Python, and Linux. Are those destined for an E^3 “rug pull” too? Will it ever stop this kind of behavior, consistently conforming our behavior to itself with the money and industry position it leverages?
Don’t forget in calculating that industry position that OpenAI is now able to contract to the DoD for offensive capability.
While the influence is much smaller than with windows or apple, it’s still there. Linux is hardened against capitalism, but if we start believing that it has no influence we set ourselves up for Debian Pro+ in the future. Just because it’s good now doesn’t mean it capitalism can’t shit all over it faster than we believe possible…
This. “Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.” has been Microsoft’s mantra for a long time, now. Folks need to recognize the signs that their favorite things are being targeted before they get ruined.
So does Slack. But while they are 2 of the foundational distros, neither is the first go to choice of the average user. Neither distro caters to the mainstream user. If you are choosing either of those two distros, you are definitely old school and/or are looking for a solution to problem that is perhaps more of an edge case.
Man, there is a LOT of people in this thread hoping to normalize this, or pretend it will happen anyway, or that it’s ‘not really a PR disaster’, or that people will ignore it, or-
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