“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.”
Changing settings is only frustating because the modern Settings apps sucks ass lol. You can bet everyone was less frustrated with Control Panel.
Nah, did you forget how hidden and inconsistent some of the setting location was in control panel? The windows 11 settings app may have brought some new issues to the table, but ease of finding settings is not it.
If I wasn’t already familiar with how the control panel is laid out, I wouldn’t have any idea how to find most of what I used to do on it. Also, you can only set static IP per adapter in control panel, not for each WiFi connection. That was stupid.
User: “Cortana, secure my PC against data harvesting and surveillance from Microsoft.”
Cortana: “Dave, you are not allowed to have privacy. The 1st, 4th, and 5th amendments do not apply to corporations. Also, Trump is the best that ever was. Stop posting progressive propaganda, else fines will be imposed.”
Alright, that’s fucking it. Next long weekend I have, I’m figuring out how to install Bazzite.
Watch a quick YouTube video about Bazzite. The installation is easy.
I’ve been trying to get some of my games to work on Bazzite… no hope!
nVidia GPU’s get a 20% decrease in performance. AMD works better.
Get that POS off my computer.
google has a spying app(you will have to delete occasionally) on any android phones if your using google in any manner.
Are you talking about google services? Because all google apps are spying on you
The biggest frustration is not me changing settings.
The biggest frustration is windows changing back those settings whenever it feels like it.
This is just doubling down on the “greatest frustration”
I figured that’s what this was not their way to help find where ms moved them
Well tbf, they did keep moving them on me and hiding them from me.
Wouldn’t be surprised if they moved them again…behind an AI wall that can interact with them but you can’t without using that AI. Also they’ll continue to reset them whenever they feel like it, if they even successfully get changed by the AI, if the AI doesn’t say “I can’t let you do that Dave” when you try and disable telemetry.
Or maybe the AI just lies and says it changed the setting and then doesn’t. There’s a ‘delete my data’ button on reddit profiles that is literally a fake button, it wouldn’t even be a new tactic.
Couldn’t they have used ai to figure out how to make the settings less obscure instead.
Apple has entered the chat.
you can only see that apple is in the chat by pressing cmd+shift+alt+l+7
Holy shit.
Your ux SUCKS SO MUCH, that instead of making it not shitty…
You developed AI for it?
Are you fucking kidding me
How inept are these developers
They broke alt tab.
That’s how fucking inept they are
In what way?
Multiple ways
- there was an update that meant alt-tab brought you a black screen
- there was another one that meant it didn’t tab between the two most recent windows, but brought up a selection. They tried to tout this as a feature you had to turn off
So one is a bug, and another is a feature I actually use everyday. Did you mean the selection prevents you from quickly changing between recent windows? I don’t remember it actually slowing down my switching at all.
You brought back an old, old memory of reading a Dave Barry novel about computers. In it, he describes going to a Microsoft convention in which they introduced, IIRC, Windows 95; while describing the taskbar, they apparently touted “no more alt+tab!”
Microsoft Windows be like
**bangs chest** **glass panel of case explodes**
This is why I got my 70 year old mother on a frameworks laptop running pop OS. It looks like a Mac and she thinks its pretty. Switching cost is over hyped. Fuck big tech
“Hey Copilot. Delete yourself, Recall and all other bloatware from my system. Thank you.”
Copilot: “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”
“Hey Dave, I installed CandyCrush and the LinkedIn App for windows during the latest update!”
I actually like the ability for a local AI to help with this in theory. I don’t think it’s an excuse for unintuitive UIs though.
Wow, a take that isn’t just “AI bad?” Wild.
Yeah I thought it was weird that it couldn’t do this in windows in the first place when you had to click a button to allow the AI to change your computer from light to dark mode or something. It was right 99% of the time in my brief testing, and just include an undo button in case it isn’t.
All of that said, I’m glad to be on Linux where there isn’t any AI built into my OS, but I’m also not the target audience for needing an AI to change my settings for me.
Seems like it would have been cheaper, easier, and better pr to just simplify settings or have them in more logical categories, but what would I know.
If a problem exists, and you try to fix it without AI, do you even stand a chance at getting promoted?
It’s rather apparent that you composed this comment without AI. Guess I’ll have to give that pay raise to myself again…
Of course this is a solved problem and has been a solved problem for at least 15 years now. It’s called a flat wide hierarchy. Rather than trying to put everything into categories you just put everything into alphabetical order and then have a search box. Want to change the background, it’s under B for Background, rather than having to go to
Display Settings > Customisation > Desktop Background > Custom Background > Select ImageWindows already does that. If you type Wallpaper in the search on your task bar, changing your background is at the top. Maybe AI is useful for people who don’t know what the thing they want to do is called? It’s just an extension of flat wide.
If you type Wallpaper in the Windows search bar you’ll likely get bing results for ”Top trendy wallpapers to spice up your living room!”
What do you mean likely? You don’t.
First time using Microsoft products, is it?
It’s much more fun to just half-ass a new control panel with only a few features, and then hide the old, fully-functional control panel.
Bonus points if you can then begrudgingly finally show the old, useful, control panel when a user clicks 6 layers deep in the new panel.
Maybe if you didn’t split settings into that half-baked settings app, then leave control panel in place with the remaining settings, but make control panel increasingly difficult to get to, we wouldn’t need a stupid AI agent to help us change settings.
If you have to supply your users with AI support to figure out how to configure your OS, you might be doing something wrong.
No regular user can configure anything. Most are barely literate and have the reading comprehension of a 6-8 year old.
Ai allows them to just say, turn down the brightness, turn down the volume, use this program to open this file from now on, which makes 10% configuration accessible to the 99% who otherwise would have 1% or less.
For them, adding the AI is probably cheaper then fixing the UI.
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.
