Shareholders

Billionaires, looking for more mass control.

It is not for our benefit.

this phrasing had to be intentional xD no social media worker can be this clueless

Damn I really missed my opportunity

Apparently when Satya Nadella took over, Steve Ballmer told him "don't screw up". In terms of stock price and profits, he absolutely hasn't. In terms of producing products that consumers might actually want to pay for, he has failed completely and Microsoft has never been in a worse position. But those two things are completely disconnected now so it's fine.

Why have windows calculator when you can have windows calculator with AI guess what you want to calculate, get it wrong, spy on you, and use that spying to serve you targetted ads all at the same time? #innovation

It has been glorious watching Microsoft do this, they deserve this dead end and much worse honestly.

I mean... I don't know I guess it gives me hope how incompetent the people at the top of Microsoft truly seem to be?

The way I see it, they think GenAI is the new portal to information, the way search has been for the last 25-30 years. They want to control that portal, because it’s worth trillions over time.

This is why they’re cramming it into everything and worrying about use cases later. It’s a land grab.

What do you mean people don't want machine learning chatbots spewing out bullshit in every facet of their lives and technology use?

We really need to get rid of the "AI" buzzword and refer to machine learning chatbots as what they are.

But they made Google dance, right? Maybe that’s all Satya Nadella needed out of it.

Cant write off something that isnt even in the books...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cdJQ8UyVLA

You are wrong daikiki. AI is a tech that is going to change everything, it's the "computers" of this era, they are investing in a technology that will boom. Even if you don't think it will they will push it, see what google is doing, they rigged up the search results and now you necessarily have to use AI to get good answers, it's also there by default so you can't really avoid it.

Sorry for being an idiot, but what is an agentic OS?

Agentic OS is a buzzword that's meant to imply that the OS is (or has) an AI agent doing useful things for you in the background without you explicitly asking it to do those things (ie an agent working for you). For an agent to be useful, (they say) it has to know and learn everything it can about you, your life, your friends, activities, contacts, work, and so on.

The tradeoff is pretty extreme though. Everything you do on the PC is watched, analyzed, catalogued, and retained by MIcrosoft (and possibly whoever they choose to share the info with, which is likely every government that asks). The features that do this are generically called client-side scanning and Microsoft has a few specific variants you can read about called Copilot Recall, and Copilot Vision.

"Agentic" is the buzzword to distinguish "LLM will tell you how to do it" versus "LLM will just execute the commands it thinks are right".

Particularly if a process is GUI driven, Agentic is seen as a more theoretically useful approach since a LLM 'how-to' would still be tedious to walk through yourself.

Given how LLM usually mis-predicts and doesn't do what I want, I'm no where near the point where I'd trust "Agentic" approaches. Hypothetically if it could be constrained to a domain where it can't do anything that can't trivially be undone, maybe, but given for example a recent VS Code issue where it turned out the "jail" placed around Agentic operations turned out to be ineffective, I'm not thinking too much of such claimed mitigations.

Windows 10 had a better kernel than 7. Unfortunately, that kernel was packaged with the rest of windows 10.

Wild guess:

Log everything the user is doing. Have clippy interface prompt the user to take some work off their hands. Do some web searches, start storing a dossier about the 'project'. Give the user a rough outline to complete their project based on a trained llm and some web searches. Ask the user if the outline looks good. Ask the user if they'd like some help completing some of the steps. Burning through tokens the whole time, storing telemetry with 100% knowledge of what they user does/wants to do. Selling that exact data to project management software companies and companies that write middleware to do this work. Bind everything together into a virtual notebook where users can return to any content at any step.

It's some AI crap they try to push on us.

I mean I would love a linux distro that had a local agent that could answer queries. I view it as sorta like graphics compared to command line but if it needs networked resources outside of it doing its own searches. No thank you.

This is really just a guess but... I think "agent" in this context means a personalised AI.

Training gen AI models requires huge amounts of resources. Its not practical to train an AI for your personal use.

Creating an agent is something like, taking an existing model, asking it to keep your entire browser history in mind while you ask it to do your homework.

IMO its actually one of the big limitations of gen AI, but somehow the word is supposed to mean the opposite. As in, the current approach has reached a dead end requiring exponentially more resources for less and less improvement. So because we can't make a model that just knows or learns everything, we have to make agents that know lots about specific things.

Which is why Windows 7 is the best operating system microsoft has, and seemingly will, ever produce.

hear hear!

Win 7 sucked too.

Win XP was the beginning of enshitification.

You just have nostalgia.

Agent work can be pretty magical. I've been using cursor recently and the fact that it can just execute commands on your PC means you can just tell it to do something and it does. Troubleshooting as it goes

If you are evil it is....

At least 30 years.

That's one thing I love about FOSS, that the only stakeholders are the devs and the users. The goal is to make software that's good at what it does.

When it comes to any tech company's product, you not only have all the stakeholders that corrupt the end product, but you have giant teams of marketers, designers, engineers, and managers that need to constantly justify their existence and or be efficiently utilized at all times.

Honestly it's like lesser version of enshittification, the tendency of commercial products to always be changing things.

They have to because the capitalist imperative of infinite, progressive growth forces them to constantly seek out additional speculative avenues for profit. The potential for a valuable product (stock) is more valuable than a good product and is cheaper to produce than a good product.

It is important to note that you are also a product in a surveillance capitalist state thaf commodifies every second of your day. The speculative value on more profitable avenues to source and sell your data has more speculative value than anything your patronage would generate.

Excel 97 was perfect. Now I can barely find the shit I actually need to use because of all the "features" they've added to justify their jobs.

It's about keeping us guessing and reminding us who's in charge.

They don't want us to get attached to things.

Yeah, at least fix the bugs first.

Same here!