Windows Is Adding AI Agents That Can Change Your Settings

The registry never has and never will be simple nor usable. Windows is rotten to the core.

Just to be the devil's advocate here: There are way more settings now than back then. That interface wouldn't cut it either.

I'm dualbooting CachyOS with windows, no issues with my rtx 4070 super.

Windows 11 actually released 3.5 years ago!

I have an nvidia GPU and it worked out of the box.

I know what the point is. It sucks.

Firstly they still have the control panel.

For now

Secondly they are slowly transitioning everything relevant from the control panel to the settings app.

The settings app is half-baked dog shit.

Thirdly even having everything in the control panel didn’t make it easy to find exactly what you wanted.

It was certainly easier than the current state of things.

This makes it so you can just say “set my power profile to balanced” and it would do so. That’s a nice, welcome addition.

Sure assuming the AI understands your request and the setting you want hasn't been removed because they wanted to put everything in the settings app and the one you wanted conflicts with their data gathering and add presentation and it's not running in the background bogging down your system all the time or trying to interject itself into whatever you're trying to do without involving it.

Bullshit to all those points. If you couldnt find it in the control panel before, you sure as shit cant find it now.

Also, they've been "slowly" transitioning for over two years, wtf? We waiting for the next OS at this point?

I do NOT need voice activation, I know how to use a keyboard and mouse, the core components of input for a computer.

You want to use your voice, talk to your mom cause I'm done with her.

j/k on the mom part

I agree option 1 is the correct choice, though it does appear they are slowly going that direction…

Really? Because every new Windows version is even worse than the one before it. There are now 3? 4? different places to change network settings, but only one of them actually works correctly, if you modify the wrong one it will act like it worked but will silently break all networking on the machine instead.

Shit you know ... I feel like Microsoft has done that with the registry and gpedit... a real shame they seem to disregard those controls when it suits their new advertising model... erm... bing engagement system.

We've had config files and scripts for ages. Most of us are pissed that all of those methods half work or are depreciating away for no reason other than some UIx twat couldn't be bothered to hook something properly so they just reskin an element and misplaced half the functions. Bonus points if they did so while wasting more system resources, breaking their own search pointers, and infuriating sysadmins and users alike.

Now I'll give you that new methods can absolutely be implemented and replace (effectively even) old, longstanding methods... but Microsoft has utterly missed the boat on this. Repeatedly.

To your ai statement: Look I won't comment on where AI may or may not end up in 5 years but I know that getting a black box to hallucinate 40% less has got to be infinitely harder than indexing a filesystem, a series of .lnk files, and maybe... maybe some control names. Considering they had most of that working (even if you had the index disabled!) in windows 2000 / 9x / XP it blows my mind why this has not been resolved when it's basically a meme at this point.

No other OS has this basic problem. Why are we building onto something when the foundation is shit? I'm certain there's developers at Microsoft that have skills - but I'll be damned if I see any of them taking a step forward without two back.

Block kernel level driver access to shit. Maybe improve resource usage on existing processes. Fix the goddamn search. Don't bury a setting behind ANOTHER useless dialog. Fix something - don't jam more useless shit down our throats. We don't need new: we need working.

At the rate we're going the next windows version (maybe even 11) will intersect with Linux (pick a flavor) in terms of compatibility, usability, and stability with Linux doing literally nothing but existing. To be fair every other version is hot garbage. I'm sure we can ride out 11 on 10 ... right?

I can barely even set a static IP on Windows Server these days. I wiped out a partition the other day as well since the UI is so slow, its like it's using a REST api to do partitioning.

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 Image

I don't think anyone's ever said Linux is user friendly for non technical people. Atleast not earnestly or without hard coping

My biggest complaint about Linux is how literally everything requires you to do some arcane magic in the terminal.

Just make it a button damn it. As it is I just copy and paste what I'm told into the terminal so you could have just added a button into the operating system that just did that behind the scenes.

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.

You can just use powershell. It's that easy. /s

just rand(0,1000) from a text file of cats :)

If this literal malware (I say that because again, what MS is proposing here is what some actual viruses used to do, typically to an even worse degree than simply changing settings) gets ported to the Enterprise/Education and IoT SKUs, the people who work on this stuff for a living at the local call center or public school district are going to have a nightmare on their hands.