“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.
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
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”
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.
I figured that’s what this was not their way to help find where ms moved them
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
I set up my pc as dual boot a few weeks back. Opened up windows yesterday, for the first time in a while, to export a few settings from thunderbird. Took about half an hour to get it started. Felt like popping round to the house of an abusive ex to pick up the last of my things.
Couldn’t make a proper settings menu and AI is dumb as rocks…… - + - = - -? Shoot control panel is better than this combo.
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.
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Ot you can just right click the start menu
Yes! I really feel all this copilot bullshit is to hide the fact they released windows 11 broken as fuck and here 2.5 years later it’s still a pile of shit. It’s just fucked. I have to use it daily for work and clients and it’s done nothing but prepare me to install W10 LTSC this summer or move to Linux. Problem with Linux is a have an Nvidia GPU and don’t like having to fuck with that, otherwise Zorin it will be. Windows 11 pushes me everyday to hate it more and more. Seriously. Daily fucking updates for broken shit and shoving AI down our throats. Fuck windows.
I’m in a similar situation, though I’ve already got a dual boot set up so it’s just a matter of only using Windows when I just absolutely have to.
Earlier today, I tried to zip a directory on Windows 11 with the context menu, and it wouldn’t do it! It’s a feature that’s been in Windows forever and is even in Ubuntu, but somehow over at Microsoft they’ve managed to break it. Incredible.
Windows 11 actually released 3.5 years ago!
Oof.
I’m dualbooting CachyOS with windows, no issues with my rtx 4070 super.
CachyOS rocks. I settled on it after trying many Linux distros and CachyOS won. All distros had pros and cons CachyOS was easy to update. Easy to install and remove programs without the terminal. Proton and Wine run great on it so most of my Steam and Epic games are playable and all media types play without tinkering. That was an issue with Fedora.
I’ll look into it again this summer. It’s on the list, just not at the moment
I have an nvidia GPU and it worked out of the box.
I need to look into it more, it’s on my list for this summer
“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!”
While the precise words were different, I otherwise had this exact exchange with Gemini.
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.
I appreciate the sentiment - in fact it’s been fun watching AI being integrated into home assistant by end users and being given full control, lots of incredibly interesting times.
But not all AI is the same. Somehow I expect that Microsoft’s implementation will make it ridiculously easy to opt-in to Microsoft services and relaxed privacy settings, but will leave opting out as an exercise left to the user.
I agree but with Microsoft you know an air-gapped ‘AI agent’ is never going to happen.
Option 1: Admit your UI choices (made mostly to accommodate an all tablet PC future that never arrived) are terrible and redesign the Windows settings screens to display all new and old settings that still work, with search functions.
Option 2: Spend tens of billions training an AI to find those settings and change them.
Well done, Microsoft. I knew you’d make the right choice.
Tell me this Ai is in-box and not external like all the others.
If not, there’s gonna be a shed load of upset boomers who killed their net and can’t get it back.
Even the little blurb right here says it’s on-device.
I agree option 1 is the correct choice, though it does appear they are slowly going that direction… very slowly.
But they definitely didn’t spend millions, nevermind billions, on shoehorning this one extra feature into their existing AI models.
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.
They’ve moved away from touch centric controls, and are “slowly” moving things into the modern settings. I never claimed their shit was clean, just moving in what seems to be the right direction, for the most part.
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.
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.
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.
The real problem with the search bar is that Microsoft chose to make it language dependent, so you will need to know entirely different search terms to navigate e.g. a German Windows install’s settings that way than an English one.
Well sort of, you’re right that they’ve introduced a search bar but that’s all they’ve done. It’s all still broken down into fairly arbitrarily arrived at categories it’s not in alphabet order, or in fact any real order.
Sound settings are under peripherals for god’s sake. I mean sure okay speakers are a peripheral I guess but when you say peripheral you think things like webcams, not basic I/O.
Is I/O in this context input/output? I’ve seen it used this way before but I’m not super techie so no clue.
It is, yes.
First time using Microsoft products, is it?
Glad to be using Linux on all my computers
Holy f***, God forbid making settings menus that actually get you to where you want to go, definitely wouldn’t want to do that, much better to AI.
No shit… If you want to solve the common frustration of not being able to find settings, maybe don’t put half of them in a settings app and the other half in the control panel, and then rename and move all of them every year.
Don’t forget, outright removing a UI for modifying settings forcing users to use registry mods, potentially a PS command, or a third party tool to force the behavior you lost from a simple setting removal.
I dumped Windows about 18 months ago, before their recall and copilot BS. There are many Linux distros out there. They are free and there is almost nothing you can do with Windows that can’t be done on Linux. These days, most games for Windows can be played on Linux using Proton and Wine. There is no reason to keep Windows and plenty of reasons to dump Windows, like not wanting your personal data stolen or monitored by corporations and governments.
Is Microsoft trying to kill itself?
Yes
Hopefully
