this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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"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."

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[–] Apeman42@lemmy.world 2 points 36 minutes ago

Alright, that's fucking it. Next long weekend I have, I'm figuring out how to install Bazzite.

[–] FourWaveforms@lemm.ee 27 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Couldn't they have used ai to figure out how to make the settings less obscure instead.

[–] poopkins@lemmy.world 0 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Apple has entered the chat.

[–] silasmariner@programming.dev 6 points 4 hours ago

you can only see that apple is in the chat by pressing cmd+shift+alt+l+7

[–] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 45 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

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"

[–] goferking0@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 2 hours ago

I figured that's what this was not their way to help find where ms moved them

[–] ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 8 hours ago

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.

[–] andybytes@programming.dev 22 points 13 hours ago

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

[–] SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 59 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] Taleya@aussie.zone 19 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

They broke alt tab.

That's how fucking inept they are

[–] toynbee@lemmy.world 6 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

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!"

[–] Taleya@aussie.zone 3 points 5 hours ago

Dear god, those fools never worked with two spreadsheets at once in their life

[–] dai@lemmy.world 11 points 17 hours ago (1 children)
[–] wetbeardhairs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 13 hours ago
**bangs chest**  
**glass panel of case explodes**
[–] ABetterTomorrow@lemm.ee 7 points 13 hours ago

Couldn’t make a proper settings menu and AI is dumb as rocks….. - + - = - -? Shoot control panel is better than this combo.

[–] bampop@lemmy.world 17 points 18 hours ago

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.

[–] GenosseFlosse@feddit.org 4 points 13 hours ago

Surely there would be no way scammers or hackers would take advantage of this with some crafty prompts that somehow get feed into the agent...

[–] FinishingDutch@lemmy.world 34 points 21 hours ago (7 children)

Ah Christ. We’ve collectively regressed so much in computer knowledge that people can’t even find a settings menu? Even I have trouble believing that one.

I unironically had a friend who hated Linux Mint for awhile because he believed for YEARS you always double click applications in the task bar like you would on your desktop. When he switched he was so furious how apps would crash and/or just not start until I told him "dude.. just click it once"

I have no idea how this didn't happen on Windows or how he never had something open up twice

[–] GenosseFlosse@feddit.org 5 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

The problem that i cant find the setting, or it's in a different app or intentionally cant be changed easily. I want to limit my battery to charge only when below 30%; but i cant do that in battery or power settings. I want to disable some "feature" where windows randomly adds a new keybord layout to windows, but this is not a setting but seems to be a bug. I want to completely disable usb- or lan-wakeup, but despite changing settings in the device manager my desktop is sometimes turned on in the morning after i set it to hibernate the night before. I dont want one-drive or cloud, but this is also not a setting but a design decision by the MS marketing department to make money with their half-baked cloud solutions.

Disabling wol and USB is usually a bios-level setting. Everything else is windows being shite.

[–] endeavor@sopuli.xyz 10 points 17 hours ago

kinda fair considering windows has like 20 control panels that should all do the same thing but at the end of the day you still need to use regedit.

[–] Biyoo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 points 21 hours ago

Finding settings in Windows is pretty hard

[–] smeenz@lemmy.nz 19 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (6 children)

The last time finding settings in Windows was straight forward was Windows 95. Since the stupid dumbed down 'settings' app was vomited upon us, it has been nearly impossible to find the thing you know is there but has now been renamed and moved, and isn't even indexed in the settings app search bar.

[–] FurryMemesAccount@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

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

[–] smeenz@lemmy.nz 4 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

Have you tried to configure gnome beyond what is offered in its GUI ?

[–] Mesophar@pawb.social 4 points 13 hours ago

The reasoning I moved from Windows to Linux was this right here.

If I'm going to be fighting with Windows anyway, because of the registry giving me issues, then the drawback of "but Linux hard! You have to configure things!" was moot.

[–] FurryMemesAccount@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

No, I'm a happy i3wm user.

Because I've tried to get GNOME to do what I wanted. (Also it was too slow on the machines I was using at the time).

And that's besides the point: on linux you can just use a good DE without messing with much -- KDE, cinnamon, etc...

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[–] Aeri@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago

Well, there's the small issue of Windows now having control panel the settings app and some shitty third thing sprinkled in there somewhere. There are some things that should have settings but don't. You can no longer simply disable Windows update on your own, because Microsoft has decided they know best.

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[–] Notso@lemm.ee 16 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

"Hey Copilot. Delete yourself, Recall and all other bloatware from my system. Thank you."

[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 13 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

Copilot: "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"

[–] GenosseFlosse@feddit.org 6 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

"Hey Dave, I installed CandyCrush and the LinkedIn App for windows during the latest update!"

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[–] csm10495@sh.itjust.works 18 points 21 hours ago (3 children)

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.

[–] TeddE@lemmy.world 5 points 19 hours ago

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.

[–] Joelk111@lemmy.world 7 points 21 hours ago

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.

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[–] altphoto@lemmy.today 2 points 13 hours ago

WTF! Just keep it!

You know that friend who wants to sell you his laptop but keeps showing you know it works instead of letting you try it? That Microsoft. So I say fuck them, just keep the fucking thing if they love it so much that they can't let me use it the way I want to use it -> Linux.

[–] GalacticTaterTot@lemmy.world 55 points 1 day ago (11 children)

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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[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 98 points 1 day ago (22 children)

Perhaps you could just make them easier to find by putting them in one location... You could call it a "control panel".

[–] endeavor@sopuli.xyz 3 points 17 hours ago

Curious who the hell downvoted you.

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[–] Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 18 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

They really are trying to drive away their user base huh

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[–] sexy_peach@feddit.org 9 points 21 hours ago

Glad to be using Linux on all my computers

[–] The_Caretaker@lemm.ee 9 points 21 hours ago

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.

[–] AnotherPenguin@programming.dev 6 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Easy way to automatically set settings that are convenient for them and disguise it as AI being AI

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