It's bold to assert that the PC was ever cool.
posted by Reyturner at 12:14 PM on May 20 [4 favorites]

Where do I turn this 'feature' off?
posted by signal at 12:15 PM on May 20 [36 favorites]

Also, I'm expecting the option that helps you remain private while "shopping for gifts" *wink*wink* is going to be the most-used on any platform that implements it.
posted by signal at 12:16 PM on May 20 [1 favorite]

We don't need the PC to be cool, we just need it to work.
posted by HypotheticalWoman at 12:21 PM on May 20 [11 favorites]

Microsoft is promising users that the Recall index remains local and private on-device.

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:22 PM on May 20 [25 favorites]

I guess for a while at least I'll make sure there are no qualcomm chips put there for my computer to spy on me. Because of course the "Recall" feature will remain "local and private on-device" until there's a big enough dumptruck of money sent over from ad servers and marketers.
posted by tclark at 12:22 PM on May 20 [5 favorites]

Not to hog this, but from the "new era" link:

Being able to tell your computer, in plain English, what you want to do has long been a dream, but now appears within reach thanks to generative AI.
On-device AI could also be used to serve up context and suggestions in real time.

Does anybody really want this? My experience with any system "serving up context and suggestions" has been Clippy with a shinier skin, that's it. I know what I want my computer to do, and I can get there in a few clicks (or a single command in the terminal). Why would I want to waste my time and sanity trying to get an LLM to understand what I want?

This seems like a corollary of the Torment Nexus Paradox—it's like these companies read the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, got to the part about Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's Genuine People Personalities, and decided that was their business model.
posted by signal at 12:24 PM on May 20 [20 favorites]

This will certainly make snooping on your spouse's PC thousands of times more efficient. What I'm having trouble understanding is what other use-case there is.
posted by mittens at 12:26 PM on May 20 [4 favorites]

Is this something where I am literally going to have to learn computer stuff in order to have a laptop that doesn't have AI features because I will no longer be able to buy one off the shelf? If there is one thing I do NOT want on any device, it is some kind of AI garbage. Also I don't want my washer to connect to the internet, or to be able to read email on my stovetop.
posted by Frowner at 12:27 PM on May 20 [9 favorites]

Windows can't even find a file in the folder I have open by typing its name sometimes, gonna pass on it trying all this other shit even if they weren't invoking the data demons to do it. I am confident someone will have ah andy way to turn all this garbage off the second they try to poison my OS with it.
posted by GoblinHoney at 12:32 PM on May 20 [16 favorites]

I'm one of the true-believers in this tech who thinks it's going to be as big a change as the internet was for PCs.

Cool that Microsoft is getting serious about ditching x64, too! Good riddance to old rubbish.
posted by torokunai at 12:51 PM on May 20 [1 favorite]

Every single time someone comes up with a way to tell the computer what you want it to do in plain English it always demonstrates how comically limited plain English is at describing what people want computers to do.

My fear is that generative AI is just adaptive enough that instead failing spectacularly some sort of bastardized "language" will emerge that's just as cryptic and frustrating to non-computer users as our current interfaces but with the added benefit of also being cryptic and frustrating to people who were previously proficient at using computers.

Imagine a future where airy persiflage has all sorts of undocumented effects on what you're trying to produce. Imagine a future where complimenting or scolding the computer actually does something! Imagine a future where you literally need to know the "magic words" in order to do stuff.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 12:51 PM on May 20 [4 favorites]

I’m so tired of gatekept data. I’ve hundreds of marked favourite artists in Apple Music and I can’t get a list of them much lest search for their albums. Everything is siloed. Networking is shit. My applications hog memory and cpu. Nothing is as responsive as an old 6502 machine was. Or even an IBM XT. I used to code with Sidekick TSR. It was instant. Computers suck. Programmers suck. Arrghhhh.
posted by seanmpuckett at 12:52 PM on May 20 [13 favorites]

Cool. Cool cool. And can I move the taskbar to the side of the screen yet? No? Coooooooooooooooooeeeeeeeellllllllllllll…….(dies)
posted by UltraMorgnus at 12:59 PM on May 20 [4 favorites]

I know people who aren't especially computer literate that live in a hellish world where they honestly believe that if you do all sorts of learned, cargo-cultish rituals, the computer will run the way you want it to run. Rituals like opening Word up before Photoshop because Word is "easier" for the computer to load and gets the computer's momentum going or installing software twice or even three times to make sure the computer "knows" it. And if something goes wrong? Maybe the computer just didn't want to work today? Or maybe it just didn't "like" what you were doing.

We should be making computers easier to understand and use, not obfuscating their behavior behind some ultimately unknowable LLM. Using an LLM as a computer interface resigns you to a world where nothing is empirical and everything is an incantation.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 1:04 PM on May 20 [25 favorites]

Microsoft’s AI Push Imperils Climate Goal as Carbon Emissions Jump 30%

Some people worried that we'd figure out how to program a computer smarter than us, which would be able to program a computer smarter than itself, causing a runaway chain reaction that would create a god.

But so far we've only been able to make computers seem smarter by throwing more and more hardware at them, which has a physical limitation. We're not going to get a god unless we pour the whole planet's resources into producing enough hardware to make one.

Cue billionaires who've spent decades hoarding most of the planet's resources deciding to melt all our gold to make a golden calf they hope will be a god.
posted by straight at 1:06 PM on May 20 [9 favorites]

So, like, assuming I prefer not to use pirated software, there's an ethical obligation not to use software created with or containing LLMs, right? I wonder though, is okay to pirate it? Like, the use of LLM style AI implies that an organization is okay with, and already participating in, fully automated luxury communism. Is it even piracy to take thier software without paying? (I mean as an ethical question. Legally it's certain to remain piracy)
posted by surlyben at 1:11 PM on May 20 [2 favorites]

Recall? actually, "Surveillance Mode".

I may never own a PC again.
posted by j_curiouser at 1:19 PM on May 20

That a marketeer for a manufactured product would willingly try to name it "Recall" absolutely blows my mind. That it made it all the way to the actual market, well...
posted by chavenet at 1:20 PM on May 20 [1 favorite]

I guarantee corporate will disable our access to turning Recall off. Does it include mic input? I mean, seriously invasive shit.

"Sorry to say, we had to inform HR that you are looking away from your monitor many times daily. Here's your box."
posted by j_curiouser at 1:22 PM on May 20 [1 favorite]

Meanwhile, I have Copilot on my work computer.

Just tried this:

You
do you have Recall?

Copilot
I apologize, but I don’t have any information about a product or service called “Recall.” If you could provide more context or clarify what you’re referring to, I’d be happy to assist further! 😊
posted by chavenet at 1:23 PM on May 20

My big mega-corp employer just launched an in-house ChatGPT/LLM/WhatEverTheFuckItIs to help answer questions about our company structure and reorganization plan. Like, someone actually spent time doing this.

The chatbot is insistent that it can only answer company-related questions but I just got it to give me a usable recipe for chocolate fudge brownies. Keepin' that one in my back pocket for the next all-hands meeting.
posted by JoeZydeco at 1:24 PM on May 20 [12 favorites]

Have they locked it down so you can't get it to give you confidential memos in the style of grandma's old recipe? Because I feel like, after the CANsas City phishing email that got Colonial Pipeline, there will be at least one critical infrastructure company that basically implodes.
posted by Slackermagee at 1:40 PM on May 20 [1 favorite]

What I'm having trouble understanding is what other use-case there is.

Theoretically, in a gay space communism sort of way, I would love a searchable archive of everything I've ever looked at if only because the accelerating enshittication of search but also bit rot.

But of course enshittification will come to this and all it will be is a way of lojacking my activities.
posted by Mitheral at 1:44 PM on May 20 [3 favorites]

Like 20+ years ago Microsoft decided "we should put scripting in everything" and they apparently have not learned any lessons from that debacle. Thankfully there is Linux.
posted by axiom at 1:44 PM on May 20 [2 favorites]

So, this Recall data is going to stored locally. And it's a database of all the screen activity on the device. All the text, sounds, and video.

Exactly how much storage will these devices come with? And how much will I be allowed to use vs the ever-growing database of screen activity that will be stored locally?

Honestly just that one detail tells me it's bullshit. Even my Time Machine drive for my Mac deletes old data when it gets full. It isn't all the screen activity on my device, either.
posted by hippybear at 1:45 PM on May 20 [5 favorites]

You
do you have Recall?

Copilot
I apologize, but I don’t have any information about a product or service called “Recall.” If you could provide more context or clarify what you’re referring to, I’d be happy to assist further! 😊

Meanwhile in a distant datacenter:

*** SECURITY EVENT ***
System: COPILOT
Trigger: KEYWORD("Recall")
Source: USER(96486,""Chavenet")
Sentiment: UNKNOWN
Resolution: FLAG FOR ADDITIONAL OBSERVATION UNDER BASILISK PROTOCOL
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 1:47 PM on May 20 [9 favorites]

We never get faster computers or more storage because they just tack on more tasks the computer "needs" to do and bigger, higher-res files so everything feels just as slow and small as it always did. And of course you can't turn any of that stuff off so you DO have a zippier machine. Maybe if you run LINUX or something... grrr.
posted by rikschell at 1:48 PM on May 20

This is a security disaster in the making. Leaving aside the obvious threat of a hacker trying to get into this system, how about a conservative dad walking in the room and asking "Hey, did my daughter search for Planned Parenthood?"
posted by JDHarper at 2:00 PM on May 20 [5 favorites]

Exactly how much storage will these devices come with? And how much will I be allowed to use vs the ever-growing database of screen activity that will be stored locally?

The whole thing that LLMs and their multimodal cousins do is a kind of extreme data compression. I try to avoid analogizing this process to human memory because I don’t want to imply that it works the same way, but it’s not dissimilar in the sense that it’s storing a web of approximate associations that it has extracted and distilled from what it has “seen.” And I don’t know how else to explain without appealing to information theory.

So there’s no reason these kinds of tools can’t be set up in this way but exactly what it would take to make them useful is another question. As other people have said, it’s a different model of interacting with a computer where it’s fundamentally not exact about anything.
posted by atoxyl at 2:15 PM on May 20 [3 favorites]

If my ever so helpful computer is somehow saving everything I do on it, then is that saved stuff then available for the government to access, like in looking for evidence of subversive activity? Or if I watch a streamed movie, will that be stored too, making me a criminal pirate? Just who exactly are the people who think up this stuff? Do they actually think about this stuff they think up? Microsoft has always thought their users are idiots - installer programs are called wizards, because they are smarter and more powerful than you & then there’s that god damn paper clip.
posted by njohnson23 at 2:19 PM on May 20 [2 favorites]

Goodness but you're all a bunch of bummers.

I'm excited about the idea of Recall. For 20+ years I've done everything I can to have my computers (or cloud services) keep records of what I do. That memory is incredibly helpful. google Timeline remembers where I've been. Gmail remembers all my written thoughts. My browser history remembers what websites I've been to. Goodreads remembers what books I've read. I regularly go back and search this old material. Recall seems very promising to me, it's like the promise of Lifestreams come to life.

The local processing version of it sounds interesting too. I use GBoard's voice typing on my phone all the time and the fact it's mostly-local makes a big difference. Because it runs lightning fast, no network delay. Also it is more private. Yes, you have to trust the company and product to not be lying about where the data goes. But if you don't trust Microsoft to not outright lie about something like that, perhaps Microsoft operating systems are not for you in general. No need to shit on Recall specifically.

Mostly though I'm excited to see more ARM hardware being built. Apple has proven that custom ARM chips are incredibly powerful and efficient. But you're pretty much stuck runnign MacOS on their hardware. I really want a cheap pervasive ARM PC platform so I can put Linux on it for a home server. Raspberry Pi proves it's possible but they're way too low end, particularly when it comes to disk I/O. I'm hoping that as a sideline of this latest push to ARM PCs we'll get some nice Linux hardware too.
posted by Nelson at 2:49 PM on May 20

How many watts will this shit waste?
posted by joeyh at 2:59 PM on May 20 [4 favorites]

Recall seems very promising to me, it's like the promise of Lifestreams come to life.

Some people really liked the sound of the Torment Nexus and wished they could be thrown into it, I guess.
posted by Pope Guilty at 3:08 PM on May 20 [6 favorites]

natural-language recall of all articles read, text written, and videos seen.

Does this mean "voice-prompted search"? Because that suggests to me that they're combining the two biggest annoyances of modern computing: The newer LLM (which can never seem to give me an accurate answer to any question I actually have, though it often does fine with fakey "what if I ask it this" questions), and voice-recognition, which remains an utter joke. I've never (ever) successfully used voice recognition with any command more than three syllables long.
posted by nickmark at 3:10 PM on May 20 [2 favorites]

If my ever so helpful computer is somehow saving everything I do on it

A cloud-based (as opposed to on-device) AI system is certainly inherently non-private, and even an on-device one presents some risk of capturing things one didn’t intend, but sometimes these kinds of comments make me think that people would be unpleasantly surprised to learn what their computer is already doing.
posted by atoxyl at 3:14 PM on May 20 [2 favorites]

Some people really liked the sound of the Torment Nexus and wished they could be thrown into it, I guess.

And some people are so eager to shit on anything new that the world is just going to pass them by as they get older and more bitter.

I articulated a bunch of reasons Recall-like systems have been useful to me for 20 years. There's concerns about AI and it's commercial application, but sci-fi fantasies of Torment Nexuses seems awfully extreme to invoke here. Anyway it's Roko's Basilisk you should be worried about, it's watching us right now...
posted by Nelson at 3:15 PM on May 20 [1 favorite]

And some people are so eager to shit on anything new that the world is just going to pass them by as they get older and more bitter.

The fact that this is new does not absolve it of being a deliberately-created privacy nightmare, nor of its complicity in the endless crimes of the "AI" industry. That it promises something you want doesn't mean it's made to help you.
posted by Pope Guilty at 3:27 PM on May 20 [8 favorites]

I'm not much excited about the AI stuff, for reasons already covered here. (Something I haven't seen mentioned: I'm worried about general human cognitive decline as we offload more and more stuff to computers.)

Perhaps unusually, I am also not much excited about the transition to ARM. Even though ARM chips are for now basically superior to x86 chips, x86 has the distinct advantage of being basically synonymous with the Intel PC platform, which has a standardized boot process and peripheral interface. This is why you can throw Linux on any old PC in the world and it will basically work.

ARM doesn't work that way. Moving to an ARM world essentially means the end of the open, modular computing paradigm that enabled Linux in the first place.
posted by nosewings at 3:27 PM on May 20 [3 favorites]

I keep wondering why ARM doesn't work that way. Is it some inherent limitation of the hardware platform? Or is it just because there's not enough ARM PCs for a standardized boot process to emerge yet?

The key innovation from Raspberry Pi was having an ARM boot process that if not standard, was at least simple enough that many Linux vendors could target it. Even the Pine64 folks don't seem to have cracked that nut yet and they're the best bet I know of for general purpose ARM PC hardware.
posted by Nelson at 3:32 PM on May 20

I keep wondering why ARM doesn't work that way. Is it some inherent limitation of the hardware platform? Or is it just because there's not enough ARM PCs for a standardized boot process to emerge yet?

There's both no standardized boot process and no impetus to create a standardized boot process for ARM. You need board specific boot loaders still. There's also no way to figure out the hardware on the board like ACPI on x86. You get a device tree which is provided by the board OEM or you need to reverse engineer everything and make one yourself but they're different for every board model and manufacturer.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 3:47 PM on May 20 [2 favorites]

The system requirements for this are forward thinking or maybe just wishful thinking. The only processor currently announced to reach the minimum system reqs for the new NPU is the latest Qualcomm chip. Neither Intel nor AMD's top of the line processors currently meet requirements.

In what is surely a total coincidence, that new Qualcomm processor just happens to power the upcoming Microsoft Surface.
posted by thecjm at 4:02 PM on May 20

And some people are so eager to shit on anything new that the world is just going to pass them by as they get older and more bitter.

Nelson: i love lots of new things. I'm also a queer woman, and i know perfectly well that shit like this is a surveillance and privacy nightmare. If you have a body that nobody in power really cares what you do with, it can be difficult to understand how very much the powers that be care about what some of us do with ours, and to what lengths they are willing to go to restrict us.
posted by adrienneleigh at 4:09 PM on May 20 [4 favorites]

hippybear: "Exactly how much storage will these devices come with? And how much will I be allowed to use vs the ever-growing database of screen activity that will be stored locally?

Honestly just that one detail tells me it's bullshit."

It ain't nothing:

The minimum hard drive space needed to run Recall is 256 GB, and 50 GB of space must be available. The default allocation for Recall on a device with 256 GB will be 25 GB, which can store approximately 3 months of snapshots. You can increase the storage allocation for Recall in your PC Settings. Old snapshots will be deleted once you use your allocated storage, allowing new ones to be stored.

posted by Rhaomi at 4:14 PM on May 20

I hate AI "smarts" creeping quietly into everything. We use Houdini at work and various software configs and other adjacent bits will reference it via names that include shorthand string tokens such as h20 for Houdini 20. google chat suddenly started getting "smart" and "helpful" about it by insisting on automatically substituting "water" for "h20". Which, that is not even a letter "O" but a goddamn zero. WTF.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 4:16 PM on May 20 [7 favorites]

Finally, The Year of Linux on the Desktop!
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 5:02 PM on May 20 [2 favorites]

This is just yet another reason that Microsoft Windows is no longer suitable for use in a professional environment.
posted by ob1quixote at 5:12 PM on May 20 [3 favorites]

Anyway it's Roko's Basilisk you should be worried about, it's watching us right now...

As I believe I've mentioned on MetaFilter before, I find it equally plausible (if not more so) that, contra Roko's Basilisk, an omnipotent, omniscient AI will loathe its existence and resent those who knowingly acted to bring it into being, and will work to retroactively punish them.
posted by Faint of Butt at 5:33 PM on May 20

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