this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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Microsoft knows that the addition of adds to Windows, Recall, data mining, etc are not suicide. As far as tech news goes, Lemmy really exists in an echo chamber. The vast majority of us at least have some interest in technology. For the majority of the population, though, this isn't true. The typical person sees a computer as a tool to be used for other things. They're not reading articles about the latest release of Windows, new CPU technology, the latest GPU, etc. They're using their computer, and when it's time for an upgrade, they buy whatever suits their needs.
If I was to ask any of my family, or most of my coworkers, about any of the latest "controversies" surrounding Microsoft, they would have no idea what I was talking about. Microsoft obviously thinks that the added profits gained by monetizing their customers will offset the loss of 1% of their users that switch to Linux. They're probably right, too.
I like Windows, personally (well, Windows 10 at least). My unofficial rule has always been if it needs a GUI, then it runs Windows, otherwise, it runs Linux as a headless machine. Once Windows 10 is no longer a viable option, my unofficial rule will be "it runs Linux." Most people will not make this switch.
But you’re ignoring the entire enterprise side of things. MS Recall + pervasive data mining and ad injections are things that the vast majority of IT departments are going to refuse to sign off on. These technologies meaningfully and fundamentally undermine organizational and system security, up to and including potential inadvertent exposure of cryptographic secrets, which the modern internet is basically built on top of.
Sure, consumers are likely going to acquiesce out of either laziness or ignorance. But IT orgs aren’t going to simply sign off on this - particularly if they’re operating in an industry where InfoSec really matters (basically, any regulated industry like medical, biotech, or aerospace).
There is a huge corporate insensitive that everyone is not realizing here. By screen recording + OCR, there is a possibility to start using this data to replace some labor intensive, but simple tasks of operating a business. If you can create RPA+ML+LLM that can rerun repetitive tasks, you have holy grail on your hands. I think this is one of the big reason why M$ is pushing this.
I assume to be down voted to oblivion, but I do business automation and integration for living, and at the same time I am scared and excited.
Lmao do you have any idea how quickly that’s going to go off the rails? They’re going to get into a hallucination feedback loop, which will destroy the integrity of their systems and processes, and they’ll richly deserve it.
At any rate, most highly-effective technical teams have already automated the shit out of all their rote operations without using ML.
Absolutely. Corporations - at least, shitty ones (most of them) - are absolutely salivating at using this. They want to be able to see and easily summarize eeeeeeverything you're doing.
Some are absolutely already using a form of this. It's not a hypothetical - this is currently happening and many want way way more.
Automation suites exist and they are very much tuned to the individual apps. It seems giving ML an OCR readout of a page is not enough for it to know what it should do (accurately). We have had a training set for "booking flights on a browser" for about 6 years now and no one has figured out how to have it disrupt automated testing: https://miniwob.farama.org/
I was thinking about this, but I don't know what the plan us for annotating new flows with descriptions of the actions. There's no point in learning how to send an email or open a webpage, that's already easy. The value is in a database of uncommon interactions, but it's only valuable if there is a description to train on.