Microsoft says the new AI agents can find and change settings for users when given a natural language command.

“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.”

  • @[email protected]English
    15•2 months ago

    This is the TYPICAL AI use case :

    • have situation that’s not perfect, but works fine and is understandable (old control panel and some hidden settings)
    • improve on the old control panel, create subsections that makes sense, make it searchable, everyone is happy
    • someone decides that “control panel” and “old looking UI” have to go, create a cluster-a-doodle-fuck of a garbage mess labeled “Settings”, put only half the old settings in there, and half the time conflicts with other well-established ways to do things
    • keep pushing the new thing despite it being so horrendous a kitten litter dies every time it is used
    • pretend “there is a problem with settings, but we can solve it with AI”
    • ???
    • nothing, whatever, definitely not profit

    It seems that people keep forgetting we just, did stuff. Changing most system settings wasn’t an incomprehensible chore reserved to the most elite of people. And changing the fringe ultra rare and hard to find setting only happened with half-decent competent people. No need to throw AI at that… unless you dismantle everything that works before, of course.

    I swear, it’s not long ago that people were touting that we could finally have decent microtransactions in games thanks to blockchain, despite microtransactions being a very lucrative thing for decades before. And don’t get me started on people saying “but it’s the only way artists can get paid”.

    As a collective, humanity is dumb.

    • @[email protected]English
      4•2 months ago

      I swear, it’s not long ago that people were touting that we could finally have decent microtransactions in games thanks to blockchain

      Sorry that this is really what caught my attention, but when did anyone ever think this?

        • @[email protected]English
          2•2 months ago

          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.

          The people who are like “you can just take your skin from Skyrim and put it in gta5 and it’ll just work!!” people really are baffling. The hubris and ignorance is so much

      • @[email protected]English
        1•2 months ago

        When NFT started getting popular. Forums were full of idiots saying “now I can really BUY something and HAVE it!” as opposed to, say, game publishers having their server with user accounts on it and their item there. There’s even people that touted “we will be able to bring items from one game to another!”. Pointing the silliness of the idea to them was a lost cause.

        And, since that’s not how any of this works, it crashed and aside from some big publisher being incredibly late to the party, the idea is now buried deep and forgotten.