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Comment by jbombadil | Hacker News Reader

> Worryingly, in the example given, Copilot can move files around and create folders depending on its interpretation of the user's instructions. What could possibly go wrong?

As long as copilot gives me a list of everything it’s going to change before doing it and an easy revert, I don’t see a problem with this. It sounds like a great feature!

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the undo button in explorer still doesn't work properly after 28 years

I recently hit ctrl-z in explorer after accidentally moving some files and instead of moving back, they just disappeared. I couldn't believe it. I had to recover them from a remote backup.

Shit, I once irreversibly lost a document I spent an hour on due to something like that. It’s ridiculous.

Recent-ish HN post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35927413

I saved a ppt in OneDrive the other day and it disappeared. It hadn’t synced, but it didn’t only show locally, it had completely disappeared!

I closed ppt and re-opened but corp IT has disabled history in ppt so I couldn’t get to it again.

It just magically showed up an hour later……..

> corp IT has disabled history in ppt so I couldn’t get to it again.

Some of these rules that security come up with are amazing.

Really? I've never had that problem. Can you get a repro scenario?

I've had it happen before. It's a bit more complicated but I can't remember an exact repro. Something like delete, undo, redo, undo.

maybe external hard drive?

Nah, it's more like not all deletions are equal. It probably has to do with the user launching the event on the backend, if I were to guess, but sometimes if you delete something through Explorer, it isn't added to the undo history. Some of these I've seen not end up in the recycle bin despite not permanently deleting them, hence why I wouldn't be surprised if it was another user being used for these edge-cases. The deleted items would then be added to that user's recycle bin and be unavailable to the actual user's undo history.

Basically; not really sure, just making a wild guess, but I've encountered similar edge-cases before.

> I don’t see a problem with this. It sounds like a great feature!

Famous last words

That's why they qualified it.

If I can get this to sort my huge mess of photos based on geolocation and time into folders for me based on my own folder and naming structure... This just might be useful.

Edit : even older folks who have no idea how tech works might be able to finally sort their photos as well.

That sounds very helpful, and if AI can do it, then that's great. But also, it seems like rule based file restructuring should already be easily possible without AI. Shame something like that doesn't exist.

It does exist, there are at least dozens of such tools. Here's a random one I found with a quick search. https://photostructure.com/getting-started/automatic-library...

But if it's not powered by AI it won't make the news in 2023

I know on Mac the popular tool for automatic file sorting is Hazel

https://www.noodlesoft.com/manual/hazel/hazel-overview/

You can do that in Apple Photos without an AI stuff.

What they need to do there is actually build a competent photo management app into the OS.

Isn't that what they just did?

No. Nowhere near that. It's a steaming turd.

Short circuit the problem by not taking so many photos. Ask yourself honestly, how often do you ever look at them? If you do, you've probably also got them organized. If you don't, then you're just hoarding.

This sounds a lot like Jobs’ famous “don’t hold it that way” suggestion to solve iPhone 4’s signal dropping.

Asking users to take fewer photos is not a useful solution to the problem of managing large photo libraries.

In Apple-land, it's done that for ages: group via face, put name to face, group by geolocation etc. I think it's started recognizing my dogs too. Happens all device side.

Google photos does amazing work with this. It's face people detection is so good it recognises baby photos all the way to adulthood as the same person.

yeah. I have spent two weeks hashing thousands of pictures scattered around the informal backups and now I still have to deal with different size versions of the same image.

I wish the computer could rename them consistently in my stead and removed the lesser quality versions. I would prefer if it was a tool developed by anyone else but Microsoft.

--dry-run

*-WhatIf

they already generate your windows user name from your windows email leaving you with users like "hello" instead of the one you defined during startup... Such slop.

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