Recall is Microsoft's key to unlocking the future of PCs | Hacker News Reader

Recall is Microsoft's key to unlocking the future of PCs

theverge.com

57 pointsnsriv58 comments

Oh dear. My stock, clean Windows install with its default config absolutely poops the bed when trying to perform basic search/retrieval tasks (I'm talking things like launching an app I started to type the name of after hitting the windows key). Whenever I've dug into what it's doing, I've found it busy doing more important things like indexing my temp directories, or node_modules, or ensuring that all of my malware service executables are eliminated.

It's a nice headline feature but I really can't see it having a positive impact on the default Windows user experience.

Mine usually is pretty responsive about it, but the results searching in the start menu are strange. I start typing the name of something, what I want pops up, I type one too many characters (still a substring of the correct name) and suddenly it decides something completely different is the best match.

Try having a non-English Windows.

Now you have to divine the English name of a Windows app or feature, because although its name is localized when you‘ve already found it, search may or may not only look for the English name.

Or vice versa.

This was very useful when I supported a German office... search up the settings you need in English!

that's a huge pet peeve of mine too, and i can't even begin to guess what they heck they're doing. maybe an unstable sorting algorithm?

  "tel" -> "telegram"
  "tele" -> "telegram uninstaller"

I always assumed there was some logic like "well I presented 'telegram' and they kept typing so 'telegram' must be incorrect" even if the time between those was less than human reaction time.

This actually makes sense, although it's absurd behavior.

  "teleg" -> Web search for "telegraph"
  "telegr" -> Search for "telegr" in Outlook Web Emails
  "telegra" -> Web search: did you mean "Telstra"?
  "telegram" -> No results found

mmc no results .. put a period after it and suddenly it realizes you want to open mmc

Clearly you need more AI in your pc /s

imo it's embarrassing that the ux was better with windows 2000 up through 7, using windows key + first 3 letters + enter gave me reliable way to jump into an app

I install startisback on any windows machine i have power over, of course on my work machine i just have to suffer but at least im getting paid while i wait for the search to settle on a result

https://www.startisback.com/

>default Windows user experience

Oh god the search is so bad, I can't even.

Default Windows user experience is so shit I basically can't believe they tested or focus-grouped any of it. And it's constantly going backwards.

Now they hide important right-click options that people use all the time under "more options". Who asked for this?

My guess is that they're rewriting parts of it, but only implementing the absolute basic functionality.

They even took away the ability to not group taskbar items between Win10 and 11.

Absolute hot garbage and getting hotter and garbagier with every forced update.

That search is terrible, but I find that the indices stabilise in use such that search returns consistent results quickly.

I could do [ Win; [ O | T | E ]; Enter ] and get [ Outlook | Teams | Excel ] every time, for example. (ugh, glad I left that job)

Do you see any improvement after regular use?

> Recall won’t work with every Windows 11 computer. You’ll have to buy one of several fresh new “Copilot Plus PCs” powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite chips

Oh, thank goodness. That makes it much easier to avoid this sort of thing.

Too bad they've spent the last few years ruining Windows with ads and other things. I'll happily give up all these features.

Let me guess, stored in the cloud and will be used against you in court?

local

For now.

> > local

> For now.

Like everyone's music and movie collections.

Context of the iTunes hard drive scandal, for those who don't get the reference:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160506100227/https://blog.vell...

Err... 20 years ago many used this... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop

This will keep their enterprise customers happy with the most detailed bossware you can imagine. Replay everything your employees did in a day.

Haven't we all been assuming for years already that our work machines have keylogger-level monitoring?

>Recall won’t take snapshots of InPrivate web browsing sessions in Microsoft Edge and DRM-protected content, either, says Microsoft

Of course, we can't violate the rights of those poor poor content providers. The rights of the users though, who gives a damn?

I also noticed they're singling out Edge. Does that mean they won't let you have privacy in competing browsers?

Other browsers are basically malware, so of course Microsoft needs to keep an eye on them - for your safety /s

> Recall won’t work with every Windows 11 computer. You’ll have to buy one of several fresh new “Copilot Plus PCs” powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite chips, which have the neural processing unit (NPU) required for Recall to work.

Well... unlocking the future of a small subset of PCs, at least.

Sounds a lot like https://rewind.ai

I am disappointed about this one. The company decided to put its weight behind a new product that replaces it called “Limitless”. Though useful, it focuses exclusively on meetings. I had fully bought into the promise of having a second brain/external memory. Reclaim wasn’t perfect but it was a decent “beta” quality product with a great future.

So while I dislike Windows and Microsoft’s poor track record with privacy, I am still going to root for Recall!

Edit: Reading that last sentence again made me question if I can trust MS with basically a recording of everything I am doing on the PC. Probably not.

If you still want something to look back at your usage, I am making https://screenmemory.app which is sort of like Rewind, except without AI (only text search) and a nicer timeline.

As a customer (who isn’t interested in their new product), I can’t help wondering if they pivoted due to fore-knowledge of this Windows feature? If the capability becomes a commodity/expected OS feature, maybe Apple has/is expected to have similar plans and will eat their lunch.

I'm curious about the ToS. As far as i know, their version of ChatGPT on Copilot don't like +18/sexual stuff, so how would the Copilot+ react to a lot of it? Would you get banned? would it work? Would it simple ignore all the stuff when asked for it?

[dupe]

More discussion on the Copilot PCs here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40417828

It's not really a dupe IMO. This focuses much more on the recall service.

So share the link over there. That's where the discussion is on Recall and the rest of the announcement.

I hope it will be possible to opt-out of this privacy nightmare. I'm using Windows only occasionally but still feel very uncomfortable reading this.

Interesting. I have been thinking of building something just like this. Basically by using a web proxy that logs all my traffic (after all, 95% of things happen on the web these days). There's actually some tools for this purpose already.

However, this would be such a treasure trove for bad people that I'd have to secure it so damn well that I didn't really think about it. Of course I'd have to break open TLS using a MITM certificate which is a whole can of worms.

However if I would do this it is something I'd want FULL control over. I definitely don't want to give it all up to Microsoft and trust their blue eyes. Nope. Really nope. Their track record of things like Edge is so bad, first introducing a nice tool and as soon as it gets a tiny bit of market presence they start milking it already (think things like the shopping bar, or the buy-now-pay-later scams in edge).

I hate being the product for ad-targeting for visceral reasons, but it's benign compared to my days falling into the hands of someone who wishes me harm.

There are other companies that I work harder to keep my metrics away from than from MS. MS at least makes money from things other than ads.

But I don't trust Microsoft to secure that data. If Google did this product, I would have lower expectation of my screen recordings ending up on the dark web.

And I will not be using Microsoft. Where is SEC? This is nuts.

basically rewind ai

>Microsoft’s groundbreaking new AI-powered tool can search and recall anything you’ve seen or done on your PC like a personal historian.

Wow, no security impact here.

I like how a highly invasive on-device survelliance is marketed as a "personalized historian".

Real great gag from the company that hasn't had a reliable local file search since Windows XP.

The word stasi was already taken.

Luckily they were shut down in 2021 so the name's free again[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi_Records_Agency

Cynicism entirely warranted.

I do think this is a flying-taxi feature that everyone will be using in 50 years.

What happens to privacy during that journey? As long as there are taboos, there will be a desire for privacy.

Neuromancer - your data can be hacked, protect it with industrial ice?

Culture - privacy is a result of benign AIs respecting confidentiality?

"To ensure your privacy against malicious use, we seed about 15% of the logs with fabricated entries that don't actually correspond with what you were doing on your computer."

"Wait a minute... doesn't GPT-4 still have a 15% hallucination rate when it comes to document summarization?"

"Moving right along..."

can't help but laugh and think of "ruin my search history" which when clicked on will make your system search google for lots of interesting stuff like "isis application form" and "mail order paternity test".

We need a "fix my search history" adding searches like "too many windows ads install linux"

Orwellian panopticon surveillance beyond the walls of local, personal use becomes that much easier.

And a nontrivial % of users will outright balk at this.

They did the math. The users that will leave are the ones that have zero value from an adtech standpoint, which is now the main source of revenue for the consumer division. Culling those users might even be seen as a gain from the remarketing dept because they'll be able to sell Windows as a source of docile morons you can sell anything to.

I'd rather my PC forget.

Yeah this sucks.

Also search and retrieval isn't that bad anymore? Spotlight gets a lot right. Google gets a lot right.

Dystopian panopticon implementation aside, I just don't think computers are that bad at most things people use them for that we need a whole paradigm shift like Recall.

Until this technology starts doing things like reading my email for me and letting me know only the important things and I trust it to the point I can stop checking email, this is a nightmarish stopgap using screenshots and LLMs.

Spotlight also sucks for me in the latest macOSes (e.g. from Mavericks until now).

It always seems to find a bunch of nonsense files and the real ones I'm looking for appear much later.

The whole metadata database that spotlight successfully built in Tiger and Leopard doesn't seem to exist anymore. In those days it worked totally fine.

As usual, Apple is ahead of the curve.

How is it?

They have this Time Machine so they say.

A backup tool. These exists since forever. And are different from Recall features.

that's not what they meant. a recent ios update restored pictures that were deleted ages ago.

In the competitive field of “never forgetting” this week:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40372867

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40370078

Etc

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