Most of those features are garbage and make the product worse, either because they don't address an actual problem or because they are implemented poorly. But of course improving the product is at best a secondary concern, chasing the hype is far more important, both for the company itself and the individuals building this stuff.
But for non-technical people, of course, computers are already unpredictable. They routinely (appear to) misplace files and overwrite them with previous versions, and if the URL falls out of autocomplete the site might as well not exist. For people who google to find the Facebook login page, this would simply be how computers should work. You tell it to give you the thing and it gives you the thing. How that happens is immaterial.
The difference between that and Recall: I decide what goes into the wiki.
The natural next step is to have a local model trained on everything I’ve ever done, and for all of my computing tasks to be contextual to that history.
I could see this transforming how we use computers.
But I wouldn’t go anywhere near Recall.
I suspect Microsoft is pushing this so hard because they want to do what I just described, and they want to start collecting the data necessary to enable it ASAP.
I can easily see a future capability that people might love that they wouldn’t have even known to ask for. But the way they’re rolling out Recall is certainly not a good foundation.
There were definitely some comments in a previous HN post about it that attempted defend it and to paint everyone else as overreacting. Several of them even said that they thought it would be useful for something they might hypothetically like to remember or search for... I don't really remember, because the whole thing is crazy to me and I think it's crazy for any tech-savvy person to be running Windows in 2024.
> Why is MS pushing something so hard when nobody asked for it?
I assume this is a rhetorical question, but just in case it isn't: this is not a feature/product for Windows USERS. This is a feature to help train/test MS's AI stuff- YOU are the product, not the customer.
I'm not sure who at the org is pushing for this as it would essentially hand the PC games market to SteamOS. I suppose they saw how well it's worked for enterprise customers that essentially already use a Windows VM through Citrix or some other provider, and think this would solve the virus/malware problem once and for all.
... or they will just stop developing windows games and do only xbox/playstation games ...
PC games can already be played on a remote server, using services like Stadia, so it would not necessarily hand the PC games market to local Linux-based devices running SteamOS (like the Steam Deck).
I think most, if not all, of the overwhelmingly negative feedback is tied to this being enabled by default, and shipped by default
It's easy to say if you aren't one to benefit from this, but that doesn't mean no one will or that no one asked for it.
Microsoft was last to the party.
Most recently I used it to refresh my memory on a particularly convoluted way to authenticate with a third-party oauth system (it involved using an online oauth debugger and curl commands). I had gone through the process once successfully weeks ago, but by the time I had to do it again I'd forgotten every detail. Rather than have to go through the process of figuring it out again, I went back to my successful attempt, watched it, and basically retraced my steps. Rewind probably saved me an hour or two.
My take on Recall is that, like with almost everything, it's a trade-off of security for convenience. I find it valuable enough that I'm willing to make the trade-off, but others might not.
I assume they would push it for the same reason they would push any other mildly-useful feature improvement.
Here's the thing. When no-one asks for it, hard push is the only way to sell it.
:)
Because they bet big on AI, and hardware suppliers bet big on AI-enabled hardware, and so they are trying to find use cases for it.
To be frank, I would not mind having this feature on linux provided it was entirely local, and encrypted.