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Comment by stephencoyner | Hacker News Reader

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stephencoyner

Native desktop apps give these companies access to more system-level functions which will be super useful for...

- Voice dictation / interactions

- Agents accessing other applications and controlling your desktop

- Agents performing background tasks like continuous monitoring, periodic data processing, or ongoing analysis

I would expect to see these kind of features start to take off next year

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Oh I agree, but this is definitely not it, I don't understand why Anthropic released this, other than squatting the same keyboard shortcut the ChatGPT app uses, with no ability to change it :P.

By not it, do you mean those features aren’t available yet, or you don’t see the value in them?

I do see value, but the Claude app is just a webview with a keyboard shortcut, I don't even think it has voice dictation, I uninstalled it immediately.

The shortcut can be changed. Open the app settings from the menu bar, or the usual Command-, shortcut, and it's the only setting they expose.

Chat UIs are really the perfect candidate for a localfirst PWA. I have no idea why they are being built as either a full desktop app or UI where nothing is stored on device.

You’d think with all the funding these companies have they’d make better technical decisions

You're not wrong, but I'm willing to guess the biggest reason is: Analytics

You can also do a filesystem scan pretty easily. Both for useful features, as well as spying.

That requires user to accept permissions (which lately macos giving so many popups made me fatigued and accept everything)

Also data mining! :)

> - Agents performing background tasks like continuous monitoring, periodic data processing, or ongoing analysis

Who said that this was to help the end user!

Hmm yes, I don't see any issues giving a corporate controlled model with the operational precision of a coin toss full access to my entire system. There is absolutely nothing that could ever go wrong.

Nah but seriously, can we start a counter of how many times a chatbot agent has deleted someone's system32 because it was trained on data of the average tech forum?

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