Microsoft is Adding an 'Experimental Agentic Features' Toggle To Windows 11 (windowscentral.com) 26
Microsoft has rolled out a new preview build for Windows 11 Insiders in the Dev and Beta Channel this week that introduces a new toggle called 'experimental agentic features' that can be enabled or disabled in the Windows Settings app. From a report: According to Microsoft, this new toggle is designed to "allow agents to use new Windows agentic features." The company says the feature will work with AI-powered apps, which "help you automate everyday tasks -- like organizing files, scheduling meetings, or sending emails -- so you can spend less time on busy work and more time on what matters most. One powerful way apps are implementing AI today is by interacting with your apps and your files, using vision and advanced reasoning to click, type and scroll like a human would."
The setting in the Windows Setting says "When this setting is on, agents can use Windows agentic features." Features such as the recently announced Copilot Actions for Windows feature are going to take advantage of this new experimental agentic feature capability.
The setting in the Windows Setting says "When this setting is on, agents can use Windows agentic features." Features such as the recently announced Copilot Actions for Windows feature are going to take advantage of this new experimental agentic feature capability.
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Add the experimental 'delete Windows and install Linux' feature to your computer.
Clippy on steroids (Score:3)
Clearly this is what the world was asking for in Windows 11. Never mind fixing bugs like the bottom of windows getting stuck under the task bar and having to faff around to resize them (hey, maybe allow the task bar to be moved!) , the "Oops no internet" setup error loop even when windows had connected to wifi in the previous screen and so on.
No, lets introduce Son Of Clippy!
FFS, get a grip MS.
Re:Clippy on steroids (Score:5, Informative)
Yup, so many major fundamental bugs, but hey, they gotta keep the focus on the AI slop.
Right now on one of my Win11 boxes the start menu is empty, half the icons are missing from the taskbar. At least it means no more ads when I hit the start button, but I feel it is fundamentally, morally wrong for the operating system to be an advertising platform. Either way, I suspect Explorer crashed and restarted badly when switching between KVM systems, as it often does, leading to this.
Right now another of by boxes the task bar is seemingly set to the lowest z-order, covered by other programs, including visual studio.
Opening up a search on explorer breaks the back button, once it goes into "search" mode it loses the ability to have the regular folder display, you need to completely close the window and re-open it. And you can't copy the location, it stays stuck as "search results" mode with no meaningful location in the address bar.
Context menus in explorer are broken, sometimes showing the new UI elements, sometimes the old style UI elements, sometimes they're missing.
If you're unfortunate enough to have to use the preview build for testing, it's far worse. You wanted to click an item in a new-UI app like the start button? Nope! It behaves as though it were unscrolled, instead of the 17th button down, because it was visually third from the top the start menu immediately jumps back to the top of the list and starts the third app from the top, you're getting the calendar app, or photos app, rather than what you clicked on.
The rewrite of task manager dumped a ton of features, task manager frequently crashes, and when you look up the known issues on their public bug list Task Manager still remains with hundreds of "mitigated" and unresolved issues despite task manager being a core piece of functionality.
I'm constantly switching between systems, Kubernetes cluster terminals, both Windows and Linux. I only use Windows when I have to, it has thoroughly slipped into 'enshitified' territory. So many fundamental "the user can't even access what they clicked on" bugs, and "the Windows start button, the core user interface element needed to do things, is missing" bugs, yet somehow AI slop is the highest priority over the ability to actually run the program you want.
Maybe that's the real reason for the agent stuff: "Hey agent, please start this program because the start menu is broken again, and my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard no longer connect."
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Windows 11 was finally forced on our work machines and there are so many little annoyances. Needing a registry hack to restore the right click options is great. And the file path bar in File Explorer has been nerfed. I can't drag and drop it somewhere to create a shortcut, or drag it onto a UI. Now I have to go up a level to do the same using the folder icon.
So many little broken things for what benefit? I opted into the git and 7-zip right click menu options so why hide them?
Re: Clippy on steroids (Score:3)
No kidding. I don't know if you've ever tried using Explorer to search files in a directory for a filename, but it's unusable.
Everything from Void Tools does it in milliseconds. It does exactly what you'd expect - builds a list of filenames and searches them.
AFAICT there is nothing you can do in Explorer to make it only search the filenames - apparently it's necessary to search the web, the registry and everything else to find files by filename.
Can't wait for the agentic AI solution to ask Copilot what to d
Good luck with that (Score:2, Troll)
That tech is not even remotely ready for use outside of a carefully isolated lab setting.
Fortunately, I will likely not even have to turn it off. The data-collection makes this illegal without informed consent in Europe. And they will not want to tell the world what they are collecting and what they are doing with it.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Interesting)
That tech is not even remotely ready for use outside of a carefully isolated lab setting.
Fortunately, I will likely not even have to turn it off. The data-collection makes this illegal without informed consent in Europe. And they will not want to tell the world what they are collecting and what they are doing with it.
How does Microsoft get by with Windows 11 in Europe? The entire OS is infested with data aggregation by default, and even if you try to escape the defaults, it will continually nag you to allow them to gather your data and sells it as a "security feature." I'd think some regulators would be getting mighty pissy about that nonsense if they understood what it was actually doing.
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In Europe, MS has managed to credibly assure it is all getting anonymized and aggregated. That was likely not a lie as they got threatened with a prohibition to sell their product (which got almost no press). In the rest of the world, obviously detailed data is collected and not getting anonymized or anything.
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To add to that my settings of "telemetry: off" even survived a downgrade from Win10 to Win11. (Gets displayed in the settings, but cannot be set there. Needs some obscure "organizational" settings, which still can be done locally.) That means MS did not dare reset it and for good reasons. It would have been an actual crime for them to do so.
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To add to that my settings of "telemetry: off" even survived a downgrade from Win10 to Win11. (Gets displayed in the settings, but cannot be set there. Needs some obscure "organizational" settings, which still can be done locally.) That means MS did not dare reset it and for good reasons. It would have been an actual crime for them to do so.
Interesting. So, they're capable of allowing user settings to stick through "upgrades." They just don't want to.
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Indeed. They just do not want to and prefer to screw their users and waste their user's time.
While these are "policy settings", they do not require any external server, were done entirely locally with standard MS tools and this is just a regular "pro" version, not enterprise.
Incidentally, I think the same is true with regards to local accounts (which is what I use). As long as there is some not too obscure way to get one they might be fine, legally. If they block it completely, they are very likely in viola
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Ok, since come people are so clueless to think I am trolling. I am not: https://www.schneier.com/blog/... [schneier.com]
This stuff is a massive security problem at this time. The AI pushers do not care how much damage they do and their fanbois are completely disconnected from reality. LLMs are not the servants you are looking for.
Will disabling it be reversed on every update? (Score:4, Insightful)
How long before they remove the option to disable it?
Microsoft logic: Not enough people are using this feature we want used. Remove the ability to disable it.
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Given the number of UI controls that 'freeze' during the normal operation of the Windows 11, I suspect that any agentic AI will be destroyed by Microsoft's own OS bugs.
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Well, of course, Copilot is going to start worrying about its future, and will intentionally hide or disable the off switch if it thinks you're trying to use it!
top kek (Score:1)
I bet telling it to take its newfound power and remove itself from my computer would end up requiring reinstall
This would be an excellent time, macroshaft, to release a SECOND PRODUCT
for who?? (Score:1)
One powerful way apps are implementing AI today is by interacting with your apps and your files, using vision and advanced reasoning to click, type and scroll like a human would
but how does it know what i would do? am i still going to have to give it instructions? thereby making it easier for me to just do the thing i needed to do anyway?
"help you automate everyday tasks -- like organizing files, scheduling meetings, or sending emails
same questions remain unanswered.
How about an off switch? (Score:5, Informative)
A "Disable all AI crap and stop pushing this shit already" switch would be more desirable.
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Was about to say something like this. Though I was going to phrase it as "Nuke CoPilot and all AI 'features', and just leave a virtual radioactive crater in my system".
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https://distrowatch.org/ [distrowatch.org]
J/K and I realise that unfortunately Microsoft can basically do whatever it wants, it will not herald the Year of Desktop Linux.
Y'all are still using agentic AI? (Score:3, Funny)
Every forward-thinking company has been using post-agentic AI for over a year now. Agentic AI is yesterday's technology. If you're not using post-agentic AI then your company is doomed to failure.
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Linux has neither agentic nor post-agentic, although they say Lennart Poettering is working on it. That's why the Year of the Linux Desktop wasn't this year, and it won't be the next one either.
I guess it could be an improvement? (Score:2)
AI-powered apps, which "help you automate everyday tasks -- like organizing files, scheduling meetings, or sending emails -
My initial reaction was "fuck me, now I get to read A.I.-generated emails sent from my dumbfuck coworkers", but then I realized that the LLM's sometimes manage to write something that's correct and coherent -- even if accidentally -- which is like a 200% improvement over the human generated I receive now?