I was thinking about this the other day.
I can’t see the point, desktop search is a solved problem.
Yes Windows find is shit, but it doesn’t have to be.
I know a bunch of the conspiracies, but what is the legitimate use case?
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Increase in quarterly profits for Microsoft shareholders.
Because it’s not just desktop search in the conventional sense, it parses and indexes EVERYTHING that is shown on screen regardless of app.
Normal desktop search is fine for ‘where is file X?’ or ‘which document contains Y?’ but the point of Recall is to be able to deal with far more wide reaching queries, like ‘what website did I order a cake from last week?’ or ‘where did I see a great idea for a pizza recently?’, where it can find sources for natural-language queries across anything that was shown onscreen, whether it was a website, an email, a slack message, or something within any other app.
Ok, so my next question would be, is this a problem that needs solving?
At a long time Linux user, I’m wondering if it is useful enough to look into an open and trustworthy solution to give this a go.
I could see the usefulness of saying, “hey I saw this on my phone a few days ago, which site was it?”
It is a problem worth solving. Terrorism is a problem that needs solving and killing all people on earth is a solution. The next question is whether or not it is an appropriate solution to the problem.
Its a double-edged sword. There is a ton of use in something like “help me display the data in this excel workbook for a presentation” but the tradeoff is that data is now indexed in the recall database along with everything else you do.
Ultimately, using recall is a security concern that massively outweighs any benefits it offers, but to say it offers no benefit at all is incorrect.
By default, the security concerns do massively outweigh the benefits, to me. On my work machine the benefits outweigh the security issues, because it’s tightly locked down.
But if we can figure out how to safely implement such a system with very tight controls, it will be a huge game changer for individuals.
my next question would be, is this a problem that needs solving?
This is a common question on new tech things lately. Unfortunately the answer has been “no” almost invariably.
Is this a problem that needs solving?
You’re kidding, right?
MS did some research in the 90’s (related to My Life Bits) and determined how much data a person engaged with during an average day, and even then it was more than anyone could hope to manage.
I could see the usefulness of saying, “hey I saw this on my phone a few days ago, which site was it?”
To answer my own pondering. We could feed your browsing history to a local LLM, it could fetch a synopsis of the site and be able to answer that question very easily.
This wouldn’t require a really powerful AI model, combine this with desktop search and you have close to what MS is offering.
what is the legitimate use case?
You do a whole bunch of research on a subject – hours, days, weeks, months, years maybe – and then find something that sparks a connection with something else that you half remember. Where was that thing in the 1000s of pages you read? That’s the problem (or at least one of the problems) it’s supposed to solve.
I’ve considered writing similar research tools for myself over the years (e.g. save a copy of the HTML and a screenshot of every webpage I visit automatically marked with a timestamp for future reference), but decided the storage cost and risk of accidentally embarrassing/compromising myself by recording something sensitive was too high compared to just taking notes in more traditional ways and saving things manually.
It’s for when you look for a help article on single data types and copilot reminds you that there are hundreds of hot singles in your area because of a website you visited a couple of months ago. I’m not gonna mention what it returns if you need help with double data types.
I don’t think there is a point to any of Microsoft’s current design decisions and features. I’ve recently had a look at Win 11 and everything seemed mostly random to me. My guess is, someone noticed they’re doing AI these days (that’s fairly consistent) and just decided to feed some regular screenshots in.
I’ve worked in corporate America for a while now, and if there’s one lesson I’ve learned…
When the decisions from execs don’t make any sense to you, it probably means they’re trying to increase short-term shareholder value. Those decisions start making sense when you look through the lens of an MBA, but no sense to anyone who thinks beyond next quarter’s numbers.
Agree. Most of the new stuff Microsoft adds in their updates are desperate ideas concoted in staff meetings, just so some beleaguered coder can tell the dickhead boss they pushed out a shiny new turd. And/or they just add more spyware for the corporations that pay for bulk licenses and the data miners.
I wonder where this will lead. I mean the usual strategy of selling something is to look at customers, see what they want or need, give them about that… And it’ll make them buy your product. And I can see that in some of Microsoft’s products. But recently, that doesn’t seem to be super important any more when it comes to the operating system. I mean they’ve done that before. Used their marked share on the desktop to push their agenda. Even if their customers don’t like any of that. Or alternated between improvements and the worse new Windows version in-between… But especially with Windows 11 it doesn’t seem to me they care any more. Do they still have a lock on desktop computers like they used to? So they can afford to do that? Because I’m hearing more complaints than before…
What happens when their customers aren’t their users but instead are government or other corporate entities - or themselves?
Windows recall stores the data locally, but what telemetrically is it sending back? Or if its sending nothing today, what will they change it to send tomorrow? Fodder for AI training data? Sensitive secret or proprietary information?
The worst part about all of this is even if they are being absolutely and completely honest, there is no verifiable way for us to prove this because all of their code is closed source and I imagine to some capacity obfuscated.
So the natural assumption here is that, similar to free-as-in-beer products, we are the product and Windows is the platform by which we are being served.
None. It’s just an AI-bloated feature that overcomplicates what people already can do with their Windows OSes.
It’s basically an enhanced “undo” button. If everything that has happened in the last x minutes is recorded and suddenly a computer stops working or a file goes missing or a data breach happens, you can easily undo the change.
Alternately, there is speculation that it’s being marketed to companies to gain visibility into repetitive tasks to help automate them as well as to crack down on employees who just wiggle their mouse every so often to keep the monitor on or whatever people do to pretend to be busy during the 5 seconds they get free after months of in uncompensated extra work they put in.
who just wiggle their mouse every so often to keep the monitor on or whatever people do to pretend to be busy
Just use powershell to make a down cursor keypress every few minutes and put the screen on a long work-related webpage article like a normal programmer under surveillance…
I’m sure large businesses are doing exactly that. It’s one of the first things I thought of - if you and I can think of it, you know Corp is already on it.
At some meeting someone asked: “AI is going to change everything. How is it going to change the Windows experience”? And recall was the best they could come up with.
At the meeting:
“The AI could just crawl documents etc?”
“Don’t be silly… most people’s documents are cloud based now… and not necessarily with us”
“We could scan the text while they Edge?”
“I’ve told you about saying that that way…”
“Ok. we could scan the text while they use Edge to browse?”
"Use Edge? What planet are you on. Even I use Firefox. Simple truth is we have no visibility of what used spend 90% of their time doing "
“…”
“…”
“You know… we could just take a screenshot at regular intervals?”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“You know that’s such a ridiculously shit idea it might just work…”
Bottom line is Microsoft wanted to integrate AI now because they know AI will be worthwhile later and not building institutional knowledge of the technology means they will be behind when the technology becomes desirable and useful.
They are trying to sell people on it by coming up with things you can do, because they know that once you have that hammer in your hands, you will hit whatever your whims demand and then you will want a better hammer.
My uneducated guess is that they need AI-related features to sell more units and this was one that seemed useful for consumers. They were mistaken, but that’s my thought process. I use Linux so I’m viewing things indifferent on this end
