• 10 Posts
  • 305 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • I think the main reason why Word is losing mindshare, is because it was designed for paper. The whole formatting system makes the assumption that there’s a fixed width and height into which your text and images fit. In reality, a phone screen is a lot narrower and a widescreen monitor a lot wider.

    Markdown never made these assumptions. For the most part simply because plain text reflows to fill whatever space you give it. But there’s no way to position an image either, I imagine mostly for simplicity’s sake. It can look goofy at times, but it never looks broken.
    That’s why I can write this comment on my phone and someone else can look at it on desktop and it’s perfectly readable in both scenarios.







  • Yeah, good question. I imagine the screenshotting itself is largely negligible, although obviously not free either. I don’t know when the LLM gets to do its job. Theoretically, it could be delayed until some point where there’s not much going on on your PC.

    At some point, Microsoft wanted to roll out these AI features only on PCs which have an NPU, which is basically an additional CPU with a different architecture optimized for pattern recognition and such. I don’t know, if they still hold onto that requirement, but it would mean that it wouldn’t hog your CPU at least.

    They have been somewhat desperate to roll out Recall, because it was the only semi-useful out of a handful of features that they came up with to somehow integrate AI into Windows. So, that’s why I’m never quite sure, what requirements they’re still holding onto.



  • It takes a screenshot every five seconds and runs an LLM over it to extract text. Then there’s a UI where you can query it for what you did in the past.

    It came under fire when they wanted to introduce it last year, because it stored all that data on your disk in unencrypted form. Meaning if anyone manages to run malicious code on your system, they don’t need to do the collecting themselves anymore, but can rather just send off any screenshotted passwords or whatever other secret things you might’ve been doing on your PC at any point in time. In particular, Microsoft had claimed that the data would be encrypted and it wasn’t. Didn’t even need special permissions to access it.

    No idea, if they fixed the encryption now, or if this is just a case of the shitstorm having died down, so they roll it out now. But yeah, even with encryption, the implications aren’t great. If your parents or boss or law enforcement want to know what you were doing on your PC, they now have an exact history. And Microsoft could still change their mind and decide to upload all your data at any point in the future.







  • Well, I feel like the Steam Deck has partially positioned itself as just a convenience device. I imagine quite some folks have it in addition to their (Windows) gaming PC and just use it on the couch or when travelling.

    In particular, the genre most likely to cause problems are competitive games (because anti-cheat freaks out when it notices slight differences compared to real Windows). And it wouldn’t be my first thought to buy a Steam Deck to play those, simply because the screen is small and the primary controls aren’t mouse+keyboard (even though you can of course dock the Steam Deck)