What this also means: you cannot have any private conversations with windows users anymore. They all have to be considered fully backdoored. Even if the agent runs locally, you don’t know what it all sends back to MS servers.

For people who have any slice of privacy consciousness left, this is the death of Windows. The difference between this and using a desktop directly from MS’ cloud is negligible - MS can get access to potentially everything that’s visible or readable on your desktop.

After you’ve already established security, you can add obscurity (without compromising security) on top for an even bigger gain in security overall. But you can’t do obscurity in place of security.

My take on it: most people do have foresight or at least understand the issue, but they still don’t act on it or ignore it as long as the status quo is still convenient enough. So it’s purely a matter of pain and inconvenience. Once enough pain and inconvenience has accumulated, they’re much more ready to make an actual switch. Thankfully, with Microsoft’s services also becoming increasingly enshittified (forced AI chatbot integrations everywhere, even more cloud dependencies, ever more expensive subscriptions, …) there’s also Microsoft shooting itself in the foot a bit in order to accelerate this process. Vile actions from the current US regime are also accelerating the process of course.

https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/gov.whitehouse.app/latest/

As usual: this can be interpteted as Malware. That said, many apps are like this these days: full of trackers and way too many permissions. Most people never know or care.

Mildly interesting: one of.the trackers seems to be related to Huawei.

EDIT: Someone decompiled and analyzed the app in detail: https://blog.thereallo.dev/blog/decompiling-the-white-house-app

Yes, and they intentionally want those lines to be as blurry as possible.

I think still too many people missed the turning point when Microsoft suddenly stopped releasing products/software that were superior in basically all areas to their previous versions. I think that turning point was Windows 8 already, for many who consider Windows 8 a single-time mistake like ME or Vista it was Windows 10, for others it took until Windows 11 until they noticed the decline of Windows as a whole.

And it’s not just MS, but a lot of consumer tech is growing anti-consumer and gets enshittified to the point of where you really have to think hard whether or not you even want the new stuff they’re spewing out. My consumer habits have certainly changed to be much more rigorous than, say, 10-20 years ago. I read a lot more reviews these days and from many more different sources bevore I even think of buying something new.

“AI PCs” will increase your dependency on MS’ online services (which is probably the main thing that MS wants), decrease your privacy even more (also what MS wants - that’s a lot of data for sale), consume even more energy (on a planet with limited resources), sometimes increase your productivity (which is probably the most advantage you’re ever getting out of it) and other times royally screw you over (due to faulty and insecure AI behavior). Furthermore, LLMs are non-deterministic, meaning that the output (or what they’re doing) changes slightly every time you repeat even the same request. It’s just not a great idea to use that for anything where you need to TRUST its output.

I don’t think it will be a particularly good deal. And nothing MS or these other companies that are in the AI business say can ever be taken at face value or as truthful information. They’ve bullshitted their customers way too much already, way more than is usual for advertisements. If this was still the '90s or before 2010 or so - maybe they’d have a point. But this is 2026. Unless proven otherwise, we should assume bullshit by default.

I think we’re currently in a post-factual hype-only era where they are trying to sell you things that won’t ever exist in the way they describe them, but they’ll claim it will always happen “in the near future”. CEO brains probably extrapolate “Generative AI somewhat works now for some use cases so it will surely work well for all use cases within a couple of years”, so they might believe the stories they tell all day themselves, but it might just as well never happen. And even if it DID happen, you’d still suffer many drawbacks like insane vendor dependencies/lock-ins, zero privacy whatsoever, sometimes faulty and randomly changing AI behavior, and probably impossible-to-fix security holes (prompt injection and so on - LLMs have no clear boundary between data and instructions and it’s not that hard to get them to reveal secret data or do things they shouldn’t be doing in the first place. If your AI agent interprets a malicious instruction as valid, and it can act on your behalf on your system, you have a major problem).

Microslop Crashpilot

Unfortunately, most Windows users have a long history of complaining about it and then still continuing to use it.

There’s no way around it: if you keep using abusive software, you’ll stay in an abusive relationship.

I know, but it’s still a warning sign, even when some can’t read or understand it.

Though laughing about the current regime in USA is an understandable reaction, it’s also at the same time not a laughing matter at all. It’s a bit like a great comedian or clown who is very entertaining and goofy at first but at the end he randomly kills 1 person from the audience. Still a funny act? No. Because at the end of this craziness, people will needlessly suffer and/or die.

The country still has huge world-wide influence, and if that influence originates from crazies, that’s not great for anyone, neither for US citizens nor for any other country in the world which has to at least partly deal with the US somehow. It is, however, a great and very visible warning sign for other countries to hopefully not follow the US into such craziness.

The current tech/IT sector is heavily relying on and riding hype trains. It’s a bit like the fashion industry that way. But this AI hype so far has only been somewhat useful.

Current general LLMs are decent for prototyping or example output to jump-start you into the general direction of your destination, but their output always needs supervision and most often it needs fixing. If you apply unreliable and constantly changing AI to everything, and completely throw out humans, just because it’s cheaper, then you’ll get vastly inferior results. You probably get faster results, but the results will have tons of errors which introduces tons of extra problems you never had before. I can see AI fully replacing some jobs in some specific areas where errors don’t matter much. But that’s about it. For all other jobs or purposes, AI will be an extra tool, nothing more, nothing less.

AI has its uses within specific domains, when trained only on domain-specific and truthful data. You know, things like AlphaZero or AlphaGo. Or AIs revealing new methods not known before to reach the same goal. But these general AIs like ChatGPT which are trained on basically the whole web with all the crap in it… it’s never going to be truly great. And it’s also becoming worse over time, i.e. not improving much at all, because the web will be even fuller with AI-generated crap in the future. So the AIs slurp up all that crap too. The training data gets muddier over time. The promise of AIs getting even more powerful as time goes on is just a marketing lie. There’s most likely a saturation curve, and we’re most likely very close to the saturation already, where it won’t really get any better. You could already see this by comparing the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4 (big) and then GPT-4 to GPT-5 (much smaller). Or take a look at FSD cars. Also not really happening, unless you like crashes. Of course, the companies want to keep the illusion rolling so they’ll always claim the next big revolution is just around the corner. Because they profit from investments and monthly paying customers, and as long as they can keep that illusion up and profit from that, they don’t even need to fulfill any more promises.

Translation help from Fascist English to US English:

• “activist” = a non-politician whose free speech we don’t like
• “allow all voices to be heard” / “free speech” = extremist/unconstitutional/propaganda speech which serves the interests of the current fascist regime must be allowed, while every other speech will be labelled as being activist/communist/un-American/…
• “defend […] all Americans” = at least the part of Americans which we tolerate or haven’t jailed yet (subject to change)

AI has some use but it always needs human oversight and the final decision must also be made by a human professional. If you use AI to speed up tasks and you know whether the output of the AI is valid or not, and you have the final decision, then you can safely use it. But if you let AI decide on and execute important tasks basically autonomously, then you have a recipe for disaster. Fully autonomous and mistake-free AI is a naive pipe dream which I don’t see on the horizon at all.

Generally yes but it’s not nearly always so clear cut that one is 100% the offender and the other one 0%. Which is why attention to details, context, sophistication, listening to both sides before coming to a conclusion, etc. Is so important. But guess what kind of things get lost when taking part in such a one-sided blame game on the semi-anonymous internet.

Apps like this but also social media more generally allow for one-sided public naming and shaming of Individuals who probably don’t even know about it. It’s problematic because it can be deeply unfair.

I get that there is also value in women protecting themselves against predators but more than likely most content within the app/service is probably one-sided public blaming and gossiping.

And as we all know from right-wing propaganda, being the first to make a bold claim public and generate headlines with it is very powerful and spreads the message far and wide, whether true or false, and many will just believe it’s true without further investigation.

While this is “nice”, I guess, I also can’t fathom how naive this generally seems.

X is a proprietary black box and X or L.Ron Musk can change the algorithm literally at will, what they show which persons and when and when not. There is NO time ever where users have have any control over it, and to perform a statistical analysis on an online service blackbox is also kind of pointless because the blackbox can change randomly, at any point in time, possibly right after the analysis has concluded, or right before. I mean it’s not like the blackbox is in your hands so that you can actually study inputs/outputs and get consistent results. Every time you visit any X URL, there’s potentially a fresh blackbox version deployed to you (you don’t know and you can’t know). That makes it rather pointless IMHO. And it’s just as pointless to believe what X claims about these issues. Of course they’ll always claim that they don’t manipulate. And you can never prove or disprove it, because of a complete lack of control over it from the user’s end. So they can do what they want, as long as they do it sneakily enough that no one notices.

For example if this study comes to the conclusion that there was no manipulation during the time of the study, that’s meaningless because it could have happened before and it could happen afterwards. If it comes to the conclusion that there was manipulation at a certain time, then X can always claim that they’ve already “fixed” the issue and then it’s again a new black box and no one knows when the next manipulation is being activated.

The ONLY solution to this is to ONLY use open source platforms where not a single company or host is able to do what they want with the complete service. Or in other words, the only solution is to avoid X and other proprietary social media platforms like the plague that they are. Because communication should not be controlled by any big company.

The only “wins” for this current US regime are negative records: most cruel, most degenerate, most stupid, most racist, and so on. And the “grand prize” for these wins will be war (civil or conventional) plus a spot in history among the worst people ever to destabilize and rule a country.

Maybe it works as an excuse when you claim you just wanted to train your own AI model with all those pirated books and videos. But who am I kidding. The reality is that copyright violation, as well as quite a few other things, is only really a crime if you’re poor. This current “endgame capitalism” era we’re in is becoming extra-legal quite fast. Maybe we should start making interactive law books where you can view whether a particular law actually applies to your person or your company, or not. Just to keep up with the times.

Yes. Unfortunately, these systems are also a great gift for any upcoming fascist regime (like the Trump junta currently) which will not only happily continue using the existing infrastructure but also extend it like mad.

Maybe humanity’s greatest weaknesses overall: the lack of foresight and the lack of wisdom learned from historic precedents (e.g. Nazi Germany? Forgotten by now). Everything’s always about short-term goals, ignoring any long-term disadvantages. See also: climate disaster.

In other words: Users of proprietary OS like Windows have so little control over their own devices that it’s newsworthy when the vendor allows you to uninstall 2-3 bundled things out of many more. But only in some countries! It’s pathetic.

He’s obviously doing all of this to get less regulation, which in turn means more money and more power, more being able to do what he wants. Big corporations and rich businessmen will benefit from that short-term, but long-term we all suffer, because we’ll get a neo-nazi government and do even less against climate change.

Even if we manage to prevent or at least overcome the neo-nazi government once people realize that’s not a good thing to have, nature will be standing right next in line to punish us really hard for being so goddamn stupid. History will not remember us fondly. Future survivors will think of our generation(s) as insane and/or stupid, when they learn that people willingly voted for entities which destroy the planet even more, and make living conditions for citizens even worse, despite knowing better way ahead of time (earth heating up is known since the 1970s or so, and the results of nazi-governments are also known very well), and despite having the internet as an easy means of global communication and coordination.