5 ms·

The privacy concerns here are real and massive, and I suspect this will get worse before it gets better. However. This is the holy grail of computer usage. A g

The privacy concerns here are real and massive, and I suspect this will get worse before it gets better. However. This is the holy grail of computer usage. A good version of this could be the killer app for modern AI. Because of that, ripple are going to keep trying to make this feature happen. There’s already a popular implementation on macOS. I’m excited for the end-state, but apprehensive about getting there.

Slyfox33 2y ago
"Holy grail of computer usage". Really...?
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  One of the most popular features ever used on every computer is the Undo button. One of the most common questions every computer user has at any given moment is some variant of "What/Where was it?". I agree it's a holy grail, but it's also a road paved with good intentions.
  - Slyfox33 2y ago
    Recall isn't an undo button. It's just screenshots lol.
- falcor84 2y ago
  I'm somewhat with the parent on this. Getting this right will probably take a long time but can eventually bring us something like J.A.R.V.I.S, whereby an AI agent can reason about all activities you've performed on the computer in the past and give you advice or perform full tasks for you based on that. We can argue whether we want to give the AI that level of trust, but I'm very interested in the potential.
beretguy 2y ago
Microsoft will probably encrypt that db or something to try to convince people it’s safe.
- cududa 2y ago
  Please explain to me why an OS level signed and encrypted database isn’t secure
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    The same reason banks get occasionally robbed, despite all security cameras, delayed openings, biometrics, armed security, and everything else put in place. When there is a will, there is eventually a way, for anyone with enough resources.
  - plonk 2y ago
    Researchers on Twitter are saying that it’s just a plaintext SQLite.
  - page_fault 2y ago
    Because it needs to be decrypted at some point?
  - verdverm 2y ago
    When has windows ever been a safe or secure OS environment? Seems to me, many an exploit has been installed by the user while trying to get device drivers working
  - soraminazuki 2y ago
    Why is a padlock with the key stuck right into it secure? The encrypted data and the decryption key is on the same physical device. Sure, memory isolation techniques may serve as a deterrent with extreme care. But if Microsoft increases the attack surface by sloppily integrating that feature everywhere in Windows, the yet-to-be-implemented-if-at-all encryption is going to be ineffective. And that’s going to happen more likely than not.
    - plonk 2y ago
      Maybe the learning and inference can happen in a VM and the apps can only have access to a query API. (Take the equivalents if it's not all ML.)
safety1st 2y ago
I think I'll stay on Linux and let Windows users be the guinea pig for this particular experiment.
- michelsedgh 2y ago
  I wonder what kinda data they will get cause most people who code and do heavy stuff I think are on mac/Linux so I wonder how good the data they gather be you know? Mostly moms and dads using their computers wrong this is what I imagine my head is the data they gather, like maybe 50-60% of it lol and heavy users with good data are nowhere to be found
  - mikro2nd 2y ago
    "moms and dads using their computers wrong" What the hell is the "wrong" way to use a computer? Emails, social media and doing your banking? And why attack "moms and dads"? Speaking as a grandfather, I find it insulting, having used and programmed computers since the 1970s.
    - smeej 2y ago
      > What the hell is the "wrong" way to use a computer? Searching for your bank's website rather than bookmarking it, and entering your credentials into the phishing site that's the top result. Installing Anydesk or something for the "nice gentleman who called me from Microsoft to tell me my warranty had expired and he needed gift cards to pay for it." Those are the two most obvious ones I can think of. There's a multi-billion dollar "industry" separating especially older people from their money using computers. Frankly if you've even been around computers for 50+ years and haven't encountered the many and varied ridiculous ways people can use them "wrong," I have to wonder whether you've ever had to deal with regular people using them in the real world at all.
      - matthewmacleod 2y ago
        Searching for your bank's website rather than bookmarking it, and entering your credentials into the phishing site that's the top result. This isn’t wrong so much as a damning indictment of the tech industry’s inability to fix core issues despite having more money that god herself
everdrive 2y ago
Further infantilization of the user, further resource requirements, enormous privacy concerns, and proprietary technology. It all seems bad to me.
flohofwoe 2y ago
I would prefer if they get a simple search-in-local-text-files right first. That doesn't even need "AI", just some plain old 1970s-style coding.
bravetraveler 2y ago
Snake oil salesman says: "Snakes Are Scary!" Computers are the holy Grail of computers. Stop playing with fire. The tool is already here.
anthk 2y ago
No. The holy grail of computing would be taking an instant snapshot as you do with emulators/vm's from anywhere, allowing you to rollback anytime, restoring the CPU and memory settings in the spot. With incremental snapshots, 'branches' and so on, switching back and forth seamlessly as you would do with save states under an emulator. And with 'no time', with a delay of less than 5-10 seconds on creating/restoring a snapshot. On search, as they stated, Recoll did it fine over 20 years.
kmlx 2y ago
> However. This is the holy grail of computer usage i’ve seen this often and i’m trying to understand the issue. i have never wanted to go back in history or have a comprehensive history of all my actions. the only exception is the terminal and for that ctrl+r/history is more than enough. i learn, apply and move on. what’s the use case for this recall thing?
- danpalmer 2y ago
  I often have 100 tabs open so that I can find things I was looking at again. I regularly browse my browser history to try to find things I saw previously. I often remember seeing something in a chat session somewhere, but can't remember which person/channel/room it was... Being able to search everything I've seen on my screen would address all of these. I think it would fundamentally change how we interface with computers, if we could do it reliably. Silos between applications can start to break down when you have sufficient intelligence about what's on the screen too, and that's a huge opportunity.
  - kmlx 2y ago
    interesting. thanks for the reply. i also used to have lots of tabs open till i realised i need to organise better. since then i keep a few tabs open at max and regularly close all my tabs. i also tend to open a tab, read what i need to and then close it. no more clutter this way.
- mmebane 2y ago
  As someone with ADHD, being able to have an assistant with perfect memory that I can ask extremely vague questions to about things I'm pretty sure I did some time between last week and 5 years ago sounds amazing. I'm skeptical Recall will actually be able to do that. I doubt its usefulness outweighs the legal and social concerns. But I can absolutely see the use.
  - ChickeNES 2y ago
    This is honestly exactly why I'm (cautiously) optimistic about Recall.
015a 2y ago
I strongly feel that the "this is the holy grail of computer feature" take is tech-industry mindbubble. This line in the article hits very hard: > A lot of Windows users just want their PCs so they can play games, watch porn, and live their lives as human beings who make mistakes The vast, VAST majority of Windows users don't care about a feature like this. You might say "if we'd ask people what they'd wanted they'd have said a faster horse", but we've seen this play out time and time again since ~2014 where the tech industry believes some thing is going to be Next Big Huge, it doesn't stick, and Microsoft Office continues to make fifty billion dollars a year because, it turns out, we kinda solved PCs in the 90s and 78% of what We The Tech Industry has invented since then has a market 5% the size the hype would lead you to believe. Metaverse, VR, AR, Crypto, Decentralized Finance, AI, Voice assistants, tablets (what's a computer?), quantum computing, IoT (all consumers love our toasters connected to the internet, this is undeniable and people pay extra for this /s). Sometimes people just want a faster horse; which in this case means "filesystem search that actually works". The techbro response to that is "well, you can have both" but there's fucking actually zero evidence of this, period, neither Microsoft nor Apple have demonstrated the capability to get the basics of their operating systems right anymore, We Their Customers should have zero faith in their ability to even get this right, as articles like this demonstrate. > I used Microsoft Defender for Endpoint — which detected the off the shelve infostealer — but by the time the automated remediation kicked in (which took over ten minutes) my Recall data was already long gone. This isn't a Microsoft problem; well, obviously it is, but its really an industry problem. Sorry for waxing abstractly here, but we've literally actually forgotten how to build software [1]. The smart & dedicated people have either left the industry or have been marginalized by MBAs, and the kids are rewriting the Windows Start menu in javascript [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko [2] https://x.com/Zeko369/status/1791141890106290670 https://x.com/Zeko369/status/1791141890106290670

Slyfox33 2y ago

"Holy grail of computer usage". Really...?

Dalewyn 2y ago
One of the most popular features ever used on every computer is the Undo button. One of the most common questions every computer user has at any given moment is some variant of "What/Where was it?". I agree it's a holy grail, but it's also a road paved with good intentions.
- Slyfox33 2y ago
  Recall isn't an undo button. It's just screenshots lol.
falcor84 2y ago
I'm somewhat with the parent on this. Getting this right will probably take a long time but can eventually bring us something like J.A.R.V.I.S, whereby an AI agent can reason about all activities you've performed on the computer in the past and give you advice or perform full tasks for you based on that. We can argue whether we want to give the AI that level of trust, but I'm very interested in the potential.

beretguy 2y ago

Microsoft will probably encrypt that db or something to try to convince people it’s safe.

cududa 2y ago
Please explain to me why an OS level signed and encrypted database isn’t secure
- pjmlp 2y ago
  The same reason banks get occasionally robbed, despite all security cameras, delayed openings, biometrics, armed security, and everything else put in place. When there is a will, there is eventually a way, for anyone with enough resources.
- plonk 2y ago
  Researchers on Twitter are saying that it’s just a plaintext SQLite.
- page_fault 2y ago
  Because it needs to be decrypted at some point?
- verdverm 2y ago
  When has windows ever been a safe or secure OS environment? Seems to me, many an exploit has been installed by the user while trying to get device drivers working
- soraminazuki 2y ago
  Why is a padlock with the key stuck right into it secure? The encrypted data and the decryption key is on the same physical device. Sure, memory isolation techniques may serve as a deterrent with extreme care. But if Microsoft increases the attack surface by sloppily integrating that feature everywhere in Windows, the yet-to-be-implemented-if-at-all encryption is going to be ineffective. And that’s going to happen more likely than not.
  - plonk 2y ago
    Maybe the learning and inference can happen in a VM and the apps can only have access to a query API. (Take the equivalents if it's not all ML.)

safety1st 2y ago

I think I'll stay on Linux and let Windows users be the guinea pig for this particular experiment.

michelsedgh 2y ago
I wonder what kinda data they will get cause most people who code and do heavy stuff I think are on mac/Linux so I wonder how good the data they gather be you know? Mostly moms and dads using their computers wrong this is what I imagine my head is the data they gather, like maybe 50-60% of it lol and heavy users with good data are nowhere to be found
- mikro2nd 2y ago
  "moms and dads using their computers wrong" What the hell is the "wrong" way to use a computer? Emails, social media and doing your banking? And why attack "moms and dads"? Speaking as a grandfather, I find it insulting, having used and programmed computers since the 1970s.
  - smeej 2y ago
    > What the hell is the "wrong" way to use a computer? Searching for your bank's website rather than bookmarking it, and entering your credentials into the phishing site that's the top result. Installing Anydesk or something for the "nice gentleman who called me from Microsoft to tell me my warranty had expired and he needed gift cards to pay for it." Those are the two most obvious ones I can think of. There's a multi-billion dollar "industry" separating especially older people from their money using computers. Frankly if you've even been around computers for 50+ years and haven't encountered the many and varied ridiculous ways people can use them "wrong," I have to wonder whether you've ever had to deal with regular people using them in the real world at all.
    - matthewmacleod 2y ago
      Searching for your bank's website rather than bookmarking it, and entering your credentials into the phishing site that's the top result. This isn’t wrong so much as a damning indictment of the tech industry’s inability to fix core issues despite having more money that god herself

everdrive 2y ago

Further infantilization of the user, further resource requirements, enormous privacy concerns, and proprietary technology. It all seems bad to me.

flohofwoe 2y ago

I would prefer if they get a simple search-in-local-text-files right first. That doesn't even need "AI", just some plain old 1970s-style coding.

bravetraveler 2y ago

Snake oil salesman says: "Snakes Are Scary!" Computers are the holy Grail of computers. Stop playing with fire. The tool is already here.

anthk 2y ago

No. The holy grail of computing would be taking an instant snapshot as you do with emulators/vm's from anywhere, allowing you to rollback anytime, restoring the CPU and memory settings in the spot. With incremental snapshots, 'branches' and so on, switching back and forth seamlessly as you would do with save states under an emulator. And with 'no time', with a delay of less than 5-10 seconds on creating/restoring a snapshot. On search, as they stated, Recoll did it fine over 20 years.

kmlx 2y ago

> However. This is the holy grail of computer usage i’ve seen this often and i’m trying to understand the issue. i have never wanted to go back in history or have a comprehensive history of all my actions. the only exception is the terminal and for that ctrl+r/history is more than enough. i learn, apply and move on. what’s the use case for this recall thing?

danpalmer 2y ago
I often have 100 tabs open so that I can find things I was looking at again. I regularly browse my browser history to try to find things I saw previously. I often remember seeing something in a chat session somewhere, but can't remember which person/channel/room it was... Being able to search everything I've seen on my screen would address all of these. I think it would fundamentally change how we interface with computers, if we could do it reliably. Silos between applications can start to break down when you have sufficient intelligence about what's on the screen too, and that's a huge opportunity.
- kmlx 2y ago
  interesting. thanks for the reply. i also used to have lots of tabs open till i realised i need to organise better. since then i keep a few tabs open at max and regularly close all my tabs. i also tend to open a tab, read what i need to and then close it. no more clutter this way.
mmebane 2y ago
As someone with ADHD, being able to have an assistant with perfect memory that I can ask extremely vague questions to about things I'm pretty sure I did some time between last week and 5 years ago sounds amazing. I'm skeptical Recall will actually be able to do that. I doubt its usefulness outweighs the legal and social concerns. But I can absolutely see the use.
- ChickeNES 2y ago
  This is honestly exactly why I'm (cautiously) optimistic about Recall.

015a 2y ago

I strongly feel that the "this is the holy grail of computer feature" take is tech-industry mindbubble. This line in the article hits very hard: > A lot of Windows users just want their PCs so they can play games, watch porn, and live their lives as human beings who make mistakes The vast, VAST majority of Windows users don't care about a feature like this. You might say "if we'd ask people what they'd wanted they'd have said a faster horse", but we've seen this play out time and time again since ~2014 where the tech industry believes some thing is going to be Next Big Huge, it doesn't stick, and Microsoft Office continues to make fifty billion dollars a year because, it turns out, we kinda solved PCs in the 90s and 78% of what We The Tech Industry has invented since then has a market 5% the size the hype would lead you to believe. Metaverse, VR, AR, Crypto, Decentralized Finance, AI, Voice assistants, tablets (what's a computer?), quantum computing, IoT (all consumers love our toasters connected to the internet, this is undeniable and people pay extra for this /s). Sometimes people just want a faster horse; which in this case means "filesystem search that actually works". The techbro response to that is "well, you can have both" but there's fucking actually zero evidence of this, period, neither Microsoft nor Apple have demonstrated the capability to get the basics of their operating systems right anymore, We Their Customers should have zero faith in their ability to even get this right, as articles like this demonstrate. > I used Microsoft Defender for Endpoint — which detected the off the shelve infostealer — but by the time the automated remediation kicked in (which took over ten minutes) my Recall data was already long gone. This isn't a Microsoft problem; well, obviously it is, but its really an industry problem. Sorry for waxing abstractly here, but we've literally actually forgotten how to build software [1]. The smart & dedicated people have either left the industry or have been marginalized by MBAs, and the kids are rewriting the Windows Start menu in javascript [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko [2] https://x.com/Zeko369/status/1791141890106290670 https://x.com/Zeko369/status/1791141890106290670