Windows 11 Adds AI Agent That Runs in Background with Access to Personal Folders

Wayland hasn't even stabilised their accessibility hooks, and in the name of privacy have undercut what accessibility tools can see.

X server has always had an awful accessibility story. The server can break and swap node handles as you're using them.

VoiceOver is... Well, it has some AI layers that can sometimes rewrite the text it is reading. So... Think AI subtitles, but interacting with them.

JAWS and NVDA are basically Windows-only, because no one else has a decent accessibility story.

Yup. Just gotta invent a Win32-compatible Wayland first. This... Is sorta a "whole fucking owl" moment.

> As explained above NVDA relies heavily on Windows specific API's and cannot be converted to run under Unix based systems without a lot of work. Given how small NVDA development team is spending time on making NVDA work under Linux at a level at which Orca works currently would take years and mean much less development for the version for Windows. In short the more reasonable course of action is to spend time on improving Orca or other Linux screen readers rather than porting (which in practice would mean almost rewriting from scratch) NVDA to run under a non Windows system. [1]

Accessibility in Wayland is still in staging. [0] There is not the APIs you need, to port anything to using them.

X-Windows only supports Class 1 info over AAC. Class 2 was only ever semi-implemented, and is the more important class of information for the user. You basically need an Optacon, and too bad if you don't want tactile.

NVDA does work under Wine! But only with well-behaving programs running under Wine. It won't work for the rest of the system.

Gnome's Orca only works with Gnome-aware apps. It is supposed to work with Plasma for KDE things, but its a dice roll. It works with Firefox, Chrome, etc, because they go out of their way to make accessibility work better.

But Orca is about half as decent as JAWS or NVDA. Its a step ten years backwards.

Voxin (paid) used to work well, but seems to now be unmaintained. Certs expired, no updates for two years, etc.

[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mwcampbell/wayland-protocols/...

[1] https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/13196

Not mention all telemetry that was added (which turned out to be the "price" for that upgrade that even spread to W7), nagging popups and dark patterns scattered across the system, uncontrollable updates feature and updates itself which in extreme cases removed user files. We also got programs, features nobody ask for and which were installed without user consent.

Plus of course the disbanded QA and relying on the "community" instead. Which also become the cost-less help support to some degree with countless copy-pasted posts on MS forums suggesting "sfc /scannow" as the solution to every problem people faced - just so the posting "enthusiast" could get virtual points.

Windows 10 wasn't any better system but a clear sign the direction MS was heading. So before you start casting angry dv try to refresh you memory.

This is exactly why I'm switching every one of my computers over to Linux, and I'm going to recommend others do the same.

[1] https://bazzite.gg/

Thanks. Added to canonical list of "Famous last words". /s

The real chore is having to go to the store to get groceries, doing laundry, pairing socks etc … but solving any of that would require more than just bullshit LLM capabilities.

1. "Help customers buy crap" is one of the vaguely plausible use-cases which excite investors who see the ads, even if it isn't so exciting for actual customers.

2. The ideas seem sourced from some brain-trust of idle-rich, rather than from the average US consumer. Regardless of how the characters in the ads are presented, all of them are somehow able to prefer saving 60 seconds even if it means maybe losing $60 on a dumb purchase or a non-refundable reservation at the wrong restaurant, etc.

It's just shitware being added to everything at very few people's benefit just so they can score some points on the stock market AI hype leaderboard.

Are you familiar with the prior state of things that explicitly motivated this change?

You should actually expect the exact opposite. There's more money in getting large companies to pay you to redirect customers to more expensive products than in consumers paying for this kind of service. Honey[1] should server as a stark reminder here.

[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/software/honey-scandal-e...

> According to Megalag and other content creators, Honey's core promise isn't true. PayPal and Honey say they'll run through a series of coupon codes to find the best deals. However, the firm is accused of using inferior codes to ensure the retailer gets more money from the sale while promising the user that the best code was used.

> Megalag tested this in his video and found instances where better codes were readily available online, but Honey chose to use a code with a lower discount, claiming it was the best deal.