This made me think on the potential roles the three outer planets* (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) in the scheduler.

• Uranus: looking at things from a new angle. Innovation, intuition, ruptures with tradition. Higher octave of Mercury; so if Mercury is ruling network and I/O tasks, perhaps Uranus could rule specifically data creation and writing?
• Neptune: elevating things past the concrete, into the abstract. Inspiration, illusion, refinement. Higher octave of Venus; so if Venus rules desktop and UI processes, Neptune could focus on the windowing system.
• Pluto: changing the nature and “hidden-ness” of the things. Metamorphosis, unearthing, cycles of [con/de]struction. Higher octave of Mars; so if Mars handles CPU hogs, Pluto could handle specifically things that have to do with cryptography.

*before the “ackshyually” crowd points this out, the word “planet” in Astrology is used to convey any moving (from our PoV) celestial object. It includes things Astronomy wouldn’t consider as planets; such as the Sun (a star), the Moon (a satellite), and Pluto (nowadays a dwarf planet). So the situation is a lot like tomatoes being fruits, you know? “Yes” or “no” depends on the definition, and the definition is built around a purpose.

Also I’d like to point out that, although I learned a fair bit of Astrology in my teens and 20s, I don’t take it seriously. It’s mostly babble, like tarot; but just like tarot, it’s fun babble.

Be glad they didn’t include Neptune, Uranus or Pluto.

Imagine some system task running like your computer was a potato. Then you look for the reason, and it’s because the task is a CPU hog, and its associated planet is in Cancer/Scorpio/Pisces. Now imagine the associated planet was Pluto, that spends ~20 years per sign. (Note some astrology schools do take those planets into account.)

In fact even system daemons and kernel threads (Saturn) will be a mess, 2.5 years per zodiacal sign.

So yeah, fucking dumb idea. But brilliant at the same time.

Just as a heads up, you accidentally posted the same question four times.

That said yes, it’s piracy.

This would be hilarious, if not so sad. Screw it, it’s damn bloody funny.

I bet they either fired their Windows QA team and “replaced” it with AI, or it’s so overburdened with all the “vibe” coded trash that they simply gave up.

This got to do with bogus AI reports, doesn’t it?

I’ve switched systems some 15? years ago. But my mum did it recently, so I asked her this question. (Disclaimer: she isn’t the one managing her machine. Guess who does it.)

She claims it’s basically the same thing. She was surprised her start menu got different some days ago (when I updated her Mint), but it was the good type of surprise, like, “ah, it shows my profile pic now!”. Then she rambled about things that disappear from her email, but that is not an OS issue, it’s PEBKAC (she’s extremely disorganised). And… that’s it.

The author could downgrade it, and that’s what he did… or alternatively bite the bullet and go for Linux.

Even dual boot is an improvement, since the author mentions “programs I use daily (like Scrivener) and are essential to me”.

Using Wine is an option… well. Buggy option.

Not really that buggy any more. Once you get a prefix well configured, it tends to run really smooth.

“Guys, there’s someone threatening us with an AK-47. But do not worry! I’m bringing a rubber duck against the bully! It’s an incredibly powerful rubber duck!”

I saw in a recent Youtube video that between web services and AI, Windows licencing is only about 10% of Microslop’s business.

That’s correct. Here’s some data on Microsoft’s revenue:

40%     Server Products and Cloud Services
22%     Office Products and Cloud Services
10%     Windows
 9%     Gaming
 7%     LinkedIn
 5%     Search and News Advertising

IDK if that number is true, but it sure would explain how much they’ve put into user experience.

It does but it’s really short-sighted from MS’s part. Sure, Windows might be only 10% of its business, but the other 90% heavily rely on it. Or rather on Windows being a monopoly on desktop OSes; without that people Windows servers, Office and MS “cloud services” (basically: we shit on your computer so much you need to use ours) wouldn’t see the light of the day.

“This is an LLM — Linux Libre Machine!”

From the mailing list:

Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2021 14:57:55 +0200 [thread overview]

Note this is a rather old topic.

The article says “One could argue that their process was similar, in principle, to that of white-hat hacking: play around with software, find bugs, let the developers know.”. I’m not buying this crap; what the university of Minnesota did was closer to an adult randomly beating the neighbourhood’s kids, stealing their money, and then someone claiming “he’s teaching them self defence”. It is completely unethical and immoral.

I also think both Greg and Dolan were pushovers, trying to be reasonable and co-operative towards a clearly hostile entity. And, in the process, bringing guns to a sword fight:

• submissions with a umn.edu address should not be “default” rejected; they should not be accepted at all. If you belong to a hostile entity you don’t get to put on your CV “I contriboot with OS projex”
• Dolan’s demands boil down to “help us to fix your mess, don’t benefit from it, and ensure it won’t happen again”. That’s the bare minimum.

I’m from the times Rei would write “/me turns into Fanta” instead.

I blame @[email protected]! He’s always breaking them 🤣

(Seriously, he does some amazing job promoting this side of the Fediverse.)

Fixed #7 to include the beans 🤣

Rules of the Fediverse:

1. You do not talk about the Fediverse.
2. You do NOT talk about the Fediverse.
3. If a user says “disengage”, goes limp, or taps out, the shitposting is over.
4. As many people shitposting together as you want.
5. One dogpile at a time.
6. Eat the rich, fuck cars.
7. Memes will go on as long as they have to - including beans.
8. If this is your first time at the Fediverse, you have to do the no poop challenge.

Okay. I could spend hours and hours criticising GNOME for a lot of things, but this is not one of them. It is not removing functionality, as the article implies; as others here highlighted, it’s simply changing a default. That’s completely fine.

No need to apologise - you didn’t come off as a pedant, and the stuff you said is completely relevant.

Plus as I mentioned my German isn’t exactly stellar, and I only realised there was an English audio after @[email protected] pointed it out. That increases the odds I got something wrong, by quite a bit.

Thank you for pointing out corrections and clarifications. (I fixed the party’s name.)

I called it a “spiritual successor” because it’s basically the same right “appeal” to the masses, but I’m aware it isn’t a direct successor to the National Socialist Party. If I understood its history correctly, the process AfD went through is similar to the one of the Lega Nord, in Italy: the party starts gathering people for one cause (for AfD it was euroscepticism, for LN it was independence), but internal composition changes and so does the ideology, going further and further onto the right.

That [lower income people are easier to rally into supporting fascism] is a simplification.

Yup, I’m aware. Or rather, a generalisation, that applies better elsewhere — the trashing of their companies is zbs rather specific to East Germany, but elsewhere you still see fascists trying to gather support from poorer demographics (e.g. rural Southerners in USA, Protestants in Brazil, etc.) I love that you went into the specifics though, this is actually important to contextualise it.

I couldn’t find English subtitles, but here’s some quick rundown, it’s partially from the video and partially from info I got about the topic from elsewhere. Discretion is advised, my German is getting really shitty over the years (and it was never good to begin with).

They’re talking about the spiritual successor of the Nazi party in Germany, called Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Currently it got ~1/7 of the German parliament, it’s specially popular in Eastern Germany (lower income people are easier to rally into supporting a fascist party by using immigrants as scapegoat for their poverty), and it’s getting stronger.

Currently the party is legalised but people like those two are [IMO rightfully] trying to get it banned as anticonstitutional. And at this rate the AfD being a problem isn’t just a theoretical matter, they’re already threatening and killing people, right-wing violence is exploding there acc. to the video. Check the graphs around 6:40 and you’ll see (Left: criminality split by political ideology; right: criminality in comparison with the share of the parliament the AfD has).

So they’re gathering evidence of all that shit, and pressing politicians to ban the bloody party. There’s a site gathering all this evidence, afd-verbot.de. They’re also using the fact property rights are non-negotiable in Germany to rent the property facing the AfD hall and doing stuff like projecting Hitler’s Young into the AfD hall, since a lot of the AfD modus operandi is to say “nooo~ we walk like ducks, quack like ducks, do salutes like ducks, but we are no ducks”.

Later on they talk on how fascism’s path to power goes through conservatives, so in order for the AfD to seize power it’d need a coalition with the CDU (Christian Democratic Union), and they’re trying to prevent this. Then they mention a regional CDU president, Walter Lübcke (Hesse); he was strongly opposed to the AfD, and got killed by them, so they’re trying to build a memorial to him etc. to warn against a conservative/fascist alliance.

Comments linked this TikTok video. Here are a few key points from the video, generated by artificial intelligence organic stupidity:

• If you aren’t careful, OneDrive will spontaneously delete all your computer files, without warning you in plain language beforehand. No confirmation, pop-up or anything.
• You’ll notice the bandwidth waste, then look up how to stop it, then as you turn OneDrive off everything in your computer is gone, deleted by Microsoft. Then you’re forced to redownload all your data back into your computer.
• When you eventually get your files back, and try to delete the OneDrive copies, the local copies also get deleted. The only way to avoid this is following detailed tutorials.
• The issue is that people are familiar with cloud backup, so they assume it’s what OneDrive is. But it isn’t; the copy within OneDrive is the primary version, and when you work on files in your local machine, it treats them as temporarily accessing those files.

Here’s my take. It’s based on the video, given I don’t use OneDrive (or Windows).

If you trust Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple or Microsoft, then you’re a moron. I understand sometimes you need to use their services and/or software, in this case Windows, but be aware you can’t trust your own machine if your OS is Windows.

As such, backups are essential. And by backups I mean offline copies, under your complete control. “The cloud” is just someone else’s computer, dammit, once they deny you access the copy is gone.

Odds are Microsoft will never fix this OneDrive mess. It doesn’t look poorly designed; it looks perfectly designed, in a way that is hostile towards the user. I think Microsoft’s idea is to force users to incorrectly believe they need a paid OneDrive subscription, because otherwise they won’t be able to store their files. Rain falls down, fire is hot, and your files are in OneDrive, simple uh.

It’ll likely get worse over time as they refine the design further. Odds are they’re doing everything possible while barely avoiding OD to be classified as plain ransomware.

Some users here are talking about revkas PEBKAC (problem exists between keyboard and chair = problem is the user). Personally I wouldn’t say so; users should not be blamed for not being tech-savvy, when the software is made by hostile clowns actively trying to mislead them.