I got a set of their stuff. Mostly plates. Older than me.

I don’t have Windows for years, but Schadenfreude is making me oddly amused with the current changes.

[Title]

Preloading will not solve bad performance. It will not reduce the amount of resources (CPU cycles, RAM) the program requires. It’ll only make the program start before the user asked it to, so some muppets blame their machines instead of their crapware OS.

Bad performance means the program is either doing too much, or doing it inefficiently. Given how excited MS is with AI (unlike its users), it’s likely a mix of both - “vibe coded” slop + pointlessly running some model. The bullet points highlighting how they’re moving options back and forth also stink like they added the kitchen sink to File Explorer.

You can access Xbox full screen experience from Task View, Game Bar settings, or use Win + F11 hotkey to toggle FSE.

1. I’m surprised Windows has multiple desktops now. This has been the default across Linux DEs for years.
2. They’re putting this crap there??? Pffffft. Then don’t be surprised if users don’t find it.

Point-in-time restore for Windows

I’m checking the documentation. Ctrl+F “folder”, nothing; “partition”, nothing. Then I casually glanced at it.

If I got this right, you can enable or disable the restore system; but you can’t tell it which folders and/or partitions it ignore. If that’s the case holy shit, might as well disable it and use a third party backup system.

Based on user feedback, we have added support for uninstalling Store-managed apps from the Store’s library page.

As another user here highlighted (and I agree with it), this shit is obvious.

If you need user feedback to know it, might as well ask users if you should go to work.

Related:

• Mustafa Suleyman*, Microsoft AI CEO, mindblown at people not being excited with his corpo-slop
• Pavan Davuluri, Windows chief, trying to address criticism without doing jack shit to fix what’s being criticised
• Microsoft still trying to push Edge down the users’ throats

“I don’t understand, why did users turn stupid out of blue? Those things used to know basic obedience! Now they can’t even follow simple orders like «be excited»! Let’s fire the User Taming Department and replace it with AI!” /hj

*aka “Suleyman the Chaoswrecker”. Not to be confused with “Suleiman the Lawgiver”, the Ottoman sultan from five centuries ago.

I wish the author had the courage to title the article “Frustrated Windows users are switching to Linux because of Microsoft’s Windows 11 tracking, logging, screen capturing, spying, high-jacking user data to Onedrive, resetting basic user settings”.

*Yawn* shitty text.

The core is an idiocy/fallacy/stupidity called faulty generalisation: since some middleman jobs are useful, the author assumes “middlemen jobs” in general are useful. Even if those “middleman jobs” have barely to do with each other, except by not being directly involved into the production. (Cue to the examples: what do logistics and leadership have to do with each other?)

I think many people have some intuition that work can be separated between “real work“ (farming, say, or building trains) and “middlemen“ […] Like many populist [SIC] intuitions, this intuition is completely backwards. Middlemen are extremely important!

It’s rather disingenuous how the author only contradicts the popular intuition partially - note how the text still relies on its artificial division between “real jobs” and “middleman jobs”.

The rest of the text is as worth dissecting as Skibidi Toilet is.

Insert rant against dichotomies: this stinks “it’s either as big as Reddit or empty” from a distance.

My best experience with forums was one where we celebrated the day we got 300 users at the same time. It still felt vibrant, active, nice to be there. In comparison with that forum, 38 000 monthly active users is huge.

Plus those muppets behave like they really want to wallow in their own misery.

Nah. Your government is doing the right thing here.

Two reasons to not redenominate currency:

1. It’s messy. The old and new coins need to coexist for some time, and people get confused. Specially bad in the presence of disingenuous = dumb = malicious actors; picture your typical Karen saying “it doesn’t specify in which currency it should be, so I’m entitled to pay it in the old currency! I DEMAND TO TALK WITH YOUR MANAGER!!!”.
2. It’s costly. Reprinting all money would cost more than just stop minting the lowest value coins, and slowly remove them from circulation (as they hit the banks).

Because of both things, you’ll only see redenomination without hyperinflation once in a blue moon; it’s simply not worth the trouble, unless you’re cutting off three zeroes or more at once. Also, note trying to solve one of the issues makes the other worse.

Source: I’ve seen my country’s currency being redenominated twice. (Technically four times, but I was too young to remember two of them.)

Yup, same “hide it behind a wall of babble” strategy. With a key difference: what is being hidden.

Trump typically uses this strategy to conceal outrageous claims, like this:

by the way and if she gets the pick, if she gets the pick, her judges, nothing you can do folks, although the Second Amendment people there is I don’t know but

He can’t say “if Clinton gets elected, please start a civil war” in the open, right? So he hides it behind babble.

Davaluri, though? He’s hiding… nothing. That’s the point, his comment says nothing of value. Social pressure forced Microsoft to release a public statement, and MS had three choices:

1. Tell complainers to fuck off. People get pissed, ditch MS products, margin of profit goes slightly lower.
2. Listen to the complainers’ demands. People get happy in the short term, but then really pissed since MS won’t change shit, and people hate to be lied to.
3. Say nothing. Complainers get louder and louder.

He picked #3, but disguised it as #2.

Title:

Article:

[Doug Henwood] Maybe I need to take some more drugs before I make any sense of this.

Nah. It doesn’t make sense, not even if you’re high.

Before reading the link, lemme guess: “we’ll dress it in a different way, and still ship it. Regards, Microsoft.”

After reading the link: wow! I managed to overestimate Microsoft!

[Davaluri] Hey Gergely, I am responding here, and I think this applies to a bunch of the comments that people have made. I mean, a lot of comments . The team (and I) take in a ton of feedback

“Feedback”: mincing words for “backslash”.

We balance what we see in our product feedback systems with what we hear directly. They don’t always match, but both are important.

Emphasis mine. So, the data of those “feedback systems” clash with user complains. Are the systems broken? Naaah, it must be the users /s

I’ve read through the comments and see focus on things like reliability, performance, ease of use and more. But I want to spend a moment just on the point you are making, and I’ll boil it down, we care deeply about developers.

He’s babbling “we care about you” to distract the reader. Diversion tactic.

We know we have work to do on the experience, both on the everyday usability, from inconsistent dialogs to power user experiences. When we meet as a team, we discuss these paint points and others in detail, because we want developers to choose Windows.

Blah blah blah. Diversion tactic still going…

We know words aren’t enough

Implicit: “trust us (be gullible trash), this will be more than just words”.

Specially hilarious because he’s babbling a lot, but in no moment he says anything MS will do to address the complains.

it’s on us to continue improving and shipping. Would love to connect with you about what the team is doing to address these areas if you are open to it.

“Let me pretend this is a problem with you, as if you were the only one complaining about this. And let’s make it personal.”

[Jawad] It’s good to see Microsoft’s Windows chief at least acknowledging feedback

He isn’t.

while Davaluri’s comments on the direction of Windows are slightly encouraging

If you think corporate babble is “slightly encouraging”, I have bad news for you.

AI could have written both Davaluri’s quote and the article as a whole.

TL;DW: execs assume monopoly from market dominance, without taking into account other stores could contest said market dominance.

Lemmy has Reddit. PieFed has Lemmy.

Also, from 4chan’s PoV, Reddit is more like a boogerman than a boogeyman: it’s that weirdo creepo that makes you say “eew”, avoid at all costs, and if you touch them by accident or social pressures (“why no handshake?”), you immediately wash your hands.

Instead the actual boogeymen are internal: for /g/ it’s /a/, for /b/ and /int/ it’s /pol/, and for almost everyone else it’s /b/.

I’m trying to parse it.

In case it helps anyone here, the Unicode for his text is 𓇍𓇋𓏭𓂻 𓍘𓇋𓇾𓂋𓇥𓂋𓈐𓆑. I think the first four hieroglyphs are supposed to be read as /ji:/, roughly “yee”; I think they encode /j/, /i/, [lengthens the preceding vowel], [determinant for movement].

That explains it - they’re most likely doing it with OpenAI.

…I’m low-key wishing the bubble bursts before SoftBank is able to cash out.

“This should not be seen, in our view, as a cautious or negative stance on Nvidia, but rather in the context of SoftBank needing at least $30.5bn of capital for investments in the Oct-Dec quarter, including $22.5bn for OpenAI and $6.5bn for Ampere,” Rolf Bulk, equity research analyst at New Street Research, told CNBC.

When I read that, I was puzzled; when the bubble bursts, OpenAI will be way more affected than nVidia, as the later is basically the guy selling shovels in the gold rush. And odds are SoftBank’s CEO knows it; so why are they moving its investments this way?

Then I remembered this often quoted excerpt from The 18te Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte applies here: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

The “first time” here is the dotcom bubble, often compared with the current AI bubble. When the internet was becoming popular, you had that flood of dotcom businesses with overpriced stocks, stocks went brrr then kaboom, bursting around early '00. Like this:

Note however how sharply the prices raised in '99. I think SoftBank is betting on that: buy stocks, sell them juuuuust before the bubble bursts, and you got some nice profit.

Here’s the open letter. I also recommend people to read what Wikipedia says about her, and take your own conclusions.

“We are not predicting human-level AI next year,” a Commission spokesperson told Euractiv in response to the scientists’ open letter, arguing that AI is developing faster and less predictably than older forecasts had suggested.

“This is about being prepared, not declaring a date,” they added. “Responsible planning is not guessing the future, it’s preparing for different scenarios.”

CUT OFF THE CRAP. Even if we interpret her statement as a figure of speech, she still fucked it up. She is a politician dammit; it’s part of her job to be careful with the shit she says.

As I said in another thread, a week ago: AI is not screwing workers over because it’s stealing jobs. It’s more like suckers at the top will lose big money on AI fluff, and to cut costs off they’ll fire a lot of people.

Based on stuff said in the comments (“İt happened when I asked for weather, maybe someone can replicate it.”), I did some dumb test. Using duck.ai because… well, guess why I’m not subscribed to ChatGPT? Privacy. The article confirms my decision, by the way.

Anyway, I was curious, I wanted to know which location it would assume I’m from.

I don’t know which is the dumbest part - making shit up / lying / assuming, acknowledging its own intellectual dishonesty… or not taking spelling into account. (Using British spelling might not be a sign someone is from the UK [I’m not], but it’s a pretty good sign the person is not in USA.)

Indeed. Sadly, corporations abused telemetry so much that it makes users automatically distrust software with it - even when it’s opt-in. As such I’m not surprised it isn’t more common, specially in the Linux ecosystem.

If we take distro defaults into account, it’s possible Arch stats overestimate GNOME market share.

Based on tecmint list, the top 3 distros are Mint, MX Linux, and Endeavour. Their defaults are:

• Mint - Cinnamon, MATE
• MX Linux - Xfce, Plasma, Fluxbox
• Endeavour - Plasma

Granted, the fourth one (Debian) does default to GNOME, but your typical Debian user is more experienced, so it’s less likely they stick to the default.

…I wish I had actual data instead of a bunch of guesses. :-/