If you cannot stop using windows for whatever reason, just find ways to stop paying for anything with Microsoft. For instance, I worked out a plan to get my dad off of office365 the moment they started jacking up the price to add copilot. That’s recurring revenue that Microsoft will NEVER see again.

I completely agree. The good parts of the web are on the margins, now. Everything is hyper-surveilled otherwise. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to avoid that, too. Even if you don’t own a smartphone or use a computer, what are the odds your face has been digested by a company like Meta to train their AI? Or that your car’s license plate has been picked up by a Flock surveillance camera?

When I was young I thought more technology would lead to better, liberated lives. I studied computer science because I’m genuinely interested in programming and computers.

Now I think we have passed an inflection point. More technology will worsen our lives. It’s harmful to the planet and climate.

Also, the people who get into programming now seem to lack curiosity and are only in it for a paycheck (for which I cannot blame them, because the avenues to a good, stable life are receding rapidly). And the places we are putting the most collective effort, as directed by our capitalist overlords, is either in furthering surveillance technology to be used against us or otherwise vulnerable populations like Palestinians, or toward unchecked society-rending technology like generative AI.

It’s probably MUCH harder than do a GDPR (or equivalent) take out request then deletion request

I cry my American freedom tears. Free to have no privacy laws to protect me or give me any legal recourse.

The proliferation of electron programs is what happens when you have a decade of annoying idiots saying “unused memory is wasted memory,” hand-in-hand with lazy developers or unscrupulous managers who are externalizing their development costs onto everybody else by writing inefficient programs that waste more and more of our compute and RAM, which necessitates the rest of us having to buy even better hardware to keep up.

idk why OP didn’t just link the original article. https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal

and numerous further sources at the bottom of that piece e.g. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-stargate-project-to-consume-up-to-40-percent-of-global-dram-output-inks-deal-with-samsung-and-sk-hynix-to-the-tune-of-up-to-900-000-wafers-per-month

How did you determine it was the SSD failing and not another component?

I’ve been a full time Linux user at home for over six years. It’s why my username is what it is :)

I can’t say it’s flawless. Sometimes you get what you pay for. But in most every significant way it is the better choice.

YES! Same!!!

I have to use Windows 11 for work. Maybe this is because of CrowdStrike or something, I don’t know, but I often encounter a problem where the main section of explorer, where you can actually click files and stuff, just breaks. That entire region becomes unclickable and unusable, even though the rest of the Explorer window (like the icons on the top part) all still work. So I just have to close the window and then reopen Explorer, re-navigate back to where I was, and proceed from where I left off.

Never, in the decades I’ve been using computers, have I ever encountered something as stupid as this with this amount of regularity. Windows 11 is a uniquely bad OS compared to every competitor option, including prior versions of Windows.

No matter how “cool” it is its primary purpose, first and foremost, is to generate spam. A trillion dollar industry, effectively, in the service of spamming our search results, inboxes, text messages, science journals, homework assignments, and so much more

The announcement did not include Copilot? No mention of 300 useless AI features being shoved down our throats??!

It’s wild how by virtue of the fact that Valve isn’t a publicly traded company beholden to shareholders, the same Valve which has a history of putting out half-baked goods and which has an always-on DRM client called Steam, seems poised to surpass most of its competitors both in the user privacy and hardware hardware spaces with just straightforward products. They have a product to sell, and that’s it. They don’t need to micro-optimize for bullshit like seemingly every other large tech company does.

Yes. The owner/developer is Kape technologies, an Israeli spyware/adware company.

To quote from cnet

For maximum privacy, I recommend VPN providers with a jurisdiction outside of Five Eyes and other international intelligence-sharing agreements – that is, one headquartered outside of the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. So it initially seems like a positive sign that, while CyberGhost has offices in Germany, it’s headquartered in Romania. German entrepreneur Robert Knapp says he founded the $114,000 startup on the back of low-wage Bucharest labor before flipping it for $10.5 million in 2017.

The issue is who he sold it to – the notorious creator of some pernicious data-huffing ad-ware, Crossrider. The UK-based company was cofounded by an ex-Israeli surveillance agent and a billionaire previously convicted of insider trading who was later named in the Panama Papers. It produced software which previously allowed third-party developers to hijack users’ browsers via malware injection, redirect traffic to advertisers and slurp up private data.

Crossrider was so successful it ultimately drew the gaze of Google and UC Berkeley, which identified the company in a damning 2015 study. (You can read the Web Archive version of that document.)

This practice, commonly called traffic manipulation, is condemned web-wide. And the only difference between it and one of the oldest forms of cyberattack, called man-in-the-middle (MitM), is that you clicked “agree” on the terms and conditions.

Whether or not PIA or ExpressVPN or the other providers owned by Kape fulfill this data scraping and ad-serving pipeline in my mind is irrelevant. Choosing to do business with them rewards bad actors when there are other VPN sellers who don’t have such a tainted lineage.

I think we are seeing the beginning of the end of an open internet. Taking a few legitimate problems and exploding them up to destroy anonymity online. And VPNs are not the solution when using privacy-preserving workarounds are either outlawed or just don’t work on any major website.

That it goes hand-in-hand (especially in the USA) with a neo-fascist right wing in control opposed by the most limp-dick “left” is extra troubling. What was the inception point for this trend? Oct 7, 2023? Were too many people shown images on TikTok of Palestinian civilians being mercilessly bombed?

Sad part is I like the design, but it’s been over-exploited by big tech corps for the past 8 years so now I have to hate it because of the new symbolic meaning it has taken.

Indeed, I’m not justifying surveillance in either country. Just reflecting on how it’s been portrayed and is progressing here in the USA

I think it’s much simpler than that. I think he just wants to make money and sees an opportunity to enrich himself. These people don’t have a sense of morality, only a “fuck you, got mine” basic American individualism

The irony is I remember growing up with numerous stories about how expression is locked down in China and everything there is surveilled and if you speak poorly against the government you’ll get arrested etc. And thank goodness we are free in America to express ourselves even if it’s against the government because, my gosh, I might not like what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it!

And as if with no sense of irony and not even a remote bit of critique, all those stories about surveillance in China (true or not, I don’t know) were actually true, are currently true, or are becoming true here in the USA. And in many cases they’re just sold as commodities back to us e.g. ring doorbell cameras.

And a final thought: the USA used to be able to justify many of its foreign interferences on a sort of moral high ground, including freedom of expression and all that. That mask was slipping but now with Trump2 seems to have just fallen off. The pretense has given away to crass might makes right international relations. I consider the USA becoming a hyper surveilled state to be part of this story.

The secondary use here is when you get asked in performance evaluation time how much you’re incorporating AI into your workflow. And you’d better not say “none” so you keep generating these nonsense documents and throwing them away so it appears like you’re using AI

Their primary use case in the office that I’ve seen is asking someone a question and having them send a LLM response where they clearly didn’t read what you asked and the response they sent you does not answer the original question. It’s so cool!

I’m picking up what you’re putting down