An W11 update in February took my work computer 1 hour to update, even Windows put “estimated 50 mins” on the Windows Update screen. Decently fast processor, 16GB RAM and SSD.

I think our IT manager paused updates for everyone in late January because of all the issues it was causing, then that Friday afternoon I walked around the office and saw a bunch of people taking a “second lunch” because their computer was in the process of updating Windows.

What do you even get from a Luna subscription? Just a Amazon-only rental library of games?

Proposed revision: Do not use Copilot for business purposes.

☁️✊️😠 “We didn’t need a robot’s help, we were perfectly capable of accidentally sudo rm -rf /* ing our disks on our own!”

I’ll be honest, I don’t like the way AI is pushed and speculation ruining the price of computing, but it has helped me once or twice. For example I used someone’s vibecoded driver patch to get a relatively ancient audio interface working, which was the last thing that I would have missed using Windows for.

Legion TD2 is a game that was originally a Starcraft mod.

Years ago, one of my buddies tried to open a very long spreadsheet and Libreoffice couldn’t do it. I think the maximum row and columns reached parity in version 7. I think one more cosmetic feature that is missing is the easy to access table and chart style templates.

The scammer is not going to be on the phone with the victim for 24 hours continuously.

Yeah, I take issue with that, but I don’t think it would be used if people complain to banks that reading the flag bricks the app.

I tend to favour privacy over big tech control, but I recognize we have to at least consider the cost-benefit of these tradeoffs, to live in a society. Of course I’d prefer a phone with no warnings, no nagging, if you get scammed that’s my fault and I will keep my phone that way if it means I will stay off Android 15 and de-Google my next phone. But Google’s plan is within the realm of an acceptable compromise to me because sideloading is still available to everyone without registration with Google. Each person will feel differently about it.

Taking your position to the extreme, if trading liberty for comfort is “always” a bad idea with no exceptions, you can turn off your phone and do without the comfort of it. (Only saying this because always is the word you chose to use.) To accept cellular and home internet services to communicate in the public realm requires you to give up some level of privacy, though of course it can be possible to stop a lot of the unnecessary surveillance that happens along with the necessary tradeoff.

If the process doesn’t include any phone home stuff, and is just a one-time cool off period to prevent scammers, this is acceptable to me. That should be enough to get potential victims to self-question, ask more knowledgeable people of what’s going on to avoid being unknowingly hacked, without being naggy every time for users that want to do what they want.

Making a software “foolproof” will probably invent a bigger better fool, hoping for some sort of free crypto app jumping through these hoops, but this should weed out most of the basic scams.

It’s a mixed bag, I’m pretty neutral on it since it prevents copyleft licensing as much as copyright.

I don’t mind if the developer adds AI-generated code, but if they mix it with their own work without appropriate attribution in a way that it could be considered all AI-generated, it may become un-copyrightable.

https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/issues/164

TIL it has purposely not been implemented by the main developers in over a decade for ideological reasons. There are scripts and forks to enable it by default.

Aside from the point that Jellyfin is meant to browse your own personal collection of files usually after the fact…

Some file formats like mkv do work even if partially downloaded, so if you’re downloading a torrent for a free libre open source movie, choose the option to download chunks in sequential order, and I think there’s a way that you can watch while downloading.

Uh oh, Epic’s not making more profit than last year! We need to squeeze money out of parents’ pockets for their gullible kids and milk our cash cow harder!

🫰Done! I’ve deleted all existing recovery infrastructure! Now your disaster recovery routine has been reduced to 1 second, which is the time it takes to put your human head in your hands and cry!

Windows Slop Edition

Oops, pretending to take the moral high ground is out the window as soon as MIC dollars are at risk.

Update: and seems like being ready to toss principles aside wasn’t enough for the Trump administration.

While I’d prefer better off-by-default and making AI opt-in, this is the next best option. Good job Mozilla.

Kinda neat about the human responses… sure some are trolling but maybe we have to test our global expectations. In North America, a car wash tends to be this garage thing with either automated cleaning or a set of supplies to clean your car, and your car has to be in the shed to be cleaned effectively. But if washing your car by hand is the norm, I wonder if people in some countries surmise that the cleaning staff could just walk over with the sponges, buckets and hoses and stuff to the car, if you’re already 50 metres away from the washing point.