I have to use Windows 11 at work. Whenever I complain about it to any of my friends, they say, “it’s easy to work around that. You just have to…” and then they say to modify some registry key, or set up a group policy, or run a powershell command, or use some cleaning tool.

But even if it’s easy to do that, it’s not easy.

1. You have to know about the key or the cleaning tool, and there’s a different one for every problem.
2. You have to keep up to date with the new user-hostile behavior introduced to Windows every month.
3. You have to keep up to date because Microsoft removes those circumventions, because they don’t want you to be able to remove their trash.
4. You have to vet the tools, make sure they’re not malware. And continuously make sure it’s not replaced by malware in the future. There’s no central repository of Windows programs like there is for Debian or Ubuntu, so if you just web search for the tool name every time, you might click on a malvertising link in the search results instead.

If you convince someone to pull the sword out of the stone, you get to be the new wizard.

LLMs and current generative AI won’t. But there will be better AI systems in the future.

And consider the scale of the datacenters they’re building: New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses. They’re installing 9GW of natural gas turbines on site. They’re planning for better AI that will be much different from the current batch.

While we all know that current AI is much worse than human work, consider that they might just use it anyway, and not care that their product is shit.

Anyone got a mirror of the post? I’m getting this error message:

Sorry, a potential security risk was detected in your submitted request. The Webmaster has been alerted.

Reference ID: 18.a104d217.1777692249.4596f77

You can proceed to www.senate.gov.

If this problem persists, please contact the Office of the Secretary Webmaster at webmaster@sec.senate.gov.

Clicking the www.senate.gov link gives the same error message.

No idea about this. I drive a Honda Civic in the US, and hardly notice gas prices. I’m much more concerned about food prices, rent prices, and unemployment rate.

A car warranty lasts like 2 years. I can’t afford a car less than 2 years old.

$100-$500 according to the article. No discount for the biometric data they’ll sell.

I took psychic damage. I’m especially annoyed by the part where they rendered it at the slanted pixelated low resolution, and then upscaled it with a bilinear or bicubic interpolation.

Here are my boobies:

Web browsers have a huge attack surface, and are most people’s main exposure to potential exploits. Without javascript, 99% of the attack surface disappears, becuase the attacker no longer has a way to run arbitrary code.

A lot of terminal-based browsers don’t do javascript.

If I want to scrape a page, this makes it a pain for both parties. I’m not an AI company, so I can afford the hash tax, but it’s still a pain to spin up Firefox from a from cron job instead of wget. And I’m still doing it, Anubis doesn’t stop small time scrapers like me who aren’t running AI training, and only scrape like one page per day. So now the server has to serve the original page, plus all the Anubis stuff each time my crown job goes off.

It sucks that you can’t browse anywhere without javascript anymore. It used to be that all the open source sites, most news sites, forums running phpbb, even YouTube aside from the actual <video> element all worked without javascript, and as a bonus there would be no ads.

Now, you can’t browse anywhere without these challenges. At least this one is noninvasive, but the Cloudflare one and the Google Recaptcha do a ton of fingerprinting to choose whether to let you in.

USPS has a home-rolled one that requires web assembly enabled, or it silently fails with a blank page. There’s no non-malicious excuse for that.

If this is the future of web browsing, hopefully more sites use systems like Anubis. But I also hope at least static pages can be viewable as plain html.

Their proof doesn’t prove anything if they control the hardware and software scanning your biometrics.

https://lemmy.world/post/45806056

Trump tells Iran to sign deal with US or ‘the whole country is going to get blown up’

This sort of implies nuclear war. And nuclear war implies global nuclear war, which implies apocalyptic nuclear war. Though it’s not totally clear. If the US nuked Iran, other nuclear powers may respond with non-nuclear weapons on the US.

Hopefully it’s just another tantrum, and he’ll forget his threat like last time.

A lot of apocalyptic themed comics on Lemmy’s front page today. I wonder why /s

Probably order a Digikey catalog. Do they still make printed catalogs? No idea. Then I’d download as many Kicad libraries as I could find.

I’d scrape, as best I can, the online stores of anywhere I’d expect to need to buy from. Hopefully they’ll set up phone lines to order through.

I’d download as many Steam games as I could fit, starting with the smallest. I have a bunch that I got from sales for like a dollar, and haven’t played yet. I’d probably try to organize LAN parties for Factorio, Total Warhammer, Phasmophobia, and 7 Days to Die. I’d get a crack for Steam, to let me play all my games offline. I know it has an offline mode, but sometimes it doesn’t work, and asks you to sign in, so I’d have the crack ready in case offline mode stopped working.

I’d download full disc sets of Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Fedora (which I’ve never run, but maybe I’d try). The full sets, the ones with every single package, so I could install any package I wanted without Internet access.

I’d find a local Linux users group, so I could bring my questions there instead of web searching. And help others with their questions when they can’t web search either.

I’d find books and videos to watch, by going to torrent sites and sorting by seeders.

I dunno, but it’s not like this.

I’ve tried supporting multiple news sites, but it’s always something. Like the site just crashing before I can get to pay, or an endless captcha, or my credit card being rejected as sussy, but the credit card company claims they haven’t declined anything. I’ve tried multiple credit cards, multiple computers, Firefox and Chromium, always the same.

The Onion is the closest thing to news I successfully paid for.

Castielsprostate has been using HP inkjet printers for too long. They need to get a Brother laser printer.

In 1991, lithium-ion batteries cost around $9,200 per kilowatt-hour — 33 years later, they cost just $78.

Where can I get lithium-ion batteries for $78 per kilowatt-hour?

Steam and itch.io are the only ones that treat Linux users as first class citizens.

Steam, itch.io, and GOG are the only ones that offer any Linux games at all.

This affects SD cards, which are extremely common and supported by open source operating systems. This affects Compact Flash cards, which use the same protocol as PATA hard drives, just a different connector.