I see it as a proof of concept. Whether these products deliver or not doesnt matter. What matters is components within proprietary tools can now be replicated in a fast and effective way.

Not everything from AI is slop. AI in the hands of good developers can be powerful and help make open source projects more productive. It needs careful governance and quality control, but this kind of stuff helps level the playing field as resource limited projects can do more with what they’ve got.

If youre willing to pay for a browser, donate that money to an OSS project that creates an actual private & secure browser.

It is insane to give money to a company like Brave for a browser that removes the stuff they deliberately packed in to their core browser to track people and make money.

At best what Brave are showing is that privately owned companies can’t make private secure browsers because they are profit motivated. The only way privacy can happen is to remove the profit motive entirely.

Yeah I only use windows at work now, ditched it at home. The start menu takes over a minute to open, and then when it does it ignores clicks for another minute.

Then whenever I want to run outlook I have to search because the start menu doesnt let me set favourites. And I have to wait when I type in Outlook because the first search brings the crappy built in version of outlook (which I have clicked on more than once to be immensely frustrated to see it open) and then wait until “Outlook (classic)” appears and click that.

I discovered some of my less technically able colleagues gave up on Outlook because they assumed it wasn’t installed and use the web interface instead. And that is just one of numerous daily frustrations I get with Windows.

Honestly, Windows is now a big steaming pile of crap. All my home devices are on Linux, and I only use Windows at work because I have no choice.

A broken clock is correct twice a day as they say. I’m no fan of Blair but he has been consistent in being pro EU and was one of the few voices in Labour after the referendum who actually said remainers shouldn’t give up and we should campaign to rejoin.

That said, now is not the time. What we should be doing is rejoining the customs union which will undo some damage and out us back on a course to rejoin. But even that seems out of reach because politicians seem terrified of giving Farrage anything to campaign on rather than confronting him head on.

Just to say, its minimal effort to set up. Its the kind of annoyance ypu get scratching an itch - a momentary effort for long term relief.

Honestly the US is so crazily stupid now. And that cones from someone who lived through Brexit and Boris Johnson as prime minister of the UK.

We are living in the stupidest timeline.

I use proton myself. I dont know about private browsers but it works with Thunderbird via its own decryption app Proton Bridge. Thats a good privacy solution (assuming its a secure desktop), and gives you a local backup of your email.

They will never learn because they make Windows for Microsoft not for users. They do whatever suits them and they think will maximises profitability and their share price. They have to keep “growing” so they have to find new ways to make money.

As for the article; what shill bullshit is this?

It probably makes sense for a lot of users to have their default browser of choice open automatically at login, as most people spend the majority of their time in a web browser. Windows already automatically preloads Edge in the background by default to increase its startup performance, so it’s not a huge leap to automatically display the app itself if Windows knows you’re going to open it anyway.

No, it does not make sense to do this. Apps can be set to auto launch if users want them to. This only makes sense from the perspective of Microsoft trying to push Edge onto user so it can grow it’s market share and harvest even more data.

Yeah, could also have two Pi-Hole instances. One is network wide and block ads for everyone, and the other is the DNS the kids PCs use, set with a white list of approved sites only. You can set Pi-hole to block everything (set * as the a RegEx filter) and then add domains to the white list to be allowed through.

Groups is probably more efficient but two instances could be offer more options/nuance on how you run things.

Holy shit. Less than 1% of households. This is not normal for the vast vast majority of people.

Get out and get out fast. Get your personal documents together (birth certificate, passport) and leave.

Its going to be hard and scary at first, but the world outside your family home is far safer than the one inside it.

Says a lot about America that she couldn’t just say “she was wrong”. She first had to attack the people she doesn’t agree with. This image encapsulates just how broken the US is.

Out of interest, which aspect don’t you believe? The article is clear the broken update effects a specific subset of enterprise users, on a specific mix of base versions and cumulative updates.

This seems like a classic windows update issue. In fairness to Microsoft it is difficult to prevent bugs when there is a huge install base, with a huge range of hardware, with a huge range of users on different mixes of updates and updating at their own. I personally think that’s totally believable.

What’s not clear is perhaps the implied overarching story that W11 is worse for this than other versions of Windows. I can’t answer that about windows updates themselves, but I certainly believe W11 is the worst version of Windows I’ve ever used (and I’ve used every version back to 3.11 as a kid). I have to use W11 at work: the UI is absolutely terrible and unfriendly but far worse it constantly and inexplicably slows down, programs become unresponsive repeatedly and I come across errors constantly.

I work in a big organisation and I don’t even bother to report most errors now - we hop between PCs because of the nature of my Job, and I’ve come up across so many I just can’t be bothered opening more tickets. I’d describe it as a mostly large volume of minor issues and inconveniences that cumulatively, on top of the bad design, that make it a shit experience. But I’ve also had numerous major errors since we moved from W10 to W11 on different PCs - they all have the same hardware and software yet the problems are different on each. I’ve given up reporting the problems and just avoid the PCs, and I think a lot of my colleagues are the same.

My organisation (I work in a large Hospital), is already stretched due to high work volume and low staffing and we now have a constantly little drag from Windows 11 on everything we do. It’s like Microsoft sprinkle a little bit of shit onto every computer, every day, all day. The cumulative effect in just my organisation must be massive - I shudder to think how bad it is across the whole economy.

The publicity will have little impact; only the AI bubble popping will make them change course. But the damage is already done - they’ve pivoted their company to AI, forced it into all there products and force their employees to use it. Once the bubble pops that’s going to take time to undo and fix.

AI of course will still be a thing, but at the moment they’re wasting billions on it as everyone wants to be to AI as Google is to search.

Scarcity manufactured by the AI “boom”. When the AI bubble pops, expect a huge slump in hardware prices as companies try to offload huge stockpiles of worthless RAM, CPUs and GPUs.

The headline doesn’t quite reflect the situation, but it is difficult to capture in a headline.

Essentially add “for now”. Many of the issues are fixable but not necessarily by one laptop maker. As the article said by the time the issues were likely resolved the laptop would be obsolete as the version 2 of the chip would release.

Having said that, it’s not clear how fast the issues will resolve as without any devices there won’t be impetus to put fixes in to different parts of the ecosystem to get the full potential of the chipset.

The GPU sounds like the most serious problem and without manufacturer engagement may be the longest to get fixed.

Yes it’s fairly simple to do, essentially the user needs to download an image of a Linux install disc, flash it onto a USB stick (or a Dvd I guess), and then reboot their PC. They may need to press a key at boot to open the boot menu and select the USB (or the bios to change the boot order).

After that, most distros offer a very easy to follow installer which will install the new OS.

Most Linux installs can be done alongside windows (on the same hard drive or it’s own drive) but windows tends to break the boot loader with updates. It’s gernallt better to only dual boot if you’re good at fixing things - otherwise a full Linux install is better.

The most inportant thing is back up all your important data, and only do this if you genuinely want to leave windows. I’d make sure your windows license is digital before doing this too as that allows using windows again if you want to go back.

I’d say anyone can use Linux, it’s user friendly and robust. In terms of installing Linux, I’d only do it if you are sure you know what you’re doing - installing any OS - including windows - can involved trouble shooting problems.

For me it seems to be when you go through to download the windows binary, you get an iframe on the page containing another site. That has ads and serves up the download. So I’m guessing the ads are on the website that provides videolan with hosting for its binaries?

They are old fashioned intrusive ads pretending you need to click then to start your download. But the download starts already.

The key is getting out at the right time, and that is weighed massively against small investors. The big investors and institions control the market and can move quickly while small investors cannot.

Tesla is not doing well - look at its falling sales. It’s a risky stock to hold. The AI companies are also highly risky stocks to hold.

That doesn’t mean don’t hold them - all anyone is saying really is that these are high risk investments, and at some point they are going to probably crash because it’s a bubble.

That doesn’t necessarily mean “don’t invest”. It does certainly mean be prepared to get out fast and also only use money you can afford to lose when investing with such high risk stocks.

It’s about short term vs long term costs, and AWS has priced itself to make it cheaper short term but a bit more expensive long term.

Companies are more focused on the short term - even if something like AWS is more expensive long term, if it saves money in the short term that money can be used for something else.

Also many companies don’t have the money upfront to build out their own infrastructure quickly in the short term, but can afford longer term gradual costs. The hope would be even though it’s more expensive, they reach a scale faster where they make bigger profits and it was worth the extra expense to AWS.

This is how a lot of outsourcing works. And it’s exacerbated by many companies being very short term and stock price focused. Companies could invest in their own infrastructure for long term gain, but they often favour short term profit boosts and cost reduction to boost their share price or pay out to share holders.

Companies frequently so things not in their long term interests for this reason. For example, companies that own their own land and buildings sell them off and rent them back. Short term it gives them a financial boost, long term it’s a permanent cost and loss of assets.

In Signals case it’s less of a choice; it’s funded by donations and just doesn’t have the money to build out it’s own data centre network. Donations will support ongoing gradual and scaling costs, but it’s unlikely they’d ever get a huge tranch of cash to be able to build data centres world wide. They should still be using multiple providers and they should also look to buildup some Infrastructure of their own for resilience and lower long term costs.

It does make sense for Signal as this is a free app that does not make money from advertising. It makes money from donations.

So every single message, every single user, is a cost without any ongoing revenue to pay for it. You’re right about the long run but you’d need the cash up front to build out that infrastructure in the short term.

AWS is cheap in the sense that instead of an initial outlay for hardware, you largely only pay for actual use and can scale up and down easily as a result. The cost per user is probably going to be higher than if you were to completely self host long term, but that does then mean finding many millions to build and maintain data centres all around the world. Not attractive for an organisation living hand to mouth.

However what does not make sense is being so reliant on AWS. Using other providers to add more resilience to the network would make sense.

Unfortunately this comes back to the real issue - AWS is an example of a big tech company trying to dominate a market with cheap services now for a potential benefits of a long term monopoly and raised prices in the future. They have 30% market share and already an outage by Amazon is highly disruptive. Even at 30% we’re at the point of end users feeling locked in.