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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • I use Kagi for everything, and use DDG and Google as backup searches. Usually, if Kagi didn’t get me what I want, others won’t either. I still prefer using multiple engines when looking into certain things, and that’s no fault of Kagi.

    Best feature IMO is personal ranking and DenyListing. For example, I can downrank Microsoft.com from my results, uprank StackOverFlow, and block CNet from my results. I can also downrank or block SEO nonsense sites from my results. I use this feature carefully, because I don’t want to create my own bubble, but some sites are empirically terrible quality



  • I felt like clarifying that the updates issues I faced were the last straw and that if anyone was interested, I listed the other reasons I quit working with them and never looked back. That’s why I wrote all that at the bottom.

    Even if Microsoft does some things right, they still have a history of doing things wrong and have a bevy of other dark patterns. I do not trust them to get it right anymore. They could go back to their old ways tomorrow and I wouldn’t be surprised. Thankfully, it’s not my problem except at work



  • I haven’t used Windows 11 interestingly, so I don’t know if they’ve changed their update habits, and I wouldn’t be surprised either way. Windows 10 is the last edition I’ve used. Since Windows 8, I had plenty of issues with Windows and Microsoft, and it got worse every release. I’ll bullet-form my personal complaints at the bottom of this page.

    My final straw for Windows 10 in my personal life was a forced restart, and I had all my update settings where I wanted them, and still, I lost a really important session to that reboot. Since I was pretty comfy with Linux, I went that direction. Since then, Linux has gotten more user-friendly and plays videogames, way more than Mac. It’s still not something I recommend to most people, but probably someday, it’ll get to a Mac or Windows ease of use.

    At work, most of us haven’t been migrated to Windows 11 from Windows 10, and I still get updates installing in the background a lot, causing issues even on our Windows servers. I’m sure our ops team can tune these abhorrent update defaults, but it’s just a frustrating experience nonetheless.

    I think a prompt or reminder could go really far to let the user configure that during setup.

    Here are some of my complaints over time:

    • Force installs and bloat. Inclusion of bloat by default. Reinstallation of bloat on updates.
    • Resetting of my settings and registry edits regularly.
    • Ads on the desktop
    • Needless nagging to use their other bullshit like Onedrive. You think it’s good? Great! Let me uninstall it and use the cloud providers of my choice.
    • Forcing an inferior start menu without a choice to use alternatives or the old ones.
    • Windows tracks insane amounts of users’ data and actrivities, and I do not trust them to admit to all the tracking they do but the tracking they admit to doing is already mind-boggling.
    • Windows 10’s forced upgrade and Windows 10 popup scandals were completely dishonest and disgusting, and I have not heard enough apologies for what they did. This personally affected me and broke a bunch of crap before Windows 10 was even well-baked.
    • A history of forced updates. A history of forced reboots. A history of lost work. This is me and my family. It sounds like Windows has reverted some of their worst practices, but the precedent is set, and I’ll never trust Microsoft to stick to it.
    • The Windows seeker’s scandal personally affected me. They put all sorts of beta garbage on my computer without telling me. This caused a loss of files. They’ve made a resurgence on their unethical behaviors in the browser space. I have faith they’ll continue to revisit their other old habits. Look up Embrace-Extend-Extinguish and it’ll get you started. IE was their old baby. Edge is the new one.
    • Buying and killing small companies and studios, such as Rare, a bit like EA had done
    • Moving away from some of the nice things earlier Windows versions did, like a start menu with a neat list of organized and searchable programs.
    • Having just 1 UI experience that isn’t super customizable and breaking 3rd party UIs.
    • Fullscreen popups and nonsense over nothing
    • Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior has been a factor most of my life. They still push the boundaries of anti-competitive behavior to the Nth’s degree. Again, that reading on Embrace-Extend-Extinguish will give you a taste of their BS.
    • Having fewer features and techs than Linux that I like to use, such as specialty filesystems, IO schedulers, process schedulers, swapping systems (ZRAM/ZSWAP) etc. Being stuck on NTFS (are you kidding me?) REFS is too little too late and you can’t even boot off it
    • Way worse IO/Disk performance and features
    • inferior memory management

    Overall, I don’t want to do business or help in the success in an organization I do not like by offering up my data, watching their ads, and using their products less than necessary. I like some of the things Bill Gates has done, but it doesn’t change any of my views on this.


  • Yeah, the security in knowing that if you’re way top busy right now, you don’t have to install or even download any updates. And you don’t have to worry your system will suddenly become crashy, glitchy, and unstable because it decided on its own to install some things and let you know you can reboot whenever.

    It’s so freaking annoying I have to use Windows at work. It takes liberty to do what it wants and then my workflow gets hosed.

    I get that there is security, but if you force updates, I should have some kind of notice or “hey, we need to install mandatory updates. You can schedule in the next 24 hours when or you can get them over with”



  • From what I understand, they’re divesting resources that aren’t in Firefox or at least involved in a trustworthy/open source AI project.

    I see a lot of people in this theead are upset at this, but I’m tentatively excited. If they can pull off a good AI engine, especially built into the browser, that would be nice. If it had offline capabilities, that would be amazing.

    Even if they can pull off a good AI solution that’s not built into Firefox but it’s offline, I’d be really excited. I’m not crazy about having especially detailed and intimate information being thrown to some vendor out there, not knowing where it’s going. Modern AI can do some amazing things, but a lot of them reserve the right to have a human read whatever you put in them and warn you about that. This is too limiting to me for my preferred use-cases.

    Once concern I have is that Firefox and its engine are one of the last non-chromium browser platforms that have a household name and are FOSS. So to me, that has to be the first goal to keep healthy. Maybe the AI thing will help in this respect



  • I really don’t know.

    If I had to guess possible reasons off the top of my head:

    1: the aux cable and port are a very common for factor for electronics of all sorts, especially computers. So you could probably transfer that data to non-Gameboy devices and not have to manufacturer more proprietary GB ports which you may also have to write drivers for on your non-GB hardware. And your customers would also go through the hustle, if you require them to use your proprietary debugging hardware and drivers, when they inevitably test and debug their own games for your console.

    2: in the event of a crash, the kernel might better be able to handle the aux than the proprietary port. Pure speculation by me.

    Regardless of any possible reasons or strangeness, it just seems much more probable to me that the behavior of dumping the rom over the audio port is a design choice rather than a coincidence.


  • I remember about a decade ago, when I was a student, I helped a small company with some office work. An office admin showed me various things using her computer, such as their QuickBooks data. The bevy of ads I saw suggested to me that she was a religious, dog-owning, single parent, and she was clearly seeking a partner and she was about 50 years old. I got all this just from the front page of her yahoo and was blown away at how specific and personal those ads were. And some of the ads were Spanish so she’s easily bilingual.

    Totally creeped me out and I wasn’t sure she even knew that her computer was just broadcasting to her office all her personal info. She regularly collaborated with countless others, even new faces, using this same computer, where anyone could see what I saw.






  • “If any god at all” in that context implies the person has doubt in the existence of any god. This again is not a statement of preference. One can be an atheist and happy with their beliefs or unhappy with them.

    I just don’t see anywhere that the person said they’d like for things to be that way. They could easily be very unhappy at a disbelief in a god for all we know.

    Said another way: just because I don’t believe I’ll ever be a millionaire doesn’t mean I’d prefer never to be one.

    EDIT: I want to acknowledge that many people get strength and relief from their faiths and beliefs. And I would like to acknowledge that people’s happiness and comfort in a difficult world is a very good thing.




  • I also have 12 GB. There are usage patterns where additional RAM wull be useful or even necessary on a phone. When you have more RAM, the phone can sleep tasks and leave background apps alone without having to discard their contents from RAM. This means fewer cold startups. Also, more contents can be cached, which means faster app startups. Both of these techniques also reduce CPU usage and improve battery life. You can also achieve more tabs in your browsers and more and bigger apps running at the same time. More RAM also means fewer situations where swapping is done or needed, so additional CPU and disk cycles are saved and battery usage is reduced. Some apps will actually require more RAM or spin more when memory is scarce. Examples can be advanced content creation apps in audio, video, or picture/photography. Also, some games, especially in high settings.

    Are these additional GBs necessary? No. And most people would not notice them, as even 6 GB is overkill for quite a number of peoples’ usage patterns. Your phone does maybe 95% of what it does just about as well, even when you have a low-midrange CPU and GPU that is from a few years ago, and just 4 or 6gb of RAM.

    This holds true for iOS and Android. They’ve both done a fair bit of housekeeping and software improvements to reel in excessive resource usage gen over gen. I think Android was doing some catch-up here for a while, but I don’t know how they go toe to toe on this anymore, and it’s difficult to empirically compare the two in this area.