That’s why I’m running GrapheneOS, where I can actually disable things.

They don’t want you to disable things they can make money off of you with.

“Why is it called UMU if it is a Universal Wine Utility? … Oooooh, nevermind.”

The one on the bottom right should be the same as the center right but with “Apple” written instead of “Microsoft”. And maybe with the hand of the character representing Apple reaching in the other’s pocket while doing what he’s doing.

If you look back at the sci-fi movies that came out soon after lasers were invented, you could see that people had all sorts of crazy ideas of what a laser could be used to do and that a lot of them had absolutely no idea of what a laser really did. Ultimately, we’ve found out that most of those imagined uses were pure bullshit or extremely impractical, at least with the current state of the technology. It didn’t mean that the technology was useless. We ended up finding all sorts of useful purposes for it that they had never imagined, like disk players or barcode scanners. It only means that it took time for people to better understand what the real world applications of the new technology was and a lot of the initial assumptions were dead wrong.

AI is going through the same process. It will take time before the technology’s strengths and weaknesses are better understood by the masses so it can be better applied to more realistic uses. And for the commercialization of snake-oil applications for it remains confined to fringe markets.

Microsoft needs to be broken up.

Any company that can be so blatantly anti consumer and still makes boatloads of money is obviously abusing its dominant position on the market.

Big dumb corporation doing big dumb corporation stuff. It’s so big it can’t behave coherently anymore. But it’s also so big that it acts like a black hole that sucks all the money towards itself regardless of how stupid, unproductive and wasteful it is being.

The sad part is that all of this is all self-inflicted in the name of “growth” for the shareholders. They absolutely could take 7, modernize it, call it “12” and release it as a lightweight, fast and more privacy-respecting OS. It would probably be far cheaper to make as well.

But that’s not what the Corporate elements of the company want. They see the OS as a platform to force feed to the users features that they can market as “lucrative” to the shareholders. Nobody else wants that. I predict that Windows 12 will have some sort of baked in “AI” that you can’t get rid of as a bare minimum.

But this is none of my concern. They’ve finally pushed me over the hump and now I’m 100% sold to Linux. It has gotten so much more approachable than it used to be. Especially with Mint.

Microsoft is dead to me.

Maybe if after a disastrous enough reception of Windows 11 they might make a Windows 12 that actually cares about being more palatable to the users, like they did with Windows 7 following the disaster that was Vista.

But I think they’ll most probably only move to meet us halfway like they did with Windows 10 following the other disaster that was 8. Where they replaced a major irritant with another and then slowly stacked more and more irritants with updates thereafter. They are too addicted to the revenue from data harvesting to give it up.

I was hesitant for a long while and ended up installing Linux Mint on an old SSD I had laying around this way there was no commitment.

Now I’m realizing I haven’t booted up my regular windows 10 drive ever since and am considering getting rid of it altogether.

On a side note I created a virtual machine on the Linux side that runs Windows 10 LTSC on it for a few other programs I sometimes need that would be very difficult or impossible to make work on Linux like Inventor, Office and Photoshop. It lives trapped in the box and isn’t allowed to connect to the internet. If I need to download something for it I download it on Linux and drag and drop it into the box. It’s like having a little pet Windows that you keep locked in a pen, so it works for you and only for you and it can’t escape to go into your house to spy on you and shit bloatware all over your carpet.

When the marketing guy tries to do a job meant for the engineering department.

I have a Lexmark black and white laser printer which I’ve used lightly for years (went through one and a half paper packs so far) and it’s still going strong with the original toner cassette. And when I’ll need to replace it I know there are third party cassettes available on the market for it which are substantially cheaper than OEM. I bought it to replace a Brother inkjet printer which was just an ink/money pit despite being a Brother. Inkjet is absolute crap no matter the brand. HP makes it even worse with a ton of assholeish DRM layered on top.

Ultimately there are two big things to avoid: inkjet and HP. Look up a laser printer and make sure that there is third party cassette support for it before you buy. Brother is apparently good in laser but don’t necessarily limit yourself to that brand.

In my area Kia drivers are also generally bad, but more in the “drive 20 under the speed limit for no reason while dragging a traffic cone that they’ve hit ten minutes back” category.

I’ve caught myself being excited about buying a ladder once. I’m officially old.

“I’m going to make the world a better place… For me.”

-Dr. Steel

Management not providing their employees with adequate tools to do their job while also keeping them in the dark about the greater picture of their company. Ignoring their employee’s problems and then blaming those who try to solve it on their own.

And whenever you want to search for information about something the result page gets flooded with AI generated garbage pages with misleading titles and that provide bullshit information.

That article is also so obviously biased and manipulative. To pretend to be balanced while controlling the narrative in their favor, they have a short section where they mention some lesser downsides while downplaying them and completely failing to even acknowledge the main concerns that people’s basic rights for privacy would be violated by such a change.

And then they dangle the carrot of a better credit score in front of their readers should they accept to have their rights eroded further. What kind of dystopian bullshit is this?