It's 2025. We've known for a couple of decades that Win32/Win64 and Windows and its main ecosystem only work because various hacks into the kernel to make it all run more smoothly. Even the video driver architecture basically has built in restarts when buffers blow up.

It's a shitty proprietary operating system which somehow, every time they try to clean it up, it gets worse under and on top of the hood. I stopped using Windows for my own personal devices four years ago, and will not go back. Ubuntu, Debian and MacOS offer cleaner UIs, and even if the software libraries are a bit smaller, at least I'm not a prisoner to endless ads.

Christ I had to set up a Win11 laptop yesterday, and between setting up the OS and Edge I had to turn down "offers" and additional tracking functionality around seven or eight times. Actually more, because then I set up a non-privileged user profile, and had to do it all again. And that was Win11 Pro. I can only imagine how much worse the Home editions are.

There's no speculation that increases CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere lead to the more heat being trapped. We've known that since the late 19th century.

If you want to use AI, fine. But if I don't want to use it, don't force it on me. Don't put it in my OS and make me have to jump through hoops to avoid it. Don't put it in my applications and have it automatically steal all of my original work to use as training data.

A reasonable person would understand that when these companies take these kinds of actions and put the onus on the end user to opt out, that this is highly suggestive of unethical motives. Normalization through market saturation and removal of choice is a core tenet of the enshittification playbook. And if you, as the consumer, don't fight against this, you will quickly find yourself paying money for what used to be free; putting up with planned obsolescence; not being able to buy durable or reliable products; and becoming inured to vendor lock-in, intrusive advertising, and privacy violations.

The question is not whether generative AI technology is "useful," "trustworthy," "ethical," or "valuable." There are valid use cases, and to argue against that is a losing proposition. Rather, the issue is about the behavior and motives of the entities that have commodified them. Conversely, people defending the use of AI because of its utility are missing the point: you do not need to attack those who choose to avoid it (and in doing so, implicitly defend the unethical behavior of the companies that are pushing it on everyone) as the price for being able to benefit from it.

It just goes to show you, there's none more gullible than the paranoid.

When I want to point out to the kind of morons who post on the Internet, I'll tuck this post away.

Yup, the sad truth is that if you really want to save children, you need to ban parents.

Aside from the obvious privacy issues, the concern I have is that this product seems to be positioned as a medical device, but lacks any information about how it is measuring what it purports to measure. What studies support the analyses it claims to perform, and how are its methodologies validated?

It's deeply deceptive to sell a product that claims to track health-related data without disclosing how accurate or meaningful it is. Not only is such marketing exploiting the uneducated public and leading them to believe in snake oil, it also creates confusion, sows distrust of legitimate medical devices and therapies, and may actually lead consumers to make incorrect decisions about seeking medical advice. For instance, one can reasonably envision that someone who buys this product could believe that it could justify less frequent colonoscopies. That could be a fatal error.

One of the most fascinating aspects of H2O is the sheer number of forms it can take under different conditions.

The problem was that you were part of that chain of obligations to, and the guy above you could grab your wife, or in the case of James II of England (James VI of Scotland), he could grab you.

China's population decline, as standards of living increase, will largely take care of the problem. China, like every nation that is now on the other side of the economic growth-population growth curve, will have to figure out how to deal with the next half century. But nothing is going to make factories less automated, and between population decline and foreign tariffs, they are only going to push automation further to fill the gap.

Which will not prevent automation. Look at the history of technological advancement, from the Paleolithic to today. Each major innovation has disrupted labor in some form or another, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, in a proximal sense, but in the long run societies adapt. You cannot block innovation, and if you do, you simply surrender the field to the nation that is willing to throw out the status quo.

All North America can think about is building more pipelines. The oil obsession, in the face of climate change and economics, means we're just going to fall further and further behind. Sure, for a while tariffs will serve to keep EVs and economy cars out, but not even the United States can defy gravity forever, and when it all comes crashing back to Earth, North American automanufacturers, the heart of North America's industrial capacity, will be shattered.

Or the automakers could just ignore the dictates of the White House. But at this point, we're stuck in a tragedy of the commons, with strong encouragement from political leaders in the US and Canada, who lack either the wit or the courage to make the final break.

If anyone had been listening to what he was saying, they would have had no idea what he was saying? The grandiosity masked the complete deficit not merely of ideas, but even of reason and coherence? They elected a mean-spirited moron.

Is it April 1? Or is this another manufactured moral panic?

Xi is a lot of things, but a tinpot dictator he isn't. I despise everything the regime running China stands for, but if we're going to look at the PRC's ability to maintain itself and even expand itself economically and scientifically. Xi may die tomorrow, but the PRC isn't going anywhere. If progress is measured in research, have you paid attention to how much basic research is coming out of China these days, as compared to the West, which seems bound and determined to decimate academic capacity, or hand it over to a bunch monomaniac billionaires.