Perhaps I'm just a curmudgeon, longing for a bygone era and overdue to take up my retirement hobbies of tiling at windmills, yelling at clouds, and telling kids to get off my lawn...

But why is it...Why. Is. It. that web browsers seem to be built with the express and sole purpose of being as annoying as possible?

Why are scrollbars - when they're visible on the screen at all - so razor thin as to be difficult to grab? What websites are improved by an extra dozen pixels of width on widescreen monitors?!

Somewhat more controversially, I don't mind the "Awesome Bar" paradigm, where the address bar shows suggestions based on browser history and bookmarks. I don't find this problematic, but I *do* find it annoying that autocompletes don't even have the *option* to do tab-complete. I hate that browsers default to navigating me to https://192.168.1.1008006/ because that's where I went last time, even if my goal is to get to https://192.168.1.1./

Greenbar Certificates were excellent. They took effort and expense to acquire, and made it very easy to help users verify that they were going to bankofamerica.com, rather than all the typosquatting and unicode replacements that required eagle-eyed users to ensure were the right place...but no, EVERY browser got rid of that for some reason. What experience did their removal improve?

Title bars shouldn't be persona-non-grata; it's infuriating to have to close tabs to move the window around on the screen.

And I don't want to hear another word about 'muh security' in browsers when it is physically possible to replace the firmware on a connected smartphone Through. The. Browser. Internet Explorer 6 was atrocious for a hundred reasons, but don't tell me that the functional-equivalent of ActiveX and Java are okay when Google does it in Chrome.

Firefox, in case there was some possibility that a major browser could exist that *didn't* require a post-install script to fix, shows more nags and notification/tutorial spam than half the actual-spammers...and I don't know why there's this obsession with a sidebar, where I can pin things that...send me nags. Microsoft doing it makes sense, because they're microsoft...and Chrome doesn't have to do it because they do all of *their* nags in Gmail...but Firefox? Why is the left side of the screen okay to use for a useless sidebar that takes multiple attempts to permanently-hide, but scroll bars can't live on the right side?

Which brings us all the way to Edge, morphing into Copilot. Nobody wanted Clippy or Cortana, but somehow, if they force Copilot down our throats hard enough, it'll be good? Please, it can't get 'vibe coded Excel formulas' right, one of the areas it *should* be able to do consistently and reliably...but a rack full of GPUs can't reliably sum or average properly; God help whoever uses it to guess their way to VLOOKUPs... ...but Edge needs it, apparently. On what basis? Edge already auto-syncs data into one's microsoft account, even if one only uses one to activate MS Office and explicitly stated "this app only"...so all that data is getting sucked in and profiled. It automatically reinstalls itself, even if a user removes it from a computer. It gives 'shopping tips' and stores passwords and payment methods and opens Office files in browser-based office, and Microsoft is strong-arming Win10 users to use MS accounts to slurp up data in exchange for security updates... ...So...why?! Edge is already data slurping and ad-laden to the greatest possible extent a browser could be, and users don't want it...so how does morphing Edge into Copilot help *anyone* at all? ...I have no concept of how *nobody* at *any* browser creation firm can come up with a browser that has an address bar, a bookmarks list, a plug-in facility for users to add more functionality if they want...and then shut the hell up and display websites. It really shouldn't be such a huge ask for the browser to display what the user wants. Opera and Brave are only marginally better; both do the stupid sidebar thing and notify users of browser-based things...and then we get into the consortium of smaller-scale rebuilds, like waterfox or vivaldi, which are actually pretty close to useful, but then the first time a website doesn't load, suddenly it's the browser's fault and one must "use Chrome" to prove there's an actual server side problem...

Shady Pines beckoneth me....

It's copied from The Atlantic, and right away, the opinion author's assertions run into trouble.

"For the overwhelming majority of graduates, the returns on going to college more than offset the cost of tuition. ". That's news to all the grads drowning in debt they'll never pay off.

"After factoring in financial aid, the cost of attending a public four-year college has fallen by more than 20 percent since 2015, even before adjusting for inflation." What? Seriously?

Many more things like that. And she never even addresses the issue of enrollment now being overwhelmingly female, with majors that are money losers in the job markets. Nor does she address the fact that a growing number of students are foreign, sent here by their families or governments to gain technical and business knowledge to take back home after graduation. The whole thing reads like a PR piece for colleges.

Negative, Ghostrider. While standard support is up, HPE has an extended support system called "mature support" covering HP 9000 and Integrity servers until 2028, including HP-UX support . So it's not truly dead just yet.

Everyone that buys Windows licenses from those El Cheapo Google Marketplace vendors has to as the licenses tend to be pro licenses pulled from machines that won't activate over MS's web method.

It's not an education if you only assign stuff "relevant to their lives" (which is a crapshoot decision in any case; what books are really going be relevant to modern teenagers?). Part of what you're supposed to be getting in school is knowledge of the foundations of your civilization, which is why colleges have a Great Books program in the first place. High Schools typically don't burden students with all that many difficult old books anyway. I had to suffer through Wuthering Heights but I also got to discover Lord of the Flies.

Might it be that the Beeb relies on groups like the Spectator for guests as an opposite to it's own party line, and thus drive the outrage demo to boost ratings? A' La the old CNN crossfire route? What else would they do? Bring on, say, the Guardian every night and basically just agree on everything?

The daily format, yes. The Internet has killed that.

But I think there's still some room for print journalism under certain conditions, and profitably so as well, if done right.

Many moons ago, I used to get the Washington Post's Weekly Edition. I don't know if they do it anymore, but it was a newspaper, mailed to your home once a week, that had longer, more in-depth investigative stories and analysis on the issues of the day than you'd find in the daily papers, as well as an opinion and editorial section. I think something along these lines, combined with certain elements of the old Sunday paper format... cartoons, ads, local events and notices, arts coverage.... could sell as part of a larger digital subscription that gives you daily access.

Obviously, Apple would prefer to create something that enables post-purchase monetization...but forget Apple for a second. Facebook couldn't make them happen, HTC couldn't make them happen, Oculus couldn't make them happen.

They have fundamental problems that nobody can fix. People don't generally like putting things on their face. They tend to need more room; nobody likes accidentally banging their hand on a lamp they didn't realize was there. The use case (beyond niche industrial and medical uses) has been crappy video games...and that assumes that motion sickness doesn't factor in.

They're expensive and they don't provide enough of a use case to offset these problems *and* their cost. If it were just about Apple finding out it's tough to do post-purchase monetization, then Apple could have spent their way to success...but nobody has found enough of a use case to engender *real* demand.

Oh, I 100% agree that there's no way for the budget to go up and tax returns to go up without either debt or inflation, so yeah, there's definitely some atrocious math going on here.

In terms of questions regarding USAID and fraud, this is a pretty good look at the topic, and the Youtuber is a self-proclaimed socialist, and decisively anti-Trump, so it's not some red team apologist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... . Even if you don't believe half of what she says, the other half is probably worth at *least* understanding that USAID isn't run by the most philanthropic of people.

Please tell me why I - and a good number of other people - wouldn't want an OS that was Windows 7 + UEFI/NVMe support + the HAL introduced in Windows 8 + whatever API/backend updates are required to run current-gen software?

The glass look was better than the borderless squares...and while Win7 still made it possible to choose borderless, flat squares if desired, Win10/11 requires WindowBlinds for the same task. "Settings" is in no way an improvement over the Control Panel. Notifications is worse than the balloon pop-ups; in 15 years they haven't solved the fact that notifications superimpose themselves over the up-arrow that shows additional tray icons.

I shouldn't have to run the Windows 10 Decrapifier script and WinUtil to get rid of the garbage that *nobody* asked for. There's no need for OS-level account integration, and holy hell OneDrive keeps trying to suck in everyone's data by claiming it's a 'backup' with regular nags on startup. Oh, and can we talk about how in Windows 7, BitLocker was the reason people bought the super-expensive 'Ultimate' edition, but in Windows 11, it's in the home versions and enabled by default? Home users didn't ask for that either; data recovery from unbootable hard drives is far more frequent of a need than full disk encryption in a home user setting. The new Hyper-V and WSL are nice power user functions, but most of this was sorted out on Win7 with Virtualbox and Git Bash.

These are just a handful of things I can think of off the top of my head. I'll concede the HAL, the hardware support, whatever functionality makes new software work, and even the new Task Manager...but if you're going to tell me that Windows 10 or 11 is an improvement over Win7...I'm gonna need you to back that up a hell of a lot better than described.

More to the point, dating apps already suck for young men. It's hard enough for them to get a match of any kind, and the apps are notorious for women ghosting men or going out with men just to get a free meal or monetary favor of some kind. Now imagine finding out that the only reason a woman goes out with you was to use you for your work connections. How is this not a kind of catfishing or fraud?

I tell my sons to avoid these apps like the plague. This kind of stuff only reinforces that.

Somehow the lawyers will get the majority of the settlements.

This is bad news if the Pixels are now eSIM only.

GrapheneOS only supports pixels and many of its users prefer a permissionless SIM.

Maybe they'll add support for some other device, perhaps one of the privacy phones.

True as that may be, I'm thinking the idea still has merit.

For starters, they aren't making money while it was down. If their plan is to ban the users who received credits and skins in the breach, they can still do that, but also deal with whatever selling/trading happened - do you ban a player who traded skins with someone who got the skin from the hack? Do you not?

But they could deal with the currency influx by increasing the price of the skins/lootboxes/whatever, at least to some extent. Users would be able to buy a bunch of things they couldn't otherwise afford, which still gives them a reason to keep playing the game, and then when they run out of the in-game currency, they're still "invested" and more likely to stay and buy currency to buy skins at the inflated prices...AND, they'd still be seen as making a move in favor of the player in the process.

I think this makes more sense than anything else; taking away the currency might be the "technically correct" thing to do, but it is unlikely to improve spending within the game, so Ubisoft would likely lose more in the long term. ...but then again, this is Ubisoft; I wouldn't put it past them to cut off their nose to spite their face.

and discuss the BEST use of AI that I've come across: VirtualDJ.

For those who aren't in the know, club and mobile DJing is largely computer-based now. There are a number of vendors who have software catered to this vertical; the biggest names in the industry are Serato DJ Rekordbox, Traktor, and VirtualDJ.

Two years ago, VirtualDJ added "Stems" to the software, allowing for vocals, instrumentals, bass, and drums to be separated in real-time on computers with GPUs capable of running the models. Stems allowed for on-the-fly remixing and acapella in/out capabilities that used to require production beforehand. While the others have integrated it into their software since, VirtualDJ was the first to do so.

Not content to sit on the success of that functionality, VDJ this year added in two related functions. The first is a lyrics display, that allows the DJ to see when a section of a song has vocals, and which ones don't. While this used to require setting cue points beforehand, the ability to see how many measures are coming before the lyrics start or stop helps to seamlessly blend songs that the DJ may not be familiar with (and no, it's not a 'skill issue'; songs rotate on a near-weekly basis now, learning them all is basically impossible). A similar function that is helpful is the auto-censor capability. For DJs that find themselves in a crowd that demands clean radio edits, the ability to have the software automatically mute out offensive lyrics, regardless of whether the track is a 'clean' edit or a 'dirty' edit, is incredibly helpful.

I bring this example up because of WHY I consider this to be the best implementation of AI I've come across. It's great because it's effective...but it's effective because it's limited in scope. It's not trying to do everything, it runs a handful of specific and specialized models that handle particular functions, all of which can be completely ignored if desired. It's not filled with nags, it's not doing data collection (well, it might be...but like, playlists, not PII), it's not hallucinating...it keeps its scope limited, and models tight enough to run on a GTX1060 without a problem.

So, while the comments here will be boundless in the places where Clippy 2.0 has been more of a headache than a useful way to improve outcomes, I thought I'd give a particular example of a company who has done it well.