The illusion of intelligence evaporates if you use these systems for more than a few minutes.

Using AI effectively requires, ironically, advanced thinking skills and abilities. It's not going to make stupid people as smart as smart people, it's going to make smart people smarter and stupid people stupider. If you can't outthink the AI, there's no place for you.

My wife and I bought a used 2024 Mini Cooper EV just last weekend, for roughly that amount. It seems well-built and is very fun to drive. However it is only useful for driving around town because its range is only 120 miles. Technologically this is clearly out of date. I couldn't help but think that if not for trade restrictions we could be paying the same for a new car with more advanced batteries and motors. In fact the Mini Cooper EV, the 2025 model with almost double the range, is not available in the US because of trade restrictions.

I never liked the framing of 'their brain hasn't finished maturing.' You could as well say that after 26 the brain begins its decline into risk aversion and senescence. Somebody has to go out and slay the beasts and fight the enemies and make the babies and young people in their physical prime did most of it.

The last thing NVidia wants to do is advance TPUs as a viable and more affordable alternative to the GPUs that are a gusher of profit for NVidia. Even if it's inevitable, delaying the erosion of the GPU market is worth billions per month to them.

This is some big-league gambling! $200B in a morning! That's the entire market cap of Apple in spring of 2010. (For reference that's when the iPhone 4 came out - they were at the top of their game.)

Without knowing precisely how Explorer is structured, it's conceivable that there may be different dynamically-linked libraries and/or execution points for running the desktop and for the file explorer, in which case just having explorer.exe running in and of itself doesn't mean that new modules have to be loaded if explorer.exe process fires up. The solution could very well be to load the libraries involved in file browsing when the desktop opens.

Just guessing here. There was a time when there was a lot more horsepower required for GUI elements than folder browsing, but this is 2025, and explorer.exe probably uses orders of a magnitude more resources now than it did in 1995, because... well, who knows really. Probably to sell more ads and load up more data to their AI.

That, on modern hardware, they have to preload a fucking file browser so that it pops up faster is just an indication of what a steaming pile of garbage MS is. They had sweet spots with Win2k-WinXP and with Win7, but their incoherent need to be a whole bunch of contradictory things --- with AI! has led what was a rather iffy OS and UI experience to begin with to become a cluster fuck of incoherence.

I do most of my day to day work on MacOS and Gnome, and fortunately the Terminal services version I have to RDP into is Server 2016, but every time I have to work with Windows 11 I'm just stunned by just how awful it looks and how badly it behaves.

I had forgot about Altman getting fired by the board for not 'being candid' (presumably tantamount to lying). Admittedly if there is a business equivalent to being expelled for academic fraud, that might be it.

The thing with Notepad isn't that it's good... rather that it's everywhere.

Notepad is for when you're working but not on your machine. Not everyone's work flow is going to be 100% local and you probably won't have permission to install something on someone elses server.

No matter what the version, what the patch level, what the fuck is wrong with it, notepad is there and notepad works.

Sounds like MS are working on the last part unfortunately.

It'll be three thumbs up shortly at the rate they're going.

Completely agree with your post BTW.

Buy British Beef, Mad Cow disease is still safer than what's in the local stuff.

If nothing else, Kennedy and his cronies can duck behind really expensive equipment while flinging feces at each other. We can leave some bones amongst the servers for them to discover and perhaps use to beat each other.

Vast amounts of money flowing to companies that will leave precious little as they fail out. The rich who are willing to play the game will get richer.

Haven't heard much about DOGE lately. I'm sure they have an unbroken track record of success marrying disparate datasets of a scale that is microscopic compared to what's being proposed here.

Won't matter who wins in 2028. They're going to inherit sweet fuck all except for a half finished White House.

48 months, and I just had Apple put a new battery in. Unless the actual protocols get deprecated, or it flies off my motorcycle to a grisly demise, I expect to have my iPhone 13 for another 4 years.

Internet: "Google is using your email to train AI models!"

Google: "We don't use them to train our Gemini model."

Um... can we have more details? We suspect a devil infestation.