Because for the past 30 or so years, it has worked very well for MS to keep their main products barely useable, rely on lock-in and chase the next big thing so they can get their dirty hands on it early and lock more people into more products.

That is exactly wrong. Beta versions are there to find bugs. If nobody complained about them, they won't be found. So if you try beta versions, please DO complain about bugs.

I guess "vibe-something" is going to be the anti-word of 2026. People are slowly waking up to what it actually means to let the AI do the work.

I'm not dissing AI, I'm using it extensively myself and there's a few AI whitepapers with my name on them. But like any tool, it can be great when used correctly and ruin your day when not.

That doesn't mean what they do is automatically legal.

I'm pretty sure there's a demand for "murder my husband", or for "can someone please drown my neighbour". And yet it's illegal to offer such services.

Also: Voters. Smokers are still a fairly substantial fraction of the population, enough to swing a vote, especially if, and that appears to be the trend in most western democracies these days, there are two opposing political sides roughly evenly matched.

I mean, does it not strike anyone as a very weird coincidence that we have almost perfect 50/50 splits in so many countries?

No, but they do everything BUT force to make it the most attractive option. Just as one silly example: With wages and prices as they are, having both partners work full-time is basically required unless you're in the top few percent of earners or inherited wealth. So who's going to cook? After a long work day? Convenience food is the obvious choice. You are not being forced, but unless food is a high-priority item in your life, you are very much steered into that direction.

Yep. Or "We will make our product worse until profits go up!"
Fascinatingly, this works sometimes, at least for a while. Look at Microsoft for a current example.

It is. That is why things like this stupid "Code Red" work. It is all just about who pretends better that their product actually has merit (or will have merit soon, promise!) beyond the few it can actually do well.

Yep, kind of feels like it.

I agree. Well, you cannot get everything out and specific things like, say, SSN or more common health problems, can be blanked out with patterns. But misspell the name of the condition you have or describe it instead of using its name and you are already screwed in most cases. And names, quasi-identifiers of people, etc. are basically impossible to recognize reliably.

Hence what needs to be done here is also that anybody working on the data needs to be under oath to not leak any personal data and all processing must be done on isolated infrastructure. Obviously, that makes things slower and more expensive.

Training data, issue diagnosis, market research, targeting data for ads, probably to sell it to others at some time.

Such a shame. I think we should be "tough on crime" on these people!

The Windows 10 Decrapifier Script, combined with most of the tweaks available in WinUtil should reduce your workload pretty effectively.

Sad it needs to happen...but I hope it helps streamline things for you.

That is somewhat surprising to me. They are 95% crap these days.

That's actually a good question. Inks have changed somewhat over the past 5,000 years, and there's no particular reason to think that tattoo inks have been equally mobile across this timeframe.

But now we come to a deeper point. Basically, tattoos (as I've always understand it) are surgically-engineered scars, with the scar tissue supposedly locking the ink in place. It's quite probable that my understanding is wrong - this isn't exactly an area I've really looked into in any depth, so the probability of me being right is rather slim. Nonetheless, if I had been correct, then you might well expect the stuff to stay there. Skin is highly permeable, but scar tissue less so. As long as the molecules exceed the size that can migrate, then you'd think it would be fine.

That it isn't fine shows that one or more of these ideas must be wrong.