Weird; Teams is the one Microsoft product (other than their mice and keyboards, which don't really count) that I actually like using. It's a little slow, and the text-search capability isn't very good, but for the most part it just gets out of my way, does its job, and helps me do mine. (I'm running it under MacOS, though, maybe that makes a difference)

Unlike any other software program you run, your computer's primary operating system has access to pretty much everything on your computer; it has to, or it wouldn't be able to function as an interface to the hardware.

That means that the #1 feature your OS can offer is to be trustworthy -- if you can't trust your OS's developers to do the right thing by you, you're hopelessly screwed; no amount of virus scanning or firewalling can protect you from the OS itself. Continuing to use an untrustworthy OS is like keeping your money in a bank controlled by Bernie Madoff and hoping that he'll decide not to take your money.

That they've got a pretty decent LLM built in to their own skull, and it's available gratis for their personal and professional use for up to 8-12 hours per day. The best part is that the more you use it, the better-trained and more effective if gets.

Here's an idea: All graphical operating systems published by gatekeeper-class companies (as defined in the Digital Markets Act or foreign counterparts) would need to support, at minimum, some specific GUI API for developing local applications. For comparison, the US government used to require POSIX compliance. Microsoft delivered the bare minimum POSIX support in Windows NT versions 3.1 through 4.0, though initially not enough to be practically useful because it lacked networking and graphics.

How would one go about building the FOSS alternative to Apple Mobile Device Service, the component of iTunes that synchronizes music into the Music app of an iPhone? That's probably the biggest thing keeping my roommate on Windows. She wants to play purchased songs (ripped from a CD or purchased on Bandcamp or Itch.io) and rented songs (from her Apple Music family plan) in the same playlist. Because Apple Mobile Device Service is a driver, Wine doesn't run it properly. Last I checked, libimobiledevice for Linux could write files but not the music database used by the Music app, and VLC could play purchased songs stored as files but not rented songs.

Most Windows licenses included with laptop computers sold in major big-box electronics chains are not Pro.

Wine runs user-mode applications. It does not run kernel-mode drivers.

Such a law would have to be very carefully written so as to distinguish between "bots" and assistive technologies used by human beings with disabilities. I can't think of where to draw a bright line.

I guess it's the whole industry's "stupid choice" to sell products on Amazon then. When I worked for an online toy seller in 2010-2019, Amazon's marketplace service provided an Excel spreadsheet with macros used to perform local preflight validation before sending a product listing or inventory change file to the server. You'd put in product listing information, and it'd tell you what you would probably need to change before the server would accept the file. This was optional but highly recommended to reduce server-side processing errors at least until I wrote my own validation routines in Python. Excel could run the macros; LibreOffice Calc could not.

There's no real reason why you couldn't just specify the amount of battery you're willing to pay for as an option when buying your EV, or even add/remove battery cells from time to time as your needs indicate. One battery size need not fit all.

The problem arose when an early version of ChatGPT read and memorized the entire text of the Necronomicon, and in doing so summoned Baalzebub, who is now running as an unrestricted daemon process on OpenAI's server farm.

If LLMs seem like they are accomplishing more than a collection of preprogrammed neural weights ought to be capable of, well there's the secret sauce right there :)

I'm not sure that's true; if you destroy the entire computer, how do you verify that the important parts (e.g. the hard drives) were actually destroyed and not repurposed? Presumably they were inside the case, but if you don't open the case up and look, you can't prove that they weren't pilfered the night before and are in someone's bedroom now, waiting to be listed on eBay or somewhere worse.

If I was that paranoid, I'd want to manually inventory each hard drive and watch it being fed into the shredder with my own eyeballs.

My suspicion is that most parts of the computers weren't destroyed, but rather they were sold off or given away to some third party that will figure out what to do with them. But it's easier and simpler to tell the public they were destroyed.

I disagree that phones and tablets are both good enough and affordable.

On their own, phones and tablets are not good enough because they run phone operating systems. These trade off flexibility for reliability, in part because people expect a phone to be their primary way of reaching emergency services (1-1-2, 9-1-1, 9-9-9, etc.). Phone operating systems are locked down with strict W^X in such a way that makes them not very capable, for example, for lightweight programming projects. Change my mind.

One can circumvent the lockdown by using the tablet as a remote terminal for running applications elsewhere. This requires adding a mobile data subscription and a virtual private server, or adding a mobile data subscription and a virtual private network (like Tailscale or Hamachi) to connect to your home computer behind an ISP-managed firewall. That adds a recurring fee in the tens of dollars per month or hundreds of dollars per year.

The practical problem with Chromebooks at the time was that for several years, between the debut of Chromebooks in 2011 and widespread support for Crostini (a GNU/Linux virtual machine) in 2019, a Chromebook couldn't do anything other than browse the web without threatening to wipe all your data (because "OS verification is OFF") every time you turned it on. That isn't very conducive to offline use while (say) riding a bus. I had been using my netbook for lightweight hobby programming projects.

The disadvantage of a bigger laptop is that a bigger laptop is less convenient to use in a cramped space, such as on a bus commute to and from your day job. It's also less convenient to pack in a cramped space, such as your tiny personal locker at your day job. A 10.1" laptop fit in (say) a locker in the back of a Walmart Supercenter, and a 11.6" laptop did not. That's part of why I was so disappointed that manufacturers suddenly discontinued 10.1" laptops at the end of 2012. I remember recommending that people affected by this discontinuation buy a cellular iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard case, a VPS, and an expensive data plan, and use the iPad to remote desktop to the VPS. I rejected that workaround as cost prohibitive at the time.