Ah yes, America "thrived" because people went to church, not because it had a secular constitution, independent courts, free speech, science, public education, and a government explicitly barred from enforcing religion. Correlation solved.

A religious population!= a religious state. The U.S. succeeded because belief was optional and law wasnâ(TM)t written by clergy, which is exactly why the Founders bothered with the First Amendment in the first place.

And invoking Iran as the only example of religious governance failing is cute, but unnecessary. We can just look at any place where religion actually runs the government and compare it to the least religious countries today which, awkwardly, are doing just fine.

If church attendance were the secret sauce, Mississippi would be an economic superpower by now.

Any international company or foreign government that isn't currently working on a move away from US based computing/storage/OSes/Office suites is setting themselves up for failure. We've shown that we can't be trusted with their data.

No, he means Notepad. Now with Copilot!

Why should anyone have to go and create a security policy, especially on a "professional" OS to prevent ads? Especially when a future update will almost certainly re-enable them.

Users shouldn't have to baby sit their OS like this. And if you tell the OS not to do something, you shouldn't have to worry about future updates overriding what you've already told it.

MS treats their power users like idiots, and is driving them away with it.

New phones are several hundred dollars, and offer very little improvements over models a few years old. With inflation and every other cost of living rising, wages stagnating, unemployment rising, people are making choices. And more often than not, the choice is to pay food and rent instead of a shiny new phone that doesn't do anything new.

A decent amount. Here's a pull request for the dotnet library where they were having copilot do work.

It did not go well. The comments are gold.

https://github.com/dotnet/runt...

That's a whole lot of extra words, instead of just saying that you're a fucking moron who doesn't understand science.

I'm probably going to go for the 48GB/1TB as far as storage.

I tend to try and buy a laptop that I'll use for several years, this seems like my best bet right now. It will be replacing a 9 year old Dell Precision laptop that I've been using daily since it was new.

Curious what Mac you're using? I'm getting a new personal laptop somewhat soon, and the M5 chips look really nice. How much RAM do you have? I've currently got an M1 mini with 8GB of RAM that works pretty well but it tends to start bogging down when using containers and having a bunch of youtube tabs open. I'm not sure how much of the Apple Tax on memory I need/want to spend.

Yeah I used to have the MSDN subscription where you'd get binders full of CDs every quarter.

Visual Studio Community is free though for non-commercial use, and commercial use as long as you're under a certain annual revenue (Something like $1.5 million I think?). I'm sure the volume licensing that most shops use is far less than $500/month.

VS26 is surprisingly good. There is a ton of AI crap in it, but you can completely turn it all off. VS26 runs noticeably better on my machine than VS22 did, I've been using the preview version for a while now without issue in my day job. Like I mentioned though, we're migrating away from Windows altogether now that .Net runs well in Linux and there are good cross-platform IDEs available.

It's different now though. The alternating good/bad Windows releases used to be the core of the system was good or bad. Windows 11 is pretty good though. What's made it bad is shitty choices that Microsoft is making trying to squeeze money out of users. Ideas like their Recall AI crap they keep rolling out. Overwriting system settings with every update. Why do I have ads on my "Professional" edition for xbox crap? Why in the ever loving fuck does the built-in solitaire game now require a recurring subscription if I don't want to watch ads between games? I don't want to use OneDrive or Edge, stop prompting me about them.

And yeah, there's plenty of easy workarounds to almost all of these issues, but the point is that they keep making these decisions and pushing them on users. The Windows system itself isn't horrible these days, it's the management decisions that are killing it. A new version of Windows won't fix that.

One of the old school Windows developers posted a pretty good video on this the other day. He makes some good points, and honestly if they followed his ideas, Windows would be much better for developers and power users. But I don't see them doing that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Not a fan of Microsoft, but Visual Studio has made a ton of improvements over the past few years, including this release.

Unfortunately they've fucked Windows so badly recently, and JetBrains has made their IDE free for non-commercial use (And far cheaper for commercial licenses than MSDN) that myself and a ton of other .Net devs are moving off of Windows completely and won't be getting to use this new version.

I loved my mini, I just wish it wasn't made with the crappier low-end components. I'd guess that's part of why the sales were so low, people wanted a small powerful phone, not a small gimped one. A Mini Pro would have been amazing. I finally upgraded my 12 mini to a 16 Pro, the phone is too damn big to comfortably hold and use one handed.

I've been saying this for a while as well. My spotify playlist has roughly 2,000 songs in it, but it continually plays the same 100 or so over and over. It's obviously not anything remotely close to a true random shuffle, and it's obvious that they've put work into making it not truly random.

The only thing I can think of is the royalties are cheaper for 2 plays of the same song than two plays of two unique songs.

And in researching alternate platforms, it seems that they all do this, making this an industry-wide issue, which screams that it's some BS licensing thing shitting up the experience for the end users.