Yeah, all this stuff is totally for the end-user's benefit. That's why it's being forced on everyone.

We live in odd times when people think games need to have low-level access to the OS and read hardware serial numbers, even if you want to play exclusively offline.

I used to use Userchrome to reorganize the order of context menus and do a few other UI tweaks... until they removed those features.

Now I don't bother. I just use a fork of Firefox.

I see ageism is alive and well.

That's only when the PR shit hits the fan. Up to that point, it's cover-ups all the way down.

You know, just like any other organization full of petty office politics.

If all the AI systems were to disappear tomorrow, are you confident you could function without it?

I've had my fill of people saying they've "learned" things, but can't actually get anything done without automation.

That reminds me, I should find a new stand-alone PDF viewer for my workstation. The Firefox PDF viewer is orders of magnitude slower than any other PDF viewer I've ever used. If I have a 100-page document consisting of bitmap page scans and I skip to the end, it can take 30 seconds to render a page. It is just so damn slow.

But yeah, improving initialization time is a newsworthy deal.

Perhaps it would not kill us intentionally but rather by accident. I doubt AI understands the concept of not existing.

Everything these days is designed from the ground up to require an Internet connection.

Car manufacturers are used to charging $2000 for a vinyl sticker pack or a plastic spoiler. Of course they will use any disruption in the market to justify gouging people for thousands.

My car is almost 12 years old. I don't see myself replacing it any time soon.

Prices on those have gone up, too. Markets can be irrational, but they aren't stupid.

To be fair, every major OS refuses to do backups by default. You have to do everything manually yourself. As much as geeks love to scream about the importance of backups, it's remarkably difficult for ordinary people to do it, especially if you want proper version-controlled backups, and especially if you want catastrophic full-system backups. Most of the time, tech companies don't allow you to make backups, citing "copyright" concerns.

The best anyone offers is cloud storage (ie, a mirror), because that can possibly generate more revenue. Otherwise... figure it out yourself.

I don't see this as a problem with dumb end users. This is a cultural problem. The whole tech industry deserves a swift kick up the ass.

It's easy to understand. Embedded OSes are everywhere, but the manufacturer chooses them, not the end user.

What's hard to understand is why Linux people keep celebrating themselves when hardly any end users chooses what OS they use, and even when they can, the choice is still a pain in the ass.

Half the country is more stupid than Trump, as they consistently fall for his narcissistic tantrums.

The only reason one could argue that Trump is actually pretty smart is because the bar has just been dropped that low.

Let me break the mood by being an actual geek for a second.

It's weird to hear polysilicon being described as an "ultra-pure" form of silicon, because it's formed on a silicon wafer without a pure crystal structure. That's why is high a high level of electrical resistance. It's actually one of the least pure forms of silicon used in chip production.

But, hey, most of my knowledge of chip production is ancient and dates back to 0.5 micron processes.