They keep wanting to turn the OS into a bunch of non-optional, deeply-integrated, unremoveable, application-layer talkie assistants.

It's been the same for decades - Active Desktop, the little paperclips and wizards, etc. Microsoft Bob infected them and they're still trying to make it happen.

If Windows was an OS, and Copilot was an optional app that you could download for free or buy, and which any similar AI assistant could plug into your OS in the same way (e.g. so you could choose Gemini or ChatGPT to help in your OS instead), and there was an option to just say "No, none of that"... I'd probably stick with Windows.

But my last 10 machine at home is coming to its end, and its replacement is not going to run Windows. Purely because... you forgot where the OS ends, and my data and my applications begin.

I just want the OS. I'm not interested in ANYTHING ELSE that you have to push. I don't have Office. I don't use Teams. I couldn't give a damn about Copilot or AI. I just want something that boots to a desktop and lets me click the icons of programs that *I* have chosen to put on there.

It's simply not possible on Windows. They proved with IE, literally broke the same laws again with Edge, now it's Copilot, etc. No. And now you're not just being a pain in the butt, intercepting my web traffic to pop up ads for your browser ("There's no need to download a different browser..."), but now you're actually reading all my data and taking screenshots of my screen.

I'm done. Make an OS and the rest as applications and not only would it reveal quite how many people WANT Copilot etc. but it would also mean that you wouldn't be literally breaking the anti-monopoly laws like you have for several decades now.

I live in an all-electric house.

I bought heatpumps within the first 2 years of buying it. Heating with resistive electric is expensive and inefficient (technically it's about 100% efficient... which is awful compared to a heatpump which can be MORE efficient... because it uses the tiny amount o of heat already present in the air outside your house, even in sub-zero temperatures).

My electricity bill is one-third of what it was when I moved in, purely because of heatpumps. By comparison, I have also moved all my home IT to half a dozen individual Raspberry Pi's which, collectively, run at about ~100W... less than it costs to run my laptop, let alone a server.

Most people are trying to reduce their base load and reduce their heating costs, not increase them.

Can it put the fecking taskbar icons back where they were? And let me drag it around the screen? And bring back the start menu? And finally move everything into either control panel or Settings (but not both)? And actually let me choose to NOT update if I so wish? And making things an OFF BY DEFAULT OPTION first, and never removing an option, just switching it off for those who don't want it? And letting me theme Office again so I can make it look like Office 2000? And ....

Because I absolutely hate AI with every fibre of my being, but if lets me do those things, I might well consider supporting it.

Good for you.

Now...

When can we fecking buy it?

Untethered means battery-powered wifi gaming.

Immediately, not interested.

I can play my Vive Pro as long as I like (e.g. at a party we can all have a go for hours), it's reliant on the power of the machine connected to it, not the device itself, and it provides tech specs far in advance of the wireless junk.

I solved that problem with a hook in the ceiliing and one of those springy-cord things (like people used to have on their keys) so that you can move in literally any direction and it doesn't matter at all as the cable will follow you, and then spring back to the hook when you step back again.

Literally a $10 solution, never had an issue after that.

Yeah, you remember when all the game-streaming services failed because they just couldn't actually overcome the latency issues?

And you know that in VR, latency is the thing that makes you feel travel sick and/or have an awful experience? (Good VR sets have such low latency that it's incredible, and this is basically a non-issue, but even a poorly-programmed game can introduce enough latency to have this effect even with perfect hardware).

And that wireless tech - regardless of its implementation - is subject to local radio noise and will "hang up" if there's interference?

Streaming shite to VR is a TERRIBLE idea. That's why they often need proprietary cables to do it, as per the OP.

If it was intelligent, it would be making its own money by now.

"When we go down, we want to take down every market with us because we're a bottomless-money-pit and are chasing a dream that we can't achieve with all the world's computing resources, the training data of the entire Internet from billions of people, and excruciatingly overburdening several utilities to try to find something that we think will just magically happen if we keep throwing stuff at it. And we've used up every available money source but are still hundreds of billions in the red without any sign of profit, so we just need to tank everyone so that we can succeed"

I paid and still have a Disable Advertising button in Slashdot and this is YET ANOTHER time that that prior purchase is not being honoured.

All that would happen is that the companies would take the last version, continue using that in privately-patched versions that they never distribute (they don't need to, they only need to provide source if they're providing binaries and YouTube et al don't give you their binaries), and wait for someone else to start up a fork.

Additionally, they can't. If they change the licence, they can't build on what's already there as its GPL. It's literally in the design of the licence that they deliberately chose. You'd have to get the sign-off of thousands of previous contributors (some dead) or rebuild all the pieces of the software that they touched without any reference to their original code. It's not going to ever happen, same as the same argument for Linux etc. that people keep thinking they're being clever when they push it, not realising that it's designed deliberately so that it's forever open-source.

Sorry, but the only reasonable solution is to block their ability to submit a bug unless it comes from a human maintainer at Google, with a full patch and no AI slop inside it. And if they work around that ban them again. And if they work around that, stop accepting bug reports / patches as here.

I studied AI 25 years ago, thanks.

The consumer-grade technology being available clearly came about in the last 5 years.

Additionally, it's a technology which is going to - inevitably - significantly increases its costs. Being given away as a loss-leader against hundreds of billions of dollars or generation costs is going to come back to bite once you're reliant on it and have abandoned other things.

P.S. abandoning 60 years of traditional computer science for 5 years of ONLY MODERN AI (unless you're intending to teach kids about neural networks, etc.) is a dumb thing for an educational framework to do.

P.P.S. I work in schools. I work in IT.

P.P.P.S. We don't teach kids any real computer science at this age, what this is use COMPUTING - i.e. using a computer. Same difference as between literature and literacy, or maths and numeracy. Teaching AI as a base core subject intending to replace higher-level CS is... dumb.

I work in schools - and have worked in pre-schools.

You think that makes a difference? If anything, the kids are MORE pliable and there's GREATER opportunity for abuse and indoctrination.

What a dumb idea for a technology barely 5 years old in its current iteration.

The real solution would be a citation system.

Something like LexisNexus has every court case that happens in the country.

So... why not have an official version of that, tied in with the official court transcripts and when you cite a case, you need to give that citation number from the official database. If you're citing only a few lines, you link to those few lines.

You wouldn't be able to cite a non-existent case, at best the case you cite wouldn't match what you claim it does, and with individual statement citations (HTML literally does it already), you could prove in one click that that series of words actually appears in that cited case.

You want to stop this? Then open-source the law instead of hiding it behind stupendously expensive private commercial services like LexisNexus.