...except for the 2015 version, every other version of Unreal Tournament can be spun up and made to work perfectly?

Same.

Also same...but something tells me that if Bitwarden were to do that, there would be a Vaultwarden fork the next day.

Even if there wasn't, browser-only access is annoying but serviceable, and it exports well enough to move to something else.

Tell me you haven't bought a Windows PC in a while without telling me.

They ALL encrypt the drives by default or any user intervention. For home users, I *disable* it as part of the initial out-of-box setup, because Bitlocker is enabled by default and the key is uploaded to the Microsoft Account users are forced to use/create when doing the initial machine setup.

Now, the REAL fun is that Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decided that BIOS firmware updates are worth sending to users via Windows Update. Well, when those BIOS updates happen, they can sometimes trip the TPM in a way that requires the BitLocker key to be input in order to unlock the system. While MS will display the key's ID, it doesn't show the MS account it's tied to, so if a user forgot which e-mail address they happened to give during setup, or no longer have access to that account, the user loses access to their data because of a BIOS update that was probably either optional, or legitimately fixed a security vulnerability that required the laptop to be physically accessed in order to perform. 9 out of 10 laptop owners would absolutely prefer "a thief could potentially access my data if my laptop is stolen" over "i could lose my data if MS and HP decide to send an update"...keeping in mind users cannot opt out of updates, even to the extent of "update Windows, don't touch my BIOS".

So yeah, the story is legit; I have personally had to give people the bad news on this topic on more than one occasion, Pepperidge Farm remembers when BitLocker was a function Microsoft only included with Windows 7 Ultimate, but now it's enabled by default for home users with no meaningful awareness or consent given to do it.

Apparently, it's not ransomware when Microsoft does it.

Same...but the parents love it because they're cheap and easy to replace without data migration drama, and schools love 'em because of Google Classroom and Workspace functionality that Google gives to schools for peanuts while being checkbox compliant for bad-stuff-on-the-internet policies.

I'm grateful that I grew up learning to own my data...but I can appreciate that Google really made it seamless to not-worry about it.

Because automakers stopped giving car buyers some variant of the single-DIN/double-DIN dash cutout with standardized wire colors for a wire harness, so owners could put whatever they want into the dash if they didn't like the OEM offering. Carplay/AA was the loose successor to that; users had some agency with app selection, but GM has famously torpedoed that solution. Their arguments were so bad that it was almost transparent that they did it just so they could try and get subscription revenue from customers for functions Carplay provides out of the box.

Now, you might reasonably argue that a means of returning to user-replaceable infotainment head units is basically what you were getting at with "secure mount"...but my point is that these shouldn't be mutually exclusive. A stock stereo *should* have Carplay/AA, along with a means of replacing it if the user deems fit...but i do think it's reasonable to ask for both - base trims of econobox cars include Carplay; it shouldn't require aftermarket hardware to implement, and the owner shouldn't have to be stuck with a panhandling screen if they *don't* buy an aftermarket stereo.

Because schools have been focused on "not-getting-sued", and to a lesser extent, "graph of standardized test scores go up and to the right", for a while now. In fairness, the outcomes we generally want - students with working-understandings of the world, life skills, problem solving, critical thinking, social awareness, self-awareness, and emotional stability - are all *very* difficult to quantify. It's even more difficult if we understand that every child has the same finish line, but different starting lines. So, we end up with the lowest-common-denominator of "effective and consistent regurgitation", which is simply the easiest thing to quantify and compare.

Well...that's because the real problem was both hard and easy to bury. Tech in the classroom works when it has a defined purpose, teacher training, tangential connections to existing curricula, and an underlying understanding of the principles the tech is intended to streamline.

Anyone who has ever seen a SmartBoard demo will attest to this - those demos are expressly designed to showcase exactly how new tech can supplement the teaching of old principles, and it looks *amazing* when the tech is shown in such a capacity. The problem is that the Smartboard salesmen can polish a 20 minute demo to a mirror shine, leaving teachers to figure out how to use the thing effectively in their classroom for six hours a day for 180 days...and it invariably ends up being used as a 'next-slide-button' for Powerpoints and an expensive projection screen for Youtube videos 95% of the time.

Tech in the classroom works well when there is an instructor expressly seeking to use it as an augment to existing lessons. Tech in the classroom stops working well when an admin signs a big check to a vendor, dumps a pile of Chromebooks and an instruction manual on a teacher's desk, and says "figure it out"...especially when it's paired with "you must use it".

Last piece of the puzzle: "it's what everyone else is doing" is a depressingly effective way to mitigate criticism and litigation.

Put it all together, and THAT's why everyone tried to do OLPC...and the backlash against it isn't necessarily stupid people sliding from "tech good" to "tech bad", so much as a group of average people - some smart, some dumb - saw the general shift of education in general, combined with sales demos and best-scenario case studies, gave it a shot, and now have their *own* data which indicates that the product being sold didn't yield the intended outcome, and responding accordingly.

This isn't a defense of the districts who pushed it, just the opposite - it's an indictment of the districts who could have avoided the whole problem before they burned millions of taxpayer dollars on a system with a fundamental flaw for which they did not adequately budget, and was obvious to any focus group of teachers and technologists who were given enough say to shoot down the proposal.

Sadly, here's basically the scoreboard:

--Google Chrome
--Microsoft Chrome (Edge)
--Apple Chrome (Safari)
--Chinese Chrome (Opera)
--Crypto Chrome (Brave/Vivaldi)
--AI Chrome (Comet)
--Firefox
--Not-Firefox-Firefox (IceWeasel, Palemoon, Waterfox, etc.)

And, while I prefer Firefox myself...the fact is that web developers hated the drudgework of having to work in anything but a browser monoculture...and Google wanted the browser to be an OS unto itself, which is why the browser has hooks into everything else - overwriting the firmware on a phone is something that Microsoft got no shortage of crap for making such a thing technically-possible with ActiveX, but when Chrome does it to update a Pixel in recovery mode, it's "innovative".

This sounds nice in theory, but for quite some time now, that hasn't panned out the way it seems like it should.

Let's use a great go-to example - the finance department. Back in the 1970's, it was mostly-manual. You might see a calculator in the back room, but the ledgers were written by hand, the credit card slips all came from a knucklebuster, and lots of people had full-time jobs doing calculations and data entry and inventory management.

*all of that* is automated away now. Scan a barcode, shipping manifest of the whole palette is entered into the inventory system for delivery. When a purchase is made, inventory is decremented, ledger is updated, credit card company updates the statement in real-time, accounting ledgers are updated, bank balances are updated, information is downloaded into Quickbooks, the Quickbooks file is sent to the accountant, tax calculations - ALL OF IT is done automatically. From the farmer's market to the Fortune 500, *nobody* is doing their accounting work by hand anymore. An accounting firm with five accountants can handle the tax returns for ten thousand businesses annually precisely because of how much is automated.

Now...*some* businesses probably repurposed their bookkeeping staff to other tasks...but the bookkeeping industry today employs a tiny fraction of the people it did in the days of our parents. Did some businesses encourage the bookkeepers to help develop their business? Sure, some did...but most simply laid off the staff and "grew" through the reduced payroll.

AI will indeed help with some gruntwork areas, and it will enable the sorts of projects that used to be done with Excel macros and Access databases...but "capacity limits" haven't been a true barrier for a while. It's been readily possible to higher programmers on a "gig economy" basis over at Upwork for decades. More and more off-the-shelf solutions exist for niche applications as SaaS or OSS on Github.

But the real disconnect is here:

You'd be hard-pressed to grab a hundred people at random, have them think of the software they use regularly (be it desktop, mobile, SaaS, or embedded), and point to a time in the past decade where their software got an update and they were HAPPY. Exceptions certainly exist - most DJ software got the ability to separate vocals and instrumentals in real-time, which was huge for the industry...but for *most* people, *most of the time*, software has gotten worse, not better, because "new features" are far more likely to be implemented to benefit the developer, not the user. Try going to a website without an adblocker now; it's a 20MB cacophony of garbage surrounding two text paragraphs for most of the internet. Adobe Acrobat does maybe three useful things more than were present in version 9 from 20 years ago, yet it's five times the size.
I *might* agree that AI can help improve the process of software development by reducing the amount of time spent on gruntwork...but the overall culture of making software user-hostile has been a cancer on the industry that long preceded the availability of Claude and ChatGPT. If AI accelerates that, then I do think there will be a gradual shift in problems - some businesses will try to DIY their own software, which brings support and liability problems back in-house that were half the joy of outsourcing, but the desire for the in-house option comes from that software being too user-hostile over time.

Chocolate making, cheese making, watch making, banking, staying out of wars, and blowing those huge horns to sell cough drops.

Are you sure about that? Because carriers disagree.

This is the quiet part Stone is saying out loud - the point is to alter UIs.

Now, the data itself is *probably* helpful...but I am hard pressed to think of ANY application - desktop, mobile, or web - that ANY user would describe as having improved over the past decade. From the disappearance of colors and contrast and borders and scroll bars, to 'settings' screens getting their options eliminated, to toolbar buttons losing their text labels, to modal dialogs and overlays and "hints and tips" taking the place of pop-up ads everywhere...there is VERY little software that has gotten better, despite decades of traditional feedback from users.

Meta is absolutely going to use this to ascertain how users have figured out to work around the dark patterns and user-hostile design users have spent the past two decades battling, and making it even more difficult and exhausting to get anything done.

Even if I bought that employees wouldn't be penalized for what the brass finds after putting North-Korean-grade spyware on their computers, there is zero indicating that Meta will be using this to improve anyone's user experience in a way that the user would agree is, in fact an improvement.

Great news! All of the Unreal Tournament games still work for online play on modern PCs! It's still fun, still dirt cheap, no subscription, and SWATHS of maps and mods all over the internet!

Just skip to the part where we go full circle and add a slot on the front of the next Xbox where we can feed it quarters to keep playing.

When I visited the UK last year, I went through customs. It took one of those facial recognition scans. There was no opt-out, there was no agent at the booth, I got no stamp in my passport.

Whatever system they're using already needs to be so pervasive that their solution to "papers, please" is to take the "paper" part out of it. This doesn't surprise me at all...but it would be somewhat fun to attempt using this app on a rooted phone.

https://github.com/Dwedit/NoCo...

Tiny utility to turn it back into the right Ctrl key it's supposed to be. 10/10 recommend because I used to use the MS PowerToys program (1.5GB when the only function I needed was the key remap?!), and while it *usually* worked, *some* software had a bit of trouble with the PowerToys implementation, but works perfectly with NoCopilotKey.