I moved the four Windows 10 machines on my LAN to IoT LTSC in February, anticipating this period, and it wasn't without incident. For instance, the need to install the Microsoft Store from a GitHub repo (the store has some driver-related items that I can't get any other way).

Excessively targeted ads is why I dumped Instagram over five years ago. If this comes to GPT and can't be altered, I'm out. I'll find alternatives, it's a deal-breaker.

...using protection of kids as excuse to join in the privacy race-to-the-bottom that China has been winning for so long. UK has shown the way, sadly.

Just read in this thread that iPhone 13 support set to end around 2028, vs 2029 for iPhone 14. I have a 13, and will keep it either til something essential refuses to update to anything that old, or support and security updates end. I'm hoping by then that some 'rebel' FOSS phone will be gaining traction, even if I have to live without Whatsapp and some other loss leaders that keep us all in the mainstream.

Opportunism. Not surprising a company would want to flood a market that has recently seen such an upturn in credibility and adoption. Right now, their shovelware is considered in that context of credible human output. Once they have created an impossible signal-to-noise ratio (which, at this scale, they can accomplish almost overnight), the noise will turn podcasting away from algorithmic recommendation and towards human-made reviews.

Headline is BS. Read the article - you can still use an answer file (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/update-windows-settings-and-scripts-create-your-own-answer-file-sxs?view=windows-11)

I saw this Johnson stuff develop over about nine months, and it was quite cool, though I doubt it ever got perfected. Ultimately, despite Trump's ban on states making AI laws, there is going to be a Hindenberg trial result that even the powers-that-be won't be able to sway, and that will be the precedent...well, not for the death of AI, but for a significant reboot away from systems benefiting from ANY non-licensed data.

I moved my whole LAN to IoT Enterprise LTSC in February, and be aware, it's no picnic. You'd be surprised how useful the Microsoft Store is for essential setup stuff, and you have to jump through hoops on GitHub to get it installed and working on LTSC. There are a lot of other caveats too, not least the price - I ended up paying about $100 USD per installation, but you can pay way more. I'm glad I did it, and I still recommend it, but it's not friction-free by any means.

Thank you, YES!

After all the 2024 shenanigans with VMWare, finally moved to Hyper-V, which has its own issues, but at least its a native architecture and works very well.

I guess I'll be giving Linux it's 4th chance with me in 25 years soon. But my previous experience was that GUI friendliness vs. CLI expertise-needed was a binary affair, unlike Windows: as soon as you need to do anything not covered in GUI (and that's a lot, depending on what tooling a Linux program gives you, and whether the devs decided it was 'for Grandma'), you're in sudo-land. In Windows, there are more layers of GUI beyond the first one before the stark plains of Powershell come into view.

The original post and this re-link to it all feel paid-for.

Doesn't inspire confidence in a new worker. Not that nearly any company wouldn't likely replace workers with AI, but you're joining a company with an avowed and brutal track record of trying to do it, and which is clearly awaiting progress so that it can do it again.

ChatGPT-4o became *infuriating* because of this over the last month. No amount of saving instruction not to do it to GPT's long term memory makes any difference. Every time it closes a response with an 'engagement' question it's wasting tokens and driving me nuts. Only one time in 20 is the question meaningful and intended to foster progress on the current task.

In the last few months I switched all three PC-based machines on my home LAN to Windows LTSC IoT, buying a license from a Romanian official outlet. You have to call Microsoft in the US to talk to a robot in order to activate each copy, but the license is perma-activated after that, but linked to the installation hardware, which I can live with. It's not all a picnic - getting the Microsoft store into LTSC requires a special GitHub repo, and it's surprising how many things you need the store for, particularly for laptops. Also, there are a bunch of other rough edges that don't exist in Windows 10 Pro and Home. The main one is that IoT identifies as less than V2022 of Windows, which can make certain software impossible to install. But it has been worth the extra effort and time, to get out from under the shadow of the October withdrawal. Incidentally, you can't stop Windows updates with LTSC IoT, nor can you delay them any longer than in regular versions. The main difference is one extra control method (which doesn't extend the delay period) + the updates are far less frequent.