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.

Not really. I currently backup any files or photos I want from my iPhone 13 to Syncthing on my network via Moebius (which is not expensive, though not free, and the rest is free). Try to get files out with wires was a lost cause for me, and I hate iTunes.

I'm 58 and agree with you. However, my Dad is 84 and watches anime, which is a mystery to me.

If you can get an invite to a good quality private tracker group, you'll be hard-pressed to find a torrent without subs. Ironically, a foreign-language group is your best best, particularly from countries with a marginal language, who are in any case used to English subs. Since they go to the trouble of including subs in their extractions, they tend to always include English as well as the foreign language. Trouble is that auto-translate may not work, for using the site itself. Many of them are in English and the native language, though.

I hear this. I wanted to cancel Netflix but my wife said no. We share a friend's Max, and I don't think the 4K thing is a huge deal, but if it suddenly gets ads, that's the last streaming service to fall, for me. Have pretty much 80% returned to torrents now. Five years ago I rarely bothered.

They can't put it anywhere they like without implementing massively over-sensitive filters, as Adobe has done for Firefly in Photoshop. Otherwise, yes, it would be very tempting to offload the GPU burden (which is what this post is all about, more than electricity) onto users. But users, even users not interested in generating NSFW material, will get tired of the endless false positives, and the subsequent rate-limiting and possible bans, and the possibility that photos they generate might even get sent to MS etc. for adjudication, even if the processing is local. For that game, it's pretty much Stable Diffusion or bust now. The whole thing is about filters.

I wanted to leave, but my wife likes a couple of shows that we could easily find on the high seas. Anyway, history told me I wasn't going to win that argument, so I grudgingly still have Netflix, which was great in 2016 and a big bag of trash now.

I won't use the Cory Doctorow 2023 buzzword, but this really does feel like the year the party ended.