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.

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.