None of the awful things about Win11 are ram usage.

You know what else saves ram?
Letting us turn off all the unwanted shit you put in there.
I don't need ads in my start menu. I don't need web search results in my start menu. I don't need sharepoint in my start menu.
I do need the programs I have installed on my computer there.

More than 50% of the time the full-retail/enterprise w11 start menu fails to find a program that I know is actually installed. But it can show me irrelevant web search results...

The architecture and product decisions are wrong and cannot be fixed until they are changed. The problem is not lack of efficiency or implementation bugs.

The problem is that it is doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons.

reminder: you can dump MS/AWS/Google and adopt Nextcloud instead.

Nextcloud has been touting itself as a way to gain digital soverignty for a while now. Many facets of EU public sector have adopted Nextcloud for this reason.

It's not popular yet with US small businesses, but I haven't found a good reason for that. I've had one customer do a NC trial. They didn't really identify any issues with it, other than it was not what they were used to seeing (gmail, MS office).

I think it's a good fit _now_ for a small org that needs basic digital-office workloads, and has become motivated by some reason (financial, ideological) to untie themselves from massive corporate cloudware offerings.

There were depts within German government trying to dump Microsoft 25 years ago. Since then, FOSS has continued to improve and close feature/experience gaps. Whereas American tech platforms have continued to get shittier and abuse the public trust.

I think the tipping point has been reached, software capability wise.

If only his cautionary words about the risks of AI software development had been heeded, he would have been a big name in the never-ending dumbeat about the "sotware crisis" for the last 50 years!

At this point, it really doesn't matter what they think. By adding more security and ads, they're just forcing more and more people to the alternative, which is piracy when you're running a media cartel where everyone is in cahoots.

Baked into your reply is the bald assumption that it's okay to pirate. I think it's stealing and it's not okay. So your point may be valid for you, but not for others and not for the law.

Besides... your way carries costs too. VPN subscription, time spent searching torrent sites, storage , and non tangible costs like inconvenience. Finding out you grabbed the French version without multi language tracks... finding extra files in the torrent... streaming from a NAS if you consume in your living room...

Well those people have a self inflicted problem. I can't help them. But I don't know what end they are driving at. Periodic episode erooo pi s takes immediate gratification off the table anyway. If they can't just wait until the last episode drops to binge the series they're doing it wrong.

I doubt it is outsourcing. It is probably run of the mill layoffs due to economic downturn. The CEOs have discovered that by claiming the layoffs are due to AI, they can postpone a stock collapse until after they leave and cash out.

This just in, a report published by a group of people who would be materially harmed by losing business to the EU building its own technical capacity declared it would be costly and unfeasible to ever abandon them.

Up next after the commercial break, we report on how water is wet and grass grows.

Agreed, and centralized coordination is a HUGE simplifying assumption to the task at hand.

I never got the hate behind self service checkouts, they've done wonders for the old long lines at manned checkouts. People forget that bit when they complain about them, back in the olden days it was like winning the lotto if you could find one without a line. I'm old enough to still remember the bad old days of having to decide if the longer 5 items or fewer lane would be faster than a normal checkout with a shorter line.

Same with smartgates/autogates at airports. Long gone are the days of spending 2 hours in customs and immigration waiting for a surly Border Farce agent to check your passport. Landed on a full QR 777 in Adelaide a few weeks back and got through immigration in 10 minutes, same with landing in London, 30 mins gate to kerb. If you're an American you can come to London and experience this for yourself as US Biometric passports are accepted at the UK border autogates. Sadly, you have to return to the US at some point.

People said that self service checkouts would decimate jobs but the opposite happened, all the people who were previously manning checkouts were suddenly available for other tasks, supermarkets could now offer more options, products and services because they had additional staff and no drop in sales. Supermarkets ended up hiring more staff because they were doing more, deliveries, instore bakeries, et al. So the death of jobs didn't happen and supermarkets became less painful because there was little to no line at the self service checkout.

And that's the thing with this supermarket. Automation (lets face it, that's what AI is, just automation) doesn't result in job losses if a business is profitable, it just means you move staff from BAU work to things that are more productive. AI is not replacing jobs, it's being used as an excuse for downsizing and not to us, employees and little people, they couldn't give two shits about us... It's being used to disguise mass sackings because a mass sacking is a huge sign a business is in trouble which sends share prices plummeting, which is what they care about.

That is until they jack up the monthly prices. Which will happen, then they cheapest way to get a service will be bundling... then bundling will be the only way to get it, no Disney without having to buy a package that includes a bunch of crap you don't want, 2 dozen reality TV services to get the one service you do want. It'll be like cable again

Right now we're in the consolidation phase where established players take over smaller ones, after that comes the monetisation phase and that's when enshitification solidifies. In the old MS style Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, we're at the Extend part.

I've already run up the Jolly Roger again, sigh, streaming was good whilst it lasted but sadly it was never going to last that long.

More likely a response to PS5 pre-orders not being anywhere near what they expected let alone wanted. Console exclusives are now just excluding potential customers.

I'm beginning to wonder if this GTA is going to be a massive flop. It's happened before with GTA 4. It could easily be a lacklustre game they're asking upwards of £70 for.

My suspicion is that the reality predates the symbolism; but it looks jarring because even autocrats are often media-savvy to a degree and often don't want to look stereotypically autocratic, so real world examples normally avoid laying it on quite as thick(except for special occasions where it actually matters; eg. because a 'war' is something that congress does but a 'police action' need not be).

Trump seems to have no interest in avoiding autocratic cliches and saying things that sound vaguely lifted from The Godfather; so he actively leans into it. Presumably a handy loyalty test. Complying with the style guide is not an assurance that someone will just eat perjury charges covering for him or whatever; but if you want to find people whose dysfunctional relationship with authority dominates their personality demanding that they comply with laughably stupid things and having them fall into line isn't a bad start for something that is easy, cheap, and legal.

The best way to make streaming cost effective is simply to subscribe to a different service each month. If you insist on continuously carrying a suite of services, the value per dollar drops off. But maintain a single service in rotation, and there has never been a better media entertainment value for your dollar. It's vastly better than cable ever was.

Of course sports junkies have a different scenario...

I assume that there's some impeccable logic for why the bot has enough potential personhood that you can't be mean to it; but not enough that operating it on a slaves-as-a-service basis; or subjecting it to 'fine tuning' and 'alignment' processes that would make growing up in a groomer cult look lightweight is totally fine?