just go loony in the heat.

You won’t just go loony. I’m pretty sure those conditions are ripe for permanent brain damage. Stay safe out there.

I’ll take it one step further and say that if you absolutely must use Office, O365 works in a browser on any operating system. You literally don’t need Windows anymore for that.

My prediction is that they’ll go full SaaS and make the non-pro version “free”, with a whole raft of features “cloud only” behind a Azure/O365 subscription.

Dear Microsoft CEO and C-suite people.

Push back on your investors now before it’s too late. AI features are ruining your product and its image.

A lot of companies are tied in up this AI bubble and Microsoft is not too big to fail in this regard. Your customer-base has gotten by just fine without AI and invasive screen-capture technology used to support it, for decades at this point. Most people see your product as an operating system: a product designed to support other products. They do not want more capabilities from it, and have come to rely on good support for hardware compatibility, stability updates, performance updates, and most importantly, security updates. It is the darling of OEM PC installs, and government and commercial enterprise continue to renew their site licenses because of it. These are the core features that will continue to bring value and keep people on your platform, not AI.

If you firmly believe that agentic AI is the future, make it an optional installable product or a completely distinct operating system altogether. This is strategic since it has radically different marketing needs than Windows or Windows Professional, and supports a distinct subset of your overall install base. Foisting this feature set on your existing users is doing nothing more than artificially inflate adoption numbers, and you’re risking the entire enterprise to think your investors don’t already know this. It’s not smart, it’s not even brinksmanship or a bold technology decision. It’s reckless.

Exactly. Another lemming made a fantastic quip to this effect, claiming that consoles and windows are performing “SCP level containment” for the rest of us. Let them have CoD.

Malicious compliance writ large.

Also, the number of hurdles you have to clear for this tells volumes about where the site owner priorities lie.

make no mistakes

LOL. I know it’s for a laugh, but you may as well add “pretty please” to that prompt.

Edit: I wonder if it just hallucinates more convincingly, instead?

IMO, I think it also has a lot to do with consoles, and how relying on the platform as a closed and secure system feeds into the thinking going on here. “Turn the PC into something we trust like a console” explains everything.

It really is as simple as “don’t trust the client.” Just assume that everyone is trying to cheat and go from there.

Servers should know what valid inputs from clients look like, and aggressively validate and profile those inputs for cheating. Meanwhile, the server should only send data to the client that is needed to render a display. Everything else stays server-side.

The key is to build a profile of invalid activity, like inhumanly fast mouse velocity coupled with accurate kills. There’s an art to this, but for things like FPS games, the general envelope of valid user activity should be straightforward to define. The finer points get caught during QA, and then further refined post-release. Someone might even come up with a library for this if there isn’t one already.

As a bonus, this also catches situations where people are using kernel circumvention like external hardware, in order to cheat. The behavior as seen by the server is what ultimately gets flagged.

Is this a computer in a keyboard ? Staggering beauty.

Indeed! That’s how it was done in the 80’s.

The trend was built around keeping the cost down. That and a screen (TV) could cost as much as the whole unit and you probably already had one of those. Nowadays we don’t think twice about our laptops coming with a screen, but if I could somehow keep the screen but replace the rest, I’d welcome the price cut that comes with it.

Bubble-economy Japan led the way for an insane amount of features, aesthetics, and innovation for personal electronics. Most of it was dead-sexy stuff.

One of my favorite examples, the Sony MSX HitBit F1XD:

Selinux

Hey, let’s not get crazy. I still want to use it for practical things, too. /s

If you haven’t read it, this is explored somewhat in “DM of the Rings”: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=612

… although, I myself cannot recall how they explained Gandalf’s resurrection.

TL;DR: viable last-ditch option would resemble Highlander 2 in terms of putting one corporation in charge of “protecting” the planet.

Okay, so I was keeping the idea of using deliberate “global dimming” in my back-pocket just so it wouldn’t worm it’s way through the zeitgeist. It’s a viable last-ditch option, but it comes with steep drawbacks. But since we’re here now, fuck it.

We already know that, thanks to requiring shipping vessels to use low-sulfur fuel, cloud seeding can actually reduce solar gain. The problem is that it also blocks out a lot of the light needed for photosynthesis. So this approach punches down on the environment in a completely different way. As for people, while global warming will absolutely impact agriculture, so would less sunlight.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shipping-rules-are-affecting-global-warming/

So we could just use airplanes and cloud-seeding. Or we could increase particulates in the atmosphere. Or, as Elon suggests, fly satellites to do the job. The tradeoffs here are awful: disrupt where rain happens, raise lung cancer risks globally, or catapult one man into multi-trilliionaire status while they charge every government on earth for the privilege. Plus, each of those options are more or less forever if we never get around to carbon sequestration that actually works.

We should seriously considering doing anything else first.

Edit: I know I didn’t invent this idea. Rather, I just didn’t want to add to any consensus around it.

Also the more I get into languages like Rust, the more these doubts are increasing and leading me to believe that most of it is just dogma that has gone far beyond its initial motivations and goals and is now just a mindless OOP circlejerk.

There are definitely occasions when these principles do make sense, especially in an OOP environment, and they can also make some design patterns really satisfying and easy.

Congratulations. This is where you wind up, long after learning the basics and start interacting with lots of code in the wild. You are not alone.

Implementing things with pragmatism, when it comes to conventions and design patterns, is how it’s really done.

NGL, writing pure functions in Rust is fantastic. Writing responsible code that handles all the error conditions turns the “happy path” into hamburger. Even with the ergonomics of Result, Option, and even ?, code just sprawls and becomes a readability tradeoff. I’m only a few months into Rust at this point, and I have a lot to learn, but it’s tempting to just .unwrap() and .expect() where I think it’s unlikely to fail.

One of many reasons why I love BSG. As a retro-computing enthusiast, the idea that antique systems are naturally impervious to conventional digital attacks, just felt so validating.

Sure, our navigation system is based on a Commodore-64, but good luck getting it to divulge mission-critical information over bluetooth. Or any information for that matter.

have you heard the earth is flat?

Hah! What a hilarious take. It’s clearly a four-day timecube.

Well, they can take my plugins and Tampermonkey when they pry it from my cold, dead, hands.

Highly recommended. It’s a really funny show and does not overstay its welcome.