MudMan

Well, I’m still waiting for Twitter to “need a replacement”. It seems to be doing just about fine on its new normal. Ditto for any of the other Meta places, which have only consistently grown over time. Yes, Facebook, too.

To be clear, I don’t particularly mean too little, too late for me. I’m not on Twitter or Facebook or any of those platforms, Bluesky and Fedi aside. And again, I was not on board with the Masto quote tweet thing. I did stop using it frequently, but not for that reason.

I mean too little, too late to make an impact of any kind. Masto has been stuck where it is for a while, and so has Bluesky. I don’t think either are going back to growing anytime soon, but if either does it probably won’t be because Masto added quotes. I’m fairly comfy talking to the same dozen people out here like I’m in a 90s IRC channel, but ultimately it’d be nice if the gross places didn’t keep driving the global conversation forever. And on that front… yeah, too little, too late.

That was a shockingly long turnaround for these, considering. I’ve come and gone from Mastodon like three times since this was an argument and at least twice since they said they would do this.

Oh, well. I originally thought this was a bad call, and I did hate the old Twitter snippy bullshit this enabled, but Bluesky sorta proved to me this was a cultural issue more than a feature set issue. And while we’re at it, while I don’t particularly like the implementation of Bluesky’s custom subject feeds I’m fairly convinced that some alternative to chronological-only feeds would be beneficial. This seems like too little, too late, honestly.

I’d argue I’m doing the opposite.

I was turning this stuff off when my Google and Samsung phones kept suggesting that they could do searches based on the content of my phone screen or my camera feed. It’s only “normalization” in that it’s… you know, actually normal and widespread. I don’t think people are too alarmed now, I think they weren’t alarmed enough when the first wave of “smart assistants” started doing this like a decade ago.

Right, so when you said “forced it on everyone” you meant “the feature existing at all even if it’s optional or disabled”.

See, I don’t have a problem with the latter, that’s legitimate. But you implied the former, and the former is false.

Now, I don’t like the feature and I absolutely turned it off the moment it (finally) got patched into my supported PCs. But it’s worth noting that similar features are present on Android phones (from all the way back on Google Assistant to the upcoming Magic Cue), Apple phones (via Visual Intelligence and Siri) and other PC and phone manufacturers. I recommend turning them all off, but with the caveats you original omitted this isn’t a Windows-specific thing, it’s a pretty widespread fad.

Of course the reason people are latching on to the MS version is their initial implementation was hot garbage and entirely unaware of its own context, so now it’s a meme, particularly in tech-savvy, Linux-friendly circles. The biggest lesson we’ve all learned is that Microsoft is bad at PR and marketing, which I feel we already knew.

I mean, I’d rather not. I definitely take a number of steps to limit that. Same as I take steps to prevent that from Google on my phone or from both of them and others on my Linux devices.

What I don’t do is make up stuff to be paranoid about in case the very real privacy concerns you already have to pay attention to aren’t scary enough to make me feel superior online.

I’m so exhausted of social media nonsense latching onto meme crap to push preconceived narratives and flipping over to ignoring reality altogether the moment any facts at all don’t fit their dumb little package of memes.

You know what, I hope it’s not actually off and anybody with the trivial means to check what their Windows PC is sending to the mothership notices so we can get the EU to GDPR the crap out of them and build some nice hospital somewhere with the fine money.

In the meantime, go do conspiracy theories over on Twitter. There’s plenty of real stuff to be mad about at Microsoft without having to make shit up.

I swear to Torvalds, if the amount of old ladies using Linux because their Fedi relatives installed it on their laptops is accurate we are in the middle of an major demographic crisis.

Yes, that’s toggleable on settings and set to off by default. Do remember to turn off Click-to-Do, though, if nothing else it’s annoying to trigger it by accident. I also remapped the copilot button back to being right mouse click.

I mean, they’re pretty useless features and I wish they had spent more time working on better stuff, but… you know, I turned it off.

They did what now? I have no Copilot features turned on in my PCs, and I actually have a certified Copilot+ laptop.

Microsoft has given users fair warning, and said that users can get a year of updates for free but eventually the company will have to face facts and extended support beyond October.

We can’t recall a time where Microsoft has done such a thing but these are extenuating circumstances given that most users just aren’t budging.

WTF is this guy talking about? Far as I can tell this is the Win7 playbook all over again. Looking it up, this was the timeline:

Jan. 13, 2015: Microsoft ended Mainstream Support for Windows 7.

Sept. 6, 2018: Microsoft announced the ESUs for Windows 7. The ESU program is a paid service that provides critical security updates for legacy products for up to three years after Extended Support ends.

August 2019: Microsoft announced a year of free ESUs, but only for select users, including customers with an Enterprise Agreement or Enterprise Agreement Subscription with active Windows 10 Enterprise E5, Microsoft 365 E5, or Microsoft 365 E5 Security subscriptions. This was limited to only Government E5 stock keeping units.

Jan. 14, 2020: Microsoft ended Extended Support for Windows 7.

Jan. 10, 2023: The ESUs reached their end of life on the first Patch Tuesday of 2023.

That’s almost a decade of post-end of support updates. If anything, MS confirmed ESU before trying to shut down home user patches this time, so it looks less like terrified backpedalling. And as the linked article itself admits, the data they’re reporting on shows a significant number of users still on Win7. The article waves it away as just “too many”, but the original report says 8.5%.

Because, as it turns out, the kind of people using Kapersky antivirus software and the number of people who would not upgrade from a 16 year old OS that has lost support half a dozen times over the past half a decade show significant overlap. In the Steam survey right now Win 7 is only 0.07%, for reference.

While we’re at it Win 11 is 60% vs 35% for Win 10. For all the headlines when Steam shows Linux growth you don’t often hear over here that Win 11 went up by 0.5% and Windows overall went up by 0.36%, although it’s worth noting that Windows has been pretty stable between 94 and 96% since the survey started.

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep reality checking it: the Win 10 end of support process has been wildly overhyped, particularly among Linux-friendly circles. It is not meaningfully different to moves out of other “good” versions of Windows and it’s not a catastrophic crisis point for MS, for better and worse. They’ll keep support up for the people who need it for as long as they’re willing to pay and most legacy home users won’t even know their old Win10 is unsupported because it’ll just keep happily chugging along with all the same malware it already has until something breaks and they have to buy a new laptop with a preinstalled Win11 or 12 or whatever.

The most the Win10 death hype is doing to hurt MS is create a flurry of social media posts that can convince tech savvy, Linux-curious users who were previously held back by lack of gaming support to give user friendly distros a try.

So just to be clear, OP is here saying owning a Raspberry Pi goes beyond tinkering and is for engineer nerds and you’re jumping in to propose that you want to develop your own microcode or you riot?

You may be in the wrong thread, friend. If you want to chat about how afraid you are of what AMD and Intel are putting in your morning cereal you may want to start your own conversation about it instead.

The Raspberry Pi is explicitly build as a widely available tinkerer tool. Its stated goal is to be cheap and widely available. Do you know what I would have given to be able to buy a disposable computer I could slap into things in the 90s for the equivalent of 60-100 bucks? That’s insane availability. We could argue about how successful they are at that goal, but it doesn’t matter because there are now even cheaper knockoff boards out there. It’s bonkers.

And guess what, building a IBM PC compatible at home in 1989 was nerd engineer stuff. It cost an order of magnitude more than the Pi, for a start, but it was also poorly documented, hard to get and nobody else was doing it. The only reason I got one of those at around that time is I had a relative who was an actual engineer and knew what to get.

You only remember it being accessible tinkering for the masses because you got good at it.

Incidentally, I’d argue that Linux used to be tinkering, now it’s… you know, a OS.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still janky, but unless you deliberately throw yourself on the deep end the most “tinkering” you have to do is copy paste a line into the command line every now and then. And I would dispute that Windows is that locked down, either. Maybe Microsoft would like to lock it down further, but you can do whatever with it. For one thing you can run Linux inside it, if we’re talking about tinkering.

Yeah, no, but that’s my point. Cars, and particularly certain cars, have become less accessible and more locked down.

But a bunch of other stuff has popped up that wasn’t there before, too. Try home automation, self-hosting, 3D printing or energy self-generation back when you remember servicing your own car or modifying the exhaust on your motorcycle (teenagers here didn’t have cars in the first place, actually).

That’s why I’m saying you’re mixing up two things. It’s one thing that corpos are closing down mainstream consumer products, it’s a very different thing to claim there is no tinkering left outside of… installing Linux in your old laptop and having to troubleshoot it constantly or whatever that scenario is.

It’s just not true. There’s plenty of tinkering left, new and old, in a bunch of spaces. Which is not connected to whether or not you get to upgrade the RAM in your Mac Mini. Different things.

I don’t know, man, I think there’s a lot of subjective experience in that perception. VCRs are actually kinda finicky, and you would not mess with CRT TVs at home if you respected your life. Computer stuff used to be prohibitively expensive, too. And cars weren’t any cheaper (I mean, where I am, your mileage may very if you’re in a place that uses miles). Plus the number of people I know with a different number of fingers than they used to have because of messing with car repairs is more than one, which is several more than I’d hope.

Meanwhile the average Joe can get a crapped out C64 on the Internet for peanuts if they just want to feel useful by doing some light soldering. Or recycle a laptop into a home server for literally zero money. You can get a 3D printer for 150 bucks and spend the rest of the decade getting good at CAD or 3D sculpting for fifteen bucks per kilo of plastic.

I’m not even saying the more recent stuff is better or more accessible. It’s just that middle age crises are what they are and it’s easier to remember older things fondly. I was a kid, we didn’t have a ton of money and I tinkered on my computer despite the fact that messing it up would have meant not having one anymore indefinitely. Plus I didn’t have youtube tutorials. The first time my BIOS battery died I spent months manually entering my BIOS settings on every boot because I didn’t know what had happened and had no info to find out.

The stuff I did with my parents around the house hasn’t changed, it was all saws and nails and hammers and hoes. That was the same thirty years ago and three hundred years ago, too.

I’d say you’re mixing up two things. It’s objectively true that consumer electronics are cheaper, more disposable and less repair-minded than a few decades ago when it was all fire hazards, big fat caps and wires everywhere. It is absolutely not true that tinkering as a hobby has gotten less accessible, popular or readily available. It just shifted around a little. The tools changed, the types of things you mess around with changed, some became available that weren’t (no home servers for you in the 80s!) and some became harder.

Is it?

I mean, you can “tinker” just fine on commercial, proprietary hardware. That’s the point of programmable computers in the first place.

I mean, this makes no sense, but it’s a window into a particular mindset.

FWIW, computer builds are about as complicated as they’ve been for a decade, there’s a whole new market for at-home object creation ranging from 3D printers to affordable laser cutters (sometimes both in the same machine), retro computers haven’t gone anywhere and are way more popular than ever as a hobby. If the real stuff is too hard to find or expensive there are now ways to build replacements ranging from single board FPGA units to kits where you can buy a PCB and all the components to solder at home.

There are now self-installable solar panel kits, fully open source home automation systems, and a whole subculture of very manageable self-hosting built around recycled old hardware. As a penis wielder of a certain age I feel like my socials are made up of nothing but aggressive hobbies to sink money on while pretending I am more crafty than I am so me and my middle aged friends can brag past each other about our computing habits or gardening habits or building habits or health habits.

BUT this is a thing. This is a thing people feel. They will go check a Linux distro because it feels weird and hands-on and crafty and adventurous, even though it’s…, you know, installing an OS on a computer that mostly works fine.

If it’s any consolation, this has been part of the appeal for three decades, give or take a few years. The “nothing else we can tinker with” angle is relatively novel, though.

Top upvoted comment just tore a big fat hole into the entire argument and I have to say, good for the comments section. That’s so rare.

One open question here is whether we’re seeing youth employment decrease because AI is effectively replacing entry level workers in these fields, or because executives wrongly think AI can or will soon be able to do so?

You have to assume that if anybody puts a hiring freeze for junior employees right now it’d be out of some combination of caution, hype and insecurity about the economic landscape thanks to the usual suspects.

Turns out if the discussion is “quantitatively rich” but is ignoring the obvious qualitative observation it may end up flip-flopping a bunch. I’m not sure I’m as excited about that as the author, because man, is that a constant of the modern corporate world and does it suck and cost people money and stress.

There’s a growing wisdom gap coming in America. The people who are already well versed in company practices and culture are going to use AI to complete the tasks that they would have otherwise given to assistants and junior resources.

Counterpoint: no, they are not. Not with the current path of tech progress on the field, at least.

Because seniors well versed in company practices and culture will get tired of having to manually redo junior work corrections really quick, and we are nowhere close to closing the error correction needs at this point.

Repetitive work that could feasibly have been automated or removed already? Maybe. There was a TON of room for automation that people weren’t investing on doing and the AI gold rush will feasibly take advantage of some of that. But AI replacing junior jobs wholesale? Nah. The tech isn’t there.

Yeah, see, I’m not a lawyer, but I am confident enough that “committing crimes in another country remotely is safe” is absolutely terrible legal advice. Don’t do that. I am confident enough in my understanding of legal matters to issue that recommendation.

I mean, I’ve given Rochko crap here for not thinking things through when he incorrectly suggested more decentralization would make Masto behave differently than Bluesky in this issue. I don’t for a second assume he meant “because fuck it, fine me if you can, USA” or I would be giving him way more crap and closing my Masto account just in case for good measure.

If you run a social media platform that hosts American users they actually might.

Same as the bar for whether GDPR applies to you isn’t whether your server is physically in the EU, it’s whether you’re processing data from EU users. Or, in fact, how you’re supposed to get explicit permission from EU users to host their data anywhere outside the EU in the first place.

Now, I’m not a lawyer in Mississippi, so I’m not gonna give you legal advice, but I would definitely look into it if I’m setting up a public instance. The same way I’d be looking into what compliance things I need to do to host people’s data, both due to GDPR and due to other privacy laws around the world. It’s one thing to set up for friends and family, but if you’re hosting data from outsiders you probably need to understand what you’re doing.

I’ve also not looked into what happens if you are sharing data with a noncompliant server in a restricted territory (so someone is self hosting in Mississippi and then federating with your server elsewhere). I don’t think the legislators who wrote this dumb rule know, either. They clearly haven’t thought that far ahead. Common sense dictates that the outside server would be fine and it’d be the local server’s problem to be compliant. I presume that’s what Bluesky is counting on (i.e. that someone will set up a local instance and act as an ingest bridge for them without it having to be them). Then again, you have British legislators now claiming that all VPNs need to have age controls, so I am not taking common sense for granted when it comes to these things.