In that it’s mostly a merch ad hidden behind a clickbait title.
So I guess it’s a good test for that sort of “just read the headline” response.
It’s been a rough few days and I think I may be coming around. What hope is there to parse AI misinformation if people can’t parse a Reddit-like link aggregator?
I may be done with this place at this point. It’s just all bad. If not the whole Internet, certainly the whole of social media.
I am so furious with this at this point.
And the problem is, I also get what’s going on. You all feel cool and proud and self-actualized with the whole thing where you moved to Linux and whatnot. And you really, really, really want to tell somebody about it. I get it. It’s social media.
It’s fine the first few times, but it piles up after a while, you know? You can only have somebody veer sharply to the left towards “I use Linux, by the way” so many times.
Nobody asked if it was a dealbreaker for you. That didn’t happen. And even if someone did it’s not relevant to the conversation we’re having. We know.
Look, again, it’s not you. It’s just that hanging out around this place and trying to engage with the issues can get to be really weird after a while.
I’m confused. What is “not accepting” a MS account to set up Windows? I mean, if you don’t have to use Windows and that is a dealbreaker for you, then great.
But if you need to use Windows and you want to… you know… work… around… having to be logged in, he’s suggesting a way to do that. That’s what we call in the business “a workaround”.
As I said elsewhere, I get that people want this to be a dealbreaker, or the suggestion to be a pointless defense because this is a Linux community and there is a cultural pressure to pretend that the account problem is a massive dealbreaker (as opposed to most normies just going with it, just like they do on their phones, which is what actually happens), but OSs aren’t football teams. You can both criticise MS for having an online activation requirement, rightfully so, and acknowledge a potentially useful mitigation for anybody who needs or wants to use the OS without being constantly logged in.
Hah. “Kid”, right.
First off, don’t be disrespectful to young people, some of them can make decent points sometimes.
But also, man, I wish. I was using DOS before this guy was working on it.
Man, I don’t really care what you think, but the way you can only parse this as taking sides or being personally attacked is… kinda not healthy?
Just maybe come back to it in a couple of days and give it some thought.
No, I have an issue with both him misrepresenting Mac OS and with you misrepresenting his point.
Because for the fifteenth time, what matters is what’s true. I’m not taking sides with you and assuming every fallacious argument you make is fine and every fallacious argument this guy makes is not, or viceversa. Your fallacies don’t justify his, and importantly, his don’t justify yours.
Look, at this point you’re being obtuse because egos and the Internet and whatever, so whatever, you do you. This conversation is deep into “I’m not mad, I’m disappointed” territory.
Yes. People have been correcting him on the Mac OS thing. Which you said was irrelevant several times.
I, remember, said it is not. Because again, this is not about what you like, it’s about what is true. Given what I’ve seen so far I’m assuming that a) his workaround is valid, and b) his statement that MacOS works the same way is not. I’m open to changing my mind on both of those because, one more time, it’s about what is true.
On that note, the breakdown of what is sent, how and when is absolutely dependent on your account login. If it was not then there would be nothing to complain about. That doesn’t mean they don’t send anything without an account (unless you’re not online at all, obviously), but the payload of information will be different and in some cases some calls may be dependent on you having an ID in the first place. Plus there’s the question of whether unsigned users leave any connection to the account that activated the Windows install. Which I don’t know about and you clearly don’t care about.
Oh, and… yeah, I would love to help Linux get more mainstream. If only egotistically, it’d be super nice if the parts of it that don’t work right for me due to missing drivers got more first party support, but having the underpinning of home computing software revolve around open source software? Yeah, I wanna help with that. I do agree with you that “I installed Linux for my grandma” is not “helping”, either, but I didn’t say I do that, either.
Nnno? To any of that?
I mean, he’s biased, you’re biased, whatever. The question is whether his information is accurate. Which I’m assuming it is. I haven’t tested it, but nobody seems to be disputing it. I’d personally like to know how much an activated Windows using an offline account phones home, if at all, and what data it shares and stores, but I’ve noticed nobody seems to care about the specifics of that in this fanboy flamewar, which is frustrating.
In any case, accurate information from biased sources is still accurate, and not sharing the same biases you have isn’t deception.
Also, nobody presents these workarounds as permanent anything, he hasn’t made that statement or even implied it. Most people sharing the previous workarounds actively warned that they seemed like an oversight and MS may patch them out at any point. Which they ended up doing.
Again, this seems like you equating caveats with dealbreakers for the sake of pushing an agenda. And as someone who uses both Windows and Linux on the daily I’m just gonna say you’re not helping. Misinformation makes people who notice it less likely to side with you and everybody here can notice it because we’re all tech savvy enough. I guess being the hardcore guy acting all uncompromising makes you feel cool or whatever, but it’s not doing much of use.
…
I mean he used to work there, so yeah?
You saying the accuracy of the account requirement in MacOS is irrelevant makes me wonder if it is incorrect, because… well, no, it’s not irrelevant. I’d like to know. I mean, I will continue to use Windows because I need Windows things, but if I was in a position where I’m mad about this to the point of making me look for a clean break that would be a fairly relevant thing to know.
What I’m hearing here is that people are mad about what he’s saying, not because he’s wrong or because it’s not useful, but because this is a Linux community and people want this problem to be as big as possible to wield it as a dealbreaker to specifically promote the OS they like. Which is, I’m guessing, why you don’t sound stoked about MacOS not having the same issue?
Weird as it is to root for specific pieces of software, I also don’t find that particularly useful because, frankly, people using Windows already know how good or bad Windows is. Trying to overplay it is not particularly constructive to promote alternatives. You can acknowledge the ways in which people can work around annoying Windows stuff and still point out you don’t need any workarounds on Linux, if that’s what you want to do.
This is astoundingly weird.
I mean, he didn’t show up from the ether to make this tweet, he’s a semi-well known youtuber, his anecdotes about his time at Microsoft have been reported in specialist press often and to my knowledge nobody at Microsoft ever went “hey, we don’t know who that is”. No matter how many grains of salt you take on uncited Wikipedia content, there are enough citations there to verify his identity, from local newspaper coverage of his career to links to public talks mentioning his background. He has frequently namedropped coworkers at the time, who to my knowledge haven’t contested his accounts. The Wikipedia page in question isn’t even a hagiography, bringing up his failed companies and legal issues surrounding them.
I don’t mind skepticism, but this is paranoia. Is it possible the guy is a bullshitter whose wide reaching lies have somehow not triggered a rebuke from the people he has specifically named? I guess weirder things have happened. Would you be questioning his background if he was saying something you don’t perceive as disagreeing with you? Absolutely not.
I have no more reason to question this guy having worked at Microsoft (and on the Task Manager specifically, which is a really weirdly mid-tier thing to brag about for twenty years if you didn’t do it) than to think Niccolo Venerandi didn’t contribute to KDE Plasma because he has a Youtube channel. It’s just a strange way to react to this.
I mean… is it? I’ll take everybody’s word for it that he is incorrect, since I’m not a Mac OS user, but while it certainly makes it sound that Win11 is doing something common he’s still providing a workaround for that thing. He can simultaneously be going “it’s not that uncommon” and “but also, here’s how to work around the problem” in the same post.
Does that read as justifying it? It sure seems like he’s providing a workaround, same as all the people who used to point at the simple shortcut to work around the requirement when that worked smoothly.
I mean, I, for one, hadn’t thought about it. It’s not a terrible way to go about it. Doesn’t help me, I need a MS account to do Office stuff so I may as well, but if you’re really hung up on this and can’t avoid Windows it’s a decend solution.
Wait, believe what?
I promise real humans made Windows. Like, a lot of them. It’s not that weird.
But beyond that, trust me, that is this guy’s entire personality. I believe he uses his Microsoft access card with his picture as an image in thumbnails often. Which I’m now realizing I’ve judged him for when it’s probably in response to getting this type of reaction a bunch.
Yeah, but… this isn’t that.
You’re literally saying “well, anecdotal impressions say this, so I refute this study that says something else”.
We don’t like that. That’s not a thing we like to do.
And for the record, as these things go, the article linked here is pretty good. I’ve seen more than one worse example of a study being reported in the press today.
They provide a neutral headline that conveys the takeaway of the study, they provide context about companies mentioning AIs on layoffs, they provide a link to the full study and they provide a separate study that yields different, seemingly contradicting results.
I mean, this is as close to best case scenario for reporting on a study as you can get in mainstream press. If nothing else, kudos to The Register. The bar was low but they went for personal best anyway.
Man, the problem with giving up all the wonky fashy social media is that when you’re in an echo chamber all the weird misinformation and emotion-driven politics are coming from inside the house. It’s been a particularly rough day for politically-adjacent but epistemologically depressing posts today.
So the report itself argues there is a need for better data, and it seems fairly level headed, but…
…what’s with people being mad about it?
I say this a lot, but there seems to be a lot of weird anti-hype where people want this AI stuff to work better than it does so it can be worse than it is, and I’m often confused by it. The takeaway here is that most jobs don’t seem to be behaving that differently so far if you look at the labor market in aggregate. Which is… fine? It’s not that unexpected? The AI shills were selling that entire industries would be replaced by AI overnight, and most sensible people didn’t think so or argued that the jobs would get replaced with AI wrangler tasks because this thing wouldn’t completely automate most tasks in ways that weren’t already available.
Which seems to be most of what’s going on. AI art is 100% not production-ready out of the gate, AI text seems to be a bit of a wash in terms of saving time for programmers and even in more obvious industries like customer service we already had a bunch of bots and automation in place.
So what’s all the anger? Did people want this to be worse? Do they just want to vibe with the economy being bad in a way they can pin on something they already don’t like and maybe politics is too heavy now? What’s going on there?
I suppose it makes more sense the less you want to do and the older your hardware is. Even when repurposing old laptops and stuff like that I find the smallest apps I’d want to run were orders of magnitude more costly than any OS overhead. This was even true that one time I got lazy and started running stuff on an older Windows machine without reinstalling the OS, so I’m guessing anything Linux-side would be fine.
After a OS update? I mean, I guess, but most things are going to be in containers anyway, right?
The last update that messed me up on any counts was Python-related and that would have got me on any distro just as well.
Once again, I get it at scale, where you have so much maintenance to manage and want to keep it to a minimum, but for home use it seems to me that being on an LTS/stable update channel would have a much bigger impact than being on a lightweight distro.
I’m sidetracking a bit, but am I alone in thinking self hosting hobbyists are way too into “lightweight and not bloated” as a value?
I mean, I get it if you have a whole data center worth of servers, but if it’s a cobbled together home server it’s probably fine, right? My current setup idles at 1.5% of its CPU and 25% of its RAM. If I turned everything off those values are close to zero and effectively trivial alongside any one of the apps I’m running in there. Surely any amount of convenience is worth the extra bloat, right?
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.
Look, like I said, it’s not you and it’s not about whether you’re agreeing or disagreeing with me.
I think at this point I’m just disappointed at the concept of social/user generated media as a whole. Straws and and camels and all that.