Well, we are talking about half the active PCs still running Windows 10 instead of Windows 11.
That’s a lot more than just the few “I don’t care”-people.

Instead it consist mainly of the “I don’t have the means” people, that don’t have the Hardware required to upgrade and also not the money to quickly change that.

Microsoft screwed up here. There simple was no need to demand such harsh hardware requirements and especially no need to enforce them that hard.

I agree that would have been the sensible way to go… Together with an “Install at your own risk” message when trying to upgrade a PC containing an older CPU…
I really don’t know what their reasoning is to enforce the requirements so hard for everyone.

First major requirement is the presence of a recent TPM module, which is absolutely not required performance-wise, but only for DRM-reasons (and read that as “Digital Restriction Management”).
Second even more arbitrary one is that they excluded all CPUs before at least Coffee Lake generation. Perhaps half of the PC stuff people I know to be running at home is still from the mid-2010s, so practically completely pre-Coffee-Lake.
And the IT infrastructure of the e.g. the German executive government branches is on average probably more in the range of 15 years old. A surprising lot of that isn’t even fully switched to Windows 10 yet… (hey, at least we are increasingly migrating away from Telefax…!)

Wait…
Excluding half of the active PCs or so from upgrade due to arbitrary hardware constraints didn’t push upgrading?
How can this be??? 😯🫢

Well, a mindless, repetitive task prone to errors and a task requiring obscure knowledge (“d” as a synonym for dick… one of those self-censoring Gen-Z things?)
Nice to now have tools to solve these tasks and gain some time to do more interesting stuff instead. Lively discussions on Lemmy, e.g. ;-)

I didn’t understand your comment, so I asked the same LLM as before.
It explained it and I think that I get it now. Low-grade middle-school-“Your Mom”-joke, is it? Ha-ha… 🙄

This also means that AI did better than myself at both tasks I’ve given it today (I found only 9 states with “d” when going over the state-list myself…).

Whatever. I’m gonna have second lunch now.

No, this is Google throwing the cheapest possible shit at you that is barely capable of stringing together 5 coherent sentences and has the reasoning capability of a tapeworm.

Here is the output of the minimalist open Chinese model Qwen3, that runs locally on my 6 year old mid-end PC:

The US states that contain the letter "d" (case-insensitive, as state names are typically capitalized) are as follows. I've verified each state name for the presence of the letter "d" in its standard spelling:

    Colorado (contains "d" in "Colorado")  
    Delaware (starts with "D")  
    Florida (contains "d" in "Florida")  
    Idaho (contains "d" in "Idaho")  
    Indiana (contains "d" in "Indiana")  
    Maryland (ends with "d" in "Maryland")  
    Nevada (contains "d" in "Nevada")  
    North Dakota (contains "d" in "Dakota")  
    Rhode Island (contains "d" in "Rhode")  
    South Dakota (contains "d" in "Dakota")  


Total: 10 states.

Thanks, will try that!

And Reddit completely.blocks you from reading when coming from a VPN exit, unless you are logged in (at least with. MullvadVPN).
Brave new world… :-(

Depending on the age of the EEE, you might run into problems because the old low end CPU doesn’t support instruction set extensions that are assumed to be present by distros nowadays. I think it was SSE2…?

Not only the U.S. grid is weak compared to China’s… Strategically China seems to be outpacing the U.S. on many fronts, being much more stringent and focused on long term goals than the chaotic U.S. at the moment. I really don’t like the idea of living in a world with China as the leading nation, but it increasingly seems like the most probable development in the mid to long run. And transition will likely not be smooth…

That surprisingly wasn’t that hard, actually.

One side of the family already settled on Threema for communication years ago, the other side I had to first show Signal to and help with installing it, but now they are even using it in other contexts.

And apparently I live in a bubble that is quite open to Signal, so most of the people I know at least use it in parallel to WhatsApp. And for the rest there is still RCS.

The actual hard part are (since I became a parent) all the WhatsApp groups that exist for most kinds of organized child activity, including distributing much of the crucial information regarding school.
Also at my wife’s work WhatsApp is standard for coordinating with the colleagues.

For that purposes we use an old customized WhatsApp-only smartphone, that is used by the family like some old-fashioned fixed phone-terminal, only for messaging…

It’s not just weird hobbies here, but basically all that are somehow organized.
Also a lot of relevant school information is only shared within parent groups on WhatsApp.
My complete WhatsApp-boycott lasted exactly until the first of my childs entered school… :-(

No, in a very private part of the Cloud, so don’t be afraid!

Hey, didn’t you read? It uses “Meta’s Private Processing technology”!!1!

Also:

original message: “Please don’t leave dirty socks on the sofa.” The AI then offers “funny” rewrites, such as: “Please don’t make the sofa a sock graveyard,” “Breaking news: Socks found chilling on the couch. Please move them,” and “Hey, sock ninja, the laundry basket is that way!”

Am I the only one that thinks the “funny” ones in the given example are much more offensive than the original one?

Nice, another reason to not use WhatsApp…

They are not that common here in Germany in general, but my city has in the past years put up a dozen or so, mainly in public parks.
They are maintained by our municipal utility service and are basically always in perfect condition.
At least during summer. Being outdoor installations they are shut down (actually completely removed) during the winter months.

Other than that I only had one in elementary school 30 years ago, which also worked and a lot of actual natural springs with drinking outlets that are often maintained by rural communities.

Our city also has one of those natural water drinking fountains, but as it is the (still maintained and monitored) remains of a thermal baths project from a hundred years ago, it is not so suitable for actually quenching your thirst. Full of crazy salts and minerals with a faintly sulfuric aroma on top - but supposed to be healthy :-)

So, in general: no complaints where I live.

Well, an AI is incredibly patient and you can toy around with the language freely without perhaps feeling embarrassed. That alone lowers the entry bar (especially for slightly awkward persons like myself…) considerably.
On top of that AI is dirt cheap compared to a personal tutor or traveling around the world.
So it would open effective language learning to a much broader audience than before, which undoubtedly is a good thing!