So yeah, they built a new product and tried to force everyone to use it, when it had no improvements for the users whatsoever. And surprise, no one is excited to use it.

Yeah, for a while I was looking for any benefits to moving from win 10 to 11. 7 to 10 had kernel and scheduler improvements, for example.

Only ones I could find were the virtual desktop support (though I had an alternative desktop back in the XP or Vista days that supported that, so not really groundbreaking), and WSL, which I didn’t have any use cases for.

Other than that, it was just shit I didn’t want. Copilot, recall, more UI changes that don’t really add anything (on my work laptop where I didn’t have a choice, first thing I did was go into the UI options and undo as much as I could). One of the things I used to like about windows was that it wasn’t a mac, but the UI changes look like that’s their inspiration. The inspired folks porbably all left already.

What?

I like that Linux isn’t designed for the lowest common denominator. Windows frustrated me as much with the stuff that was designed for the stupid as the stuff that was designed to make them money, just the second one ended up dominating in the end. But I remember the earlier frustrations often having the thought “I bet they just changed this to reduce support calls from people who don’t know wtf they are doing”.

It’s called a comic, the images are in sequence and tell a brief story, though you do need to know how to read to understand what’s going on, so find an adult to read it to you and explain what’s going on in the last panel.

I had an upgrade plan for my PC that involved a step up to a 4k monitor, but when the time came, it was hard enough just finding a 4k monitor with decent specs that I stopped to really think about whether I would really benefit from it. I already knew I didn’t need it, but I realized that I wouldn’t even really gain anything from it. I already used the UI scaling with the one 4k monitor I had at work, so that was a wash. And for games, I didn’t really have any times when I wished the resolution was higher than the 1440p I was already using, but I did have times when I wished it would generate the frames faster or more consistently.

Part of the change was a new GPU to handle 4k better (they were supposed to justify each other), but I ended up just getting an ultrawide 1440p monitor instead.

I don’t think I’ll ever bother with higher than 4k for TV or 1440p for PC.

That’s the closest I’ve been able to think about for why people turn to puritanical values in the first place: jealousy that others can do fun things they think they can’t, plus maybe a second layer of being upset that some aren’t also upset about it.

Oh wait, I almost forgot about the control angle, where if you can convince enough people that some normal and ok aspect about humanity is actually wrong, then you can catch people “slipping” and manipulate them via guilt or blackmail.

Puritanical bs has nothing to do with morals, as much as some like to pretend it does. What harm are you trying to call out or prevent?

They make me think of kids who hide food they don’t want to eat in stupid places and get all surprised when they realize it makes wherever they were hiding it into a biohazard.

Or anyone who thinks they are getting a free benefit from using something a certain way and completely ignoring that each use ruins it a bit more.

I think the tech industry got used to people not giving a fuck as they shoveled more and more anti-features with weak “feature” reasoning to back it up (like convenience of having all your files in one place to justify continual data transfer between the device and their servers, processing audio remotely to justify sending an audio feed, “you can access your history” to justify saving the history, etc) that they are surprised that there’s pushback as it enters this new level.

This feels like similar energy to getting outraged about a tan suit.

Were all involved parties consenting? That’s the only thing that matters.

Plus on the optics side, we’ve yet to see if being in the Epstein files is bad enough optics for CEOs, so I think “signed something on an adult woman’s boobs when she most likely specifically requested/offered it” is entirely a non-issue.

Everything AI boom is likely a lie, and Nvidia bribing Trump to sell H200s to China, at 25% export tariff, is proof of incapacity or unwillingness of US industry to deploy them.

I’d love for you to be right (I’d like to see nvidia compete as an underdog since they are fairly anticompetitive in their dominant position) but think this reasoning is flawed.

Wanting to sell to China just means that demand isn’t exceeding supply, or maybe even that they have access to more supply that they’d use if they could sell to China, which is a massive market. Or even if they don’t have any excess supply, higher demand means they can set higher prices and still expect to sell all inventory.

Like the US car companies wanting to sell cars in China doesn’t imply that they are unable to sell cars in the US, it just means they want to sell cars to China and the US.

I agree with the rest of your comment and think it was well said, sorry about this nitpick.

The thing that makes it more suspect IMO is that shareholders voted for it, not just the board. Courts specifically said they didn’t need to but shareholders (dominated by large account holders) still voted for it.

Anyone else feel like Tesla is actually how Elon is being paid for being the one to make twitter fascist and the DOGE bs? Like the majority of shareholders don’t actually gaf how the company does and the billion dollar compensation package had nothing to do with Tesla other than it being the vehicle through which the payment was made?

I’d argue that SEO was one of the biggests causes of search result degradation and consider any complaints coming from them as highly suspect due to conflicting interests. Eg, a change that makes it harder to game the search engine algorithms is good for searchers but bad for SEOs.

I hope the whole industry dies (or already is? I don’t hear much about it these days lol). They are just marketers whose whole job is to get you to look at their shit instead of the most relevant results.

Why do you think the encryption capabilities on your PC are there for your sake? They might have sold them to you on that, but they are really there to protect copyright data because TPM allows encryption/decryption that is completely hidden from the rest of your system. Like an encrypted handshake that then transfers an encrypted key to decrypt the video stream. But it doesn’t save the decrypted data, it immediately re-encrypts it using your display’s private key (or whatever device is next in the chain, maybe your GPU). They can make it so that the unencrypted stream never touches your RAM or travels on any wire, which means you can’t pirate shows as you watch them unless you point a camera at your screen.

Obviously if they just said that was one of the main points, no one would want it and media companies couldn’t benefit from it because they’d have to compromise to sell content.

The other point was so that they could build a system where they hold the encryption keys and get to choose whose data is actually private. Obviously that’s an even harder sell.

So they did what marketers always do and lied by omission about what it was for and just outright lied if they ever said they’d never give the keys to law enforcement (did they ever even say that?).

Let go of the idea that someone selling something to you implies any kind of loyalty, especially when either party is a large corporation.

If that happened to you, what would you do the next time you saw a silica gel packet?

Though, on the other hand, having the video saved offsite is useful because then anyone with physical access to your home can’t get rid of the video showing they’re there.

This is not an argument in favour of using cloud services, because that gives access to your video to anyone the company deems should have access (or sometimes individual workers who either have access as part of their job or gain access because businesses suck at security). It’s in response to you saying isolate the cameras from the internet entirely; there is a good reason to have them connected (though you could have a PC handle that with a connection to two networks and no physical or software bridge between the two, just take video from one, upload (encrypted) to server on other).

Funny story, though I do question the study they referred to, because there’s different flavours of counter-culture that look pretty different from each other. Hipster is one, but there’s also goth, emo, trench coat aesthetic, people who chase outdated trends, punk, metal, those who don’t dress up any differently if they are going out or staying in, otaku (like the ones that wear clothes with hentai on them, I wouldn’t call cosplaying a counter culture so much as a costume hobby unless cosplay wear is their default)…

All of those looks are very different from each other while not wanting to follow the main culture’s trends and flaunting its definition of beauty.

And tbh, I’m not sure I’d even call hipsters a counter-culture. There was a desire to rebel, but looking at the aesthetic, I can’t tell what they were really trying to rebel against. Looking sloppy? Business casual? Maybe it’s because the aesthetic has been absorbed into the culture itself or maybe it was an advertiser-led “rebellion” in the first place? Or trying to be ahead of the curve means eventually the mainstream “catches up” and the look just looks normal now?

Also, thinking about it more, I wonder if the hilariously apt story was genuine or if someone there realized how they could really push their story by inventing an angry reader to prove their point.

Shareholder call:

While we did see a record low revenue on Jan 25th, we made up for it with record high revenue on Jan 26th. Not only was makeup buying more intense than normal activity, numbers were greatly helped by adding popular product links from the “thank you for your feedback” page, which also gives the executive team things to laugh about.