sylver_dragon

By combining Mozilla’s scale and trusted reputation with Anonym’s cutting-edge technology…

Ya, that reputation is taking a big hit right now.

Congratulations, you have now arrived at the Trough of Disillusionment:

It remains to be seen if we can ever climb the Slope of Enlightenment and arrive at reasonable expectations and uses for LLMs. I personally believe it’s possible, but we need to get vendors and managers to stop trying to sprinkle “AI” in everything like some goddamn Good Idea Fairy. LLMs are good for providing answers to well defined problems which can be answered with existing documentation. When the problem is poorly defined and/or the answer isn’t as well documented or has a lot of nuance, they then do a spectacular job of generating bullshit.

I have to believe the actual poll and report aren’t as glaringly stupid as that headline. If you ask nearly anyone, “do you want peace?” They are going to respond with “yes.” The devil is always in the details though. Ask them, “should the war in Ukraine be ended by the Ukrainian Government capitulating to all Russian demands to secure an immediate peace?” And, you might find a lot of folks are suddenly less peaceful. This reminds me of the old saw:
There’s lies, damned lines and then there is statistics.

With a crafted question and a bit of p-hacking you can get a lot of results you want out of people.

My experience has been pretty similar. With Windows turning the invasive crap up to 11, I decided to try and jump to Linux. The catch has always been gaming. But, I have a Steam Deck and so have seen first hand how well Proton has been bridging that gap and finally decided to dip my toes back in. I installed Arch on a USB 3 thumbdrive and have been running my primary system that way for about a month now. Most everything has worked well. Though, with the selection of Arch, I accepted some level of slamming my head against a wall to get things how I want them. That’s more on me than Linux. Games have been running well (except for the input bug in Enshrouded with recent major update, that’s fixed now). I’ve had no issues with software, I was already using mostly FOSS anyway. It’s really been a lot of “it just works” all around.

That is a possibility. To be honest, I haven’t tried very hard yet. I’m currently working on spinning up a Win10 VM in KVM and I’ll see how that works. And Android emulator is another good idea, I’ll have to give that a go.

And once you have found your specific collection of plugins that happen not to put the exact features you need behind a paywall but others, you ain’t touching those either.

And this is why, when I’m investigating phishing links, I’ve gotten used to mumbling, “fucking WordPress”. WordPress itself is pretty secure. Many WordPress plugins, if kept up to date, are reasonably secure. But, for some god forsaken reason, people seem to be allergic to updating their WordPress plugins and end up getting pwned and turned into malware serving zombies. Please folks, if it’s going to be on the open internet, install your fucking updates!

Did the same. The writing has been on the wall for a long time, Microsoft’s anti-user behavior is only set to get worse. I made the jump to Linux (Arch) and things have been reasonably smooth. I did have a few issues with Enshrouded, but was able to get past those with Proton-GE. The only issue I haven’t worked around yet is Roblox with the kids. But, I may just have to pick up a cheap tablet for that.

I think AI is good with giving answers to well defined problems. The issue is that companies keep trying to throw it at poorly defined problems and the results are less useful. I work in the cybersecurity space and you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a vendor talking about AI in their products. It’s the new, big marketing buzzword. The problem is that finding the bad stuff on a network is not a well defined problem. So instead, you get the unsupervised models faffing about, generating tons and tons of false positives. The only useful implementations of AI I’ve seen in these tools actually mirrors you own: they can be scary good at generating data queries from natural language prompts. Which is, once again, a well defined problem.

Overall, AI is a tool and used in the right way, it’s useful. It gets a bad rap because companies keep using it in bad ways and the end result can be worse than not having it at all.

what is the advantage in using Windows 11 over 10?

Many years ago, I was at a Windows XP launch event and the Microsoft Rep had a really honest line:
“Why should you start using Windows XP? Because we’re going to stop supporting Windows 98!”

And ya, that’s pretty much been the cattle prod Microsoft uses to push new versions, eventually you stop getting security updates for the older OS and at some point there are enough security vulnerabilities which make it no longer safe for daily use. That said, with Windows becoming more and more user hostile, other options start to make more sense.

Microsoft: “We’re sorry, this is all just a misunderstanding. We thought you were too stupid to notice.”

“High Impact” like a body hitting the ground at the bottom of a cliff.

Marketing is far from dead. Larian themselves used it to great effect with BG3. Does no one remember the announcement trailer released for BG3 well in advance of any gameplay footage? That’s marketing, though and through. And yes, it worked plenty well on me. A D&D game based around Mind Flayers, made by the folks behind Divinity Original Sin? Shut up and take my money. Also, when I noticed the outline of a Nautiloid ship in the background, I may have needed a change of shorts.

The difference with BG3 was that Larian didn’t just pull an Edward Bernays style marketing as a con. They delivered a good product, worked with players to fix any issues and have gone above and beyond supporting the game after release. They have done everything right to build long term customer relationships. Maybe they don’t reach the same level of profits some other companies might, by stuffing microtransactions in every orifice. But, I suspect they are profitable and seem to be better built be continue long term and not have to tear the company up and saddle one of those pieces with insane amounts of debt.

While I can’t promise that I’ll buy their next game, I’ll undoubtedly keep an eye out for it. Larian puts out a quality product and doesn’t fuck their customers. That’s what makes their brand of marketing work.

I would expect so. Pretty much all settings in Windows are buried in the Registry somewhere. Whether or not this will be well documented, is an open question. Granted, Microsoft has a habit of changing settings like this, whenever the fancy strike them. So, you’ll need to track that setting over time.

They’re less laws and more “guidelines”.

So far, the toggle is built in:

Either way, these recommendations can be disabled by going into the Windows 11 Settings app, so you can avoid them. However, app recommendations are tied to other content in this section, so you’ll miss out on some features by turning it off.

Not sure what else will be “missed”. But, my guess is they will be “missed” in the same way that one misses a case of chlamydia.

While I can understand Poland’s desire to have nuclear weapons available, this seems like it would be a really provocative step towards Russia. Nuclear weapons positioned that close to Russia will raise the threat of a nuclear first strike against Russia. Even without an unstable strongman in charge of Russia, it’s easy to see how a Russian government would be uncomfortable with this. At the same time, with an unstable strongman in charge of Russia, the provocation may not matter. Putin has proven he is willing to invade his neighbor and slaughter thousands, without provocation. So, I’m sure Poland isn’t as worried about provocation as they are defense.

Yo ho, yo ho off to the digital seas we go!

In fairness, I can see a use case for this as something to have on in the background while doing other tasks or as a way to discover new content either the algorithms would have never shown you or you might not have clicked on. But, I can also see the service providers using this to further try to show-horn ads into everything and fuck up the current system of “pick a show I want to watch and watch it now”. In which case, it’s once again time for them to learn that piracy isn’t so much a price problem as a service one.

Windows 10 released in 2015. Windows 11 released in 2021. It’s pretty much in line with other release cycles for Windows Desktop OS releases.

• XP -> Vista - was about 6 years
• Vista -> 7 - Was about 2 (But everyone sane basically skipped Vista)
• 7-> 8 - Was 3 years, with a fourth year to get to 8.1.
• 8 -> 10 - Was about 3 years.

If you only look at the releases which mattered, XP -> 7 was 8 years and 7 -> 10 was 6. So, it seems like Microsoft kinda accepted reality this time around and we didn’t get some sort of asinine Windows Mojave shenanigans trying to polish a turd. That said, I’m still running 10 on my main system and my experiences with 11 are making me consider an upgrade path to Linux when Win10 goes EoL.

And Windows Me never even made the list.
Having been an early adopter of it, I know why.

It’s always a “chicken or the egg” situation. Right now, there isn’t much need for a home router with anything faster than a 1Gbps port. In the prosumer space 10Gbps is available, but it’s not super cheap (about $300 with SFP module). But, if something like 50Gbps becomes common, manufacturers will be incentivized to make products for it. The economies of scale and the effects of competition will kick in and prices will come down.

I’m old. I was at one of the events where Intel announced 1Gbps over copper. This was supposed to be impossible, there was no way to push 1Gbps over Cat-5 cables. But, with Cat-5e and Cat-6, they had cracked it. At the time, there was no way this was ever going to be a cheap technology and it was intended for large enterprises for major switch interconnect runs. Now it’s everywhere.

Maybe 50Gbps to the home won’t happen. And this is just some exec blowing smoke. But, maybe they’ll do it and kick off the market for cheaper equipment in that class. While I do agree that we’re lacking the “killer app” to make that much bandwidth to the home necessary. Things like music and video streaming came about after the advent of faster speeds. It wasn’t until we had DSL that people realized that streaming music, in real time, would be a thing. We needed the bandwidth to be there for the use cases to be discovered.