They probably reached their goal. It was never about efficiency. That was just the PR spin to sell it to the public. It was about getting rid of pesky regulatory bodies which stood in the way of making more money. Especially those who hindered Musk’s companies.

The USA is currently experiencing the end phase of capitalism: massive corruption turning into open corruption with an economic oligarch class fusing with the government, massive income gaps and problems for regular citizens, class and culture wars plus reappearance of fascism to keep the population busy with culture wars among themselves instead of uniting against the exploiters, and so on. But it just started in USA. It’s already swapping over to other western democratic countries as well.

You becoming a neo-nazi by constantly being served right-wing propaganda on company-controlled social media channels is better for their business than if you were a neutral, critical thinker. It’s why Twitter was worth the 40 billion for Musk. Not because he expects it to ever repay itself. But because he can produce more loyalists by influencing what the algorithm shows and hides for you. Nazis are great for them because they’re busy fighting against other parts of the population while giving the wealthy class a free pass to do what they want. Which is more money, more influence, more exploitation.

What this also means: you cannot have any private conversations with windows users anymore. They all have to be considered fully backdoored. Even if the agent runs locally, you don’t know what it all sends back to MS servers.

For people who have any slice of privacy consciousness left, this is the death of Windows. The difference between this and using a desktop directly from MS’ cloud is negligible - MS can get access to potentially everything that’s visible or readable on your desktop.

On many websites, the cookies are created no matter what you choose. It’s a dark pattern to get you to accept all, yes, but In the end it’s often meaningless.

Use a decent browser like librewolf which isolates cookies so only the site that created them can access them and clears all cookies on exit - this protects you from bad effects of cookies so you can just accept all. However, you’re still susceptible to other methods of tracking (like IP address or browser fingerprint based tracking) unless you use Tor Browser or something similar.

How to Wagon your Dragon

Incredible community project. Massive scale. Looking forward to this much more than to TES 6. Also doubt that Bethesda is even capable of creating a top-tier game these days.

Not just themed Chrome but with Microsoft’s anti-features (data gathering) and unwanted integrations added on top. Or instead of Google’s. Not sure. Anyway, if you don’t want to freely give away even more of your browsing data to either Microsoft or Google you shouldn’t use any of those.

If you want a Chromium-based browser for the desktop, try Brave but be wary that you need to change lots of settings to make it behave well (but it’s still the least bad Chromium-based browser, when not counting Vanadium for GrapheneOS/Android).

If not, try Librewolf, which already behaves well out of the box and reigns among the top Firefox-based desktop browsers.

After you’ve already established security, you can add obscurity (without compromising security) on top for an even bigger gain in security overall. But you can’t do obscurity in place of security.

I read somewhere (and it seems very plausible, though I’m not sure whether it’s scientifically accurate) that the subjective feeling that time runs so fast is something you automatically get with increasing age, and it has to do with what’s still exciting or new for you in life and what is not. With increasing age and life experience, you get the feeling that anything is still exciting or new less often over time. You’ve kind of seen it all, that’s why days seem much more similar to each other than when you were still a kid (when almost every experience you’ve made was still a fresh one), that’s why each day is less memorable, that’s why it seems like time is flying by like crazy.

My take on it: most people do have foresight or at least understand the issue, but they still don’t act on it or ignore it as long as the status quo is still convenient enough. So it’s purely a matter of pain and inconvenience. Once enough pain and inconvenience has accumulated, they’re much more ready to make an actual switch. Thankfully, with Microsoft’s services also becoming increasingly enshittified (forced AI chatbot integrations everywhere, even more cloud dependencies, ever more expensive subscriptions, …) there’s also Microsoft shooting itself in the foot a bit in order to accelerate this process. Vile actions from the current US regime are also accelerating the process of course.

https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/gov.whitehouse.app/latest/

As usual: this can be interpteted as Malware. That said, many apps are like this these days: full of trackers and way too many permissions. Most people never know or care.

Mildly interesting: one of.the trackers seems to be related to Huawei.

EDIT: Someone decompiled and analyzed the app in detail: https://blog.thereallo.dev/blog/decompiling-the-white-house-app

Yes, and they intentionally want those lines to be as blurry as possible.

I think still too many people missed the turning point when Microsoft suddenly stopped releasing products/software that were superior in basically all areas to their previous versions. I think that turning point was Windows 8 already, for many who consider Windows 8 a single-time mistake like ME or Vista it was Windows 10, for others it took until Windows 11 until they noticed the decline of Windows as a whole.

And it’s not just MS, but a lot of consumer tech is growing anti-consumer and gets enshittified to the point of where you really have to think hard whether or not you even want the new stuff they’re spewing out. My consumer habits have certainly changed to be much more rigorous than, say, 10-20 years ago. I read a lot more reviews these days and from many more different sources bevore I even think of buying something new.

“AI PCs” will increase your dependency on MS’ online services (which is probably the main thing that MS wants), decrease your privacy even more (also what MS wants - that’s a lot of data for sale), consume even more energy (on a planet with limited resources), sometimes increase your productivity (which is probably the most advantage you’re ever getting out of it) and other times royally screw you over (due to faulty and insecure AI behavior). Furthermore, LLMs are non-deterministic, meaning that the output (or what they’re doing) changes slightly every time you repeat even the same request. It’s just not a great idea to use that for anything where you need to TRUST its output.

I don’t think it will be a particularly good deal. And nothing MS or these other companies that are in the AI business say can ever be taken at face value or as truthful information. They’ve bullshitted their customers way too much already, way more than is usual for advertisements. If this was still the '90s or before 2010 or so - maybe they’d have a point. But this is 2026. Unless proven otherwise, we should assume bullshit by default.

I think we’re currently in a post-factual hype-only era where they are trying to sell you things that won’t ever exist in the way they describe them, but they’ll claim it will always happen “in the near future”. CEO brains probably extrapolate “Generative AI somewhat works now for some use cases so it will surely work well for all use cases within a couple of years”, so they might believe the stories they tell all day themselves, but it might just as well never happen. And even if it DID happen, you’d still suffer many drawbacks like insane vendor dependencies/lock-ins, zero privacy whatsoever, sometimes faulty and randomly changing AI behavior, and probably impossible-to-fix security holes (prompt injection and so on - LLMs have no clear boundary between data and instructions and it’s not that hard to get them to reveal secret data or do things they shouldn’t be doing in the first place. If your AI agent interprets a malicious instruction as valid, and it can act on your behalf on your system, you have a major problem).

Microslop Crashpilot

Congrats.

Yes, desktop Linux is generally very usable for the majority of users these days. This was already claimed to be the case in the late 1990s, which is probably why many non-IT-professionals had a bad first expression with desktop Linux. But this has changed since (very roughly) about 10 years ago or so, and for gaming in particular it has changed since very roughly about 5 years ago. This is also the reason why desktop Linux was at like ~1% market share all the time but has suddenly grown to ~6% within the last couple of years already. And with higher popularity comes more developer interest and support. Furthermore, Windows is becoming worse over time because Nadella is more interested in milking his user base instead of nurturing it, and many want more independence from US-based proprietary software due to the current political situation, and so it’s very likely that desktop Linux is going to keep snowballing upwards. The trend is looking very positively for desktop Linux, it will probably reach MacOS market share within the next couple of years. For gaming specifically, it’s already #2.

The most important thing about the Linux ecosystem is of course that most of it (at least the core components) is free/open source software and this is necessary to have digital sovereignty.

Other users interested in making the switch can make their transition easier by doing it in 2 steps: first, replace all important applications you’re using on Windows with Linux-compatible applications (for example, no MS Office, no Adobe), then adjust to the changed workflows while still using Windows. Only after that, install Linux as the primary OS (or set up dual-boot, but it has disadvantages. Best is to physically disconnect your disk containing Windows (so you still have a backup in case you desperately need it) and use another disk for Linux). That way, the culture shock is a bit mitigated because you’ll have at least some familiarity (the applications you need) inside an otherwise unfamiliar new OS environment. That way, the change will feel less overwhelming.

If there are still dependencies which can’t be worked around, there’s also the emergency solution of using either wine or a Windows VM on Linux. In the latter case it’s probably best these days to use winboat, which allows running Windows-only applications which then run inside a specific Windows VM or container on Linux. Or you just use a full regular Windows VM on Linux, with a shared folder between both systems for exchanging files.

Unfortunately, most Windows users have a long history of complaining about it and then still continuing to use it.

There’s no way around it: if you keep using abusive software, you’ll stay in an abusive relationship.

In order of priority:

1. Check for a Linux-compatible alternative
2. Try installing/running it via Bottles (a veeeery easy to use Wine frontend, hiding lots of wine complexity). Wine allows running most windows programs directly on Linux, with almost zero performance overhead.
3. Try installing/running it via winboat (basically WSL in reverse - a well-integrated Windows VM or container running on Linux so you can run pesky Windows-only programs with it) (haven’t used it myself yet)
4. Use a regular full Windows VM on Linux (likely less well integrated and more resource intensive than #3, but maybe even more compatible). Set up a shared folder between host and VM for easy file transfers.
5. Dual-boot Windows from another disk. Set up a shared folder/partition for file transfers.

The current tech/IT sector is heavily relying on and riding hype trains. It’s a bit like the fashion industry that way. But this AI hype so far has only been somewhat useful.

Current general LLMs are decent for prototyping or example output to jump-start you into the general direction of your destination, but their output always needs supervision and most often it needs fixing. If you apply unreliable and constantly changing AI to everything, and completely throw out humans, just because it’s cheaper, then you’ll get vastly inferior results. You probably get faster results, but the results will have tons of errors which introduces tons of extra problems you never had before. I can see AI fully replacing some jobs in some specific areas where errors don’t matter much. But that’s about it. For all other jobs or purposes, AI will be an extra tool, nothing more, nothing less.

AI has its uses within specific domains, when trained only on domain-specific and truthful data. You know, things like AlphaZero or AlphaGo. Or AIs revealing new methods not known before to reach the same goal. But these general AIs like ChatGPT which are trained on basically the whole web with all the crap in it… it’s never going to be truly great. And it’s also becoming worse over time, i.e. not improving much at all, because the web will be even fuller with AI-generated crap in the future. So the AIs slurp up all that crap too. The training data gets muddier over time. The promise of AIs getting even more powerful as time goes on is just a marketing lie. There’s most likely a saturation curve, and we’re most likely very close to the saturation already, where it won’t really get any better. You could already see this by comparing the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4 (big) and then GPT-4 to GPT-5 (much smaller). Or take a look at FSD cars. Also not really happening, unless you like crashes. Of course, the companies want to keep the illusion rolling so they’ll always claim the next big revolution is just around the corner. Because they profit from investments and monthly paying customers, and as long as they can keep that illusion up and profit from that, they don’t even need to fulfill any more promises.

Two words which every internet-using person should know about because they tend to be forgotten: proportionality and sophistication.

Just because there is some element of crime within a specific group within a society, doesn’t mean that the solution is to completely exterminate the whole society.

This is what the word “extremism” means - if you’re an extremist you find extreme measures at least OK because you’ve stopped differentiating and thinking about proportions. And when doing extreme measures to a specific group of people (usually a minority group, or even a whole weaker country), then you’re right-wing extremist.

You wouldn’t want those things to be done to yourself when you’re part of a subgroup that’s under attack. You wouldn’t want to be a victim of extreme measures. That’s one reason why these extreme measures shouldn’t exist in the first place.

Collapse will definitely come. Our way of living on this planet is not sustainable, especially now where everyone who would have the power/influence to change things does literally and openly the opposite (e.g. USA turning their back on climate friendly research/technologies for example). So I think it’s kind of over, I’m kind of an optimist but time is simply running out, we had the Paris agreement and all that jazz like 10 years ago and almost nothing really changed (the only time something changed for the positive was during 2020/2021 but that was involuntarily!), in fact it’s now probably worse than it was back then, so it’s kind of over. Sure you can and should individually continue fighting for it because every small improvement will at least delay the collapse a bit which is useful, but I’m not going to naively believe that we will be able to counteract this anymore. It’s too little, too late. And that’s not even taking into account the possibility of a WW3. And rich/powerful people probably know this as well that the geological and political situations become increasingly unstable which is why they are building luxury bunkers. I would build one too, if I had the spare change.

1 (2012)

How to Wagon your Dragon

Soldier (Platoon)

Something quiet on the Western Contested Spot

Raindrop Man

Shaun of One Body

D.T. - The Default Terrestrial (E.T.)

Star War: Appearance of a Jed

Indiana Jones or the Only Crusader