skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for sharing your story. I'd like to add that it's very much possible to disable many of these annoying things. But doing so: 1) requires some research 2) can cause your system to become unstable (e.g. if you run a script that tweaks many settings in the registry) 3) those settings may get reset with a major Windows update 4) you hardly need to do this on MacOS. Myself, I have my ways of dealing with all of these things. But it feels like an uphill battle.
It's been years since I played it, but I remember there being some fairly intricate vector illustrations in certain locations. A vague memory of some sort of giant land-walking robot you rode for a while. It may have had some animation, or that might just be my imagination.
> Linux Respects Its Users

Maybe I'm just ranting, but Ubuntu seems to be by far the most common distro for Windows users, and they're definitely not perfect in this respect. I've been running Linux as my main OS for about 20 years and I can't rid myself of snaps. Synaptic will show that the package provided by Mozilla is the latest version and the snap is the installed version. If I reinstall, it goes back to the Mozilla package, only to mysteriously show the snap is the installed version within a few days.

I don't want to bring up the discussion of the Snap Store again, but this experience is pretty much what you get with Windows, just on a much smaller scale. I'd strongly encourage Windows users to install Mint or some other friendly alternative rather than going with the standard recommendation.
Plus there's a camera in the car. Pretty easy to keep riders accountable, and solve any dispute.

Compare that to other car sharing options (e.g. Zipcar, where cars are usually a mess, but there's no way to keep users accountable).
I had the good fortune in being able to attend a couple of corporate receptions as a kid, where I had free roam over some of the exhibit halls in after-hours. It was incredible.
> The EU accounted for more than $24 billion in revenue last quarter, the most revenue outside of North America. Obviously this isn't something Apple takes lightly.

"Europe", not the EU.

And Apple's "Europe" segment isn't even just Europe. It also includes India, the Middle East and Africa.
- no more solitaire

- cortana

- ads… ADS… in the OS

- forced updates

- windows live accounts (or is it microsoft.com? wait, no, I think it’s office.com?)

- two system settings screens

- major new versions after “last version of Windows ever: 10”
Ironic because Microsoft's biggest OS competitor Apple uses a lot of SF inspiration in their OS.
They don't even need to output to JSON - https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2021/hosting-sqlite-database...

The entire thing could be a static site using the above method -- even if it's many hundreds of megabytes in size!
Discussion (16 points, 8 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40675849
Show HN: Language-Agnostic Mutation Testing with LLM-Powered Agents
This app has solved alt-tabbing for me: https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/.
Although not non existent, I’ve found this to be less of an issue with the Surface laptops and look forward to trying the Surface CoPilot PCs.
Have never had that much of an issue with Windows 11. I think Recall could be a useful feature once implemented.
On non surface laptops, I still don’t understand why PC manufacturers are so beholden to McAfee?
I prefer Linux (Ubuntu, Alpine, etc) over MacOS X because it can be locked down a lot easier and you have a lot more control over actually what's going on behind the scenes. not to mention all the software is free.
> LLMs aren't trained for accuracy

This assertion in the article doesn't seem right at all. When LLMs weren't trained for accuracy, we had "random story generators" like GPT-2 or GPT-3. The whole breakthrough with RLHF was that we started training them for accuracy - or the appearance of it, as rated by human reviewers.

This step both made the models a lot more useful and willing to stick to instructions, and also a lot better at... well, sounding authoritative when they shouldn't.
Another thing I was always curious about is why swing-arm actuators stuck around all these years, rather than moving to a single fixed rail with a strip of individually addressable read regions, and another rail separate (and upstream) from this with write capability).

No more mechanical actuation at all, eliminating a huge amount of complicated precision machined componentry as well as the voice coil itself.

Mounting this fixed rail to multiple structural points inside the case means there would be zero possibility of a head crash.

No cross interference or mode switching between reading and writing. The entire region passing under the rail can be scanned simultaneously, or if it's not possible to manufacture such a sensor at a data density to match the drive platter then perhaps the rail could shift a millimetre or so back and forth to allow micron-fine positioning from a milimeter-course array of heads. Much less mass to move, likely simplifies the math needed to meet the data in flight, and reduces the total reciprocating moment to a single linear axis solution.

I know I can't be the only person, nor the 1st, to have considered this idea. I suspect multiple variations may be lurking in the patent portfolios of the big storage mfrs. But I would love to know why nothing resembling it has ever been tried in production over the 30 or 40 something years that hard drives have been mass commoditized.
This is sad. If this was indeed copyright infringement, what was the rationale behind the Internet Archive initially adding these books? The Internet Archive has never been a pirate site, so there must have been some logic or justification for indexing these books.
They (chicken soup) bought the company a friend works at. They failed to pay their employee’s health insurance premiums, then failed to tell the employees for months. Now the employees are having all their claims revoked during that period and are having to pay them on their own.

And this is the second time they’ve done this.
You are using a product before enshittification begins, of course it's much nicer.

When it's been 28 quarters of general availability of Wayno and profits need to keep growing faster than before, they'll get dirty, the AC will stop being fixed, they'll start getting flats / engine trouble, etc. in the middle of the drive.

Enjoy it while it lasts. Be sure you move quickly to the next new thing before this one goes downhill too :/
Presumably all the executives, PMs, and designers all use Macs.
I used Windows from about 1993 to 2006. In 2006 I was given a Mac Mini as a thank you for completing an unpaid internship. I fell in love with macOS and have basically been a macOS user since.

At the start of the pandemic I bought a PC to game on. 16-core Ryzen, 64 gigabytes of ram. I'd been kind of pleasantly surprised with WSL and just general improvements in cohesiveness. It's still got that Windows jank under the hood though.

But then... It won't f**ing run Windows 11 because it doesn't have a TPM. And they pester me about buying a new computer. You have to be kidding me.

It's just absolutely incredible Microsoft decided to declare very powerful machines only a few years old essentially eWaste.

I'm probably going to give Desktop Linux another go, at least for a bit. I have no idea what distro though.

I ran Ubuntu on some of my older machines for a number of years. I actually loved Unity, I still think it was the best Linux desktop and I'm bummed they basically killed it.

I tried Pop_OS! a couple years ago on a MacBook Pro but it just up and imploded on me after a couple days Windows ME style. I've got Elementary OS on an old MacBook and I've had a decent time with it. The apps not made specifically for it though. Felt real out of place.
Most of these will run in a VM just fine.

I have a barebones 'just installed' win10 image that I use to clone a new VM for each new app I add. Solidworks, NX, Cadence, Altium and ISE all work fine with no problems because of 3d acceleration or such.

Admitably my impetus for this was conflicting FlexLM emulators cough, but there's no reason it can't work just as a way of keeping things organised and clean on a host OS that isn't windows.
Fantastic! We must ask the proper authorities to weigh in, and invent something if necessary.

The language stack exchange, maybe? Social networks #linguistics tags?

Mixaprop can stand in as a name until we find one more true
You're definitely right. In most of the US there's a speed limit and there's an understood amount over the speed limit you can still drive and cops won't bother you.
> disastrous random access latency of optical media

In my experience, it wasn't that much of a problem, since unlike HDDs the latency was very predictable (subject to CD drive speed), so programs were written just fine to handle it.

(It probably also helped that the average CD drive speed was faster than the worst-case drive that the program designed for)

I still think developers should be forbidden from having SSDs so they stop writing such terrible programs.
Going by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea..., China appears to be producing new reactors at a rate 25x greater than France (because China is building 25 reactors). They're both producing about the same amount of power, but China have AFAIK the tech edge with the first 4th Gen reactor in commercial operation and innovations like the Gobi Desert reactor where they are building power plants that have less need for water.

The West has been working to create a strategic axis of failure for the last few decades when it comes to energy infrastructure. I'd feel a lot more comfortable if the Chinese were at least involved in any nuclear reactors that I was going to be the consumer of. They seem to be good at it and I think energy is important.
Fortunately O&O ShutUp10++ exists.
> It should be fine to ask that question

It is. I interpreted the parent post as a neutral question, and I intended my reply to involve playful analogizing. I'm sorry that it didn't reach you as such through the side-channel-impoverished medium of text.
it's really not the ads that upset me, it's the remotely exploitable vulnerabilities that take Microsoft 3 years to fix that's kind of where I have a problem. I stopped using Microsoft products in like 1991 man sorry
I think Proton is a great project (and CodeWeavers deserve credit there as well), but why does it have to be a choice?

I have been multi booting for 20 years, preferring Linux distributions the whole time, but other OSes when I want to use them.

I recently started using a dedicated Windows system for gaming and other Windows favored tasks. I am running a KVM switch, using AMD Graphics on a Linux system and Nvidia on this Windows system. I also have a macOS system, that I use as needed.

I do this with mobile devices as well. It doesn't seem worth it to squabble over choosing a path.
I am an author who relies on copyright for part of my living, yet I agree that copyright protection lasts too long. I feel like it should protect the work for a reasonable time--say 20 years--after which one must pay an initially modest but exponentially increasing fee to renew the copyright every X years. Big players like Disney could afford to keep their stuff out of the public domain for a while, but not forever. And many deceased artists' work would slip into the public domain when their estate could no longer afford the renewal fee.
Unfortunately by June 1984 people had already seen the Mac and Lisa.

Fortunately 2024 is the year of the Linux desktop, while Apple and Microsoft are busy adding creepy and intrusive AI features.
Likely a reference to an old search engine (altavista), which of course sucked next to google.

Yet, it ironically gave better results than Google does today.
> Most of these will run in a VM just fine.

Emphatically, no. Running CAM, or CAD software, in a VM, is almost unusably slow with any large models. I’ve tried. It’s not fun to zoom through a large model at 5 FPS. You need to have GPU passthrough, and even though you can make that work, it’s very risky (hardly a stable sane thing to build a business on), and you’re just running Windows again, but worse. We need GPUs in Windows already (primarily NVIDIA) just to keep the CAD from being too slow, and to keep our rendering options open.

Even if it worked brilliantly in a VM (which it doesn’t), why would I double my operating systems and run them simultaneously? That’s just begging for compatibility issues, frustration, and defeats the point of avoiding Windows entirely. Any benefits for avoiding Windows are almost completely negated.
I am exclusively a Linux user (mobile and desktop) but I gotta be fair: if updates upon installation are the main complaint...

Pretty sure some vendors update phones in the store to avoid bothering the customer with it. Seems like a lot of effort to boot the full inventory's amount of phones every time there's a security patch only so people don't have to download a diff on first launch (edit: found it https://www.macrumors.com/2024/03/27/what-new-machine-to-upd...)
In system design that distinction may not matter.
I hope that was sarcasm
Redbox has a streaming service, too. I joined it only to subscribe to a single movie: Final Destination 3, which I found out while working through that series is only available on the platform for some reason while all of the other films are elsewhere.
Love the print statements still in the code:

https://github.com/jamespfennell/new-typesetting-system/blob...

Alot of this doesnt look much different than Java code bases i see
Huawei Announces Harmony Intelligence on HarmonyOS Next
If you're not a paid shill then you sure do a good job of it
Charging at 1C or less on phones would mean 20W on a 5000mAh battery. For laptops it would be 100W maximum, probably 65W or 45W for most laptops. All the Dell laptops I have allow me to set a low percentage and high percentage, and I have the high set to 55% on laptops I use primarily plugged in, and 80-90% on more mobile laptops. Now if only Pixel phones and ereaders/watches/battery banks also allow me to have such control over how much to charge.

Would be ideal to have LFP batteries and such control, but that will take a while.
I realise the 'MACH' name here doesn't seem to be directly related to mechanical speed, but back in the 90s I remember seeing a quote in a computer magazine about hard drive head seeking and reading, with something along the lines of it being equivalent to:
"flying in a fighter jet 20 feet above the ground at Mach 2 and counting the blades of grass as you go by"

I wonder how accurate that is as a comparison (both now and 30 years ago): I'm guessing there was a fair bit of exaggeration going on, but maybe not.
NASA indefinitely delays return of Starliner to review propulsion data
> At this point, I have lost count of the number of times that I've left my perfectly working Windows computer at the end of my work day, only to return to a completely broken computer that won't boot the next morning.

Has this happened to anyone else? I've never experienced an official Windows update rendering a system unbootable. I've certainly broken Windows before, especially when messing with the MBR, dual booting, changing system files for customization etc., but never with a random Tuesday patch.
The best gaming machine indeed runs Linux, and is called Steam Deck.

I don't like macOS, but I'd take it over Windows without much hesitation. MacOS is like an authoritarian but tidy country. Windows is more and more like a corrupt third-world country :(
Thank you, but I specifically mean the windows XP alt tabbing era. Pressing alt tab should always go back to the previous window in focus, not the previous app. This one looks app-based too, sadly.

Pressing alt tab tab should go back two windows of focus, and alt tab tab tab should be three, etc. It was the best feature and now I regularly lose vim windows and terminals because switching windows seems to ruin the tabbing order. It’s never history-based anymore.

I’ll try it out though.
It will resonate with tech sector workers in S.F and Austin. Maybe the digital nomads driving up cost of living in Lisbon, Barcelona and Prague. Aside from that, no.
Well I guess that explains why "the normal force" is the one that counteracts gravity.

(for those of you who don't know, the super simplified explanation in physics 101 is that the normal force is the vector that pushes up while gravity pushes down for objects that are resting on top of each other)

So I guess the one who named it "the normal force" would be more correct that he ever imagined if your theory of gravity was the real correct one!
Oh man, the absolute clusterfuck of settings screens is irritating. OS settings interface isn't a fucking micro service project; it's like technically, yes, they're updating the same things underneath but I don't want to spend mental energy thinking about the best way to update network settings in <current year>
Not "for printers" per se. What it was designed for was to accurately represent a printed page in electronic form. So the innards of a PDF look more like "instructions" for a virtual printer telling it where to position "font glyphs" on a "virtual sheet of paper".

It's use as an almost universal "printer format" for applying toner/ink to paper came much later.
We're basically at Vista again, but in a different dimension. This time instead of performance, it's invasiveness, and erosion of both discoverability and general cohesiveness.

Windows 11 installs all sorts of stupid stuff and turns it on.

I feel like I only know how to use Windows 10 and 11 because I know about all the old dialogs from old versions.

I struggled today on a Windows 10 computer with Wi-Fi and ethernet to turn on/off Wi-Fi due to mixed meaning of tile highlight state. Maybe it's just me.

And when Windows 11 installs updates and says "You're almost there" I say, "no, you're almost there and why are you doing this now."

I'm optimistic that eventually leadership will change and this will be corrected. Edit: or somehow a new OS will be developed that's backwards compatible with Windows.
>I don't see political language at all.

The article links to openly political articles. Whatever the supposed context (excuse), this is a political act in the context of a research presentation. As if this is not enough, the article quotes unsupported statements of Brandon Johnson as well as counterarguments (though the latter are mostly burred in the article link). Which is unnecessary to present their data and is unequivocally political. That they are "both siding" the political argument should not be an argument: a. because it is on its face inappropriate in such a presentation and b. such a tack tries to hurdle the obvious critique question that would follow. Which is whether both sides are presented evenly. Are they acting as political journalists or trying to present data? Give us a break. The authors can write what they wish, of course, but don't ask us to turn a blind eye to the politics that are inserted into the article. Whatever the excuse.

> I also don't understand why this would be a politicized topic.

The topic is openly politicized, as everyone can see from the fact that it is hotly debated on the political stage. It is difficult to believe that you are being serious.

>There's a for-profit corporation selling snake-oil to cities, and then there are people (like the researcher/author) who want to reduce crime and save taxpayer money.

Okay, I see.

I rest my case.

What a waste of time.

>It's important to note that this researcher would easily get published regardless of what she found. If ShotSpotter works at all, that's a huge result! If it doesn't work, that's also very notable! And if the evidence is mixed, it still contradicts every other unbiased study that shows that ShotSpotter doesn't work. In a way, this was the most boring result.

It reads to me like you don't understand the relevant principles under discussion when it comes to research.

>Plus the author seems to go out of her way to be balanced, writing things like:

Is this your idea of research critique? Because this is the type of analysis, generally speaking anyway, that is accomplished in actual competent research critique. And a lot more. Which was the sum of my comment.

We must be in agreement that what this topic calls for is intensive critique and review of all research.

I'll especially be interested in whether or not the metrics are even meaningful, let alone if the results are high evidence, or if the research design itself is faulty. Of course, I wouldn't dare suggest a political reason for that should I see obvious faults in it. Like I said, I'd await a real critique / review and let that speak for itself.
>If you don't make your books readily available, then you should have no right to demand copies of your book be removed from places like IA

What if an author explicitly doesn't want to distribute their works or to distribute an alternative version of their works? There was the recent case of the company that owns the rights to Dr. Suess choosing not to publish old versions of books they felt had racist depictions.

And who sets the standard for readily available? If I offer my book for sale for $100 is it readily available? At what price is something no longer readily available? Does it depend on the type of book? What if it's for sale broadly but not in the state where you live? What if it's free but must be read in person and cannot be taken home with you?
You're comparing to the free tiers of Spotify and Youtube, which in effect is saying that we should put ads into our books.
It is, I did it. It just took a while.

There were system settings for the start menu things and the search bar. All the preloaded crud like Candy Crush, which I got the impression was more of a placeholder(?), was removed easily enough through the add/remove software panel. There was a preference somewhere to get Edge to shut up too.

I think I might’ve had to Google something to find one setting. None of it was really too bad. It’s just a bunch of wasted time that I shouldn’t have had to deal with.

And it feels like the OneDrive pop-up comes back every once in a while after a system update. But that’s easily dismissed too.

Nothing came from my OEM, it was just a bog standard Windows install. All the junk comes with windows. As the user, none of this was for me.

I view some of the stuff Apple does as an attempt to help me by selling me something, though not all of it. I don’t want it to happen. It’s annoying. But it somehow feels more appropriate than what Windows does.

Preloading Candy Crush? I mean come on.
But shouldn’t they inform you and let you opt out of the downgrade even if they know something?

Ubuntu at least asks if you want to proceed with a package update, you can look at the changelog to see what the update is about, and you can mark packages to be on hold and skipped for updates.
Is confabulation different from hallucination? If not I do suppose this is a more accurate term for the phenomenon except that the exact definition isn’t common sense without looking it up whereas “hallucination” is more widely understood.
You can with a tremendous amount of effort create a brittle config that will run some of that software acceptably, especially if you're sailing the high seas. In a real world situation it's an absolute no-go.
Turn it into a theory that predicts exact quantities (accelerations) and I will start paying attention.
The first example is from an actual game, Larsen-Korchnoi, where White does manage to put the Knight on d5. The article includes that part of the game, it's a pretty funky manoeuvre.
> Two weeks ago … I've since bought one and am using it fairly extensively

How did he get it so fast.

I bought one in May and won’t get it until August.

Website says current waitlist ETA is November.

—-

Kind of makes me want to cancel my order if he got to jump the line.
Isn't that the issue? Getting thumbs up from an underpaid human reviewer isn't the same as accurate facts.