NutWrench

NutWrench , 16 days ago

I finally switched to Linux Mint a week ago. I’ve just had enough of Microsoft and I couldn’t think of any more reasons why I shouldn’t switch.

I’ve got Libre Office for all my productivity needs. All my Steam games work under Linux. My VPN works just fine. Firefox for web browsing. Thunderbird for email. And Wine to run those 1-2 Windows programs that I just can’t do without.

NutWrench , 16 days ago

The switch to Linux will have to come from the bottom up. Corporations will NOT switch until Microsoft costs them serious money.

NutWrench , 17 days ago

Well, since the billionaire class doesn’t pay it’s fair share of the tax burden, that money has to come from somewhere.

NutWrench , 17 days ago

Rob . . . Robbyyyyyy . . . The Robster . . . The Robaroonie . . . cracking the bad jokes . . . coasting on what’s left of his SNL cred.

NutWrench , 17 days ago

Well . . . the smart people they ignored when CoPilot was first proposed.

NutWrench , 19 days ago

Is one of those “features” CoPilot? Because I did a search for it on my Windows 10 installation, and found several small bits of it, including a directory called “Microsoft CoPilot.” It looks like a placeholder for a full installation, later on. I’m guessing Office 365 put it there.

NutWrench , 20 days ago

The problem with big companies like Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, etc is that once all the smart & creative people have gone, all you have left are the “line must always go up” business idiots, who have no idea what their company even does or how to fix it.

CoPilot / Recall is exactly the kind of End-stage, “let’s screw our customers to death” idea the CEOs come up with before just their company implodes. Seriously. No one at Microsoft has thought this through beyond “data mining our customers.”

How are other governments going to react to this? Will they trust their nation’s secrets to an OS with such a blatant backdoor built into it? How does this “feature” work with search warrant requests? How secure can a database connected to an always-on Internet connection possibly be?

NutWrench , 18 days ago

Yup. I’ve seen this lemming-like mindset before: “But if WE don’t implement <terrible idea> then Google might implement <terrible idea> FIRST!”

It doesn’t become a less-stupid idea just because some else is doing it.

NutWrench , 19 days ago

Microsoft’s goal has always been to turn your PC into a locked-down console, loaded with their spyware and rent-ware. I’m surprised they’ve allowed 3rd party software on our PCs for this long.

NutWrench , 18 days ago

I installed Linux Mint on my internal D: drive. I didn’t want to dual-boot off my C: drive or mess with its partitions. (I had a bad experience removing Linux from a dual boot system and getting the partitions back to normal).

If you’re really worried about messing up your c: drive, you can physically disconnect it when you’re installing Linux, so the Live installer only has one choice for installation. Once you’re sure Linux is working correctly, you can run “sudo update-grub” which will add your c: drive to the boot menu on the d: drive. Now, you can boot into either OS without having to change your boot order in BIOS.

NutWrench , 20 days ago

20th century Google: “Don’t be evil.”

Wow. They sure let that motto slide, didn’t they?

NutWrench , 20 days ago

So . . . MS wants to force Recall on us… Assures us that it’s “secure.” And it can’t be bothered to even lightly encrypt the data? This is just plain incompetent.

Also, MS want to bundle CoPilot with Office 365, a subscription service. You will be paying for the privilege of spying on yourself.

NutWrench , 20 days ago

Another clueless CEO who doesn’t know what makes his company’s very existence possible.

NutWrench , 20 days ago

So . . . exactly what stealth crap is hidden in the Chrome “update?”

" . . . but it’s also the day Google started to pull the plug on many Manifest V2 extensions as its rollout of Manifest V3 takes shape."

Ahhhh, there we go. Manifest 3 will break almost all Chrome adblockers.

NutWrench , 20 days ago

Just don’t criticize fascists and religious nut jobs. That’s OBSCENE! /s

NutWrench , 22 days ago

This software is a security nightmare for any government that uses Windows. Absolutely no one is going to trust their nation’s security to an operating system with such a blatant backdoor built into it.

NutWrench , 22 days ago

Well clearly it’s the truck. If you don’t eat that truck right away, it’s gonna spoil.

NutWrench , 23 days ago

Samsung switched from Tizen to WearOS literally 4 months after I got my Galaxy watch 2. That was annoying. $200 is way too much to spend on such a short-lived product.

NutWrench , 21 days ago

I think Proton is the smartest thing Valve ever did. Steam is going to get about 90% of the gamers moving from Windows to Linux.

NutWrench , 16 days ago

I think Proton is the smartest thing Valve has ever done. Thanks to that, Steam is going to get about 90% of all the Windows gamers switching over to Linux.

NutWrench , 23 days ago

Same here. I installed Linux Mint on my internal D: drive and left my Windows C: drive completely untouched. Then, I changed my boot order in bios to boot from drive D: This lets you play with Linux without messing with the bootloader on your Windows drive, or fiddling with partitions.

Once I decided to keep Linux, I modified the D: drive bootloader (“sudo update-grub”) so it would show both drives when I booted from D: Now I can boot into either OS without having to change the boot order in BIOS.

NutWrench , 24 days ago

Back in the Dim Times (1990s), before ad-blockers appeared, there was a program called WebWasher. It’s basically a proxy server you run on your own computer and it contained all the ad filters. You just configured your browsers network setting to point to WebWasher and it would handle all the ad filtering.

So even if companies completely remove extension support from their browsers, we’ll still have an alternative. :)

NutWrench , 24 days ago

If you want to believe that illness is caused by demons and witchcraft, fine, knock yourself out. But that’s not how the real world works. If you’re going to make extraordinary claims about reality, then you have to provide extraordinary proof. “I believe” isn’t going to cut it in the reality-based community.

NutWrench , 24 days ago

Every once in a while, a squirrel finds a nut. This doesn’t make Musk some kind of Urskek philosopher -sage.

NutWrench , 24 days ago

“Trial’s over. Donnie’s a convicted felon. The judge out front should have told ya.”

NutWrench , 27 days ago

A little too “pseudo” and not enough “random.” :)

NutWrench , 27 days ago

These are the sort of accidents you get when you mix a child-like worship of billionaires with cheap, sheet metal construction and a failure to grind down exposed sharp edges because there was no rule saying that the billionaire had to do it.

NutWrench , 27 days ago

Both strongly resemble Boston Dynamics’s “Spot” robo-canine.

I’m betting that’s exactly what they are, with some glued-on plastic detailing.

NutWrench , 27 days ago

Here’s the sooper-secret search result algorithm for whatever you type into Google:

YouTube results, followed by Reddit results, followed by “Sponsored” results, followed by AI-written Bot results, then a couple pages of Amazon results and finally, on page 10 or so, a ten-year-old result that’s probably no longer relevant.

NutWrench , 27 days ago

There’s a native Linux version of Steam (at least for Ubuntu / Mint) that works great. It also uses a proprietary Wine wrapper called Proton, that’s pre-configured for all your Steam Library games.

NutWrench , 28 days ago

I can’t think of a single reason why I would need detailed snapshots of everything I did with my own computer.

But I can think of plenty of reasons why corporations, advertisers and governments would want that.

NutWrench , 28 days ago

I think the problem with big companies like Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda, etc is that once all the smart & creative people have gone, all you have left are the “line must always go up” business idiots, who have no idea what their company does or how to fix it.

CoPilot is exactly the kind of End-stage, “let’s screw our customers to death” idea the CEOs come up with right before their company implodes.

The reason I know that’s true is because when this stupid idea for CoPilot came up, there were no smart people who immediately said, “do you have any idea what a terrible f*cking plan this is?”

NutWrench , 29 days ago

Your Steam games will go to the grave with you

Just like my porn!

NutWrench , 29 days ago

I think this is what happens to every company once all the smart / creative people have gone. All you have left are the “line must always go up” business idiots who don’t understand what their company does or know how to make it work.

NutWrench , 29 days ago

You know, The Infinite Monkey Theorem states that if you chain a room full of monkeys to typewriters and let them all beat the keys at random, for an infinite amount of time, they will . . . eventually . . . through sheer random chance . . . produce the comple works of William Shakespeare. Maybe in 10 trillion years or so. THIS is current state of “AI.”

What Musk is proposing is like building an army of very expensive, very wasteful fusion-powered robots to beat the monkeys in the hope that the monkeys will work just a little bit faster.

NutWrench , 29 days ago

And all that avocado toast! I mean really!

NutWrench , 30 days ago

Isn’t AI amazing?

NutWrench , 30 days ago

Funny story: a guy brings his car into a repair shop for service. Starts watching porn on his phone in the waiting room. Meanwhile the Bluetooth speaker in his car is giving everyone the full audio experience.

Make sure you know what your phone is paired with. Especially if you watch porn.

NutWrench , 1 month ago

Behold the wonders of AI! Now, we don’t have to pay human beings to edit webpages for us! Thanks to AI, you can just sit back and watch the money roll in!

NutWrench , 30 days ago

Or lawyer-bot cites some sovereign citizen crap as if it were established legal precedent. “You can’t prosecute me in this court! Your flag has a gold fringe on it!”

NutWrench , 1 month ago

This isn’t the first time Microsoft has pushed telemetry and malware in its OS. But I think they have finally crossed the line with CoPilot. What they want to do with it is so incredibly obvious and intrusive that most people just won’t stand for it.

NutWrench , 1 month ago

Sounds like Google wants to get out of the search engine business. Maybe we should help them. Try DuckDuckGo. Or SearX

searx.space

NutWrench , 1 month ago

Yup. I think this is what always happens when the smart people leave a company and the only people left are “the line must always go up” business idiots who don’t understand what they have or how it works.

NutWrench , 1 month ago

I’m worried about my Steam library. Steam ended support for Windows 7 not long ago. How long will they Support Windows 10?

NutWrench , 1 month ago

It looks like Windows 10 is going to be my last Windows operating system. Thanks to Microsoft.

NutWrench , 1 month ago

They also highlight the fact that Google’s AI is not a magical fountain of new knowledge, it is reassembled content from things humans posted in the past indiscriminately scraped from the internet and (sometimes) remixed to look like something plausibly new and “intelligent.”

This. “AI” isn’t coming up with new information on its own. The current state of “AI” is a drooling moron, plagiarizing any random scrap of information it sees in a desperate attempt to seem smart. The people promoting AI are scammers.

NutWrench , 29 days ago

And this graphic is from the Holocaust Memorial Trust? Well, isn’t that just exploding with irony?

NutWrench , 29 days ago

Many fallout shelters also had food rations and cots that doubled as stretchers (they had handles at the top and bottom). A few even had radios and Geiger counters.