0xEF

I have not experienced that, which is why I questioned the difficulty. I've installed Windows 10 on a good amount of machines at this point, bypassing the NRO during the install process, and have not had any issues that prevented me from installing software/games or just using it like a normal PC, even after connecting it to the Internet.

However, my experience may be dated. It's been awhile since I've had to freshly install Windows. Perhaps things have changed.

Ahh. Well, I feel stupid.

I'd say it's increasingly hard to tell anymore, in my defense, but my god, it's right on the page.

By Microsoft's own admission, it sounds like it:

> Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC is built on the Windows 10 / 11 code base so it’s natively compatible with the software and solutions you use today.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/download-windows-...

I've not tried to use it specifically, which is why I'm curious.

Interesting. And worrying. I see a good number of those Kamrui (and competitor) Mini PCs from Amazon replacing a lot of the far more expensive and lower-powered industrial PCs for various uses in smaller machine shops. I was not surprised since they're inexpensive and have a decent kick to the hardware, but I've noted that the version of Windows they ship with is fairly free of a lot of the usual bloat, so I assumed they were just using one of the available scripts to remove it...which likely included the KMS38 work-around? And I can tell you first-hand that most of the smaller shops are far too busy penny-pinching to spend even a few hundred dollars a year on licensing one or two of those machines properly.

I never looked that deep into it since nobody came to me with any issues about it, but you have me wondering. I don't personally use Windows, either, despite my HN handle (it's just a reference I thought was funny), and I am finding myself more and more ignorant to what Microsoft is actually pushing. Thanks for the heads up. Will spend some time looking at this deeper.

Running unlicensed versions of Windows has historically been pretty easy. Am I missing something with Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021?

With Windows 7, once the evaluation period ran out, you just had to deal with an annoying notification about your copy not being genuine, but it never stopped me from doing whatever I needed to do after installing it on dozens of machines over the years, at this point.

I'd push even further and say it encroaches, if not outright invades the conversation about who owns what data. Both are terribly muddy waters, to be sure, but something worth hashing out since we live in an age of information that is both accessible and under threat, so the real question is where do we want to collectively steer this ship?

The amount of injected implication you are imposing on everything I said...this is some seriously unhinged gaslighting in effort to obfuscate the fact that you came out of the gate calling someone delusional over a comment you barely understood. We're wasting each other's time, so I'm out.

Try to have a better day.

> I am not 100% certain why Google decided to ruin google search.

Ask Prabhakar Raghavan. Bet he knows.

You clearly didn't read my whole original comment before mouthing off. Go back and do that, you'll find that I pointed out most do not complete it, that it is supposed to be challenging and I never called it "easy" as you imply ("not tremendously difficult" =/= "easy")

Heck, I even talked about having to be serious about completion, and you could not bother to read the whole comment, then proceed to call me delusional? FFS, I am now praying for your co-workers and I'm not even religious.

I can't begin to describe how valuable your input has been through this whole thread about something you're quite possessive and passionate about, which surely places you in a position to aggressively dismiss any other possible way of looking at it! Wow, love learning about new perspectives on HN!

Wishing you best of luck in AoC, Life and Love but I imagine someone like you doesn't need it, being a complete toolbox and all.

P.S.: Tell your coworkers I'm sorry they have to put up with you.

Comparing previous years, they're exactly what I'd expect, to be honest. Only people serious about completion will...well...complete it. Even if they do not know any code, if you pick something well-documented like Python or whatever, it should not be a tremendous challenge so long as you have the drive to finish the event. Code isn't exactly magic, though it does require some problem-solving and dedication. Since this is a self-paced event that does not offer any sort of immediate reward for completion, most people will drop out due to limited bandwidth needing to be devoted to everything else in their lives. That versus, say, a college course where you paid to be there and the grade counts toward your degree; there's simply more at stake when it comes to completing the course.

But, speaking to the original question as to the number of newbies that go all the way, I'd say one cannot expect to increase their skills in anything if one sticks in their comfort zone. It should be hard, and as a newbie who participated in previous years, I can confirm it often is. But I learned new things every time I did it, even if I did not finish.

Your profile: Former staff software engineer at big tech co, now focused on my SaaS app, which is solo, bootstrapped, and profitable.

Yep. Makes sense.

> And by any metric

Can you cite one? Just curious. I enjoy when people challenge the idea that the advancement of tech doesn't always result in a better world for all because I grew up in Detroit, where a bunch of car companies decided that automation was better than paying people, moved out and left the city a hollowed out version of itself. Manufacturing has returned, more or less, but now Worker X is responsible for producing Nx10 Widgets in the same amount of time Worker Y had to produce 75 years ago, but still gets paid a barely livable wage because the unchecked force of greed has made it so whatever meager amount of money Worker X makes is siphoned right back out of their hands as soon as the check clears. So, from where I'm standing, your version of "improvement" is a scam, something sold to us with marketing woo and snake oil labels, promising improvement if we just buy in.

The thing is, I don't hate making money. I also don't hate change. Quite the opposite, as I generally encourage it, especially when it means we grow as humans...but that's generally not the focus of what you call "change," is it? Be honest with yourself.

What I hate is the argument that the only way to make it happen is by exploiting people. I have a deep love technology and repair it in my spare time for people to help keep things like computers or dishwashers out of landfills, saving people from having to buy new things in a world that treats technology as increasingly disposable, as though the resources used to create are unlimited. I know quite a bit about what makes it tick, as a result, and I can tell you first hand that there's no reason to have a microphone on a refrigerator, or a mobile app for an oven. But you and people like you will call that change, selling it as somehow making things more convenient while our data is collected, sorted and we spend our days fending of spam phone calls or contemplating if what we said today is tomorrow's thought crime. Heck, I'm old enough to remember when phone line tapping was a big deal that everyone was paranoid about, and three decades later we were convinced to buy listening devices that could track our movements. None of this was necessary for the advancement of humanity, just the engorgement of profits.

So what good came of it all? That you and I can argue on the Internet?

I was once in your camp, thinking there was some sort of middle-ground to be had with the emergence of Generative AI and it's potential as a useful tool to help me do more work in less time, but I suppose the folks who opposed automated industrial machinery back in the day did the same.

The problem is that, historically speaking, you have two choices;

1. Resist as long as you can, risking being labeled a Luddite or whatever.

2. Acquiesce.

Choice 1 is fraught with difficulty, like a dinosaur struggling to breathe as an asteroid came and changed the atmosphere it had developed lungs to use. Choice 2 is a relinquishment of agency, handing over control of the future to the ones pulling the levers on the machine. I suppose there is a rare Choice 3 that only the elite few are able to pick, which is to accelerate the change.

My increased cynicism about technology was not something that I started out with. Growing up as a teen in the late-80's/early-90's, computers were hotly debated as being either a fad that would die out in a few years or something that was going to revolutionize the way we worked and give us more free time to enjoy life. That never happened, obviously. Sure, we get more work done in less time, but most of us still work until we are too broken to continue and we didn't really gain anything by acquiescing. We could have lived just fine without smartphones or laptops (we did, I remember) and all the invasive things that brought with it such as surveillance, brain-hacking advertising and dopamine burnout. The massive structures that came out of all the money and genius that went into our tech became megacorporations that people like William Gibson and others warned us of, exerting a level of control over us that turned us all into batteries for their toys, discarded and replaced as we are used up. It's a little frightening to me, knowing how hyperbolic that used to sound 30 years ago, and yet, here we stand.

Generative AI threatens so much more than just altering the way we work, though. In some cases, its use in tasks might even be welcomed. I've played with Claude Code, every generative model that Poe.com has access to, DeepSeek, ChatGPT, etc...they're all quite fascinating, especially when viewed as I view them; a dark mirror reflecting our own vastly misunderstood minds back to us. But it's a weird place to be in when you start seeing them replace musicians, artists, writers...all things that humanity has developed over many thousands of years as forms of existential expression, individuality, and humanness because there is no question that we feel quite alone in our experience of consciousness. Perhaps that is why we are trying to build a companion.

To me, the dangers are far too clear and present to take any sort of moderate position, which is why I decided to stop participating in its proliferation. We risk losing something that makes us us by handing off our creativity and thinking to this thing that has no cognizance or comprehension of its own existence. We are not ready for AI, and AI is not ready for us, but as the Accelerationists and Broligarchs continue to inject it into literally every bit of tech they can, we have to make a choice; resist or capitulate.

At my age, I'm a bit tired of capitulating, because it seems every time we hand the reigns over to someone who says they know what they are doing, they fuck it up royally for the rest of us.

It might be silly to impose rules on the English language at all.

And yes, I realize by putting that in an HN comment to live on the Internet forever, the ghost of every English teacher I had growing up in the US is going to haunt me, one by one, until I am mad and rendered unable to communicate because the anarchic amalgamation that is the English language has lost any shadow of sensibility.

In fairness, I find it a perfectly wonderful language to get creative with, but I really do believe its evolution as a sort of Frankenstein's Monster, composed of parts borrowed from German, Latin, French, etc, has allowed it to transcend into something that broke free of any rules we tried to impose upon it. We're taught different ways to write an essay "correctly" for the sake of appeasing specific branches of academia, grammatical structures that are often awkward and completely at odds with how we actually speak, inducting more and more colloquialisms and slang into the accepted dictionary authorities each year as the stodgy old guard, once considered rebellious and fresh, passes on to the next generation.

English is dynamic and alive, in that way, leaving our educational curriculum running to catch up. Believing that, I cannot blame even the most eloquent native speaker for getting things "wrong" from the perspective of a non-native speaker. It's likely that they learned different and flimsy rules at different times from different sources.

I'm not sure the generalization is accurate. Most of us can remember the 'i before e' rule we were taught as kids, but the English language is a celebrated mess of borrowed words and guidelines masquerading as rules. It is admittedly confusing for native and non-native speakers alike, but if we throw a reliance on spell check into the mix, which does little to help with spelling a person's name, we just create more opportunity for degradation.

That said, it should be a pretty hard rule when writing about a person to, at the very least, check to make sure you spelled their name correctly.

PDF link for those that are curious: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...

The general sentiment is that you cannot trust code you did not write yourself and that we need to be able to trust the person who did, but you can form your own conclusions about how that fits into the modern tech landscape.

I can be pedantically forgiving myself, admittedly, but this is one thing I'm staunchly behind. If I cannot read every character of every line of code, including packages/dependencies, that makes the hardware function and allows me to alter it as I see fit, then it is not truly open-sourced.

For me, the open-source movement is about keeping my software and hardware in alignment with my values and security concerns. If there is a part of that "open-sourced" software that is closed to me, I have no way to evaluate that and determine if I want to use it. Yes, this imposes some extremely strict limitations about what I end up with in my projects, but I'm okay with this since it forces me to think differently about certain problems.

I also don't mind that other people use product with closed-source portions or whatever, and in fact, find some of them quite good. I'm a wearer of an original Pebble to this day, and I'm fine with knowing some proprietary libraries are needed to make it go. I didn't build it, I'm not hacking on it, it's just serving my meager smartwatch needs in this instance.

What I do mind is misappropriation of what I consider a clearly defined term. I am not sure why we haven't come up with another term to mean "partially open-sourced" yet (or have we, and I am just not aware of it?) but I think it's time we did so more discerning users can delineate between the two when making a decision about products to purchase or build.

Truly captures the spirit of these types of HN comments; Person A does a thing, Person B points out how pointless thing could have been done better in effort to flex smart.

Post - Blog post about recapping a Timex Sinclair 1000"

Response - "Ah yes, the 'multi-region composite mod'—because nothing screams cutting-edge like jury-rigging a 40-year-old potato to a VCR."

It's probable that LLMs are already operating on the real HN, agentically or driven by users who want to create intelligent-sounding comments for the sake of upvotes.

Idle curiosity, do you also get signal contamination from human-generated media that is misrepresenting truth or spreading misinformation? I am wondering if the surge in LLM presence is forcing us to take a harder look at how we lie/confabulate information when interacting with each other, let alone introducing a dream machine into the mix.

Not really a difference for those of us who are not medicated, though. Everything around us, especially the stuff served up on the screen you are looking at now, is all clamoring for our attention, burning out our reward centers with reckless abandon in the process. Jumping from app to app has us chasing dopamine crumbs just like cigarettes did when I smoked them for 15 years of my life. The lesson is if you want to hack a human, make them feel something.

Thinking is hard, so any product that gives people an excuse to stop doing it will do quite well, even if it creates more inconveniences like framework bloat or dependency rot. This is why shoehorning AI into everything is so wildly successful; it gives people the okay to stop thinking.

You do know that you can learn to make new sounds with your mouth, tongue and vocal chords right? You are aware that just because a particular language does not use a phoneme that does not eliminate your ability to reproduce it? I have a lot of fun learning how to make sounds and pronounce things properly from different languages, my latest being Danish, which is proving difficult but certainly far from impossible. Perhaps you should try it, sometime?

Despite your otherwise quality contributions to HN, you're coming off as a bit insane here. I hope you understand that, which is why I will continue to badger my point; there is no reason they can't ask that people use their preferred name. None. The only thing you do by continuing to argue against that point is push your own Anglicize-all-the-things notion of the world, which is certainly not shared by all, not even remotely.

> There is also the pretty major issue that native English speakers cannot even pronounce "Türkiye", nor easily type it.

Skill issue. I don't speak Turkish either, but it takes all of two minutes to look up and learn the pronunciation and how to type an umlaut over a U with a simple alt code. I mean, come on. The Turkish government isn't asking everyone to convert to Islam and get to a conversational level with the language, just say their country's name how they think it should be said. If a nation can't even ask of the world to do such a simple thing without native English speakers getting bent out of shape over it, then it might be time for some serious self-reflection.

But hey, downvote away if it makes you feel any better.

Respect?

If the people of that nation want their nation called something specific, cool. If they want to adopt/use the Anglicized version of their country's name, also cool. It's up to the people in that country, I guess.

Plus, you know, gobble gobble.

What makes you think there's an alternative? Generally speaking, you are locked in the tax bracket you are born into. Sure, you might see a slight upward movement, here and there, but for the most part your wages will never outpace the economy around you unless:

A. You are born into wealth

B. You inherit wealth

Most of us don't fall into either of those two things under an economic system that is designed to extract the most value from the people working in it, the profits of which bubble to the top and never trickle back down.

This is why things like overtime are such an easy sell. If the company can afford to pay overtime, then there's no reason they can't afford to raise their workers hourly wages so they make the same money at 40 hours or less that they would working 50/60 hours. I'm here to tell you first hand that there's no increase in productive output of the company as a whole when everyone is working overtime versus when everyone is on 40 hours. That's a myth that needs to be quashed, especially with production being increasingly automated. As someone who visits our automtive and aerospace factories across the US frequently, the amount of guys I see standing around looking at smartphones is astounding, but so long as the company can post higher valuations by making it look like they're flush with both work and cash by offering copious overtime, they're happy. Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime and all that.

Sorry, I forgot to address your part about investments. Those are another bit of snake oil sold to the middle class to sooth their financial woes. Fact is, unless you have a considerable amount of upfront capital, all you're doing is lending money for various fund managers to gamble with. They profit more than you do, even when you do see the marginal increases you might see.

Manufacturing (my field) would be a good place to start. Most of the guys I work with work overtime not because we have a bunch of work to do, but to inflate their weekly paychecks that much more. I've stopped reminding them that nobody ever got rich by working overtime, and it's a tool designed to keep them toiling away. Odds are if something like a 32 hour week passed, it would take a ridiculous amount of convincing for them to adopt it since overtime is so deeply entrenched in the culture.

I'd personally be more supportive of the 4-day 40-hour work week because I converted to that about six months ago, myself, and I'm not looking back. I find it works very well, for me.

I'd be all about 32-hour work week, but provided either employers were required to pay us all more, or the price of _literally everything_ in the US consumer economy came down. Cutting my paycheck by 25% would be devastating to the arguably modest lifestyle I have built for myself, so I can't see that ever being offset by just being generally happier because I'm not wasting the single life I have making someone else rich.

I was not aware of those, thanks. Certainly up for consideration but I can't imagine that price point being attractive to the decision-makers in my company.

> Well at the moment you have to power, house and protect an entire Windows PC...

In the case of this specific product, the customer supplies their own PC and we supply the software for it. No matter how you cut the mustard, it's not an ideal setup in my eyes. It's rare to see them us an existing PC that serves more than one purpose on these machines. What I usually see them do is buy a cheap Windows laptop and have that running next to the machine. So, as I mentioned, if I can eliminate the need for a separate PC at all, that's a step forward.

I'm currently exploring the Pi 5 idea, too. I've only been with the company for a few years, but this design was made about 15 years ago? The speed of getting them to change anything, especially when what they've been doing has been working, is glacial, at best, even though they're a small company with the potential to be pretty agile. I have a Pi 5 in-house right now with Windows 10 on it (courtesy of https://github.com/Botspot/bvm) as a sort of proof-of-concept that we would not even have to port our software to work on a different platform, but it's in the corner of my workroom collecting dust due to their lack of interest. Some days, I'm not sure why I try.

I see another commenter pointed out some Seeed boards that was not aware of, so I guess it's not that the options never existed, but more so the higher-ups aren't all that interested in changing something for the sake of future-proofing or being more efficient and cost-effective. This is, unfortunately, an extremely common problem in industrial automation. That and, as much as I try to keep up, I'm also admittedly not fully cognizant of all the SBC/microcontroller options out there, so I appreciate discussions like this.

Because then I have two seperate boards to power, house and protect. Combining those into one would make for a smaller design footprint, in our case. With this particular product, portability and compactness is ideal, since it is intended to be used on job sites to mark steel banding or tags. Often times, these guys are working out of a very dirty trailer that's already crammed with equipment, so space is at a premium for them. The machine does nothing special, so size tends to be where the competative edge is in that admittedly niche market.