Krssst

> A $60 difference

Oh, the difference in dollar is less than I expected. And you're right, after checking, the difference in price in the USA is $60 ($139 Home and $199 Pro). In France, Windows 11 Home is 145€ compared to 259€ for Windows 11 Pro: https://www.microsoft.com/fr-fr/d/windows-11-famille/dg7gmgf... - https://www.microsoft.com/fr-fr/d/windows-11-professionnel/d... (USB key is selected by default but the download edition is the same price).

This amounts to a difference of 114€ or 135$ at the current exchange rate which is significantly more. Also surprised that Windows Pro is 189% of the price of the Home edition in France but 143% in the USA.

I initially bought the Home edition but could not upgrade to pro without buying a full license so I had to bear the full cost of the French Pro license, which lead to an upgrade cost of 259€ instead of just $60. (basically I had to buy the pro version to get password unlock with Bitlocker since TPM unlock was broken with dual boot, needed to enter the recovery key after every boot to Fedora). If it was possible to only pay for the difference they did not make it obvious.

And in general paying this much for an OS that still pushes dark pattern and ads onto me leaves quite a bad taste in my mouth; I wouldn't mind paying a subscription if I could get an OS that does what I want and gets fully out of my way. (but I guess subscription would come with mandatory online accounts which is part of the problem at hand here).

Considering Windows's history with user consent I would be worried about the keys eventually being uploaded without asking the user and without linking online accounts.

Probably not now but not something unimaginable in some future.

However, since Windows can still run on user-controlled hardware (non-secure boot or VMs), I guess this kind of behavior could be checked for by intercepting communications before TLS encryption.

It requires the Pro edition of Windows too.

Note that password-based Bitlocker requires Windows Pro which is quite a bit more expensive.

> sign into your Microsoft account or link it to Windows again.

For reference, I did accidentally login into my Microsoft account once on my local account (registered in the online accounts panel). While Edge automatically enabled synchronization without any form of consent from my part, it does not look like that my Bitlocker recovery key is listed on https://account.microsoft.com/devices/recoverykey. But since I unlinked my account, it could be that it was removed automatically (but possible still cached somewhere).

Windows 10 was the start of the forceful push towards use of Microsoft accounts and telemetry, dark patterns to achieve that and weird features nobody wants like like Bing search in the menu or the help opening bing in Edge rather than an actual help or your browser of choice, all that to improve random KPIs without considering user satisfaction.

Compared to that, Windows 8 was misguided but not a strong attempt at disrespecting user consent.

> Once I started commuting, it happened a lot less as I built up immunity.

To give another anecdotal evidence: before COVID I used to catch 3 to 4 colds per year. Winter was basically a nightmare season where I was always living in fear of when I would get sick next. After COVID I started wearing an N95 in populated places. As a result, I went to 0 cold per years instead of getting sick even more often because of the additional virus in town. Now I feel I can live normally in winter without always worrying of getting sick and I always feel healthy.

I tried switching to a regular surgical mask (and in general being less careful) to try to find a good middle ground between cost, appearance and protection; while I did not catch colds I did get COVID at the same time as unmasked people around me, so I'm back to N95s (this was likely following something like hours and hours of continuous exposure so makes sense a leaky surgical mask did not prevent it). (my bout of covid was quite mild fortunately; but first time being mild does not mean future ones will be or won't lead to long-term symptoms).

Some people told me that wearing masks will "weaken" my immune system, I still need to see that; after two/three years I just feel healthy and this is refreshing after decades of getting sick all the time.

Plus, instead of the advice of "cook your own food to eat well, sleep well, do sports" that probably requires something like 28 hours per day with a standard-issue job while likely not being as effective as respiratory protection, putting a mask on takes only 30 seconds per day. That's probably good general advice anyway, but not the shortest path to solving the "getting sick often" problem.

Plus, a big part of an engineer's job is understanding what the system is doing and how. And correctness. Letting LLMs write everything without a deep review that would take at least half the time it would take to design and write the thing manually does not seem to meet that goal.

I think the point is not that one should not look at RAM use, but be careful when looking at it since total RAM use may include the amount that is used for disk cache which will fill to use whatever is available (and will be freed back if necessary).

It makes sense to watch memory use but one should make sure to discount the amount used for disk caching from the total.

LTSC IoT version has the bullshit stripped out so it's a viable OS. Also, it's not sold to regular people, only companies can buy it for some reason.

I use the following:

* No autoplay on playlists: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/no-playlist-auto...

* No translations and AI dubs: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/youtube-no-trans...

* No YouTube shorts: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-youtube-...

* More videos on the home page / smaller thumbnails: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/youtube-tweaks/ (to be fair, it could probably replace the "No YT shorts" one)

Not sure how safe those are, but since they only require access to data for youtube domains I assume if there was a leak it would not be too bad.

Somewhat related: more than half of my Firefox extensions are to fix YouTube (no shorts, no autoplay in playlists, more videos on the home page, no AI dubs or title translation (plus sponsorblock)). I don't hate it but I hate its progressive enshittification.

Though that's quite different from X; while the issues with YouTube are mostly plain old enshittification, the issues I have with X are more political (thus, I do hate it).

> Disease transmission becomes prevalent if people keep doing the things which spread it

The solution to covid/flu is wearing well-fitting masks and vaccines rather than never getting out.

The solution to STIs is good protection with vaccines, condoms and tests.

Religion can stay out of that.

> Your software may gain a reputation of being crash-prone

Hopefully crashing on unexpected state rather than silently running on invalid state leads to more bugs being found and fixed during development and testing and less crash-prone software.

A bit sad that this sound advice is downvoted (maybe just out of topic rather than a disagree?).

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11203943/ shows that covid transmission goes up exponentially (x1.5 per flight hour) without masking.

I guess people really don't like putting something on their face. Nobody advices only washing hands and being generally healthy against getting STIs; the advice is blocking the pathogens in the first place, I'm not sure why our lungs don't deserve as much protection.

(plus masking makes the air more humid which helps with the dry air I feel)

In-flight is quite risky: long-haul flights have much more covid transmission than short flights, which should not happen if transmission only occurred during takeoff and landing.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11203943/

Not everyone is the same. My teeth and gums are not that good and I definitely feel much better brushing them after every meal (though I'm aware I should wait after acidic food).

(time-wise, I started increasing brushing after the situation got worse. The root cause for the worsening was not seeing a dentist for two years. Don't do that, definitely see a dentist periodically. And the dentist seems happy with my brushing decision, need to do as much as I can to prevent plaque formation)

For airplanes, I buy three small bottles of water before flight (15hr flight). And I use that for drinking, rinsing and washing my toothbrush. While we cannot bring bottled water from outside the airport to the embarking area, there are usually shops in that area that sell small bottles.

In my experience, wired earphones/headphones are better for latency in rythm games.

> Open Office

Going off a tangent but LibreOffice should be preferred as most OpenOffice contributors moved to LibreOffice following the acquisition of Sun by Oracle.

Yes, looks to me that the author was being sarcastic with "unhelpful".

The LED is the lining of the power button so it's not so trivial to fix without affecting the power button itself. It's quite an annoyance too I think.

There is a C++ standard that everyone writing C++ code follows and newer version are usually compatible with one another regardless of toolchain version. Behavior of the toolchain should not change. Worst case you can use deterministic, reliable tools to automatically detect problematic locations if there really is a behavior change. (compiler warnings/errors for example)

AI code generation is not deterministic and has no guarantee of behavior, thus requires review unless incorrect code is acceptable.

> If you really want a clean windows environment, you are better off getting an IoT enterprise LTSC license.

Unfortunately seems like there's no way of getting a license legally without being a company. Windows Server seems easier to obtain but harder to morph into something useful (mostly because of missing drivers on Windows Update) though definitely possible.

On my Framework 13 AMD : Sleep just works on Fedora. Sleep is unreliable on Windows; if my fans are all running at full speed while running a game and I close the lid to begin sleeping, it will start sleeping and eventually wake up with all fans blaring.

I just take vitamins if needed, saves time and no cancer.

Unsigned integer arithmetic operations don't overflow but are done modulo 2^n (https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/operator_arithmetic...). The author does use unsigned integers so I don't think there is a problem there.

Signed integer overflow is definitely a problem however. Something as simple as incrementing a user-provided int can lead to UB (if the user provides INT_MAX).

They don't do that for any feature, no reason they'd do it for AI.

This is how I read it too, feels like a misinterpreted quote taken out of context. Everyone at Mozilla is probably well aware that removing adblockers would make them lose probably the majority of their users.

LibreOffice seems to have an optional ribbon-like interface for the people that happen to like it (View -> User Interface) (but I don't use this UI mode as I personally find ribbon-like UIs hard to work with).

One concern I'd have is that if the short-term supply of RAM is fixed anyway, even if all daily computer users were to increase their budget to match the new pricing and demand exceeds supply again, the pricing would just increase in response until prices get unreasonable enough that demand lowers back to supply.

Noisy open spaces with many people talking at the same time and people coming in sick with contagious respiratory infections is not really a recipe for productivity independently of commute.