albert_e

Not only is it enabled hy default ... it magically gets enabled by default after some days, desktop spotlight feature that pushes some lock screen wallpapers and trivia overriding my personal wallpaper, Edge trying to do the same thing to homepage, edge trying to steal browser favourites and extensions from other installed browsers once every few weeks, edge stealing default app linkage for PDF viewing, copilot in various flavours appearing on taskbar, start menu, edge, ...it's mayhem out there.

Death by a thousand cuts. So many micro abuses by the OS that keeps reminding you who has the power.

We used to be able to make any folder a popup menu on taskbar, including any subfolders. Served the need for quick shortcuts to whatever we need within 2 clicks. Sorely miss it in Win11.

Woah got this for the first time.

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Cat and mouse.

Then we shall only ever connect to a throwaway wifi ssid created for the sole purpose of setting up that TV and deleted promptly afterwards.

Samsung will then use NFC / QuickShare transient hotspot to helpfully sync all useful info from your Samsung phone nearby.

Then we block that IP address or MAC ID from router side.

Then smart TVs will switch to open mesh networks hosted by unsuspecting ISP customer boxes in neighborhood.

And maybe even starlink.

=====

Maybe wifi standard should stop using static passwords and create a device specific hash to let it connect. Wifi admin should get to approve each device connection request.

Oh? Let me check. That would be wonderful

Thanks

This might be useful on a personal PC -- licence seems expensive, though I like it being a one time purchase and not monthly subscription.

Will look to do the free trial to evaluate. (Hope we see more such tooling, and also push the likes of Microsoft to add native support)

My main usecase is on work PC though where I wont be able to install additional software or plugins. So was exploring python scripts and the like.

Thanks for the pointer.

I am surprised at such negative responses.

I am asking about alternatives to LibreOffice for a reason (stated)

Pandoc library and Microsoft Markitdown -- that other helpful comments suggested -- seem like two options that might actually work in my case and I will give them a try. My asking here was fruitful.

Running python and using python libraries is allowed on our work pcs but not running arbitrary software and EXEs with or without an installer. I cannot override company security policy, and cannot simply "talk to" our infosec team and get them to allow me to install stuff. Hope this clarifies.

Libreoffice cannot be installed on work PC

What is a good way to convert MS Office documents to markdown -- until Microsoft adds "Saves As" option to office apps.

Anything that can run locally instead of uploading potentially sensitive stuff to random websites. Would be handy on work PCs.

There is an organization named Tapestry (parent of Coach Inc).

Wonder how they can avoid the trop while not censoring themselves out.

Astra

Astral (maker of uv)

Astro (javascript web framework)

I am trying to keep these terms straight in my head -- it's hard

Looks like I am hitting some Cloudflare Block when accessing this URL

I use the quick access list but the experience of scrolling and searching through a long tree view is not the same as having fixed toolbar buttons always in one place. And there is a lot of free space on the toolbar i could use. If only Windows allowed tad bit more customization!

Will try the shortcut method - thanks for that!

The equation change a bit when you have distributed teams.

I want to pin my most frequently used folders as favorites to the toolbar of File Explorer (just like we have a favorites bar on Edge browser).

Why is this not possible.

> 82 pairs are pixel-identical

> a string like “аpple.com” with Cyrillic а (U+0430) is pixel-identical to “apple.com” in 40+ fonts. The user, the browser’s address bar, and any visual review process all see the same pixels. This is not theoretical. It is a measured property of the font files shipping on every Mac.

Current implementations of "Computer Use" Agentic AI tools mostly use visuals -- screenshotting of a computer screen and interpreting it.

These pixel-dentical character pairs will be a straight failure mode for those automations and could possibly be a threat vector if crafted well.

Thanks for that link! There is a bit more ... justification (pun intended) on that page for this recommendation to turn-on hypenation; and also some valuable advice on choosing spacing between words over spacing between letters.

I feel both cases involved documentation, approval, months of lead time -- only the OP didnt have to deal with paperwork themselves in the physical securtiy domain.

In every sphere there are attempts at security that either achieve a practical balance of fit versus downsides.

The failure of access cards is probably analogous to a well intentioned sofware authentication system that was implemented without simulating or testing for the scale of deployment, and had to be rolled back when it failed in production.

Are hypens no longer acceptable?

There is no mention of it in the post. If words (in any language) can be arbitrarily long and columns can be arbitrarily narrow, we will need to solve for this anyway.

Even without those extremes, I feel that there will always be place for the good old hypen when displaying or printing text for the main purpose of readability. No need to max out on perfect "look" in every application of text.

In fact in many places one might even find columns with jagged right edges more readable -- letting you visually distinguish each line from the one above/below it easily by length alone -- and may even lend a certain aesthetic character that is the opposite of mechanical / boring / machine produced / sterile.

Of course not negating the need for a well implemented method without bugs to justify text correctly when the use case demands it.

Does this offer truly "deterministic" responses when temperature is set to zero?

(Of course excluding any cosmic rays / bit flips)?

I didnt see a editable temperature parameter on their chatjimmy demosite -- only a topK.

anything that blocks the doom-scrolling mode on twitter videos?

I dont see youtube shorts, have no login to instagram or tiktok, and stopped using facebook years ago; only social media i frequent is twitter -- and once i view a video in the feed, it hijacks my attention by auto scrolling to a new video.

I burned a couple of evenings this way -- and I need to be more careful about this.

I use a physical notebook but not really an engeneering notebook as described here.

I make notes while working and notes during meetings. Honestly most of it never gets read after a eay but I still do it.

Very few of my colleagues carry a notebook around. Those who do are not seen taking notes too often.

I tried writing a plain text wordle loop as a python exercise in loops and lists along with my kid.

I saved the blank file as wordle.py to start the coding while explaining ideas.

That was enough context for github copilot to suggest the entire `for` loop body after I just typed "for"

Not much learning by doing happened in that instance.

Before this `for` loop there were just two lines of code hardcoding some words ..that too were heavily autocompleted by copilot including string constants.

``` answer="cigar" guess="cigar" ```

On the other hand ... I recently had to deal with official Microsoft Support for an Azure service degradation / silent failure.

Their email responses were broadly all like this -- fully drafted by GPT. The only thing i liked about that whole exchange was that GPT was readily willing to concede that all the details and observations I included point to a service degradation and failure on Microsoft side. A purely human mind would not have so readily conceded the point without some hedging or dilly-dallying or keeping some options open to avoid accepting blame.

Agree.

I thought the title meant I should type ,ls instead of ls.

I cant wait for models to get smaller enough that they can run on commodity devices.

Hope we can build an app like Whispr Flow using this with the model running completely on device.

MechanicalTurk is for desk jobs and for tasks that originate as ideas in a human mind -- even if they get routed via an API.

Here we are talking about AI agents coming up with a set of tasks as part of their thinking/reasoning step ..and when some of those tasks are real world physical tasks, assign them to a willing human being.

Those tasks wont necessarily be desk jobs or knowledge work.

It could be say -- go chop a tree, or go wave a protest banner, or go flip the open/close sign on my shopfront, or go and preach crustafarianism.

This is happening as we speak.

Codex started this and OpenCode followed suit with the hour.

https://x.com/embirico/status/2018415923930206718

The future is now

This is sane advice but maintaining strong internal engineering and IT teams is not everone's cup of tea; even organizations gthat intend and try to do this cannot achieve it -- and furthermore the big cloud operators have spent millions of dollars spreading the gospel that the only correct way to survive and build is to migrate to cloud and use their lego building blocks.

A lot of the justification for moving away from own datacenters and heavy in-house engineering teams actually makes sense to organizations of many shapes and sizes. If the core business is not technology -- it is hard to stay invested in a in-house cloud-agnostic engineeringc capability.

The world has more or less accepted this reality and adopted the services like S3 and managed databases, and tight integration with the likes of Microsoft Entra/Purview/Sharepoint/O365 etc for ready-to-use business integrations. Prying organizations away from taht convenience is going to be hard. But the current environment cretaed due to lack of trust in US could the strongest motivator ever to push businesses and nations in that direction. I reckon it will be a long and painful process though.