Some Copilot functions are done locally on some computers with the appropriate NPU chips. But it’s Microsoft, so they’ll be sending data home either way.

Most people don’t realize how slow Windows is. When you try something else, you realize how much time you have been spending just waiting for Windows to do things. Our computers can be a lot faster than Windows lets them be.

Some senior exec at Microsoft asked for this.

They sound staggeringly incompetent. And anyone who bought their software without any investigation into its quality also sounds staggeringly incompetent.

It’s funny how this mysterious individual managed to get the AI talking about “white genocide”, only for it to debunk it as imaginary BS in every single response.

Under the current regime it will be used to suppress discussion of all things LGBTQ+, particularly transgender identity and healthcare, women’s rights and healthcare including abortion, Black history, indigenous history, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, immigration, police abuses, and so on.

This is absolutely the worst time for such a bill, so of course it has a better chance of succeeding than ever before.

Finally, a SpaceX mission we can all get behind.

The hand on his heart really does make you think twice about the meaning though, just like it did with that other guy.

Stadia was actually a good product

That’s how Google decides which ones to kill off.

The new Pebble watches look interesting. Relatively basic, but long battery life (they promise) and open-source operating system.

Doctors cost money and the money goes to doctors. LLMs cost less and the money goes to billionaire fascist techbros. The fact that they’re not fit for purpose is insignificant compared to the potential for techbro enrichment.

Also, doctors have an annoying habit of helping people to live regardless of whether techbro eugenics says they deserve to.

Imagine lacking the curiosity to want to take this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn interesting new things with all the resources at your fingertips. I think the root of the problem is that capitalist society sends students the message that learning is valuable only as a means to make more money. If that’s your view then it makes sense to skip the difficult stuff and just pay for the piece of paper that gives you access to better-paying jobs. Capitalism absolutely doesn’t value having a wiser and more knowledgeable populace, and students pick up on this.

It’s the Google way. They frequently shut down even good and popular products of their own when they don’t align with some obscure corporate plan. The lesson is that you should never depend on a Google product or service.

I found Google Assistant on the Sense useful for reminders. That was about all I used it for, and it was a bit annoying that Google took it away. It’s odd that these Google-made smartwatches now only support Amazon’s voice assistant.

I can’t imagine many people would find this a pleasant device to do any actual work on. Maybe writers on the go, as the author says, though with a dubious keyboard layout even that is questionable.

Yes, Mint is good advice. Beginners will need something mainstream with a solid base and good community support, that works out of the box and doesn’t require manual configuration, and that doesn’t look too different from Windows.

It’s true, but the effect is still much less pronounced on Linux than Windows. Opening a web browser, for instance, is usually a lot faster in Linux than opening the same browser in Windows.

Part of the problem is everyone building on common libraries that themselves build on libraries, leading to layer after layer of abstraction with a little loss of efficiency at each one. Since most software is cross-platform, this affects multiple operating systems. And needing to build for multiple platforms is itself one of the drivers of all this abstraction.

The same with the incredibly powerful CPUs and huge amounts of RAM we all have now. These are little supercomputers, and everything in Windows takes longer than it did 25 years ago on machines with a tiny fraction of the power.

Deleting files and folders in Windows is the one that gets me. It’s so incredibly slow, and if you try to cancel it manages to take even longer “Cancelling…”.

Interestingly they did the same with Word 97: loaded Office at startup so the individual Office applications would seem to launch faster.