I have to use Windows at work. Fortunately I’m a domain admin. I’ll be disabling this shit with conventional methods, and also write a scheduled task script to whack the SQLite DB…or whatever it takes to nuke it from orbit.

For home users, there are tools like NTLite that let you create custom installation images for Windows. Hopefully those will be able to remove it completely.

This varies greatly by terrain and location, but it’s easy to get lost on some trail systems. GPS is a huge help, but is limited by battery life and the amount of data the map has (heh, doesn’t have) about your immediate surroundings.

Many years ago, I went hiking with a large experienced group and one of the hikers (an attractive person I was interested in) got bored with the route the leader was taking us on. She talked me into splitting off with her. Sounds like the dumb premise of a porno or horror movie, I know.

But it wasn’t fun or romantic when we got lost for a couple of hours. It was scary as hell. Fortunately, we were able to backtrack to a trail junction where the main group found us again on their way back out. We got very lucky.

Nothing good ever came from that particular friendship, either. Other than learning some life lessons.

Anyway, stay with your group and make sure you have navigation well covered.

I’m pretty aggressive about switching things off, too. I will never use OneDrive, for example.

Glad you found it useful! Love your username.

With MS you never know. They are pretty arrogant and aggressive about assuming you want things running in the background. Something you can try: Install ShutUp10 and look for things like Office Telemetry being turned on. You can switch these things off (permanently or temporarily, your choice) and see if that stops the traffic.

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

(There are other ways to do the same thing but I’ve been using ShutUp10 for years and love it)

I think it may be both. Engagement algorithms are definitely part of the problem. Agree it was far more fun when it was random / organic interactions.

However, I also think it’s kind of like a party that starts out like a book club, it gets more interesting, and then louder and more obnoxious folks hear about this, and they keep showing up.

By the end it’s a completely different vibe, and the original folks are long gone. Have experienced it numerous times over the long years, before the sorting and engagement algorithms joined the fray.

I know this comes off as kind of hipsterish. But, most obnoxious people don’t realize they are obnoxious. And confronting them seldom does anything but escalate the situation. So leaving is the mature choice. Therefore… mature folks leave, and the forum’s relative aggregate immaturity goes up.

One way to fight it is with very strict moderation, and I have seen that work. But it’s labor-intensive and requires moderators who are highly dedicated and fair, and don’t “power trip”. I’m not a huge fan of that approach overall. But in the right context (like academic discussions) it can be pretty good.

And it’s absurd what they charge for things like batteries, compared to other places.

They are delicious with BBQ sauce!

Your assumption appears to be correct. They even state they want to break consumers out of the frugal habit (paraphrasing).

People are broke, you dumb twats.

There’s a hypothetical phenomenon called the “asshole filter” that some have proposed. Basically, the idea is: hostile, humorless and trolling type people chase away the more pleasant people over time. The end result being, the concentration of assholes is always going up on social media and anonymous online forums, etc.

I don’t think it’s very scientific. How could you accurately measure such a thing. But I have felt like it was happening as various corners of the internet have grown in popularity.

One way I try to deal with it on here is I aggressively block people. Why let my energy get drained when there’s any easy way to never see the jerks again.

I don’t know if this tactic will work long term. There are potentially friendlier instances to migrate to, also. Lemmy is an interesting ongoing experiment.

Hope you hang in. Completely understand if you don’t want to.

Thanks for sharing this, it’s a fascinating take. I am certainly not against archiving things that are worth archiving. And I am not qualified to know who should or should not have the authority to make such a determination when it comes to “historical things”. But I do believe that individual people (who are not public figures in positions of power / accountability) should always have the option to be forgotten if they choose to be. I am average person of no particular historical interest or merit, I don’t really need an expert to tell me that. If I want my shit deleted at any time, and especially after I die, that should be my right. However, “ownership” can get very murky when we sign EULAs and are talking about the costs of hosting, etc. So there are “overriding factors” that may occur, too. Those should never be deceptive or misleading. But of course, they often are. They hide a lot of evil assertions in boring legalese. Google lets you delete your digital data with them if they detect no activity within a time-frame you set. If they are not full of BS and actually honor this, I think that’s pretty cool. The compulsion to archive everything is really just data hoarding. Not that different from people who live in a home surrounded by clutter they never use.

I’ve felt much the same way for decades. I am very grateful that all the stupid shit I thought, did, or said as a young person wasn’t preserved by some omnipresent archival machine. Some moments are best lost to the winds of time. People who grew up with the internet and social media don’t know what life was like before. I’m not a “good old days” kind of guy, but I do think the archive-everything-forever compulsion does vast amounts of harm.

I hope they figure out how to 3d print gum tissue. Harvesting donor tissue from the roof of your mouth certainly works, but is probably the worst part of the recovery.

Seems like it should be doable. But I doubt it’s high on the list compared to kidneys, livers, etc.

I think this explains at least part of the phenomenon…

https://youtu.be/GkpgP8ovFZQ?si=zSzzOBAz-dvODJ5r

Rodents don’t live as long as hominids.

The common ancestor thing is hard to wrap my brain around. Dawkins gives a cool thought experiment where he says imagine a card catalog with photos of you and your ancestors in chronological order. If you look back 10 generations, you’ll find a human. If you go back 100 generations, you’ll find a human. If you go back 5,000 generations, you’ll still see a human! However, they probably won’t look exactly like a moden human. If you go back 15,000 generations, you’ll find something human-like, but not really a modern homo sapiens. All of those cards along the way have miniscule,imperceptible differences. If you go back far enough, you’ll find something like a rodent. But the number of cards you need to flip through to find that rodent is extremely large. Something like 200 million generations. Keep in mind the more ancient animals had shorter life spans.

So t-rex and chickens may have come from the same branch, but there are millions of “cards” between them.

I honestly don’t know how well AI is going to scale when it comes to power consumption vs performance. If it’s like most of the progress we’ve seen in hardware and software over the years, it could be very promising. On the other hand, past performance is no guarantee for future performance. And your concerns are quite valid. It uses an absurd amount of resources.

The usual AI squad may jump in here with their usual unbridled enthusiasm and copium that other jobs are under threat, but my job is safe, because I’m special.

Eye roll.

Meanwhile, thousands have been laid off already, and executives and shareholders are drooling at the possibility of thinning the workforce even more. Those who think AI will create as many jobs as it destroys are thinking wishfully. Assuming it scales well, it could spell massive layoffs. Some experts predict tens of millions of jobs lost to AI by 2030.

To try and answer the other part of your question…at my job (which is very technical and related to healthcare) we have found AI to be extremely useful. Using Google to search for answers to problems pales by comparison. AI has saved us a lot of time and effort. I can easily imagine us cutting staff eventually, and we’re a small shop.

The future will be a fascinating mix of good and bad when it comes to AI. Some things are quite predictable. Like the loss of creative jobs in art, music, animation, etc. And canned response type jobs like help desk chat, etc. The future of other things like software development, healthcare, accounting, and so on are a lot murkier. But no job (that isn’t very hands-on-physical) is 100% safe. Especially in sectors with high demand and low supply of workers. Some of these models understand incredibly complex things like drug interactions. It’s going to be a wild ride.

Not sure it matters. I’ll be drawing a girlfriend in MS Paint, and it hasn’t changed much.

I worked on a creative writing thing with it and the more I added, the better its responses. And 4 is a noticeable improvement over 3.5.

Ha! That definitely happens sometimes, too.