The UK isn’t quite that far, but it’s absolutely the dominant text messaging and calling app in the UK. Nobody uses the built in Android or Apple tools anymore, and I’m as likely to receive a WhatsApp voice call as an actual phone call these days.

I have Signal on my phone, but I’ve literally never had a cause to use it; I’ve simply got no contacts on there.

One of these days someone should write a script that just automatically adds all the Amazon Prime games to your various Epic/GOG/etc. accounts.

I say “someone”, because I’m far too lazy to do it.

But anyway, it would take a lot of work out of the job of mindlessly hoarding games I’ll never get round to playing.

A small set-top box (essentially a Steam Deck with the screen, controls and batteries removed, and with components that don’t have the space restrictions that come with a mobile device) would still be an interesting proposition. Particularly if they partnered with the main video streaming services to port their apps across, and implemented Chromecast/AirPlay support.

I can see a market for it, as a “Chromecast and Apple TV competitor that also plays all your games”.

It’s a command that pulls a whole bunch of useful system information and sticks it on one page.

Really, the biggest use of it is for showing other people your system- especially showing off. It’s a staple of “look at my system” brag posts.

But to be generous, there are (small) legit use cases for it. If you manage a lot of machines, and you plausibly don’t know the basic system information for whatever you happen to be working on in this instant, it’s a program that will give you most of what you could want to know in a single command. Yes, 100% of the information could be retrieved just as easily using other standard commands, but having it in a single short command, outputting to a single overview page, formatted to be easily readable at a glance, is no bad thing.

Argh, Microsoft Store? One of the very few stores which remains doggedly impossible to get games running on Linux. Boo to you, Prime Gaming.

If a machine is going to have multiple users (all my computers have multiple profiles for family members) all those users have to be called something, and I’ve not got the energy or the creativity to come up with fun and funky usernames for every system when my actual name is more than good enough.

Having data means nothing if you can’t monetize it.

As you say, AI can already access it all completely for free with nothing more complicated than a web crawler. Long term, charging AI firms for access is not a viable strategy unless the law changes.

And they’ve been trying for years to monetize visitors through advertising and other schemes, and so far come up consistently short.

Ubuntu has live patching free for personal use built right in. It’s not exactly a niche thing.

(I don’t bother on most machines because I reboot my laptops every day anyway, but you know; nice for servers and whatnot).

It might be OK for you to be “disconnected”, but some of us have got stuff to do.

I have both WhatsApp and Signal installed.

In the 3 years or so since I installed Signal, I haven’t had a single conversation on it. Only a handful of people from my Contact book are showing as Signal users, and none of them people I speak to regularly.

I live in anticipation of someone deciding to message me on there, but I’m not exactly optimistic at this point.

The trick isn’t making hydrogen, it’s capturing it, refining it (so that it isn’t mixed with a tonne of air), and compressing it into a pressurised storage tank for later use.

Solar costs whatever it costs to buy, install and maintain a solar PV farm, which is not nothing.

If you’re going to build a solar PV farm, you’re obviously going to want to sell the power you generate in whatever way is most profitable.

At the moment, it’s still magnitudes more profitable to sell solar back to the grid than it is to feed it into an inefficient hydrolysis plant, create a load of hydrogen and oxygen, and then move it by leaky tanker somewhere to sell it.

The pain of this. I have two separate Windows work laptops (one for my employer, one for the firm we work with; data separation fun). The number of times I’ve booted up the second laptop ready to dive into a meeting or to quickly grab a reference only to be confronted with 15 minutes of that.

Between pestering me to check for updates, pestering me to restart to complete updates, hanging on shutdown to carry out updates, and hanging on startup to finish updates, I feel like I spend an unfeasible amount of time and brainspace thinking about system updates. Why? I’ve got actual work to do too!

Now I’m as sceptical of handing over the keys to AI as the next man, but it does have to be said that all of these are LLMs- chatbots, basically. Is there any suggestion from any even remotely sane person to give LLMs free reign over military strategy or international diplomacy? If and when AI does start featuring in military matters, it’s more likely to be at the individual “device” level (controlling weapons or vehicles), and it’s not going to be LLM technology doing that.

What I really want to know is why and how it went away.

The move was in place because of the fear that IE was becoming a monopoly. Now Edge is very very far from the most popular browser, and Google Chrome is looking like the overwhelmingly dominant player, there’s no reason to make MS prompt people to download rival products anymore.

Simple question: what would your employer say if you asked them?

My contract has a standard “no using company computers for personal business” clause. However I feel entirely confident that my employer doesn’t mind me using it to do personal errands using the web browser (on my own time). And I know they have no problem with me using Zoom or Teams to join meetings for non-work things in the evening. How do I know this? Because I asked them…

I’ve never asked them “can I install a new hard drive in my laptop, install an OS I downloaded off the internet, and boot into that OS to do things which I’d rather you not be able to track like you could on the main OS”. But I’m completely confident I’d know what the answer would be if I did ask.

If you think installing a new SSD etc. is acceptable, ask them. If you’re not asking them because you’re worried they’d say “no”, then don’t do it.

Try asking them instead if you can use your laptop to look up directions to the dentist on Google Maps. See if you get the same answer.

This is essentially a novel version of the “free as in freedom” versus “free as in beer” distinction. In this case not exactly about the cash value per se, but about the physical aspects and systemic realities behind the having of a thing.

An open hardware design means nothing more and nothing less than freedom to access, share, use and modify the designs. It is about ownership and reuse of the intellectual property.

Open hardware doesn’t change the fact that most hardware will still be manufactured by the same large corporations. It says nothing about the technical feasibility of amateur fabrication. It has nothing to do with the environmental impacts of a technology or the production thereof. It isn’t fundamentally a socialist paradigm.

For an open hardware spec like RISC-V, the reality of it is that the freedom afforded by the open designs is a freedom of large corporations to enter market with a competitive product without being squeezed out by a handful of established monopolistic giants. This is a positive thing, but it’s a positive thing with distinct limits that fall very short of any ideas of utopia.

It doesn’t really mean anything anymore. The transistors are not 5nm either. It’s just marketing.

Quoth Wikipedia:

The term “5 nm” has no relation to any actual physical feature (such as gate length, metal pitch or gate pitch) of the transistors being 5 nanometers in size. According to the projections contained in the 2021 update of the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems published by IEEE Standards Association Industry Connection, a “5 nm node is expected to have a contacted gate pitch of 51 nanometers and a tightest metal pitch of 30 nanometers”. However, in real world commercial practice, “5 nm” is used primarily as a marketing term by individual microchip manufacturers to refer to a new, improved generation of silicon semiconductor chips in terms of increased transistor density (i.e. a higher degree of miniaturization), increased speed and reduced power consumption compared to the previous 7 nm process.

No shit that it’s easy to live with marginally slower (but still really pretty fast) shipping and access to a second-tier streaming service.

It’s pretty much the definition of a luxury purchase.

Or read Renée Descartes.