If I want my fridge enshittified I’ll bag up my own poop and put it in the freezer, thankyouverymuch

Didn’t George Carlin have a bit about how all marketing people should just kill themselves?

I understood that reference

Really, have these jokers read any books? Wow.

A wild ‘D’ suddenly appears! (that’s about all I know about Pokemon…)

“AI” hallucinations are not a problem that can be fixed in LLMs. They are an inherent aspect of the process and an inevitable result of the fact that LLMs are mostly probabilistic engines, with no supervisory or introspective capability, which actual sentient beings possess and use to fact-check their output. So there. :p

Search for v2.79 (if memory serves) on oldversion.com for the last ‘good’ version of classic winamp, and the streamripper plugin is still floating around somewhere on the 'net…

An absolutely ancient tool I used to use was WinAmp (v2.x) with the Streamripper plugin. It would save out each song from a shoutcast or icecast station to a file with the artist/album/title/track like a champ. Maybe not quite what you want (won’t do youtube) but there are a ton of great indie stations on the vorbis icecast network…

Perhaps someone could write an ‘adb loopback’ app – get that into the official app store, and said app would then squirt other .apk files through adb on the phone to itself, thus sideloading it.

Couldn’t they just use a Windows VM on Linux to run the build tests?

Not that I care, the only vim I use occasionally is under MSYS64 (I think… maybe it’s just plain vi).

We already pay with all of the personal data they steal from us (adblocks or no), and all the lifetimes wasted watching ads for those who don’t or can’t block them (and the ad revenue paid to them by corps who buy those ads) so no, Google doesn’t deserve our money for Premium.

Same thing as when cable TV was new, they said paying for it was to require fewer ads… how long did that last?

Use a straw if available…

I was on a project where a co-worker left and his son was onboarded a few years later; he seemed much more chill than I when we were both working on an issue and it dawned on me that he was literally fixing (well, not really a defect just an update) his Dad’s code. Heh.

I feel your frustration… though a decent phone w/o locked Android shouldn’t require global thermonuclear war I hope!

I stress about what phone, if any, I’ll be able to install a non-bloatware, rooted, vanila OS on once the models my wife & I have become too ‘obsolete’. (OnePlus 5T with LineageOS).

WTF kill this with fire.

Norms

Time to reform Strike Force Five ⚡⚡⚡

Ah, hashcash. Wish that had taken off, it was a good idea …

They shouldn’t cluster so closely together, it’s a risk. Not that I’m suggesting anything.

Thank you.

If you’ve ensured your home network’s firewall is sane first, there’s no big issue.

If you dual-boot to Windows occasionally to run that one stupid program that can’t run under Linux, and you aren’t downloading stuff willy-nilly from the wild internet, and you haven’t previously installed all sorts of dodgy call-home programs, you can still be safe running while you’re in Windows. Hell, I have a Windows 7 box that runs just fine from my home network to the internet, thankyouverymuch. I even download stuff from there gasp, but I check the files first! Imagine that.

Most people aren’t knowledgeable enough to maintain proper security however so I guess I should just stop commenting on posts like this, as I always get flak from people stating it’s impossible to run an OS more than 2 weeks old on the Internet without being instantly hacked :p.

But still… as others say, I totally agree – move to Linux if you can.

Just block W11 updates entirely.

https://www.sordum.org/9470/windows-update-blocker-v1-8/

It’s mostly bullshit that one absolutely needs the latest Windows updates; if you use uBlock Origin in your browser and don’t download/run random .EXE/.MSI shit from the internet you’ll be fine. Keep Windows Defender up to date once a month just in case as well.

But really the best option is to switch to Linux.