So I had a relative who passed, but saw it coming and tried to make some moves to make sure his only son was set up to take care of his wife, because his wife had never really had to “be an adult” and went her entire life without handling any bills or finances or anything. So when he passed at least his middle aged son would be there to handle things including their house.

So he died and sure enough, she couldn’t handle independent living. So they decided to sell the house and she’d move in with another relative. So the rest of us are thinking “oh good, at least they cashed out in this crazy high real estate market to have a bit of a cushion”.

However, no one thought about how little the middle aged son had to worry about things like housing and stuff. He never had to buy or rent a house, he had a hand me down trailer parked on a relatives land. He always had a used car gifted to him by and other relative getting rid of it. So he had no idea what he was doing either, thought a seller’s agent was a scam to take their money, and they ended up selling the whole house and land for about $50k before any one else had any idea that they were even thinking of selling.

As well liked as he is, so much frustration when everyone has to take on a burden to help them and they make such a huge mistake that could have made things so much easier.

Interesting to have a relatively large family to see all the scenarios play out. Also have a relative that is spending all his money and is mortgaged to his eyes, and another relative who lived like a pauper who turned out to have a couple million in liquidity in her 80s because she wanted her kid to be surprised when they got hit with a big inheritance.

Well the problems to be solved aren’t necessarily the technical ones. Another way of “solving” the problems is to stop trying to use it in contexts where it’s limitations are more trouble than they are worth.

Here it is being tasked with and falling to accurately summarize news, which is ridiculous because those news articles come with summaries already, headlines.

So a fix may not mean fixing the summary, but just skipping the attempt as superfluous.

There are uses for the state of LLMs as they are, but hard to appreciate when it’s being crammed down our throats relentlessly at things we never needed them for and watch them screw things up.

The thing is, for the Windows ecosystem, ARM doesn’t have a good “hook”.

When tablets scared the crap out of Intel and Microsoft back in the Windows 7 days, we saw two things happen.

You had Intel try to get some android market share, and fail miserably. Because the Android architecture was built around ARM and anything else was doomed to be crappier for those applications.

You had Microsoft push for Windows on ARM, and it failed miserably. Because the windows architecture was built around x86 and everything else is crappier for those applications.

Both x86 and windows live specifically because together they target a market that is desperate to maintain application compatibility for as much software without big discontinuities in compatibility over time. A transition to ARM scares that target market enough to make it a non starter unless Microsoft was going to force it, and they aren’t going to.

Software has plenty of reason not to bother with windows on arm support because virtually no one has those devices. That would mean extra work without apparent demand.

ARM is perfectly capable, but the windows market is too janky to be swayed by technical capabilities.

This sounds pretty plausible. The windows user is the least likely to understand the implications of arm for their applications in the ecosystem that is the least likely to accommodate any change. Microsoft likes to hedge their bets but generally does not have a reason to prefer arm over x86, their revenue opportunity is the same either way. Application vendors not particularly motivated yet because there’s low market share and no reason to expect windows on x86 to go anywhere.

Just like last time around, windows and x86 are inextricably tied together. Windows is built on decades of backwards compatibility in a closed source world and ARM is anathema to x86 windows application compatibility.

Apple forced processor architecture changes because they wanted them, but Microsoft doesn’t have the motive.

This has next to nothing to do with the technical qualities of the processor, but it’s just such a crappy ecosystem to try to break into on its own terms.

Yeah, but it is hard to separate that, and it’s easy to get a bit resentful particularly when a projects quality declines in large part because they got lazy by duct taping in container registries instead of more carefully managing their project.

I want that to be true, but judging from their financials, their big problem send to be just massive costs. They have more revenue than AMD despite their technical challenges, but they spend way way more to get it.

Part of it is not having a lot of fab customers yet having their own fabs, part of it is a whole bunch of Intel projects you’ve never heard of that will never amount to anything, but still cost lots of money. Part of it is essentially bribing vendors to favor Intel products even as amd makes more sense in a lot of those products.

Better engineering would certainly help, but they are just bleeding money all over the place largely owing to bad business bets.

I will confess that I think making windows UI appropriate for tablet or phone has to be more than a skinning exercise. E.g. software interacting with a mouse pointer unable to deal with more vague and multiple touches. UI elements needing different spacing for the form factor. A different scheme for switching full screen tasks and recognizing that traditional windowing isn’t going to be very helpful in a smaller than 9" format.

Unfortunately windows basically favored touch at the expense of traditional desktop, when their home turf was very much not touch enabled.

3840x2440, 2560x1440, and 1920x1200. Wayland and all of them are probably just 60hz screens.

Well mine is pretty petty. Every time I start up my system I’m spammed by epic advertisements in the lower right. It’s just so obnoxious, particularly since I’m on my couch and using my controller, so I have to pick up keyboard to dismiss those.

I’m so lazy I haven’t bothered to investigate options to be fair, but broadly speaking I don’t like how much it screams “look at me, look at me!” when I had no intention of interacting with their store/launcher at all that time.

Yeah, I strongly suspect there was a camp within Microsoft that was 100% pushing for ‘rolling release’ model for the OS versus another traditionalist camp that said there would be new major upgrades. Further, I bet rather than reconciling those perspectives, they just let both camps continue on under their own assumption, until eventually the traditionalists won out and got ‘Windows 11’, finalizing which way the company was going to actually go.

The browser editions don’t quite fully work for everything.

A coworker manages to make some excel workbooks that just don’t work in the web version, and makes everyone deal with it.

I’ve had to contend with powerpoint decks with ‘features’ that don’t work in the web. For example, one group told me the only way to get a file was to click the embedded link in the pptx file, which only works with desktop version.

If you have to deal with Teams meetings with screen sharing, well, you can’t control the other person’s screen (for no good reason) and you can’t offer remote control of your own (ok, I understand that one).

I’ll say that 95% of my dealings with Office files can be dealt with between browser based O365 and libreoffice for some of those features, but once in a while I simply have to open desktop Office.

This is the perspective of someone who really dislikes Windows and is willing to deal with this sort of uncertainty to minimize Windows usage. Most people would just not want to futz with the options and go straight to the desktop client, which is the only thing that supports all the Office features.

But alas, Windows 8 was the ‘oh crap, tablets and phones might eat our lunch’ release and the focus was throwing the desktop/laptop experience under the bus to try to cater to sensibilities of markets they were never going to capture. Also, to have their own ‘app store’ to try to wrestle a google/apple like revenue model for applications running on the platform.

Windows ME was actually some Windows 2000 bits glued onto Windows 98. That’s why it was so terrible, it was kind of an afterthought when initial plans for ‘2k for everyone’ got abandoned as they realized the home app ecosystem needed more compatibility workarounds than they were prepared to offer. So instead of completing the 2k based product line, they just '2k’ed up Win98 to satisfy their then-current release cadence and make sure home market had a ‘current’ OS to go with the 2k professional line.

Note that my three monitor setup with an nvidia GPU actually works better in Linux.

Mainly because when I plug the laptop in, I have to turn the third monitor off and on again to make it ‘wake up’, but in Linux, all three reliably start displaying.

I was wondering about that. I just got forced to run native Windows 11 by work, and one monitor in my multihead setup just never wakes up automatically, but my Linux install on same hardware has no issue.

Yeah, as much as Windows feels… subpar for my day to day vanilla, it really turns crappy with my corporate’s mandated load. System is constantly chewing on some bloat from one of the various ‘security’, monitoring, or fix management solutions that they have on this.

Unfortunately, if a company pitches their extra crap as ‘enhancing security’, the execs just have to say yes, because to be an exec who ever said ‘no’ to more security is to put your job at peril. Even if three of that vendor’s competitors already got their equivalent solutions into the load already…

I’ll admit to some ‘asterisk’ to that.

So a developer evangelist said “because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we’re all still working on Windows 10”. So the media ran with the most intuitive interpretation of that language and expanded on it and declared that Microsoft was basically changing to a rolling release model. Note that folks say “he meant latest, not last”.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s formal lifecycle statement said, from the onset, that it wasn’t going to be supported in 10 years.

However, Microsoft did nothing to clarify the rampant coverage. So I’m still on the side of “the popular impression among people was eternally supported rolling release”. Just acknowledging that, formally, they did designate 10 the same way they had designated previous versions.

You’ve been downvoted, but I’ve seen a fair share of ZFS implementations confirm your assessment.

E.g. “Don’t use ZFS if you care about performance, especially on SSD” is a fairly common refrain in response to anyone asking about how to get the best performance out of their solution.

Actually, the lower level may likely be less efficient, due to being oblivious about the nature of the data.

For example, a traditional RAID1 mirror on creation immediately starts a rebuild across all the potential data capacity of the storage, without a single byte of actual data written. So you spend an entire drive wipe making “don’t care” bytes redundant.

Similarly, for snapshotting, it can only track dirty blocks. So you replace uninitialized data that means nothing with actual data, the snapshot layer is compelled to back up that unitiialized data, because it has no idea whether the blocks replaced were uninialized junk or real stuff.

There’s some mechanisms in theory and in practice to convey a bit of context to the block layer, but broadly speaking by virtue of being a mostly oblivious block level, you have to resort to the most naive and often inefficient approaches.

That said, block capacity is cheap, and doing things at the block level can be done in a ‘dumb’ way, which may be easier for an implementation to get right, versus a more clever approach with a bigger surface for mistakes.

Just two months ago, a security team member dinged one of our services for using Lets Encrypt, as “it’s not as secure as a traditional CA”.