MudMan

I still have some floppies in working order, even.

But no, I don't play them regularly. It's just easier to make a backup that doesn't need a disk in the drive. Even most of my retro PCs these days run out of a large-ish hard drive replacement, so keeping games outside their unreliable original media and the original media elsewhere is a better alternative.

It's a bit different on consoles where carts are harder to duplicate and ingest, as well as being more reliable and loading faster. Floppies and optical media, particularly when you can access the files, less so.

I'm sure the features do exist, but there's a big mix of people being semi-disingenuously mad at features you toggle off on install and never think about again, features in preview buids and features that don't quite do what people say they do.

That's not to say I wouldn't prefer many of those to... you know, not exist, but it's also true that my copilot button does nothing (that's a lie, it brings up the start menu), I don't have Recall, there are no ads in my Start menu and the extent of my interaction with "Click-to-do" was accidentally stumbling upon the shortcut, turning it off and never thinking about it again.

I shudder to think how much development time Microsoft dumps into things that work that way for all of their tech-savvy users and only exist as gimmicks and adware for normies. It's a dumb, dumb way to make software, but it's much more manageable than some corners of the internet say it is, be it due to the ragebait economy or just how weirdly partisan and irrational the Linux rah-rah gets.

As a long term dual-booter the whole thing seems kinda dumb to me on all sides for different reasons. I'm mostly just annoyed that I can't get Bazzite to hibernate properly and that I have to keep paying people to make my Windows taskbar float on the side of the screen like KDE does by default. And nobody is fixing either anytime soon because everybody is too busy being rich or smart or whatever other useless thing people like to be on the Internet.

It's a very stupid century.

Well, if noone cares, then your issue maybe just isn't that important.

I don't think that's the case, but we have to account for the possibility that your priorities just aren't particularly good priorities that other people care about.

I say I don't think that's the case because plenty of people do care about some of this stuff at least to some degree, or at least agree with it when asked.

People tend to be very down on the system or on politicians or on the ability or willingness to do anything in the common interest, and that's mostly part of the liberal lie as well. There's plenty to be done and plenty of people willing to do it. Those people need the power to do it, though. Sure, getting those people to where they need to be is hard, particularly with leftie types who will immediately get discouraged the moment their politicians aren't paragons of justice with a magic wand to fix every issue, but that's not the same as saying nobody cares.

I'd much rather have people get motivated than discouraged, and I don't need to win every fight, especially not right away. It'd rather move in the right direction than pout about it, even if the short term practical outcome is the same.

To be fair, this is not Recall, as per the article:

While the screen snooping only happens when the user expressly activates it as part of a Copilot session, unlike Recall, which is constantly active in the background when enabled, it's also designed to be more proactive than previous releases.

So... it's Google Lens?

I don't know, man, people keep telling me about all these Microsoft features and none of them ever show up on my devices. I think technically the next time I reboot my PC on Windows I'll have the black blue screens of death, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Also relevant:

At the time of writing, Microsoft was only offering Copilot Vision in the US, with the promise (or threat) that it will be coming to very specifically "non-European countries" soon – a tip of the hat, it seems, to the European Union's AI Act.

I can see that for a security role... maybe. It would have been a massive waste of time and money for what we were doing, though. Plus, this was during the good old times when people weren't being fired left and right. If anything it was hard to find people with the right qualifications that were still available. People in the field were getting hired directly out of school. If you could pass the tests, do the job and not act like a psychopath during interviews there were very few things that would have disqualified you.

I'll also say that I'm pretty sure some of what you describe would have been illegal over here, at least for most jobs.

I have hired dozens, maybe hundreds of people in corpo jobs. I can't vouch for any other employer, but I've never called anybody for anything. We had tests to verify skills and the CV was mostly a tool to know what steps to cover during an interview.

I can confirm that I didn't care about the summer you spent flipping burgers for the much more specific, entirely unrelated jobs I hired for. It mostly only let me know it was probably somebody young and relatively inexperienced padding things out.

But then, we were hiring for a very specific type of industry and... well, we weren't assholes. I have to imagine this sort of CV micromanagement is a thing somewhere or there wouldn't be a cottage industry around this nonsense.

See, that's not how pronouns work. You keep getting the concept of language wrong. It impacts suspension of disbelief, man, it's just sloppy.

Welcome to the past three hundred years of labor movements, friend. It sucks in here, but it sure is better than the alternative.

I'll say that your proposed alternatives have all the soul crushing artificiality of a customer service call center. I would much rather say nothing at all. I'm not anybody's parent or marketing representative.

I can tell you what I do for each of those things if you want to hear it, but I won't pitch somebody else's product at you and I sure as hell won't take your pitch unless I asked for it. I find people who try to sell you stuff on the street obnoxious and I'm not gonna do that same thing online.

That's my exact question, actually.

That is not a sentence.

I mean, I know what you're saying because... you know, but if we're going to do this dick measuring thing you're going to at least have to approximate language.

Finns and Americans are both "they". Everybody who isn't you or me is they.

Keep it up, we'll descend all the way down to pure formal logic this way. Breaking new frontiers of semiotics, I tell you.

You can caveat it with their perspective all you want, that's an aditional statement that has nothing to do with the original perfectly valid, perfectly understandable statement that you understood.