Posts by intrigid 211 publicly visible posts • joined 7 May 2013
Yeah, people think the crash from the IPO highs is bad for SpaceX, actually quite the opposite. They got maximum capital infusion while giving up a minimal percentage of their company. Basically, whale investors mostly donated $85 billion of venture capital to the company. Now small retail investors will be able to invest on the cheap into a much healthier capital-rich company if they choose to.
Hot take: The "AI bubble" is basically a myth. Decades from now, we'll look back at AI today the way we look back at PCs and video games in 1980, or automobiles in the 1920s.
Short-term froth and overvaluations, yes. We could easily see a 50% collapse/correction in stock valuations, maybe lasting a couple of years. But the popular opinion that the entire industry is going to collapse and be abandoned as some failed and pointless experiment is just about as delusional as an opinion can get.
My employer tried for months and months to get me on Microsoft Authenticator on a personal device. I just politely let them know over and over that my personal phone is a flip phone / can't install apps, and the other devices I have are too old and don't meet the minimum requirements. How are they going to prove otherwise?
"Can't wait for them to start charging customers ... to cover what it's actually costing the AI companies to run the bots. "
Already a thing and has been for years. I decided last year to describe to a premium plan (~$20 a month) in order to have virtually unlimited access to deep-reasoning queries and the like. I don't regret the money spent at all.
I use Windows 7 on everything, and I have all the AI functionality I could possibly need immediately at hand.
I could conceivably boot up my Windows XP machine from 2001 and get all the AI I need on there as well.
AI is a server-side feature, not dependent on client hardware.
That's a bit extreme. If you want to use an outdated OS, just don't do anything actually risky like using online banking, and you should have nothing to worry about. A router/firewall and ad-blocking is enough to achieve ~99.9% of the threat reduction compared to modern, supported OS. That doesn't even take into the account that just like software in general, a lot of modern malware and threats ONLY work on newer, modern OSes, as it's no longer worth it for bad actors to go to the hassle of trying to adapt their malware work for ~2% of the PC market.
"Security updates" are not a mandatory requirement, even though most people think of them as such. If you're really concerned that you might get hacked/ransomwared at some point, there is nothing stopping you from keeping regular OS image backups, and only doing your sensitive/financial tasks on a 2nd PC with the latest security updates.
1) Older browser versions work; they are not cut off from the internet when a new version comes out. Security certificates eventually expire, but that won't be until 2038 at the earliest.
2) There exist open-source forks to Chromium and Firefox that restore Windows 7 support to the most recent versions and codebases of the browsers.
I can respect XP as a #1 choice, given its essentially zero telemetry and its hyper-user-focused design. I was an XP holdout until 2015, in fact.
However, Windows 7 did objectively represent an actual upgrade in several significant ways: Practically unlimited RAM support being the biggest upgrade, proper support for SSDs instead of just hard drives, practically unlimited disk partition sizes, and proper implementation of video acceleration at the OS rendering level (Aero theme implementation in particular). Also, I think it's fair to say that the core OS stability of Windows 7 was superior as well. I've run my Windows 7 desktop for the better part of a year without having to reboot or getting a BSOD; I don't think I can say the same for XP.
As for being nagged about "Are you sure you want to install this?" I guess I never really noticed this, given that only install some new program maybe once a month on average.
Your "people complaining about the latest Windows are whiners" tirade might have been valid if we lived in a world where nothing was ever good enough for us, and we were all just complaining about pie-in-the-sky ideas that ought to exist but don't.
But that's not the case. Our pie-in-the-sky ideals have, in fact, already been invented and widely used by a huge portion of the world for many years. Then, those near-perfect implementations have been systematically and forcibly dismantled and replaced over the years by systems that serve the creator rather than the end user, under the guise of "well, you have to use the latest version, it's not safe otherwise".
"So what is the fix for firefox users that still run Windows 7? We can't update to the latest firefox because it won't run on W7."
As some have mentioned, 115 ESR continues to work fine and receive updates.
Alternatively, (and I would strongly recommend this instead,) Waterfox 6.0.20. It is a privacy-oriented fork of Firefox. It is based on Firefox 128, and the updated root certificate expires on Jan 15, 2038. It supports all of the same extensions as Firefox, including the beloved uBlock Origin.
Other options, such as Plasmafox/Redfox, Supermium, Yandex etc exist as well, but won't necessarily have the same desired functionality.
Firmware and other automatic were never about improving features or security for end users. They were always about improving profits for vendors. And I'm not just talking about printers. I'm talking about literally everything that receives automatic updates.
Does your device seem to be a little slower after the latest major update? Well, it is starting to get a bit old. Have you thought about getting an upgrade?
"An unsupported OS is a ticking time bomb, keeping software up to date is not optional unless you're air-gapping your system. "
There's one major problem with this argument, which is this: The vast majority of things that the average person does on their home PC, or even what a power user does on their home PC, is not sensitive in nature. It's not an existential threat if a hacker gets into your PC and compromises your web browsing history, video game save files, hobbies and creative works, movies, TV shows, music collection etc. And a hacker is not interested in any of those things anyway. They are interested in installing ransomware (which can be fixed with proper backups and restores) and accessing social media and financial accounts.
If your only argument against using an "unsupported" operating system pertains to security, then why not simply offload the security-sensitive tasks onto a different PC or dual-booted OS that accommodates those tasks?
I currently use Windows 7 as my main OS, both for desktop and laptop use. I only have Win 10 installed as a secondary OS on a laptop, and as a virtual machine on the desktop. I only use it for anything that won't work on 7, of which there really isn't much. However, I do have a lot of older peripheral hardware and custom configurations that are very likely to break on a different or newer OS, with no real alternative or substitute available.
Security? Number 1, nothing beats good quality, regular backups. If anything gets screwed up, restore the OS from a recent image. Want to do online banking and want to minimize any possibility of a breach. Have a cheap, dedicated Linux laptop and turn it on once a month.
Having used newer OSes for work, I can say 7 is simply better. Everything about it is pre-enshittification. It's faster, cleaner, more resource-efficient, and completely ad-free. Will there come a day where I can't feasibly use it any more? Frankly, I don't see that happening. It's difficult to imagine any use case that couldn't be easily transferred over to a virtual machine, remote desktop, or secondary PC.
Around 10 years ago, when I saw a pop-up that said my Windows 7 would be automatically "upgraded" to Windows 8 within a certain amount of time, I immediately downloaded a program to block that from happening. At that moment, I knew the industry had permanently switched from a customer-serving model to a vendor-serving one.
I swore that I would continue using Windows 7 until either something bad happened as a result of using it, or until some use case stopped working on it for which there were no reasonable alternatives. To this date, I'm still running it, and in fact have expanded my usage of it to three additional PCs. And with the ease of accessing newer operating systems through VMs and remote desktop, it's difficult to imagine a scenario where I will feel the need to "upgrade" in the forseeable future. And if I do, it will almost certainly be moving individual use cases over to a parallel PC running something like Linux Mint.
He had a deadly amount of fentanyl in his body. He repeatedly complained that he couldn't breathe in the minutes leading up to being wrestled to the ground. Even if they locked him in the back seat of the police cruiser with handcuffs, he probably would have died of his overdose.
When the story came out, it looked like he was strangled to death. After the bodycam footage was released, it's pretty clear that the evidence that he was killed by police is basically zero.
The problem is the false notion that if a young person tests positive for the virus, has little to no symptoms (as is the majority of cases), and gets over it, that something bad has happened. This is silly; something very good has happened. Societal immunity has increased, and the potential for the virus to spread has been undermined.
This is why "number of cases" is such a useless, harmful statistic. It lumps in the good events with the bad events into one big number.
You're confusing case fatality with infection fatality. You're factually wrong; flu case fatality is far higher than 3%. In most countries it's north of 10%. That's because very few people who get the flu go to the trouble of testing for it. Even if they go to the doctor complaining of flu symptoms, very few doctors will send away for a flu test. They save the actual flu tests for elderly and people with pre-existing conditions, which explains why the flu case fatality rate is so high.
I have a bottom-of-the-line Dell laptop with 32gb of eMMC and about 2gb free space. It brings a smile to my face every time Windows fails to update. It says it needs an additional 10 gigs.
The funny thing is that I don't have anything installed on it other than a few hundred megs worth of apps and some old games. Windows 10 is simply an insatiable monster that wants to grow and consume, for no particular end user benefit at all.
I love my top-of-the-line Windows 7 desktop.
I would be happier with the company estimating the net cost savings per employee of permanent work-from-home, and then offering say 25% of that savings to me in the form of a permanent bonus on my paycheck. Based on industry numbers I've heard thrown around, that would amount to me taking home at least an extra couple thousand a year.
