Based on the comments on that article, n+1

Wow, the days of dodgy toolbar extensions never truly went away. They just evolved to become part of your operating system.

The thing that actually baffles me about this is how this looks in the face of their next major competitor in the consumer market, Apple and their macOS.

macOS (or any other Apple product) has never (to my knowledge) had anything like this and it would be extremely out of character for Apple to suddenly change that. With all other manufacturers raising prices (including the Surface as of today) and the MacBook Neo directly competing with the mid tier PC laptops, this is what Microsoft decides to do?

At some point, one would hope that the average user starts to ask the question, can I have a computer that won’t pull this bullshit on me? But I think unfortunately most typical users (especially anyone daily driving Edge) just think there’s too much friction to move away from Windows, and so they stay, continuing to get fucked in the ass by megacorps.

But hey, I’m not in the running for a free car like them. Not like I’ll install Edge onto my Mac or Arch Linux computer and sync my shit with OneDrive.

Just yesterday, I had a studymate try to open an xlsx file on their phone - they had the Microsoft 365 app installed that would do this, but a recent update to that app just decided to change it to a Copilot only app.

So they had to install Microsoft Excel, and then it took over 10 minutes to initialise, just so we could finally look at a marking criteria. It would’ve literally been quicker for us to walk to a campus computer, log into that and read the xlsx file from that.

It genuinely baffles me how Microsoft makes their software objectively worse and outright baits and switches one popular application to turn it into another, presumably to up those adoption statistics and metrics; and they get away with it every single time. They long ago stopped caring about home users, but even business users put up with this mess.

Some Amazon employees said they were still sceptical of AI tools’ utility for the bulk of their work given the risk of error. They added that the company had set a target for 80 per cent of developers to use AI for coding tasks at least once a week and was closely tracking adoption.

Our product is so good, we mandate our employees to use it and watch them closely to make sure they do!

I would never buy brand new from them, but yes, my older devices are Intel because they were second hand and I knew more about them at the time than their AMD counterparts.

I’ve still got a ThinkPad X260 with an i5, and a MacBook Air 11" also with an i5. Those still get daily use from me and I’m not throwing them out because Intel is a shithouse company.

For me personally, I wouldn’t consider it worth the risk. You still have to make an Amazon account, hand over your personal information, let their cameras onto your network (of course, you can VLAN them) and… how many people are gonna do this to make it effective?

It just seems playing right into their hands, I’d rather outright boycott anything Amazon (I understand easier for some than others) than waste my time, money and effort into protecting my personal info against a user hostile company.

I also wonder how much of this was spurred by Linux even beginning to come to the mainstream mind and how simple most distros are to just install and run (Bazzite, CachyOS, Linux Mint).

You’ve always had Linux go around tech circles, forums, enthusiasts, etc. but big YouTube channels out of that circle are talking about it and hardware manufacturers are distributing it in place of Windows in the case of the Steam Deck, and it’s just building more and more momentum.

I think it’s easy to take for granted how (relatively) mainstream Linux is getting, but if you think today how many people talk about *BSD, that was Linux not even 10 years ago.

This whole article reminds me so much of the rogue AI sign found in Portal 2

OP has done something weird with the comment because for me the link comes to lemmy.dbzer0.com/digg.com - both of you have LW home instances so the URL is incorrectly being parsed as an instance link?

As if constantly pushing more AI slop into their software while making no real improvements wasn’t enough…

Reading the article, I don’t see how AI code was the fault in this situation. They let a developer certificate lapse without renewing it, so actually seems more like a process or human error; either their systems didn’t flag for upcoming renewal sufficiently or the alert was ignored or missed.

Here’s the crux of the article for you.

In just two years, starting in 2022, residential electricity prices rose by 10%, while commercial prices increased by only 3%, and industrial electricity prices fell by 2%.

I know this is said in hindsight, but the way the first paragraph is written sets off alarm bells of weird reporting, and I imagine probably was what triggered you to look into it further.

ASUS plans to produce RAM amid shortage problems, hoping to ease the rising costs of laptops and gaming PCs.

While I get that Asus naturally would want to be competitive, why would they (from an economic standpoint) care about ‘easing the rising costs’ of their products. They would have actual motives like trying to be independent of these major memory manufacturers.

Reports say the company is preparing to manufacture DDR5 memory by 2026.

2026 is in less than 5 days. If this instead said “by the end of 2026” or longer I’d have a better time believing that claim.

This is already happening. I couldn’t stomach watching such slop, but immediately following the Bondi shooting and Ahmed al Ahmed was shown tackling the shooter, videos were circulating that replaced Ahmed with a middle aged white man, presumably because the correct footage flew in the face of the far right agenda of Australia having a Muslim problem.

That’s the first I’ve seen a HN web client. Why does it exist, and what’s the reason against linking directly to Y Combinator?

Hacker News Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355548

This whole article is a 5 minute write up about a PCMR post from Reddit where a user had their memory stolen. That’s it. Not even surprised this article is a nothingburger given it’s Toms Hardware.

They had me at “Sustainability - Save the planet by talking about it.”

I admit I’m using my 1,1 as an extra seat in the office, but it’s form of use.

My dad had a G5 (essentially the same case design externally) and this guy is probably not kidding, those things felt like a massive aluminium block

Unpaywalled link: https://archive.is/6UiCT

From the headline I surely thought it was a bit clickbaity and maybe they wanted to use a ML algorithm to monitor some states of the facility.

Microsoft and nuclear power company Westinghouse Nuclear want to use AI to speed up the construction of new nuclear power plants.

The construction of a nuclear plant involves a long legal and regulatory process called licensing that’s aimed at minimizing the risks of irradiating the public.

Nope, seems that tech companies are trying to further feed the electricity demands of their data centers even if it means trying to fast track licensing.

Trump’s done a lot to make it easier for companies to build new nuclear reactors and use AI for licensing. […] The goal of [Trump’s May 2025 Executive Order] is to speed up the construction of reactors and get through the licensing process faster.

At the same time, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has gutted the NRC.  In September, members of the NRC told Congress they were worried they’d be fired if they didn’t approve nuclear reactor designs favored by the administration.

Of fucking course Trump and DOGE is in the mix here too.

All of this extra radiation risk so that the top 1%r’s have their pockets lined and we end up with Copilot and Recall. God damn.

I would only hazard against Debian for gaming because of it’s slower update cycle (yes yes you could use unstable or sid…), so performance improvements or fixes will take longer to get to you.

Otherwise I completely second your comment; OOP, just pick anything mainstream like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Bazzite, Pop!_OS, you’ll be fine on any of those. Once you’re comfortable with whatever you chose, then you’ll be more informed on picking a distro more suitable for your liking.