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Comment Re:Do you actually use them day today though? (Score 1) 105

It's normal that any OS will have close to 0 free memory! This is the expected behavior..

Describe "0 free memory". When I say it is 100%, I am literally looking at Outlook, Windows services, and Excel taking almost 16GB by themselves. This is not cached memory model of the Linux and MacOS where free RAM is reserved for caching. At 16GB, the "cached memory" on my Windows machine is disk swap as I can see the disk activity.

See my other post just above.

I am not searching through this forum just because you can't be bothered to retype or paste a link. Also I have to read your mind to determine which of your posts apply? That's a no.

Comment Re:8 GB of RAM (Score 1) 105

There are lots of things that could be removed from Windows that are unnecessary; however, MS makes it more difficult with each new update and patch. Removing them for the performance is such a hassle that few do it. For example, I don’t have an Xbox but MS deems it that I must have Xbox Gaming installed with each major update. It used to be that you could uninstall it. Now you can remove it but it really is not uninstalled as components still exist; for example all the modules that connect to the Xbox gaming servers still are present.

There are all sorts of service running that do not to be. I don’t have a touch screen yet all components for it cannot be removed. My machine is a desktop not a laptop yet airplane mode exists and cannot be removed. I know because one day it was triggered somehow and I was off the Internet until I rebooted and reset everything.

Comment Re: It's also unusable with 8GB of RAM (Score 1) 105

Oh Windows 11 is fine to have all of these running at the same time; using them at the same time is the problem. Switching between them is a constant issue for me. Want to switch back and forth between an email and a spreadsheet? There is a noticeable lag and pause. I can’t refer to an email the start typing in a cell immediately. And I have 16GB and it is constantly 100% used between Windows and Office.

Comment Re:8 GB of RAM (Score 1) 105

The Macbook Neo set that standard. You're apparently allowed to make a cheap laptop in 2026 with a unusable amount of RAM and storage now as long as it has a good display.

Have you looked at DDR5 and SSD prices recently? Cheap and lots of RAM or storage are conflicting conditions right now. Laptop manufacturers are not "allowed" to do this as much as they have no choice at the moment. But you are allowed to buy more RAM and storage in a laptop; do not expect it to be cheap.

Comment Re:8 GB of RAM (Score 1) 105

Macbook Neo, the machine it is a rival to, also runs very poorly on an 8GB RAM machine

According to whom? The Neo is a terrible machine to run anything memory intensive like 4K video editing full time. But that is not designed primarily to do. It was made for the average consumer like students to handle everyday computing like web surfing. Every review I have read say the 8GB is fine for these tasks.

Comment Re:Nobody wants a 1984 surveillance machine (Score 2) 68

Also "poorly implemented" and "deceptively advertised". It was originally on by default and was advertised as being secure by being "encrypted" but "encrypted" only meant Windows Bitlocker if the user turned it on; however, Bitlocker only prevents the data being read if the drive was removed from the system. The files themselves were not protected against being read by other processes or users. After many complaints, Windows relented with Recall being optional and implemented actual file encryption.

Comment Re:Wat (Score 2) 48

Guess we forgot how funny it was that we suddenly went into a "current post quantum transition while somehow forgetting how we really got out of the pre-quantum phase.

For security, some people prepare in advance of threats instead of reacting to them when they arrive. 1024 bit RSA was implemented around 1999 as the standard. It was recommended around 2010 that 2048 bit replace it. 1024 bit had not been factored yet but 768 bit had been. The current threat to cryptographic systems right now is quantum computing. Moving to more secure algorithms before they are all cracked seems like the prudent thing to do.

Comment Re:If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 1) 119

At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.

Comment If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 4, Insightful) 119

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

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