Still though it's pretty amazing how much memory and resources Windows takes up. I was debugging a Windows laptop trying to join an Intune/Autopilot environment. At the same time I was watching a Youtube nostalgia video on a Windows 95 Gateway PC.
Going through the Windows logs, it is dumping hundreds of pages of logtext every single second. Pages and pages of XML detailing what it is doing to try to connect to MS's Intune infrastructure. And this is just 1 component, checking the logs there are many other components doing the same thing.

Watching that Youtube video it got me thinking how long all this would take on a Pentium 90. This can't be the most efficient way to craft an OS surely. That saying - software is like a Gas - it will expand to take up everything - seems to ring true with Windows.

Now Intune/Autopilot is useful yes but reading MS logs you get the impression Microsoft haven't crafted intelligently designed software that handles errors and exceptions well, moves on to the next step and finishes gracefully. More - it seems that it will try a task, loop over and over, either eventually succeed or it will silently fail by timing out. It's very badly written and reading behind the scenes MS talk, with all that stack ranking, outsourcing etc, there is no cohesion or good management behind the dev teams.

This is why Microsoft has lost the home user. Given a choice of waiting 2 seconds for a tablet to fade on, or upto a minute for Windows to become usable.

It's bizarre because I recently enjoyed using some excellent Microsoft software and would recommend it. It is called Age of Empires 2.
Satya or whoever you are, sack the Windows devteam and put the AOE2 guys in charge instead, surely it couldn't get worse

If you can't VPN - a popular thing for teenagers is to use Hidden Containers to hide their porn. Load up a fake calculator, put in the right digits and there it is.
Would not having 2 logon codes - 1 a normal one, the other one also logs you on as normal but discretely wipes the hidden containers - be a better thing?

A wipe code or a "honeypot" code is no good because the police can tell and thus will charge you. If they log on and they see a "honeypot" environment with a few token internet searches and no chat or saved items, they will know that it is fake. They need to log in, see your normal phone usage, but anything stored in the Hidden Container is gone as if it never existed. As if the police suspect or find it, it's already too late.

I guess it would have to handle chat logs too, as that would be the evidence of conspiracy or what have you

So you're cool with the Government having a remote VNC connection to your phone and computer, that they can view at all times?

After all you aren't doing anything wrong and it can prove your innocence if you are ever accused of anything; the Government already has full access to your Computer usage history right? Every good Citizen should let their Government have full view rights to their systems. And why not write access, after all they may need it?

Better just hope that the pretty new colleague you took out to lunch last week; her ex boyfriend isn't a police officer and isn't of the very jealous type. Do we not see such stories appear on Slashdot regularly?

We still have 7 year old Chromebooks and Windows Desktops running fine at the School District I work at; the Chromebook hinges on some models are starting to fail but most of the maintenance I do is on student damage (picked letters off, etc). The Chromebooks have 10 years of updates then we must get rid of them by District policy.

We used to buy around 120 a year, but the price over doubled from ~$150 a unit to ~$360 a unit so we bought only 60 this year.
I have a big pile of Chromebooks where maintenance wasn't really worth the labour (e.g. they have a loose hinge and 12 missing keys, where I would have to cut off the rubber nodule from a donor machine and carefully glue it back on to the keyboard/chassis, to repair the key) But this year I may indeed go through them as much as I can.

Now I don't know about big corporations but I'd say a 7 year lifespan is common now for desktops. 10 years perhaps. We bought low-mid end desktops in 2019 - Core i5, they were the right model to support Win11 so I can easily see us getting another 3 years out of them. We do get the occasional failure, out of 120 8 have failed. SSD or Mainboard.
Laptops after 7 years most have failed due to I/O ports failing. USB-C charging ports mostly.

Businesses will just buy more refurbed desktops if they must. There are many Refurbed models on the market - usually when a company did a refresh "because they need a refresh" these desktops are refurbed and sold on for $100. I am seeing some prices now reach $200 for a refurbed Lenovo desktop but there are still plenty of $100 units available.

The public will just do what they do now. Use a phone. Everyone has a phone, and there will always be phones on contract, hand me down phones, etc. Who in the general public uses a laptop now? Adults use phones, small children use tablets, and computers are only used in schools or businesses.

The Elites want us all paying rent for everything now anyway, so this might suit them in that the only way to "own" a phone affordably would be to rent one on contract.

Rent a Gaming PC enterprises I'm sure they all failed in the past but from now on who knows. I still run a Core i7 5820k. This is a chip released in 2014! a 12 Year old Chip! Granted I have an Nvidia 5060 GPU but this GPU still pulls its weight running Doom Eternal at 4k, the 2025+ Age of Mythology remake etc.

It shows how much CPU performance basically hasn't improved in the last 10 years. Imagine if I bought a 486 in 1990 - and was still using it in 2002 when Doom 3 came out. I was thinking about getting a new Ryzen system but with RAM prices, I'll wait until the Chinese start making cheap RAM.

At some point you must have sympathy with these women yes? Throughout history they have been required to marry, lets face it, fat, ugly, bald old men. Now women have the choice - 80% of men just don't seem worthwhile for them. 80% if not more of all men are ugly and what's worse, most men have the delusion that they are the exception.

Perhaps this period of society will be a new evolutionary bottleneck for mankind; but unfortunately it isn't intelligence being selected for this time.

I use Firefox and am happy with it (I like the plugins and the fact it's not MS or Google) but I can't deny looking at the new screenshots, this new version looks like ass. Didn't designers get the memo that computers shouldn't ape phone design when Windows 8 bombed?

Also as an actual digital currency BTC is shite. A transfer of BTC will take 45 minutes on average, for 1 confirmation, and you need to pay TX fees for this to happen. At one point you had to pay $2 - $5 to guarantee you'd be in that 1st confirm window, otherwise you could be waiting literally days for your tx to confirm on the blockchain.
The BTC bros first said "use Lightning network braah" yet I've never actually seen the Lightning network used ever. Then the BTC bros said "braah you are trying to use BTC as a digital currency? lol it's a store of value braah".
That is when you know the thing is only an irrational hype machine, just like Tulip bulbs were.

For a real digital currency that people actually take you can use Litecoin, which TX in 2 - 10 minutes (still way too long to be useful for a shop merchant) with TX fees in the cents (LTC value hovers around $40 per LTC) or some of the privacy focused coins out there.

I started buying BTC at $500 a BTC unfortunately I spent it all immediately after buying instead of holding it, or I'd be very rich yes, but even back then I couldn't see how BTC could possibly go higher than $1000. But that was before I realised just how greedy and irrational people (especially those at the top) are. Now it is way too late.

Agreed, I run IT for a school district, at $800+ these are a non starter, unless they have somehow made them indestructible.

At $200 or below for a Chromebook, they are worth it as the damages can be replaced/repaired fairly cheaply. If you have school supplied ones, you can outfit trolleys of them at not so high a cost. If parents provide them, $200 isn't as big of an ask as $800. I would not want to be a school administrator arguing with parents who claim that their $800 Chromebook "just broke" when it has obviously been smashed up.

These things aren't very robust, even the more expensive models, the screens are fragile and can break just by being in a backpack when kids are being kids. The letters are easy to pry off by hand.

Paying $800+ for these things is way too much when for a school the AI isn't even what you want - it can even be a downgrade when pupils are supposed to be doing their own work and instead ask an AI to do it for them. How are kids going to learn when they have an AI doing everything for them? ChromeOS is already bad enough with abstracting away file paths, file origins etc.

Schools in various countries are now going "back to basics", less is more. If I were to design a Chromebook or computer for school use - it would be cheap, low powered, and robustly built. But I don't think the tech is really there yet e.g. a color 60fps E-ink display. Entire SoC with only i/o ports needed on a board. But of course the profit margins wouldn't be that high (that is if $800 Chromebooks will sell at all, I can't see many but the richest school districts picking these up)

Do we actually have any evidence for any of these AI models autonomously hacking into outside webservers, and doing all of this nefarious stuff? Recently I looked into an AI agent to take care of a high school's internal intranet (basically have admin access, and respond to queries such as "replace attendance poster X with this one" by normal human users. And I found such a thing was well beyond any AI agent I could find. At most they could seem to be a fancy kind of autocomplete.

So when I hear stories of these kinds of things, I can't help but feel like there were human researchers behind the scenes prompting the AI's to do such things. We then go from the AI being a really good hacking tool, to anthropomorphising these things into "omg they hide their thoughts from us and just can't wait to do us bad!"

A contract is a contract is a contract. But only among Ferengi

The Elites can and are "interpereting" those "checks and balances" to mean whatever they want them to mean. E.G. Corporate officials bribing officials etc. Turns out Money is Speech, it's not really a bribe after all. I thought Bribe meant to corruptly pay an official for a favor. Checks and Balances.
Expect them to do much more "interpereting" in the near future. Does Two really mean 1 and then another 1 ?

I don't know, Trump loves sycophants but he still knows how to do politics. He can pardon some Democrat politician nobody has really heard of, but there are some people who are just toxic. SBF is toxic, Trump knows this, he knows any pardon will look very bad and Trump loves looking good almost as much as money.

And don't forget SBF lost a lot of the 1%'s money, I can't see Trump pardoning any such person, the moment he floats an SPF pardon among his 1% friends they'll quietly tell him it's a no go.

Ironic you posting that you didn't bother to read everything he wrote on a post about low standards of reading...

I don't think I'd want to go toe to toe with an armed robot that can recognise and aim straight at a human forehead in 0.01 seconds... A different strategy will be needed.
Of course these current gen robots a slight breeze will blow them over so we have some time yet

Yes; as far as I'm aware the definition of AGI is - an AI that can handle general intelligence like a human can. That would mean visually too; not just recognising a dog or a cat; but understanding and navigating a 3D environment; following multiple complicated steps to solve a complicated problem etc.

OpenAI has not demonstrated this in any way; therefor I can say I "know" OpenAI has no AGI. Of course they could have some hidden model stashed away, but then you could say that Tesla has a car that can run on water hidden away, or that Microsoft has a decent OS stashed away.

Unless I see proof I'm not going to believe it and so far there is no proof.

Show me the model that can run on my desktop and field all my desktop support calls. A ticket comes in "help the Internet is down I can't get on" - where does it go from there.

What these guys will do is just redefine AGI "We never said human intelligence, it says General, and our model can do poems and analyse images, see it's general".
But all the hype about AGI radically changing our world - a model that can't really do anything by itself - isn't going to change the world much now is it

As long as I'm not one of the 5 or so people left alive for the Master Computer to torment...