If the crap is still there, there's no reason for me to believe disabling it actually disables it.

Recently, I had this happen with a Logitech keyboard. The key mapping software automatically installs the Discord app, but you can "disable" it in the keyboard settings. Naturally, the app still runs in the background, so I had to manually edit a bunch of JSON config files to prevent the damn thing from launching on every boot.

Come on, pal... we all know this opt-out nonsense doesn't work. No company will leave free money on the table, no matter how much profit they make on hardware.

Yeah, all this stuff is totally for the end-user's benefit. That's why it's being forced on everyone.

We live in odd times when people think games need to have low-level access to the OS and read hardware serial numbers, even if you want to play exclusively offline.

I used to use Userchrome to reorganize the order of context menus and do a few other UI tweaks... until they removed those features.

Now I don't bother. I just use a fork of Firefox.

I see ageism is alive and well.

That's only when the PR shit hits the fan. Up to that point, it's cover-ups all the way down.

You know, just like any other organization full of petty office politics.

If all the AI systems were to disappear tomorrow, are you confident you could function without it?

I've had my fill of people saying they've "learned" things, but can't actually get anything done without automation.

That reminds me, I should find a new stand-alone PDF viewer for my workstation. The Firefox PDF viewer is orders of magnitude slower than any other PDF viewer I've ever used. If I have a 100-page document consisting of bitmap page scans and I skip to the end, it can take 30 seconds to render a page. It is just so damn slow.

But yeah, improving initialization time is a newsworthy deal.

Perhaps it would not kill us intentionally but rather by accident. I doubt AI understands the concept of not existing.

Everything these days is designed from the ground up to require an Internet connection.

Car manufacturers are used to charging $2000 for a vinyl sticker pack or a plastic spoiler. Of course they will use any disruption in the market to justify gouging people for thousands.

My car is almost 12 years old. I don't see myself replacing it any time soon.

Prices on those have gone up, too. Markets can be irrational, but they aren't stupid.

To be fair, every major OS refuses to do backups by default. You have to do everything manually yourself. As much as geeks love to scream about the importance of backups, it's remarkably difficult for ordinary people to do it, especially if you want proper version-controlled backups, and especially if you want catastrophic full-system backups. Most of the time, tech companies don't allow you to make backups, citing "copyright" concerns.

The best anyone offers is cloud storage (ie, a mirror), because that can possibly generate more revenue. Otherwise... figure it out yourself.

I don't see this as a problem with dumb end users. This is a cultural problem. The whole tech industry deserves a swift kick up the ass.

It's easy to understand. Embedded OSes are everywhere, but the manufacturer chooses them, not the end user.

What's hard to understand is why Linux people keep celebrating themselves when hardly any end users chooses what OS they use, and even when they can, the choice is still a pain in the ass.