I switched to Linux Mint this year and I'm slowly adapting to it. If your computer has the resources, I recommend using Qemu to run a Windows 11 virtual machine. I set one up with a local account (tricky), installed Microsoft Office, and activated both using Microsoft Activation Scripts. I don't plan to play games on it but it will provide a nice way to access Windows software going forward.

My experience with frameworks is that they tend not to be maintained very long and it's not uncommon for them to be depreciated altogether. When that happens the developers are left in a real difficult situation. It's reasonably straightforward to replace to depreciated library but a depreciated framework probably means that the entire application needs to be re-written.

How do these LLM based AIs do at modifying human-written existing code? Lets say a project that consists of hundreds of source files, across multiple platforms and languages? I ask because there are A LOT of legacy systems out there that aren't going away anytime soon.

Personally, I'm skeptical that an AI will ever be any good at maintaining its own code. Lets say that some manager has an AI spit out the source code to create a website or phone app and the AI does it perfectly. How will the AI respond when the manager asks it to add a few new fields later on, or to change the existing logic in some way? I'm genuinely curious to know the answer.

I mean, AI is toy, so it makes sense for a toy company to embrace it.

I would certainly prefer for an AI hallucinate an encounter in a dwarven tavern over when giving medical advice.

What really bothers me about this approach is that it doesn't necessarily make the user more secure but flips the danger around. It does mean that an easily-stolen laptop will have its data encrypted but it also means that a secured desktop that was never at risk of theft is now inaccessible if the user's Microsoft account gets hacked.

Perhaps Microsoft is prepared today to help each and every poor hacked user who can no longer access their files. Perhaps they have phonelines staffed and ready to walk a non-technical consumer through the key recovery process. Perhaps their server infrastructure is iron clad with no possibility of intrusion. My question is, can they guarantee it will be so in the future? They're taking on a lot of responsibility here and needlessly in my opinion.

The simplest solution here would be to break up Google by disconnecting unrelated products. For example, YouTube could easily be spun into its own successful company. I hope though that the government takes the longer, more difficult road and tries to split Google's search product up (or at least regulates it like a utility).

There are a couple of big problems with Google's search currently. It has gotten effectively worse as their fuzzy matching technology focuses on matching the search phrase to popular results rather than the closest match. There are indications that this will get even worse in the future as Google has recently said that they are going to start discarding websites from their search options. I'm not sure what they mean by this but it's easy to imagine a situation where Google simply doesn't return results on unpopular websites.

Thus the opportunity is here to split Google into a variety of search engines and let each one tackle search in different ways. Ideally this would be done by opening up Google's massive indexing engines to their competitors and allowing pretty much anyone throw together a rival search engine that was able to run its own algorithms against pre-collected data. In principal this could create a very exciting field where consumers could choose specialized search engines (technical, celebrity gossip, world events, etc) for their particular query.

Now there are a couple of complications to this approach. The first is that Google would probably also need to open up their advertising engine to their competitors as well and allow the reselling of ad space. It is unrealistic to expect anyone to meaningfully compete against Google's adwords system - advertisers would certainly prefer to just buy ad space in a single market. Another major issue would be managing SEO, scammers, and hackers. Currently Google does an ok job here in that they generally return reputable websites for their searches. In order for the competitors to be able to offer an equivalent search experience, Google would definitely have to collaborate with the other search sites, even though the result could easily be a central authority that decides whether websites are legitimate or not.

My view here is that search really has become too important to be left in the hands of a single unregulated entity. It would be extremely difficult to regulate search in a meaningful way but doing so has the potential to really improve the online community in the long term. I hope that the powers-that-be take a serious look at this direction.

Can't you just use the Windows 7 Backup feature in Windows 10/11? I use it and it generates vhdx files.

This kinda substantiates your point that Microsoft's backup options just keep getting worse. Windows 7 Backup > File History > Windows Cloud Backup.

The thing that seems ridiculous to me is that these ISPs are getting absolutely hammered by anti-piracy lawsuits that are suing (and winning) for massive sums because the ISPs aren't doing enough to block online piracy. This is really a miserable situation for the ISPs; they either fight these endless lawsuits or start kicking off paying customers (and invite new lawsuits) based on flimsy and questionable evidence.

The solution here is for these ISPs to finally just accept their status as a regulated business and welcome their inevitable long-term profits. I guess some companies just don't know how to win.

I still have my landline; my phone company is also my ISP and though their convoluted billing system makes it hard to know for sure, I don't think I'm paying very much to have it included with my Internet.

In my opinion, the quality of the landline continues to be unmatched by cell phones. The audio quality on my cell phone can be extremely variable but my landline remains wonderfully consistent. Another thing: I can sit on hold for several hours on my landline but my cell phone will typically disconnect after about an hour.

I could be persuaded to go with a VOIP provider in the future but as someone else has pointed out in the comments, until ISPs are regulated as a common carrier, Internet based phone service will never be as reliable as what we currently have.

ISPs could be completely immune from these kinds of lawsuits if they just accepted Common Carrier status from the FCC. Instead, they spend a fortune fighting it every year. In their mind, there is money to be gained by being able to run their networks without restrictions but it sure seems like they've got to be losing more from lawsuits like this.

Yes, my fingers are faster than my brain sometimes, but not as accurate.

Personally, I think the IRS should simply send everyone a pre-filled out 1014 or 1014EZ every year at tax time. If the numbers match, sign it and send it back. If they don't, fix them and send it back. If you think that a CPA or a software package could do a better job, use them and send in their forms.

As I understand it, the majority of Americans just don't have very complicated taxes. There's no reason to make tax time difficult for them.

What's interesting to me is that ethernet continues to be more reliable than wifi even though wifi has improved incredibly in recent years. Personally, I would choose 100mb ethernet over 200mb wifi. Part of this is due to latency issues or external interference, problems intrinsic with wireless but not with wired connections. The biggest difference between the two, in my opinion, is in how the operating system handles it. If my Internet connection has difficulties when I'm connected via ethernet, no problem, everything continues to function as expected. If the same thing happens when I'm connected to wifi, my Windows and Android devices start disconnecting and reconnecting, looking for a better connection.

In summation, a big reason ethernet is so good is its simplicity. It either works or it doesn't. The operating system is expected to try to fix the problem for you.

I've played around with ChatGPT and it can produce some worthwhile code for an established new problem. It's less clear to me whether it has any hope of altering existing code, much less to locate and fix bugs in code.

It also seems like ChatGPT has little to no awareness of software versions and always seems to want to write its example code using the latest APIs and grammar. Once again, this is fine for new code, but it causes me to doubt whether ChatGPT could do much with code even a few years old.

I just want to point out how ridiculous it is to build a device that destroys it's contents after 10 failed attempts. They could increase it to 100 without decreasing the security by a meaningful amount but it would give the owner a lot more breathing room to access their data.