Same here. I used to spend endless time on /., even while at work, as so much of what happened over here was somehow relevant to my job anyway. Of course, I no longer do that same job, but even if I did I still wouldn't be a daily /. visitor today. Sic transit gloria mundi, I guess, but very sweet memories nonetheless.

Downloading the floppies for Linux 0.12 at work and then almost literally running home as fast as I could to get it installed is another of those beautiful memories. Especially as it actually booted and worked. :-) I sure didn't get a lot of sleep on that first night towards killing DOS on my home box.

It's been a while, but I tried to used LibreOffice for several years on Win10 and eventually had to drop it for a copy of Office (not 365, fortunately), There were just too many subtle and less subtle incompatibilities with the Office that I had to use on my work PCs.

I even tried to get the Libre team to address some of those (e.g. as options), but they said "We're not a copy of Office" (fair enough) and "We do it the right way" (which I honesty did not always agree with). Regardless of right vs wrong, some basic Calc manipulations were so "non-standard" for no other reason than arbitrary choice, that I had to abandon Libre. It cost me far too much frustrating loss of time (with an implied risk of loss of data), and it caused too many problems for the people I had to share my files with and who I could not force to switch to Libre.

I don't like Windows. I never did. But I sadly have one machine on which I need it. That one currently is on Win 10 and I most definitely do not want it to be upgraded to the even more privacy-invasive, ad-invasive, user-ignoring Win 11. Fortunately, it doesn't have TPM 2.0, so it currently can't, which suits me just fine.

What's more, that machine is aging and I've started to worry that it will physically break down within 1 year or so - judging by what happened to my earlier ones.So, recently, I went shopping and found a brand new "older" computer that does not satisfy Win11 's requirements, and which is now sitting in storage until I need it to keep Win11 out of my life for another 6 years or so. Hopefully by the time that one also breaks, I will finally be able to escape Windows altogether.

And yes, I do know about the risks of running an unsupported OS. Fact is, nothing truly sensitive is stored on - or connected to - that one machine, and I only use it for certain specific tasks, which allows me to shield it from many risks "by default". And it's sitting behind a double firewall anyway (and for one application even a triple one, as the relevant service provider also applies serious scanning and filtering to the point of annoying me with false positives).

My keys are with me at home and I know where they are, but not with me as in "always on my body". If I have to carry them literally everywhere where I might need them to log in (3 computers in 2 fixed and 1 mobile location, spread over 3 floors) and also every time I change between regular clothes, military clothes, and DIY clothes, then that is when I will "loose" them all the time.

I tried a few of my old e-mail addresses that no longer work.

• One very old one that I know was leaked at least twice around 2000 (but no longer know when and how) was not reported.
• One was correctly identified as leaked in the 2003 Adobe hack - I knew that already.
• One that stopped working in 2014 was reported as not leaked. I am, however, about 80% that it was leaked at least once around 2010-2012 (I don't remember the specifics of that, however).
• One was claimed to be leaked in the 2021 LI scraping, but... by then this address had been obsolete for 2 years and had 99.999999% for sure already been removed from LI.
• Two more that LI knew about in 2021 were not reported as leaked. Quite weird.

It can give you hints, but they can be just as meaningless and confusing for non-native speakers. One extreme example: in German (and in Dutch as well) the word for "boy" is masculine, whereas the word for "girl" is not feminine but neutral. To make things even worse, if in German one would try to make "girl" feminine, one would get "die Maedchen", which actually means "girls" (plural).

At least in Dutch the latter would not be the case, since we append an 's' to express the plural of "meisje" and change "het" into "de" at the same time (similar to how German changes "das" into die"). Or how adding some redundancy can help...

I have one Win 10 Pro laptop that runs just fine, but is not illegible to run Win 11. Anyway, even if it were, I would not want to get 11 - to many annoyances. And/But I most certainly don't want ads to sell me Win 11 for/on this machine. So I've been keeping it frozen on specific Win 10 versions for several years and have been blocking all surprise updates for a long time now. In fact, the machine was upgraded only once over all those years and even now is not on the very latest Win 10, because each time Windows get updated to a new release too many things break or too much time has to be spent getting my personal preferences set correctly again.

Last week I was actually starting to look at upgrading to the final Win 10 later this year or early in 2025, prior to EoL, but if that means that I'll be facing forced Win 11 ads, it just will not happen. Blocking Win 11 was my original reason for my policy after all.

I will definitely not update until someone publishes the right registry hack to kill those !@#$%^&* ads.

I fully get your point - I am a bit of a privacy nerd - but let's see..

Joe D.(igitaly Illiterate) Random's router is infected. So an employee of a three letter government agency shows up and explains that his router has been used by teh Rusians to attack the DoD and DoJ, and that a software update needs to be installed in order to stop this. What are the chances of our dear Joe allowing this to happen? What are the chances that he'll accuse the government of trying to illegally invade his privacy, or even wanting to install a secret "5G" feature in an attempt to wirelessly control his brain via the microchip they implanted when he got vaccinated against smallpox as a child 40 years ago?

This is not the future, but has been the present for 15 years at least.

Disclaimer: Back then I had to work on a product that was to enable that (2G at the time) and the company I worked for wasn't alone.

Fortunately, SmartTVs are unlikely to have this, since they can get a free hike on their owner's (sorry: licensee's - or even more accurately: victim's) WiFi, instead of having to use a paying service that on top of that is less reliable. Getting data from the few people who know how to block a router port and who then also do it, isn't worth the extra hardware and operating cost of a mobile connection.

Which is what I swiftly did within seconds of discovering the thing just 2 minutes after the reboot.

If I want a journal app (which I don't), I'll take explicit action to get one. There's no need for Apple to push anything onto me.

That would be another way to loose me as a "viewer". I often "watch" YT videos in audio-only mode, with the YT window minimized, while doing something else. A site that starts being so fascist that it thinks it should decide and enforce what I physically have to watch even beyond their stupid ads, just looses me completely in an instant.

Same here, even though I'm a daily (anonymous) user of YT. There is no way in hell that I'm going to disable my adblockers. Ever. And there is no way in any and all levels of hell that I'm going to get a personal google account for anything. Ever!

Just now I switched over to a YouTube front-end app-killing app because of this stupid little experiment of theirs - much better already anyway. But if YT finds a way to block that or to force ads - especially mid-stream ones - anyway, I'll be saying "sayonara" (in the real meaning of the word, not in the commonly used English understanding of it).

Except that no amount of regulation would be able to regulate this technology and the companies in question understand that very well.

I actually see an enormous amount of danger here (both for horrific accidents and for misuse), because we humans can be so horribly stupid and easily manipulated - including being manipulated to think that we were not. However, no amount of regulation can put this genie back into the bottle. Apart from being horribly stupid, we humans are also so intelligent as to be able to recreate/restart this development even if all the players currently involved were to completely halt all their activities immediately and forever. The knowledge of how this type of AI works is out there and cannot be unlearned. Not to mention that there is open source code as well.... Besides, a 6-months pause is nowhere near enough if they/we really want to get this under regulatory control. There's no way in either heaven or hell that in just 6 months we'd be able to agree (worldwide, no less) on what we want to happen, want we don't want, and how we can enforce all of that. Just forget it. Totally.

Look at nuclear weapons for comparison. The big powers put a big treaty and all sorts of regulation in place to prevent them from spreading. On top of that the technology and material needs involved are much more complex that for ChatAI type of AI, and yet the whole setup failed miserably anyway.

My Methuselah is an HP DC7600 desktop that I bought in late 2005 or early 2006.

It is still running right now - and not only that, it is still running a full-load compute job that I started in the summer of 2006 and that has been running ever since - apart from a few short and mostly involuntary power cuts, plus a house move in 2017.

And it's not a ship of Theseus either, because all I had to do to keep this baby running, was to replace the power supply fan (only the fan, mind you) in about 2020 or 2021 because it was starting to make a lot of noise.

I did notice a few months ago that the number of bad HDD sectors is starting to creep up a bit, but for now it's still going just fine.

There are also many more types of pieces in stratego than in chess. Moreover, in chess the attacking piece always wins, no matter what type it is, whereas in stratego the attacker can lose if it is outranked (with one asymmetric exception).

No wonder that it is much more complex.