Sham-shampoo is better than sham-poo.

Your solution to people wanting to buy some specific drinks is “don’t buy the thing you want, buy something else”. Hardly an answer.

How to say this in a non aggressive, non condescending way…

You’re stupid.

The thing stay open and out of the way. If it’s in your face when you drink from the bottle, it means you lack the ability to rotate a loose plastic ring 90° (or even the whole bottle). If it’s in the way of your pour, same thing.

They are as unobtrusive as it gets; and you going out of your way (with rage, it seems) to do something tedious like forcibly ripping them off or cutting yourself on smooth plastic instead of looking at it and moving it, effortlessly, in any position that would not hinder you, is the paramount of silliness.

I’ve seen live people actually starting a bonfire in their living room something like 20 years ago, so to me this is perfectly possible :D

Because some people think that getting high as a kite is a suitable way to not be depressed.

Sure you can. You can also spend time disabling intrusive telemetry, you can also spend time reverting half the UI changes (not the other half though), you can also spend time removing integrated services you don’t use but are still running, you can (regularly) change back some settings that gets reverted every once in a while, you can also block some IP to prevent intrusive ads, you can toggle off part of the “user experience” that bloat the lockscreen…

Or you could, I don’t know, not have to do any of that and still have a working system that’s not trying to bend you over.

Journalist doing reports in front of their dildo collection: “hold my beer”

There’s a ton of great small scale things we can do with machine learning, and even LLM.

Unfortunately, it seems the main usages will be crushing people down even more.

Great, another victory of people keeping IP in closed box away from the public at the small cost of culture disappearing.

Humans loves to see patterns in everything.

I believe the appropriate, corporate-friendly answer in this case is “go fuck yourself”

Ads should be properly labeled in most market, so it should be trivial to detect what segment is ad and what isn’t. The real question is, what to do, and if the server refuses to serve the remainder of the video before the ads duration, what will it be replaced with.

It’s costly; either you prepare encodes ahead of time with different ads and serve that appropriately, or you splice ads live for each request, which is also costly in resources. You can’t get away with just a few variation; ads are usually targeted. It also come with other issues, like, it is mandatory in a lot of place to clearly identify ads, so there should be an obvious marker somewhere. If it’s in the UI, it can be detected and replaced live by a video of kittens for the duration of the ad, so I suppose they also have to handle any signal in the video… (It’s speculation, I didn’t get any of these yet).

I’m curious to see if this will hold, and how we will run around it in the long run.

or write your windows ISO using rufus and check the “no MS account” checkbox.

Officially, the world is taking the second option in general.

We already have them. Just don’t touch any big corporation stuff and suddenly everything work without requiring the blessing of a corporate overlord. There’s already open source tools, either open or freely accessible models, and the tooling, while relatively knew, keep improving. All working locally.

Heck, even performances improves in unexpected ways. This week I ran a chatbot at an almost acceptable speed on a cheap CPU.

As long as some politician don’t come out and outlaw software as a whole (good luck with that) we’ll be fine.

Die, Rulph, said the reader.

(most) films and video games requires a bit of engagement from you.

Oh, yeah, thanks for these researchers to have provided insightful feedback such as “don’t record private activity”, “don’t store data in a plaintext user-accessible sqlite database”, and “don’t do that automatically to everyone elligible, what are you thinking no stop”. No way anyone could ever figure these out beforehand. Microsoft was totally stumped when these showed up and most certainly is very honest when they say they’re reworking it now, and not at all abusing the PR outrage to slip us something as bad in the meantime.

Interesting, we get to either hate them for going full big brother, or hate them for going full adobe in the first place. It’s nice to have a choice sometimes.