I just got awnings installed two months ago on the windows that get sun for most of the day. It dropped the temps in those rooms by almost 8 degrees Celsius on hot days. The AC even runs less during the day now.

They're simple retractable awnings that a local guy installed for me. I used to hate the idea of awnings, but the thought about IR heat getting trapped clicked with me recently and suddenly the idea of awnings seemed brilliant.

This continues to highlight the dangers of having all your eggs in one companies basket, by choosing comfort and convenience you've given your entire digital life over to a company that has no compunctions against metaphorically guillotining it for any reason they want.

I agree. Which is why I don't use anything Microsoft. Even in software projects I go out of my way to not use a single Microsoft dependency or library.

I self-host my own photo auto-upload with Nextcloud. I don't use Windows. I'm forced to use MS stuff at my work but I managed to get the company-wide policy changed to allow anyone to use Linux or Mac, so I'm running Ubuntu.

I've also been working up the effort to ditch stock Android and go with GrapheneOS.

You forgot that you also need to create a new 32bit word entry with the value of the amount of system RAM in gigabytes times 2 divided by the square root of your age times 10.

Otherwise BSODWord won't be picked up.

Edit: also you need to redo that every time your system updates because Windows update will reset all those values

However, now and I run across a windows issue. It's a nightmare. I can put hours of work into trying to fix a driver issue or an issue with updates and get nowhere. Then go to reinstall the operating system and have to spend more hours just to get it installed.

Now in Linux, not only do I rarely have issues but also fixing those issues are pretty straightforward. And if I can't fix it a reinstall takes minutes and I'm back up and running in no time.

THANK YOU. I'm sick of this rhetoric about Linux being hard and user-unfriendly because of the command-line.

Windows is such a pain to use for a while now. You need a ton of post install scripts and hacks to make it even remotely usable and when something goes wrong good luck figuring out what. The event viewer is usually just a bunch of vague COM errors with an ID. Then when you look up that ID it's barely more useful than "something went wrong".

But you can do nearly everything with the GUI in Linux for a while now. The level of stuff you would need to use the terminal for is the same level on Windows you would need the command-line for, or (SHUDDER) the registry.

In fact, I would argue that doing things in Linux via the GUI is easier than even on Windows. I'm speaking as a user of KDE Plasma. I personally dislike Gnome.

Needing to use command line for some things that should be a right click, not supporting right click

You can do nearly everything you need to via the GUI on the major distros (the ones that most people would use). There's plenty of things on Windows you must use the command-line for.

And anytime you need to use the Run dialogue it's the same argument. It's the same "issue" of having to type instead of using your mouse.

And if you don't need to use the command-line on Windows, it's the registry. The awful, terrible, horrible, disgusting registry.

I'm not actually sure what on earth you mean with "not supporting right click". Maybe you're thinking of older Mac versions?

it's just not a great general purpose desktop for the average user,

It has been for a while now.

My /home partition is the same one I setup almost 12 years ago. It's been through multiple versions of Ubuntu, multiple Ubuntu reinstalls, a switch over to EndeavourOS, a reinstall of EndeavourOS, cloned to multiple drives as each one failed or was upgraded to a larger sized drive. But it's the same exact /home data.

Fifteen years ago, you couldn't run anything other than shitty FOSS games or the occasional Platinum AppDB rated game like World of Warcraft on Linux, and even for the latter the install instructions were convoluted.

Hey! I was playing LOTRO just fine on Linux back then. It actually worked better on Linux than Windows back then too.

Before there were scripted alternatives large scale Windows deployments were all imaged because of the hours it took to set up a single machine swapping floppies and writing to spinning rust.

With Windows 7 I was making golden images to simplify deployments.

Even now for the one Windows 10 VM I need for a very specific thing, I couldn't use it without installing AtlasOS (an extensive powershell script to cut out as much of the bloat as possible). Otherwise the system would consistently slow down and stop responding. It was basically unusable (it's running on Proxmox on a considerably old server).

Recently I decided I no longer wanted LUKS encryption on my laptop because I don't travel anymore. So I followed the steps to do an in-place drive decryption. It worked, but I had missed a step to update the bootloader. So I fired up a live distro, chrooted to the installed system and 2 minutes later I had a working system.

What the fuck, MIcrosoft.

Ok, honest question. Are you surprised?

If it was any other company I would be. But it's Microsoft.

They take getting caught seriously, not the stuff they get caught at.

This is it exactly. They (gov) literally don't care if anyone gets hurt, they just care what the world's perception of them is.

They don't

The difference in people is that our brains are continuously learning and LLMs are a static state model after being trained. To take your example about brute forcing more data, we've been doing that the second we were born. Every moment of every second we've had sound, light, taste, noises, feelings, etc, bombarding us nonstop. And our brains have astonishing storage capacity. AND our neurons function as both memory and processor (a holy grail in computing).

Sure, we have a ton of advantages on the hardware/wetware side of things. Okay, and technically the data-side also, but the idea of us learning from fewer examples isn't exactly right. Even a 5 year old child has "trained" far longer than probably all other major LLMs being used right now combined.

But they are. There's no feedback loop and continuous training happening. Once an instance or conversation is done all that context is gone. The context is never integrated directly into the model as it happens. That's more or less the way our brains work. Every stimulus, every thought, every sensation, every idea is added to our brain's model as it happens.

The big difference between people and LLMs is that an LLM is static. It goes through a learning (training) phase as a singular event. Then going forward it's locked into that state with no additional learning.

A person is constantly learning. Every moment of every second we have a ton of input feeding into our brains as well as a feedback loop within the mind itself. This creates an incredibly unique system that has never yet been replicated by computers. It makes our brains a dynamic engine as opposed to the static and locked state of an LLM.

The new timeline reboot:

• Blocker: The beginning
• The Blocker Returns
• The Dark Blocker
• Blocker Homecoming
• Rise of the Blockers
• Dawn of the Blockers
• War of the Blockers
• Kingdom of the Blockers

And to bring it full circle:

• Planet of the Blockers