This might actually be a very good idea.

My first thought was to abuse something that rhymes with “Mild Topography”. But that would likely lead to legal repercussions for both you and Microsoft. A better solution would be to store hundreds of medical records in your Documents folder. You have a right to store your own medical information. If Microsoft is uploading those to their servers without your consent, and without appropriate HIPAA measures, that smells like an extremely silver-wrapped lawsuit.

Ironically, I was already using OneDrive but that very push is likely to be the thing that gets me to stop using Windows in the next few years.

My idea for it is a social network that heavily relies on webcam-recorded opinions and the occasional hand-written letter.

Yes, that’s super high-friction and inconvenient. I’d argue social media has become so lazy, incorporating effort into it might improve the experience by changing the quality of posts you see.

Just to pose a thought; how practical would it be for a small subject owner to run a FediVerse instance intended to stay localized to their domain?

For example: Indie game owner makes a reasonably popular game, they set up a website that Lemmy users can subscribe/join directly, and use that for forums/tips/discussions related to their game. People don’t need to register as long as they have an account somewhere. Some number of users would be new to Lemmy and use that site’s registration for later discovery. And, someday when X instance (the game, or the next popular one) gets infested by neonazis, everyone just moves to another and/or has other discussions backed up.

I don’t know how practical or convenient that is though. I imagine a lot of groups don’t want to risk lost users.

I’d say a good negative use case really fits in the “reliability” category. So often at work, coders expect everything to always succeed, and have no thought towards what happens if one cog ever falls out of place; but good systems can react well or even help you get to what you generally need.

Interesting that X only pays you that much to include their integratio-

Oh, they want YOU to pay THEM…!?

I guess if you want to verify the truth of this statement, look at Unity. They walked back their per-install system, but the indie community still moved away from them because it seemed clear they might try to do that at some point in the future.

The article was revised with a PR release from Microsoft saying they’ll make the feature opt-in.

Let’s of course not forget that things like upgrades to Windows 11, and use of an MS Account instead of local account, were opt-in…until they weren’t. Require them to sign a contractual agreement that this feature will remain opt-in forever.

It could be that anything you encrypt has to have its encryption key in some place inaccessible to these same hacker tools. If your computer uses Bitlocker, for instance, you need to enter a 6-digit code each time you turn it on.

Best guess, they had such a high expectation of “convenience” for this feature that they couldn’t justify any kind of security key. Which is still a dumb explanation, obviously.

Video Games.

The kicker is, for years and years down the line, all of your tech questions will be written to Google as “How do I xxxx in <obscure distro name here>”.

Many, but not all, of those problems are resolved by searching “in Linux”, but others you’d have to search for “in <similar distro>”. Windows is just Windows.

Downloads on my Surface for the sake of my vacation were the reason I resubscribed. Seems fitting it should be the reason I unsubscribe. I only worry about finding a good point of communication to let them know about this reason.

So basically, one side is a hive mind that’s required to always do what its most powerful members want, and the other has free thinkers that sometimes disagree, and you’re saying that the latter is weak, pointless, and should never exist.

Buddy, this is a terrible definition of “weak”. What you’re describing is a goddamn borg cube.

Okay…so everything you’re talking about is irrelevant to the conversation?

I grant that anyone continuing to use their old car is doing the best thing for the planet. This article discussion is around production of new cars, and which ones people buy.

Newer gasoline/petrol cars are also data collection machines. False dichotomy there.

Even if the electricity comes from fossil fuels, the efficiency of large plants is far better than that of individual combustion engines; and it provides better opportunity to replace the source with something renewable or at least safer, like solar, wind, or nuclear.

I may yet try it in the next few years. I think one large frustration I anticipate (among others) is keyboard shortcuts. I’ve become very experienced with those on Windows, and my brief efforts at Linux (eg, on my Steam Deck’s monitor hookup) have not come across enough matches for them.

I can absolutely see value in enduring the pain of a large switch though.

The minimum wage really only applies to the lowest-requirement, manual-labor jobs. Ideally, the baseline he’s suggesting would adjust for certain expertise fields, perhaps just around the subject of when they can request immigration visas or outsourcing assistance.

So for instance you need a software engineer, you shouldn’t be able to offer a 70k salary, get no one (because software engineers value their time), and then claim there are no software engineers - you would have to be offering 110k+ before any assistance.

If I’m understanding right, I believe Xbox Cloud Gaming and Geforce Now have used this. They get access to better video APIs by running as a home screen webapp, and aren’t at risk of popping the address bar from touch confusion.

Voyager, a client for Lemmy, also installs as a webapp. Similarly, it doesn’t show the address bar when you scroll up and down.

It’s deemed “acceptable”? A sociopath scamming an old lady’s pension is basically the “John Wick’s dog” moment that leads to the insane death-filled warpath in recent movie The Beekeeper.

This is the kind of edgelord take that routinely expects worse than the worst of society with no proof to their claims.

The issue is biggest for web browsers, but I also feel like I see that issue for a whole lot of web industries. Journalism, for instance. Everyone wants everything for free, and so the “articles” you see are garbage half churned out from algorithms to optimize click rate, and blanketed with dozens of ads. To take another example, games, we have a market saturated with freemium games that encourage people to spend nothing (and then hundreds). Pirates would now claim it’s a moral responsibility to pirate, but if we end up in that world, only a slim minority of people would ever make a living out of it.

The general unwillingness/inability for consumers to pay for digital content definitely causes a lot of problems now. I personally attribute it to a generally low minimum wage, but it could be an issue going beyond that.