drilling into my head, cutting my tongue

But like…an illusion, right? 😦

Wow, that’s really cool! We’ve been talking about doing something similar with movie clips, making them into a cool flowing playlist.

(angry upvote)

What kind of weed helps concentration? The kind I’ve had makes me lose interest in my own sentences halfway through.

even the rich are worried

Good.

Wow. Someone at the SEC is either being very brave, very stupid, or knows something we don’t.

Are the “Windows evangelists” in the room with us right now? Every Windows admin I know hates Microsoft with a burning rage. Literally the only people I’ve ever seen promote Windows are being paid to do it.

Counterintuitively, that’s one reason I like dealing with Windows: the community knows what it is and doesn’t pretend otherwise, like some other more “zealous” fan bases.

You think the US is the only autocratic place on Earth? The remainder of the Democratic West isn’t going to start policing every regressive regime on the planet, starting with the biggest military on the planet.

There is no legally protecting yourself from the prerogative state, i.e. whatever the dictator wants. We have to follow rules. They don’t.

Whoosh

Gotta give it to him: he knows how to flood the zone with distracting outrage.

I will almost guarantee some update will break shit at the most inconvenient time humanly possible and the people you’ve done this for will need your help, all at the same time.

Well, yeah. That’s life as an admin under the best circumstances. There’s a running list of Windows ticking time bombs over on r/sysadmin. There are lots of good reasons to ditch Windows, but I wouldn’t say the risk of MS shutting down technically unsupported hardware is one of them (because I don’t agree it’s a substantial risk).

Don’t they understand what’s happening?

No. Overwhelmingly, no, they don’t. The MAGA crowd is stuck to their pants with glee, the liberal crowd is going “oh well, we’ll get em in the midterms,” and about another third of the country is just brain-dead clueless about all of it. Maybe a few thousand people in the US actually understand just how close we are to cascading systemic collapse.

And nobody who is familiar with how technology companies operate was shocked to hear that the 100k incel camino is literally held together with cheap glue.

I still can’t believe that 46k people are both that stupid and have 100k to spend.

Hot take from an IT guy: save your important data, make a plain vanilla W11 boot USB (nothing fancy, no Rufus tricks), wipe your hard drive to zeroes, and install W11 like normal. I’ve reimaged a ton of older PCs and literally never seen it not work. My 10 year old Optiplex, supposedly ineligible for W11, runs W11 just fine.

Microsoft might someday break it, sure. That’s not new. Microsoft products were always, in practice, available to us at Microsoft’s pleasure. This is the same company that allows massgrave to exist on github because they’d rather we pirate MS Office than allow LibreOffice any oxygen. We’ll probably be fine.

The law has always been a matter of what is or can be enforced, rather than what is written. Which is why it’s been excruciating to listen to MAGA family members try to defend voting for reps who have been saying for years that they plan to eliminate the Social Security and Medicare on which those MAGAs depend. “They can’t just do that! My tax dollars paid for it! And have you heard KaMAla’s laugh??”

Same. Loaded Ubuntu on an under-specced (for Windows) Dell laptop a couple years ago. No niche OS, no obscure hardware. Out of the box, wifi won’t stay connected for more than a few minutes. Literally no other device on the network (Android, Windows, Roku, etc) has wifi issues. Load Windows back on, it works fine.

Linux is never going to take off until basic functionality works reliably. I’m not asking for the moon, here.

Probably some naive ideas about propriety and decorum.

Voting no on this CR is not voting for a shutdown. It’s voting for a different CR. Voting yes is giving up without a fight and giving Trump whatever he wants. This is the first chance since the election for the Democrats to oppose Trump through official channels, and Schumer rolled over immediately. If they do nothing now, we already have a one-party autocracy.

Appeasing fascists is a time-tested losing strategy. If the choice is between shutdown and give Trump whatever he wants, I think the answer should be clear. Trump is already speed running a federal collapse. Might as well deny him the damage he would do in the interim.