-
What would we do without places like this where we could convene and share thoughts?
I sincerely hope Woody’s legacy of open information sharing lives on for a long time.
-Noel
11 users thanked author for this post.
-
-
Hate to say it, but everyone in the world marks us as targets from which to extract fun and profit. Why should AI, trained on everything we say, be any different?
In all seriousness, like you I would like either a humble disambiguation request or the presentation of more than you wanted to know.
There’s no real reason for the answer to be anything less than the preparation of a well-organized, multimedia, wiki-like page with everything you could possibly want to know about Casio, organized by relevance to your query and tempered by all you’ve recently shown interest in. And fully fact-checked, with notes about conflicting information.
AI is currently still being treated as a parlor trick. We seem to be in the same state, but not nearly in the same ballpark, as what’s needed for it to truly enhance our lives. As it is, it just complicates them.
So much of what we try to work with never gets past the “hey, look at this” stage, and even when the few rare cases begin to go further they just don’t advance. “There’s no money in that.”
In the 1980s I imagined high tech / information tech could just build and build and build as bigger and bigger building blocks got solidified. The 1990s began to disabuse me of the notion. Now we all struggle to make the latest releases of anything do quite as much or as well as the previous version did.
“That’s (high tech) life.”
-Noel
2 users thanked author for this post.
-
All I can say is that we really, really didn’t need new tech to initially present itself to us as infallible (we all trust records on computers), then later become as untrustworthy as – or more so than – a human.
W/regard to AI knowing more about the whole world’s story than any of us could possibly know… It strikes me that any true general intelligence that emerges from AI that has tried to grok the world will almost certainly be insane in its own ways.
God have mercy on our souls.
-Noel
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
1. For Q3, the loss was $16.6 billion.
2. For Q4, the loss is $0.1 billion.
3. Free coffee was restored in November.Seems obvious to me that it was caffeine that improved productivity and profits.
In all seriousness, this was typed on the second of two AMD-based workstations I’ve had in 4 years.
-Noel
3 users thanked author for this post.
-
Windows has, well, always done better with a full, clean install.
That was a reasonable attribute when it was updated every 3 years or so.
Sigh. Now I always have to create a new Virtual Machine and work out the many, many [re-]tweaks it will require to get Windows to be trim, solid, and useful for me.
Again.I was debating a co-worker the other day that a pretty good set of tweaking could still be done. His response: “Impossible, right off the bat the new Explorer always runs slowly and stalls even worse at various times”, to which I recorded a video and reminded him “not for me”.
That being said, why, o why do we have to work so hard to get Windows back to something that still delights and amazes (yes, I used those words and I stand by them)? I’m guessing all the developers who know how to make substantive and good changes to the actual usability of the system – opposed to just hanging more junk on it or moving pixels around in the UI(s) – must have moved on from Microsoft.
-Noel
1 user thanked author for this post.
-
-
-
The subject of this thread touched a nerve. Under my tin foil hat? You be the judge.
Y’know what’s never been exploited, at least not by malware authors?
Spectre. Meltdown. Remember those?
Wait… Why did I say “at least not by malware authors?” DID someone exploit them? IMO, none other than those who would seek to herd users into action by nipping at their heels in the name of “security”.
As far as anyone knows, including the site linked above, the Spectre and Meltdown “vulnerabilities” – which if you recall came with their own marketing campaigns and cute little icons – were never exploited in the traditional sense in the wild.
In the name of security certain hardware makers wanted – needed – to publicize a sensational story, perhaps something to push us off our beloved computers that were still fast enough, running a perfectly good Windows 7 OS, a year or two sooner.
Here we are almost 7 years later and every subsequent Windows installation out-of-the-box suffers from performance hits and additional energy usage because of architectural changes that seek to avert software that might seek to break through barriers and steal information. In theory.
You might say the mitigations have been very successful. No lost secrets, right? Those who stood to benefit by making all our CPUs suddenly seem sluggish likely do think it was successful. How many millions of users bought new computers or updated their OS sooner? How much money and materials and energy have been wasted?
What’s being exploited, indeed!
For those curious and with a few minutes to spare, you might want to take some time to google a tool called InSpectre by Gibson Research. Try switching the Windows OS mitigations off and on. Do benchmarks. Do things before and after on your user interface and with your disks that are intensive, and you may notice those performance differences. Make your own choices about how to leave the settings, bearing in mind that those actual engineers who were made to implement the performance-robbing changes left a clear and direct way to turn them off.
Security probably should not be a marketing lever.
-Noel
4 users thanked author for this post.
-
In this day and age rebooting should NEVER be necessary.
In fact, the core of the OS no longer needs it. It’s just an incessant addition/changing of layers near the application level that remain unstable.
To that end, it’s quite likely that just logging out/in will correct most accumulated problems.
FWIW, I’ve moved up to Windows 11 in the past year, and find that it can run virtually forever without reboot – or at least between Windows and driver updates. Arguably, in a software engineering role, my computer probably does more work than most PCs. And notably, I have tweaked and tuned it for performance and reliability, shunning many of the IMO extraneous “features” that tend to destabilize it. In fact, I’ve found (happily) that about 80% to 90% of the tweaks that helped with systems even as far back as Windows 7 and 8.1 are still applicable to Windows 11. Mostly, if you leave behind most things implemented since then, Windows 11 can be a productive desktop system.
Following my own advice above, I have indeed logged out at least once this month. Not more than twice. No reboots since last Windows Update; my uptime at the moment is 21+ days. I’m now considering installing Windows updates a little earlier this cycle, based on the MS-DEFCON 4 advice above.
Advice to reboot is not wrong; in 2024 it just really should not be necessary to give!
-Noel
2 users thanked author for this post.
-
-
December Win 10 updates in for a week now, no new problems, no obvious regressions in functionality, and performance is as good as it was. I honestly couldn’t hope for better.
I’m not swayed even a little bit by the hype that “updated software is always better” or that last month’s “better security” is now morphed to a “gaping security hole”. It may happen that updated software solves some problem – very occasionally – but the vast majority of updates bring more trouble than they help with, especially when Microsoft uses them to add ever more intrusive features. Why do I have well over 150 processes at a resting desktop now when I had 130 around a year ago? More (!) parts of Edge running (and it’s NOT my default browser), more services running for which it’s hard to track specific names/functionality, more bloat. Fortunately I have a lot of resources in this system.
I had actually imagined updating my (1 year old workstation) to Win 11 over the holiday break, but I don’t think I want to do that just yet. I mentioned it not seeming worse above; why break that trend?
-Noel
-
-
Exactly. Consider this condition, where the Cumulative update is installing and Reboot is requested. One hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing and it puts up the reboot prompt prematurely.
[in a whiny voice] Coordinating things is so harrrrrrd.
-Noel
Author
