Widgets seem designed by the great unwashed, for the great unwashed.
When I need to use Windows, I use Windows Server in Desktop mode,
just to escape the ads and widgets and rubbish that the consumer version insists on displaying.
I always read about people and ads in Windows, haven't seen any ad ever (both 10 and 11), I am wondering what's going on (I don't use any of them debloaters either).
I have also in the past made the same comments regarding my Windows 10/11 Professional experience.
What I forgot for a long time is that on new computers I do a quick registry tweak (also possible from group policy editor) to disable web search results from my Start Menu:
I cannot emphasize enough how the 10 seconds of effort to apply the above key changes your life on Windows. Likely all Start Menu search problems you've ever experienced disappear.
The other main things I do:
- Turn off widgets from the regular Windows Settings "app".
- Change my Microsoft Edge home screen settings to make it completely uncluttered, it shows nothing except my recently visited/pinned websites. Most notably I see no MSN News trash.
Other things which make me not see adverts:
My personal PC has a personal and my work PC has a business Microsoft 365 subscription meaning that I have premium OneDrive, meaning no adverts related to it at all. But if you have no subscription and uninstall OneDrive then you see nothing about it anymore. It's worth mentioning that I find Microsoft no worse than Apple in this regard which will incessantly push you to use iCloud.
Very recently I noticed my Start menu showing results from the Windows Store, but I was able to get rid of that by following this advice: https://superuser.com/a/1933000
I find Windows bashing which I regularly see online (here and elsewhere) very tedious and not really indicative at all of the experience of people like me, I spend < 10 minutes configuring new Windows computers to my preferences and then for months or years at a time I just get on with using it to do the actual things I want without worrying about the OS at all, drivers just work, most software supports it, and WSL is awesome for when I need to do Linux stuff.
None of the recent headline Windows Update bugs have affected me personally (and I do updates promptly), while I guess it's partially luck, it may also be that only a minority of Windows users are actually affected by bad updates, while any update issues are still unforgiveable by MS, these incidents are not as broadly affecting as they may seem from seeing the news stories.
Final thing worth mentioning is that PCs pre-loaded with Windows often come pre-loaded with additional crap, so I also always format, completely remove all partitions and re-install Windows fresh using an ISO from the Microsoft website.
This is a good comment with actionable tips so thank you. But its not the windows bashing that is tedious, its microsoft making its products so steps like these have to be taken or the experience is hellish. I see no reason why microsoft can't make its software experience good for consumer users AND still makes lots of money.
Yes, it's annoying and particularly egregious by MS, but is there any perfect OS out there?
Apple also regularly has quality issues and makes questionable OS design decisions. I feel more in control of my OS experience with Windows than macOS.
With Linux you tend to have the freedom to change it however you want, but I'm not looking to invest my time into understanding the intricacies of Linux when Windows exists and out the box already does the job more than adequately, and essentially hassle free, for my purposes.
It's not perfect, but it's not nearly as bad as some people make out.
There's no perfect OS. But for me at least, ads are worse than the other flaws I have to tolerate in another OS. This is obviously a question of taste but I really hate ads in a product that I paid good money for.
Stablecoins have their uses. I'm not saying never touch crypto. But the question is what is the point of stablecoins in VC funding specifically? People don't seem to have good answers.
YC companies are constantly spending the money they get from YC right? Why get money, then put it in some stablecoin, only to then immediately cash out on salaries or whatever?
How does that make any sense to the company? Who's out here wanting their salary in stablecoin? And who among those want that and can't receive dollars and then turn them into stablecoin?
There's a sliver of talent that won't have access to the US banking system, but I can't imagine that making it worth putting up with risk + txn costs of stablecoins for the whole company.
This only makes sense to YC, to try and prop up interest in digital assets they heavily inveterate in.
The majority of humans are losing interest in digital ephemera South Park-WoW guys are desperate sell them on, otherwise South Park-WoW guy might have to work to live not just shill hallucinations like a priest.
Two of the fastest growing YC companies are crypto companies built on solana, Kalshi and Axiom. I'm pretty sure Axiom was the fastest to $100m in revenue, ever.
And after a serious beating it's still value at $48 billion.
Put it another way: of all the companies YC funded, both those who succeeded and the countless who failed, only two companies, AirBnB and Doordash, are valued more than Coinbase.
I don't think YC hates cryptocurrencies as much as the typical commenter on HN.
If you rejected economic orthodoxy and bought Bitcoin/Gold over the last.... decade or so... you won over the economic orthodox believers.
I don't really care about short term gold gambling with ~1-2 year market spans or altcoins if you want to disagree.
The biggest threat to bitcoin and gold is something breaking their scarcity. Gold, nuclear chemistry. Bitcoin... quantum computing or something(ignoring rollback).
I'm still chewing on the idea of how many supporters are bots or at least bot-adjacent (ie manufactured social proof), and what can even be done about that. When I go to my local [small, suburban] protest in a balanced red-blue area, lately it's been many honks and agreements, and only a handful of angry grimaces.
So I think the tide has long ago shifted, which makes sense what with the terror gangs executing Americans and all. The question is how we can organize into meaningful opposition when most activity happens online these days, and every non-echo-chamber forum still has extremist nutjobs who derail productive conversation.
I'd think that Congressional offices are seeing a similar dynamic too, inundated with robocalls from "constituents", the occasional untraceable threat of violence to their families if they step out of line, etc.
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