The key to having a nice time with Windows is 1) to give it loads of memory (32GB+ surely) and 2) to run a debloater script the moment you pick up a new system e.g. https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
All the rubbish from the last 20 years - ads, OneDrive, Copilot, Office upsells, Candy Crush in the start menu - it can just disappear, leaving a pretty stable system that hasn't actually changed much.
Apart from the awful control panels, anything else you don't like is probably replaceable. I really love startallback.com which brings back the regular start menu and lots of other little fixes.
Obviously everyone deserves a computer that doesn't try to sell to them CONSTANTLY, and I wish Windows were better out of the box. But it doesn't take much adjustment to get there.
Personally I don't think I've ever re-run it. I think I've clicked a few buttons as I've seen alerts about new options appearing. But ultimately it's just a bunch of powershell commands to remove packages and set options. So I'd assume it's safe to run regularly.
Thanks. I was asking because I was hoping to run it for a relative's computer that I am reinstalling Win11 on now, and they would not be capable of re-running it after the fact.
I wonder what exactly Microsoft did with “New Teams” that was supposedly written in Rust and uses the system browser engine or whatever instead of Electron. On release it seemed better, but now it seems as bloated, slow and annoying as the Electron one. MS Teams seems to have some incurable infection.
If I could, MS Teams would be the second tool I’d eject out (after Outlook and Exchange). But the company I work in is tied to MS 365 and will not give up on Teams and its useless cousin SharePoint.
Linux is not getting better in those respects, either. DE's are crazy bloated. For everyone bitching about control panels, tell me how is it done in Linux? In the WM control panel or the DE control panel? Or some obscure .conf file you must edit by hand? Your guess is as good as mine and it's beyond disorganized. If I want to change a font it's a game of three card monte.
Linux desktop environments remind me what TempleOS would look like if it was designed by committee.
Gnome for example has been working hard to simplify things (maybe a bit too hard?). The gnome settings panel is significantly simpler than win11 and osx dito.
If you want to dive deeper there is a separate tweak app (not as simple), no reason fiddling with .conf files.
Some of the programmers of Bandersnatch did release Gift From The Gods from the ashes of Bandersnatch - which I definitely had on my Spectrum! But it was very confusing - https://www.crashonline.org.uk/13/giftgod.htm
This 1984 documentary from the BBC archive covers Imagine's growth & demise, must have been a great visual reference for Brooker making the show, and the top comment has some more detail on Imagine's hiring spree - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buuUZFh_pyk also also check out 4:30 or so, where they show the game and the device that will "eventually be reduced to a small cartridge and sold with the game"!!
Also also the name Ritman is probably a reference to Jon Ritman, programmer of the brilliant Head Over Heels. But he was nothing to do with Imagine. He still gives interviews and seems lovely.
Exactly, working harder doesn’t mean putting in extra hours. It means taking on projects with larger scope, impact and ambiguity during your normal working hours
I've been happy with the solution of switching off notifications from apps that interrupt me with promotions - one strike and they're out.
The remaining notifications are _still_ frequent enough that no single app can expect to get my attention with a single buzz.
It's not like apps don't upsell to when I _open_ them and have to swipe away ads before I can use them. So why give them another channel?
25-years ago me is going to roll his eyes so hard, but you know where I don't mind slightly-targeted ads? My email & my doormat. Send me a catalogue, I love a catalogue.
> I've been happy with the solution of switching off notifications from apps that interrupt me with promotions - one strike and they're out.
I have exactly the same policy. But in my case I am forced to keep notifications enabled from apps like MyGate (since nobody would be able to visit me without it) and I have no say in the matter - my gated society uses it and my only way out is to pay for the app itself.
Ah OK - personally that would move it from an "annoying app with adverts" charge (that I'd resist) to a "leasehold bullshit" charge (that I'd pay).
I am stuck similarly with the ClassDojo app that my kids school uses to communicate with parents. The notifications are just "You have a new notification!" which leads to a slow app load, an upsell splash, before finally having to scroll to find the important message from a teacher. In this case though, paying would not make it any less slow to use.
I just check once a week instead, and the parents WhatsApp group fills in the gaps for me.
I also do my best to stick to a "one strike and they're out" personal policy.
But I also have apps that push marketing through notifications _and_ are urgent on a reoccurring basis (usually delivery or rideshare apps). For those, I'd love if there was a system notification setting (per app) for "allow notifications from this all for the next X hours" _and_ a simple UX to make that happen.
And users would flee not just because they're seeing the ads but because Firefox is obviously the slowest browser again. Stripping the ads is a big performance boost, so right now Firefox feels snappier than Chrome on ad-laden pages.
I'm not sure I've read any of Marcus' previous writing, but there's no way that essay could have been written by an AI. It's personal and has a structure that follows human thought rather than a prompt.
For sure he describes an education in English that seems misguided and showy. And I get the context - if you don't show off in your English, you'll never aspire to the status of an Englishman. But doggedly sticking to anyone's "rules of good writing" never results in good writing. And I don't think that's what the author is doing, if only because he is writing about the limitations of what he was taught!
So idk maybe he does write like ChatGPT in other contexts? But not on this evidence.
I have seen people use "you're using AI" as a lazy dismissal of someone else's writing, for whatever reasons. That usually tells you more about the person saying it than the writing though.
I see people claiming real videos are AI, or even real photos. You can really tell it's not when there's 17 other videos from other angles. Maybe someday AI will get good at that level of faking a video, but at the time being, it is much harder to pull off.
My initiation into shaders was porting some graphics code from OpenGL on Windows to PS5 and Xbox, and (for your NDA and devkit fees) they give you some very nice debuggers on both platforms.
But yes, when you're stumbling around a black screen, tooling is everything. Porting bits of shader code between syntaxes is the easy bit.
Can you get better tooling on Windows if you stick to DirectX rather than OpenGL?
> Can you get better tooling on Windows if you stick to DirectX rather than OpenGL?
My app doesn't currently support Windows. My plane was to use the full DirectX suite when I get there and go straight to D3D and friends. I lack experience at all on Windows so I'd love if someone who knows both macOS and Windows could compare GPU debugging!
Windows has PIX for Windows, PIX is the name of the GPU debugging since Xbox 360. The Windows version is similar but it relies on debug layers that need to be GPU specific which is usually handled automatically. Although because of that it’s not as deep as the console version but it lets you get by. Most people use RenderDoc on supported platforms though (Linux and Windows). It supports most APIs you can find on these platforms.
Which offers the basics, but at least works across devices, you can also trigger the traces from code and save the output, then load in the extension. Very useful for debugging mobile.
You can just about run chrome through Nvidias Nsight (of course you're not debugging webgl, but the what ever its translated to on the platform), although I recently tired again and it seems to fail...
these where the command line args i got nsight to pass chrome to make it work
SpectorJS is kind of abandoned nowadays, it hardly has changed and doesn't support WebGPU.
Running the whole browser rendering stack is a masochist exercise, I rather re-code the algorithm in native code, or go back into pixel debugging.
I would vouch the state of bad tooling, and how browsers blacklist users systems, is a big reason studios rather try out streaming instead of rendering on the browser.
yeah... I tired to extend Spectors ui, the code base is "interesting" for simple changes seemed way harder than it should have been. Shame though as its really the only tool like it for web.
My favourite though is safari, graphics driver crashes all the time, the dev tools normally crash as well, so you have zero idea what is happening.
And I've found when the graphics crash the whole browsers graphic state become unreliable until you force close safari and reopen.
I think you're saying that mass broadcasting is going away? If so, I believe that's true in a technological sense - we don't watch TV or read newspapers as much as before.
And that certainly means niches can flourish, the dream of the 90s.
But I think mass broadcasting is still available, if you can pay for it - troll armies, bots, ads etc. It's just much much harder to recognize and regulate.
(Why that matters to me I guess) Here in the UK with a first past the post electoral system, ideological coherence isn't necessary to turn niche opinion into state power - we're now looking at 25 percent being a winning vote share for a far-right party.
I'm just skeptical of the idea that anyone can really drive the narrative anymore, mass broadcasting or not. The media ecosystem has become too diverse and niche that I think discord is more of an issue than some kind of mass influence operation.
I agree with you! But the goal for people who want to turn money into power isn't to drive a single narrative, Big Brother style, to the whole world. Not even to a whole country! It's to drive a narrative to the subset of people who can influence political outcomes.
With enough data, a wonky-enough voting system, and poor enforcement of any kind of laws protecting the democratic process - this might be a very very small number of people.
Then the discord really is a problem, because you've ended up with government by a resented minority.
All the rubbish from the last 20 years - ads, OneDrive, Copilot, Office upsells, Candy Crush in the start menu - it can just disappear, leaving a pretty stable system that hasn't actually changed much.
Apart from the awful control panels, anything else you don't like is probably replaceable. I really love startallback.com which brings back the regular start menu and lots of other little fixes.
Obviously everyone deserves a computer that doesn't try to sell to them CONSTANTLY, and I wish Windows were better out of the box. But it doesn't take much adjustment to get there.
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