"And wow is it nice not to have all the ads and crapware in our faces anymore."
I don't understand this - and I'm not being a Windows defender here, I use Linux when I can (and promote its use).
But my Windows 11 installation has zero ads and zero "crapware". And it's a Dell!
Everything that I didn't want on the machine was removed when I purchased it (two years ago). I see no ads. If I did, this can be fixed easily by even non-technical users with OOShutUp10 or similar - or just edited with a registry change.
I've been using Windows since 3.1 and there were some ugly years but that is not the current state-of-the-state. I'm just calling it like I see it at this point.
The real problem is with trust and encroachment. I think a lot of people that spend a fair amount of time on their computers start to feel like their OS is their home and they go on excursions through apps. Previously, ads were limited to apps you had to go to yourself. Ads showing up as wallpaper in your house would be unsettling, and it reveals that your homeownership was illusory from the start: you never really controlled anything.
Yes, you can use cleanup software to fix the symptoms, but that's not the real issue here.
Edit: further research revealed my original first point was a false assumption.
We must be using different Windows 11 then. Last I booted up Windows instead of shoving Cortana everywhere now it's shoving Copilot. The telemetry sent would make spyware jealous.
The "current" state does not matter. What matters is that MS can shittify your experience at any time. Your machine can stop working if you don't agree to MS "updates". On Linux you have the assurance that the state of your machine can be preserved and you know exactly what's being installed on it.
FTFY: Windows is spyware. The fact that you paid for spyware or it came on your computer or it has useful properties (like Bonzi Buddy) doesn't make it not spyware.
The UI is full of Bing and Copilot tie-ins that I consider to be essentially ads. Recommended content in the start menu. The weather widget that shows you news headlines. The lock-screen-of-the-day with the text description that if you accidentally click on it, you open some Bing page. The Edge default home page. Everything is trying to push me towards engaging with Microsoft's online services, which I have never used and have no desire to use. These are ads.
It's probably the case that I could turn all of these off by hunting down the right config options, and if I used Windows as my primary desktop I'm sure I would. But it's just on my game machines which I don't want to spend a lot of time maintaining, and new crap keeps popping up in updates. It's exhausting.
A Debian Linux desktop, in comparison, is not trying to push you to anything. It's a breath of fresh air (not a term I use often but really fits here).
Note: I never made it to Windows 11, only Windows 10. But my understanding is that these things are getting worse, not better. And while not exactly the same thing, there has been a lot of talk lately about how the file explorer has become so bloated and slow that they have to preload it into memory at startup so that it can respond quickly when you click it... omg, I do not want that.
I did a clean Windows 11 install a few months ago. I expected to be bombarded with ads and all of the other things I kept reading about in comments here, but it’s been fine.
I do find it interesting that so many of the comments about how bad Windows 11 is are coming from comments that also admit they aren’t using Windows 11. Not everything in Windows 11 is my favorite design choice, but the anti Windows 11 comments have taken on a life of their own that isn’t always based in reality.
> Without the random seed and variable randomness (temperature setting), LLMs will always produce the same output for the same input.
Except they won't.
Even at temperature 0, you will not always get the same output as the same input. And it's not because of random noise from inference providers.
There are papers that explore this subject because for some use-cases - this is extremely important. Everything from floating point precision, hardware timing differences, etc. make this difficult.
You can use Firefox or a Chromium browser that does not have as many of these issues.
I was a Firefox user since the Phoenix/Firebird days but when I wanted Chromium, I chose Brave. It has better blocks for this sort of thing built into it, and uBlock Origin works fine.
It's only the Google Chrome browser that requires the Lite version of that extension. Not Chromium derivatives.
I use Brave + uBlock Origin - problem (for the most part) solved.
There was. New York magazine was the first to report this.
> New York has obtained a confidential document from the Malaysian police investigation into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that shows that the plane's captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, conducted a simulated flight deep into the remote southern Indian Ocean less than a month before the plane vanished under uncannily similar circumstances.
I've read elsewhere that maybe the cops were finding bits of information (it was just fragment of files, they were not recovered fully) and the whole thing ("He's been planning to fly to the middle of the Indian Ocen!") is just wild speculation backed up with weak "evidence".
Anyway, it's Malaysian authorities. I've lived in the region...
But since we're not citing links, this is all gossip...
It works great. You can put anything you want in there. Coding style, architecture guidelines, project explanation.
Anything the agent needs to know to work properly with your code base. Similar to an onboarding document.
Tools (Claude Code CLI, extensions) will pick them up hierarchically too if you want to get more specific about one subdirectory in your project.
AGENTS.md is similar for other AI agents (OpenAI Codex is one). It doesn't even have to be those - you can just @ the filename at the start of the chat and that information goes in the context.
The naming scheme just allows for it to be automatic.
Google Reader would present it almost like an inbox, where "unread" items are bold and read items are not.
To me, this caused a "not caught up on the inbox" reaction because I also use Gmail.
I know this is only one particular feed reader but this is just an example of how it could cause this. Looking at the screen felt like it was "work to be done" not "skimming headlines".
They operate with tension. They're supposed to have unified strategic direction from the top, but individual subsidiaries are also expected to be profit centers that compete in the market.
I don't understand this - and I'm not being a Windows defender here, I use Linux when I can (and promote its use).
But my Windows 11 installation has zero ads and zero "crapware". And it's a Dell!
Everything that I didn't want on the machine was removed when I purchased it (two years ago). I see no ads. If I did, this can be fixed easily by even non-technical users with OOShutUp10 or similar - or just edited with a registry change.
I've been using Windows since 3.1 and there were some ugly years but that is not the current state-of-the-state. I'm just calling it like I see it at this point.
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