MudMan

Hah. I fear you assuming Yahoo has an editorial line at all is giving them too much credit. All these pirated article aggregators are just regurgitating whatever algorithmically, they don’t care.

You see, part of this company-facing discussion had to do with current hiring policies, with gems like “we have never hired based on quotas, but going forward we will discontinue the practice” bandied about on stage. Such a stance could be misconstrued as an end to its illegal and discriminatory DEI policies at the company, something IBM, Red Hat, and others are ending or getting sued for.

The hell am I reading?

This is a very weird piece written very weirdly that misconstrues an automated process as deliberate cooperation.

Which I guess makes more sense when you look up the person the reposted article is reposting which seems to be some weird Trumpy asshole who is also somehow an open source advocate guy?

This is not good reporting, but congrats, I think you made me take Adobe’s side on something and I would not have bet that was possible half an hour ago.

I mean, they’re doing it to everybody else, so…

According to YouTube, the video results carousel will use AI to highlight clips from videos that “will be most helpful for your search query,” which essentially means that it will take clips from videos and play them right in results, so people may not need to click into a video to find the information they’re looking for.

Google uses AI overviews for Google Search, but the YouTube version will differ. AI won’t summarize videos, and will simply pull clips from them. It is not clear the AI-selected clips will encourage users to watch a full video, or cause fewer people to engage with videos, but AI integration into Google Search has impacted traffic to websites.

For the use case of looking for some tutorial on a thing or a recipe or something and having the option of skipping straight past all the watchtime-boosting filler content and straight to the answer this seems like a decent solution if it works semi-reliably. I imagine since they are pulling full transcripts for subtitle generation already it’s just a text search with a timecode.

I will also buy into a setting to get past “Hey guys, welcome to my video!” and “Please like and subscribe” automatically, but I doubt Google is into that.

To be clear, they ARE building an AI-forward browser and he is very plain about collecting a ton of user info. The way it’s presented in context is that they intend to plug it in to their assistant/agent thing and surface relevant stuff to you on searches (which is the potential ad opportunity the article quotes as if it was the sole goal). But yeah, the implication is that they are collecting data regardless, even if the user profile ends up being used to cater AI responses to you specifically, to train models or whatever.

Hearing the guy talk about it I get the impression that he envisions an Apple-like ecosystem where they’re constantly ingesting data and you’re paying them to have their AI services act as a personal assistant and handle purchases and booking for you directly and so on, on top of anwering queries.

I would rather clip my toenails with a rusty chainsaw, myself, but that seems to be the idea.

I hate when people post hyperpartisan reporting because it makes me do homework. In this case, you made me listen to almost an hour of a three hour podcast with three techbros chatting about techbro crap in techbro ways. You owe me years of life.

Anyway, so the conspicuously missing context here is he’s asked if they will let go of the subscription model and go after an ad business model instead and he responds “hopefully not” and clarifies that he thinks the AI differentiator from Google search is that it doesn’t feed people ads.

He then transitions into saying that you’d need a super hyperspecialized profile for it to make sense and then maybe it could work but they haven’t figured out long term memory well enough for that, which is when he talks about why they’d want to have a browser to build that hyperspecialized profile.

This is my least favorite type of misinfo, too, because he’s actually kinda saying what they say he’s saying, just out of context. But more importantly, because he says some other shit that is more outrageous, too. For example, when explaining why he thinks the subscription business will grow more than the ad business the way he puts it is that “people see it as hiring someone”, so they’re more willing to spend, and he ponders “how much do people pay for personal assistants and assistant managers and nannies?” and suggests that they’ll provide similar services for cheaper to people who can’t afford human help.

Which may not be as clickbaity and I get he finds it positive-on-the-aggregate, but is certainly some cyberpunk dystopia stuff that didn’t need the out of context quoting to be a thing.

I’d say nationalize it, but considering the “nation” in question, maybe extremely not that?

Well, the relationship between Chrome and Chromium in this situation is… interesting and a big question mark.

Presumably whoever owns Chrome will by default have a remarkable amount of influence on the ongoing direction of Chromium, just by way of having a massive dominant position over the market overnight. Chrome is not just plain Chromium as it is.

Given that the sale of Chrome would be fundamentally a regulatory constraint it’s also a given that Google would not immediately attempt to re-enter that market (or if they did that they would get a swift spanking all over again).

So yeah, Chrome is probably valuable. How well you can monetize it decoupled from Google’s advertising business proably depends heavily on who you are. Meta or Microsoft could do that very well, but then they’d be in the same regulatory danger zone Google is. DDG, Brave, Opera or Mozilla would definitely benefit but probably wouldn’t be able to afford it.

Because we’re on this timeline the more likely outcome is Elon Musk buys it and we go into another round of seeing the shambling, zombified corpse of a thing stumble forward for years while shedding fascist propaganda. I’m trying to decide if Bezos buying it puts us in the regulation danger zone scenario or the shambling fascist zombie scenario. Both?

That’s a terrible headline. The prosthesis isn’t “controlled by thoughts”, it’s controlled the same way as the older ones, tapping to the muscles in the arm. The novelty they’re talking about is the hand being wireless.

This is so cool by itself, why the need to fluff it up with misinformation? The interview (that this article is just rehashing) does the same thing, with the daytime TV hosts insisting on the “controlled by thoughts” line even as both of the interviewees keep trying to correct the statement with accurate information.

I mean, it may be higher than I think, because the amount I think is pretty low.

But I don’t think it’s the default. I am not THAT detached from younger people. iPads and Chromebooks are very region-specific options.

If you have numbers to any of that feel free to share them, because this is very far from a binary thing. There are literal billions of Windows PCs out there and that split isn’t going to be 90/10 (which would still leave you with hundreds of millions in the small bit anyway).

Citation gonna be extremely needed there. I have no idea what the penetration of the MS store is these days, but I’d be surprised to find most people punch in “VLC” in their app store before doing it in Chrome. Never mind that growing up with Windows 7 puts you in your mid 20s, who in their right mind bought into the Windows 8-era iteration of UWP? If you had said Windows 10 I would have rolled with it, but… yeah, gonna need so much citation.

But in any case, as I said above, the MS Store app is not the same as the multiple Linux package managers. You’re not going to write VLC and find three different identical-looking results with only fine print revealing which is which type of installer (none of which you can tell apart if you come from Windows anyway).

Hey, no, no malice read into it and I’m all for having a conversation about the subject. But it’s also true that if we have to litigate the basic facts we’re talking about (specifically, that Windows 10 WILL in fact have purchaseable security upgrades for several more years) over multiple posts it’s just not a very productive conversation, you know? Ideally the chat starts from the actual information being shared in the link, or at the very least in the headline.

In any case, yes, businesses will need to keep getting security updates and they will get security updates for the foreseeable, be it by moving to Win11 where they can or by moving to the long term support tracks for Win10 where the hardware doesn’t support it or it’s cheaper.

Not in the US.

The point of LTSC builds of Win10 is they will keep getting security updates, in some cases until the 2030s. That’s what the actual article we’re all supposed to be talking about is explaining.

So yes, there is a planned solution to keep a secure build of Win10 for businesses for at least a few more years. For that reason. That’s what this conversation is about. Normally I’d chastise people for not reading through to the body of the linked article, but this time it’s right in the headline. You literally could not have reached this post without reading it at least once.

I’m not a fan of the “most stuff just goes in the browser” argument, because then your OS is just Chrome and it doesn’t matter what you use underneath it. If anybody genuinely believed that people wouldn’t get so militant about the stuff you use to boostrap your PC and launch your real OS.

I also don’t agree that things are comparable just because MS keeps a vestigial proprietary app store (and a vestigial but quite competent CLI app manager, while we’re at it). Standalone installers are the default for Windows and there are very few times you’re forced to deviate from that, including for driver installations. That is a fundamental change, even before you get to the absolute mess that is the variety of repos, package formats and package managers across the Linux ecosystem. Even if you choose to use the Windows Store for some reason it has a single possible setup and more in common with a mobile store than with Linux package management.

Maybe it’s having recently switched to Fedora with GNOME and being frustrated by how patchy and unreliable their GUI software app is, but even after installing additional repos most of the stuff I want to use isn’t there and I’ve started defaulting to CLI because it’s just more reliable. It is by far the biggest hurdle I’d foresee for a newcomer, and if I had to recommend a distro/DE combo to a Windows user I’d focus on what package manager works best and most straightforwardly out of the box before anything else.

And yes, I did break something badly during that whole process and had to do some serious patching up at one point, so I do appreciate the empathy.

Honestly, dual booting is mostly fine now, I’m just annoyed by how awkward and inconvenient it still is to share a local hard drive across both systems and it feels weird to be cut off from physically mounted hard drives that are right there in your system just because there is no universally accepted OS-agnostic modern filesystem.

These days I have one computer with Windows and one with Linux. My solution ended up being sharing files over a local network and using GNOME so I can easily remote desktop from my Windows machine if I have to. It’s less annoying than the performative “run Windows in a virtual machine” thing people like to brag about and I wanted to keep a machine constantly running as a little home server anyway.

No, what? I’m saying all current desktop OSs (and mobile OSs, for that matter) will default to an app search interface when you press their respective Windows/Meta/whatever key or shortcut, so there being a “start” menu and a taskbar instead of a search bar and a dock ribbon makes no difference and is intuitive when going from Windows to Linux no matter what distro or DE you choose.

And that there being “like 3 other ways” to install applications is the issue. Windows users go to a place, click on a the “download” button, then click on the file they download and go. In Linux you could try to approximate that, but it’s the least convenient option. Instead you have an app manager that sort of looks like an app store from the other OSs, but sometimes not everything is in there and you have to manually add repositories and sometimes a thing IS there but it shows up like four times because there are multiple ways for apps to be packaged and it’s not obvious at a glance whether you’re downloading a containerized instance, a bundle of loose file dependencies or straight up code you’re about to autocompile. And when you ask online people will (correctly) tell you it’s actually easier to just use the command line package manager, except those are all distro-dependent and they all use subtly different syntax depending on what flavor of Linux you’re using.

So yeah, that’s a bigger difference and barrier to entry than “the start menu”.

The file structure you should need less often if you’re not a power user, since the user home directories are pretty much the same across the board. But hey, still, it’s very different on Windows compared to other systems, what with devices and volumes being automounted at the root level with a consistent drive name as opposed to a /mnt location and most of the pieces and dependencies of an app being kept in a consolidated folder. So yeah, it’s still a bit of a moment when you eventually have to edit a config file or manually navigate to a removable drive or something and it’s not immediately obvious where that would have gone by default.

That, and to this day it still trips me up that Linux GUI file managers mount network locations and Samba shares in arbitrary real paths you can’t easily navigate to in CLI but mounting them in CLI makes them appear in the file manager in a way that is visually indisinguishable, despite being mounted in a completely different place. That is not awkward because it’s different from Windows, that’s just weird and bad in absolute terms and I don’t get why it’s that way at all.

Famous last words before getting a keylogger that leads to all your bank accounts being drained due to lack of security patches.

Well, yeah. What kind of security do you think normies are running? They won’t even get hijacked by an unpatched Windows 10 exploit, they’ll just try to download The Last of Us by opening “WatchOnlineMoviesFree.exe” when a pop up tells them to.

Business operations will go with whatever is cheapest to maintain, which is the entire point of LTSC and the article in the link.

I mean… you go, grandpa.

But hey, that is a fair point. A lot of people talk about moving to Win11 like it’s something normies will want to avoid like the plague, as if all the things they point at as dealbreaking enshittification haven’t been rolling back to Win10 pretty much in real time. Hardware incompatibilities aside (and those are probably overstated, too) the leap will probably be very smooth unless the person in question is simultaneously extremely activist about hating modern Windows and extremely reluctant to use anything else.

People keep treating Win10 EoL as if the software is going to catch on fire. Every time they phase out a Windows version people just happily keep it installed indefinitely until they just naturally buy a new PC, at least.

I predict the big replacement for supported Windows 10 will be unsupported Windows 10. I expect that’s a pretty safe bet.

People fixate on those things. I don’t think those are the key things.

If I had to define what makes something Windows-like I’d point at the software and drivers being self-contained, self-installable executables and the old DOS-style disk handling and directory structure.

I mean, I don’t think that’s necessarily a great thing, but it’s been a long time since Windows took the “press key, type what you want to run, press enter” thing from… I’m gonna say MacOS. That start menu, taskbar and icon tray thing was a differentiator with Windows 95, but probably not since Windows 8.