Much better to install Linux, install a virtual machine (GNOME Boxes) in which you run what you still need Windows for, and access files via a Samba service as shared files.

Or just switch to Linux, and copy your files. It is good for daily use.

Dumb question: What exactly is “ricing”? I’d also be curious to learn about the etymology of that term…

Yikes.

I am already uncomfortable when my mom talks with her phone to search Google. But hey, she is 83 years old and her health is declining. Maybe she does not need so much privacy any more.

But here is a sad story: I have two friends, a couple. Both are automation engineers. They could not have kids, which was their life dream. So instead, they re-purposed their energy and built their dream house. A beautiful house. And, of course, with a lot of automation and logic programmed by them. Shutters which open in the morning and close when it is stormy. A shower which plays the right morning radio program. Extra settings for when parents-in-law visit.

But what makes me uncomfortable is voice control by speech recognition. All that cortana/siri stuff. For everything, even switching on the light. I don’t like that when I visit people. For me, it is like somebody is always listening, even to stuff that is meant only for my friends ears.

I have not told them, but I don’t like that house.

The company’s development and expansion of its services will rely in no small part on massive data center projects, which will require the same amount of energy to operate as New York City and San Diego combined—energy that currently isn’t even available.

In that case, there is a little but fundamental problem. It is based on basic physics: You can fake securities or earnings, or you can print money. But you can’t fake energy because that violates the laws of physics.

On the other side of the deal, OpenAI will have to pay about $60 billion per year to fit the bill for the agreement. It currently generates about $10 billion in revenue, which, statistically speaking, is less than $60 billion.

ok.

XKCD on that: https://m.xkcd.com/2030/

It’s an interesting point you raise. The media has mutated since the list was written, now encompassing anyone with an opinion and an internet connection. Where in the past the media was more centralised and therefore more easy to control totally, now it’s very difficult to eradicate dissent completely - the media has become more aligned to the masses than to the elites. So a different approach is needed to get to totalitarianism.

And that aporoach is widespread use of disinformation.

Another key point is the ongoing attack on the autonomy of societal institutions, like universities. Timothy Snyder has written about the importance of them in On Tyranny, and Trump behaves as if Snyder’s book was an instruction manual.

There is a German Nazi term that is perhaps useful to describe what’s happening, it is Gleichschaltung.

Alternative OSes surely do have better privacy than Android, but that’s probably not sufficient. On Smartphones, there runs not a single CPU like on a laptop, but more like 5 computers and only one of them is controlled by the OS. For example, there is a baseband processor and a radio modem. And the SIM card is a computer. And part of these can be controlled remotely (have you ever wondered how your phone automatically re-programs it parameters when you change providers?).

And then there are gaps in authentication in the radio prozocol: Your phone / SIM card authenticates against a radio tower so that the right phone user pays the bill. But the phone has no way to detect a rogue mobile tower…

It seems to be just accepted that everyone is going to jump to another company every couple years (usually due to companies not giving adequate raises).

Well. I did the last jump because the quality was so bad.

I am physicist and software engineer. My current Linux desktop PC is now 16 years old, from 2009, and with 8-core CPU and 16 GB RAM is still plain over-powered for running Emacs and rustc under Debian and Arch in VM. It is only the third desktop computer I own. I bought the second one in 1999, and that one had an AMD K6 (Pentium-like) CPU with 300Mhz clock, running S.u.S.E. Linux, and I used it for writing uni stuff and my PhD thesis on digital speech processing. The first PC I owned was a old PC with an Intel 80386 CPU which my uncle gave me in 1995. I could barely run Word 6.0 on Windows 3.11 on it (MS Word became very instable for larger documents), but LaTeX (emTeX) was running totally fine (after installing it from about 30 floppy disks).

So, to sum up: Using Linux you will save a ton of money for hardware.