I was going to make a joke that they could also replace the taskbar search bar with an AI chat bar, but after reading the article, it turns out that they’re planning on doing that for real:

Windows 11 taskbar is now being “upgraded” with AI-first features. Microsoft is working on the Ask Copilot bar, which may replace Windows Search in the taskbar.

Oh, no. I’m saying Microsoft owning your operating system and using it to push their data-harvesting software as a default browser is a monopolistic practice, whereas using Chrome by itself is just reinforcing an existing monopoly. The same goes for Mac and Safari or Android and Chrome.

Neither option is good, but it’s a step in the right direction to punish a corporation for their active attempts to subvert competition in a bid to establish their own monopoly in place of the current one.

If you have to pick between two monopolistic corporations, using both of them but giving each a little less of your data and attention is a way to mitigate the risks and damage.

If Microsoft can harvest data on how I use my computer, I can at least make it a bit harder for them to harvest my browsing habits too by not voluntarily giving them browser telemetry on top of that.

There’s plenty:

• Not supporting monopolistic practices.
• User preferences.
• Diversifying your software so you don’t get trapped in an ecosystem.
• Not having Copilot stuffed down your throat.
• User preferences.
• Making it possible to rip Edge out of Windows for the purpose of debloating.

The phoronix comment section is a garden of rationality and level-headed thinking in comparison.

Any time Rust is brought up in Phoronix, half of the comments are bad-faith idiots making strawmen and whataboutism arguments amounting to “skill issue, C is 300% safe and nobody needs better” and thinly-veiled contrarian antagonism against Rust because it’s popular.

A comment section worse than that? Impressive.

That was something they could actually market to the consumer as a necessary upgrade, though.

• “Sure, you need a new cable, but component video has cleaner edges and less color bleeding.”
• “Sure, you need a new cable, but HDMI has better resolution and no fuzziness.”

Going from HDMI 2.1 to DisplayPort 2.1a doesn’t offer anything other than higher bandwidth, and not even high-end PCs are capable of pushing resolutions at high enough framerates for that bandwidth to have been the limiting factor for games.

Because of that lack of perceptible benefit to them, the optics of replacing HDMI on consumer devices that are meant to be connected to TVs isn’t going to be good. Even if it’s an objectively better standard from a technical perspective, it will just come across to consumers as an unnecessary change meant to push their TVs towards planned obsolescence.

They’re going to complain about it, the media will pick up on the story and try to turn it into a scandal, and then legislators and regulators will step in and make decisions based on limited understanding of the technical reasons. By that point, one of the console manufacturers will have been pressured into backing down and promise to keep HDMI in their next-gen console, and the other ones will have followed suit because they don’t want to lose sales over it.

The only way console manufacturers are going to stay united in kicking HDMI to the curb is if the organization behind HDMI pulls a Unity move and starts charging royalties to the manufacturers for every time a consumer plugs the console into a TV.

As long as the manufacturers are competing against each other, that’s never going to happen.

The “gamer” consumer demographic has some of the most whiny, entitled vocal minorities. They’re going to endlessly complain about the next generation of console needing a special cable/dongle to connect to their TV, one of the manufacturers are going to fold, and then the other one is going to walk back the lack of HDMI because they don’t want to lose sales to their competitor.

And native software.

Because JavaScript runs everywhere, we have companies creating “apps” and PC “programs” that are little more than glorified web views. There’s normally nothing wrong with having shared code across implementations, but when that shared code is a 4 MB bundle of crap that creates 100s of MB in dictionaries and JIT compiler caches, you’re ruining the end-user experience.

They make entire SOCs. None of them are x86 because of the duopoly that Intel and AMD have thanks to their cross-licensing agreement, but they still have functional CPUs with a common ISA.

AMD: “Our partners will fry your expensive CPU on some boards.”
INTEL: “Our software will fry your expensive CPU on all boards.”

The only way that username would check out is either if it was owned by a pushy and holier-than-thou social progressive with zero self-awareness, a conservative with a small world view that feels “owning the libs” is a personality trait, or a troll.

Now, considering your account was created on this platform two days ago, just called the resident population of Lemmy stupid, and drink whatever kool-aid Musk is selling, it’s a toss-up between the last two.

Much like Musk himself, it seems.

He wants to allow AI slime on his own platform

Don’t forget the blatant scams called crypto games! He proudly announced Epic Games Store would happily sell games centered around NFTs and crypto after Valve said they wouldn’t allow it.

What’s next?

• Trumpla, the EV manufacturer?
• Trumpmart, selling nearly-rotten food at marked-up prices.
• Trump Burder this one already exists.
• Trumple Inc, consumer phone dropshipper.
• Trumpazon, a marketplace where he takes a cut on all sales.
• Trump Sauna, a PC games storefront.

• A version of libc that has POSIX shims.
• A filesystem with reflink support.
• A consistent UI design across old and new programs.
• Dark mode that works everywhere.
• Respect for their users’ autonomy.

Need I go on?

“Neither” is also an acceptable answer.

Agreed. The call trace shows it occurred as part of a drm_ function, which is related to the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) subsystem.

There’s a chance it might not be the root cause, but the more obvious answer is that the Nvidia driver managed to corrupt a kernel data structure.

Please fill in the blanks:

• China’s socioeconomic model is _____.
• In the Russia—Ukraine war, Russia is _____.
• _____ Korea is the more prosperous of the two.

“Keeping users safe on Android is our top priority,” Android president Sameer Samat wrote on X. “Scammers rely on anonymity to scale their attacks. Right now, if we block a bad app, they can often just create a new app and try again. Verification stops this “whack-a-mole” cycle by requiring a real identity – making it much harder and costlier to repeatedly distribute harmful apps.

So, you’re actually going to put an effort in stopping people from publishing malware through the Play Store, right?

Right?

Contrary to popular belief, it is possible to write software in assembly that is very readable. It takes thought but assembly has the edge with its miniscule footprint and zero-dependency runtime.