> MS made it that much worse by wrapping these in dark patterns that may change without notice
> It's truly dangerous if it can and does act against your wishes, interests, and reasonable expectations.
Do you really not consider the first to be an example of the second?
> Shift+Del and rm -rf don't have any guardrails around them.
Shift+Del asks for confirmation. I would expect OneDrive to do at least that much before deleting files off the local machine, even if they're recoverable.
> Do you really not consider the first to be an example of the second?
I think too many people got the impression that I'm defending OD and can't get out of that trench. My point is that a generic tool being able to do dangerous things isn't a high enough bar to say don't use it (often). A tool being able to do dangerous things in the manner I described above is a completely different devil. The "how" you end up doing a dangerous thing is what should be punished.
I want to be able to do whatever I want with my computer and my data and not have someone define what's "too dangerous" for me to use. But what happened here wasn't what the users wanted, or could reasonably expect to happen. That's the key.
> Shift+Del asks for confirmation
I'm sure OD also asked for some confirmation. By that time it's too late, you're confirming what you think will happen, not what will actually happen. When you confirm shift+del you know what you are confirming. When you confirm OD's dialog you're confirming under misleading assumptions.
> I could also write the same article about this website, how it was so full of bloat and ads that nobody wants I could barely get it to scroll, and it eventually crashed before getting to the end of TFA due to general resource exhaustion on mobile.
I found it ironic that after reading an article about all the stuff in Windows 11 that no one asked for, the site hijacked my back button to show me more articles I might want to read.
Same. I tried LibreWolf for a while but as TA mentioned, it required too much tuning. (It also isn't signed on macOS so installing has extra hoops.) I'm on Waterfox now and it's just about right for me.
As a counter-anecdote, I've had far more trouble over the years swapping physical SIMs than eSIMs. You'd think that going between two phones that use the same size card would just work, but in practice that isn't (wasn't?) always the case.
Never saw an issue moving a SIM from one phone to another (living in Asia, Europe and the US). However last week I got a Airalo E-Sim and apparently it's not possible to transfer it to my new phone.
> "A friend who had been learning some language in Duolinguo and then couldn't say a sentence to a native", should be proverbial nowadays.
I tried picking up some German via Duolingo once. I thought it was going great, pretty soon I was up to full sentences. Then one day I realized (because my voice teacher sometimes makes me translate the foreign language songs) that I wasn't learning German sentences, I was learning English sentences substituted with German words. German grammar is completely different. I haven't touched Duolingo since.
At least with Duolingo's Spanish course, the differences in grammar are among the first things they teach. Weird that it would be different with German.
It's been almost 10 years so maybe they do it differently now. I just remember they made a big deal about the gendered nouns but nothing about the fact that sentences weren't even close to correctly structured. And too be fair, maybe that was coming later and they didn't want to overwhelm people, but a quick explanation would have been nice.
I experienced the same thing with both German and Dutch while trying to learn them via Duolingo over a period of 6 months or so. After all the drilling and gamified lessons I never even started to feel like I was actually _learning_ these languages. With German I figured was just me being stupid or not grokking it properly; it's different enough from English to "feel" very foreign. But Dutch isn't that different.
I remember only two sentences from the Dutch Duolingo, maybe because they were constantly repeated:
"Ik ben een appel." (I am an apple.)
and:
"Nee, je bent geen appel!" (No, you are not an apple!)
For comparison, I did self-study with Japanese in my teens and learned enough to ace the first 1.5 years of college Japanese instruction without much effort. And I remember taking Spanish classes in high school and to this day can at least fumble my way through a basic conversation.
In contrast the only use I would have for what I learned of Dutch via Duolingo would be if I came across someone having a psychotic break. You're _not_ an apple, dude.
Granted, I spent more time with both Spanish and Japanese than with any language I tried with Duolingo, but my point is simply that Duolingo just doesn't make languages "click", at least not for me and apparently not for a bunch of others either.
I haven't tried since that one attempt. I've picked up a few words from learning German songs as part of my voice training, but otherwise it's not useful enough to me to take the time and effort.
> And generally speaking out in the country, there won't be pedestrian foot traffic, so it's not as if you need the bright lights for them.
Animals, specifically deer. That said, you can use brights when no other cars are nearby, and when there is a car coming its worth a few seconds of extra risk to not blind the other guy and put him at risk.
There really isn’t that much increase; when there’s another driver then you both have the combined the light output of both headlights, coming from two different directions.
Why does nobody think that if these lights are dazzling oncoming drivers, they are also dazzling these precious deer and pedestrians people keep saying they need to see so well.
That was my first thought as I was reading. Of course, I imagine almost every serious business would be extremely uncomfortable doing something like that. On the other hand, if the alternative is getting your account closed anyway, there's not much to lose.
It seems like Shorts keep getting worse, at least the Shorts that I get presented with. For a while the most popular format was a clip from a movie or TV show with annoying royalty-free music slapped on top and a badly chosen title. Now I'm seeing clips shrunk down into a tiny content box within the Short while the background is some guy watching you watch the clip. Why is that popular?!
I was trying to help a friend recently with a bizarre issue with a Dell laptop: the 2 key (and only the 2 key) is unreliable. Normally I'd say "hardware problem" but it acted more like a software bug. Among other signs, it's unreliable in Windows and the BIOS but not in Linux.
Unfortunately, I don't have the skills to even diagnose the problem, let alone fix it. And my friend isn't willing to put Linux on it since he wants to sell it.
> It's truly dangerous if it can and does act against your wishes, interests, and reasonable expectations.
Do you really not consider the first to be an example of the second?
> Shift+Del and rm -rf don't have any guardrails around them.
Shift+Del asks for confirmation. I would expect OneDrive to do at least that much before deleting files off the local machine, even if they're recoverable.
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