MudMan

I nean… it’s a labelling thing, presumably. They don’t want milk substitutes to be labelled “milk” so they can’t advertise as easily as a milk substitute on supermarket shelves, and presumably the same is true for meat substitutes, except this goes at a glacial pace and they tried and failed in 2020 when it was still relevant and now they’re trying again even though nobody cares about veggie burgers anymore.

You are presuming this sort of arcane manipulation of collective weirdness into multinational legislation follows human logic, and that way lies madness. Best you can do is steer it ever so slightly so it at least does something in the aggregate that stops some anarchocapitalist loon from privatizing oxygen or whatever. It’s been a very weird century.

Look, like I said, it’s not you and it’s not about whether you’re agreeing or disagreeing with me.

I think at this point I’m just disappointed at the concept of social/user generated media as a whole. Straws and and camels and all that.

In that it’s mostly a merch ad hidden behind a clickbait title.

So I guess it’s a good test for that sort of “just read the headline” response.

It’s been a rough few days and I think I may be coming around. What hope is there to parse AI misinformation if people can’t parse a Reddit-like link aggregator?

I may be done with this place at this point. It’s just all bad. If not the whole Internet, certainly the whole of social media.

I did not remember that and I still remember “Los pollos hermanos”, so that tells you how weird that one is.

Also, this dogpile works better if you understand what you’re reading. The comedic effect bit was about the title of the thread, not about my own typo. Now you made it weird by trying to outpedant a pedant but not having the reading comprehension to pedant properly.

I am so furious with this at this point.

And the problem is, I also get what’s going on. You all feel cool and proud and self-actualized with the whole thing where you moved to Linux and whatnot. And you really, really, really want to tell somebody about it. I get it. It’s social media.

It’s fine the first few times, but it piles up after a while, you know? You can only have somebody veer sharply to the left towards “I use Linux, by the way” so many times.

Nobody asked if it was a dealbreaker for you. That didn’t happen. And even if someone did it’s not relevant to the conversation we’re having. We know.

Look, again, it’s not you. It’s just that hanging out around this place and trying to engage with the issues can get to be really weird after a while.

Goddamn it.

NOW it’s fixed. Two typos. It was two typos. Point stands.

I mean… no, mine’s a typo (fixed now, thanks for the poke), the other one is a deliberate spelling for comedic effect that accidentally uncovers an endless loop of abject multilingual terror.

This is a Gus Frink meme type of situation.

He also, incidentally, couldn’t speak Spanish for shit. That whole show was a nightmare. “Los Pollos Hermanos” as a phrase haunts me. I genuinely, and I’m not joking about this, sometimes find myself having intrusive thoughts about it after all this time.

Not really, it’s more of a farmer’s lobby protecting animal products from vegetarian alternatives.

Which as someone else says below is a bit neutral and doesn’t do much, but hey. They did it to milk.

Guessing it’s some bargaining chip with the industry on the wider legislation they’re passing? This stuff is pretty byzantine. European agricultural industries are constantly on the verge of setting stuff on fire. It’s a full time job to be even vaguely aware of what’s going on with them.

You’d be surprised. Spanish countries often dub movies, particularly back then.

But if you want to know what it felt like later in life I can help.

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The ouroboros of bad pronunciation the headline implies is throwing me for a massive loop.

I mean, you carry on with your American politics things, I just saw this on my feed and had an existential crisis.

I’m confused. What is “not accepting” a MS account to set up Windows? I mean, if you don’t have to use Windows and that is a dealbreaker for you, then great.

But if you need to use Windows and you want to… you know… work… around… having to be logged in, he’s suggesting a way to do that. That’s what we call in the business “a workaround”.

As I said elsewhere, I get that people want this to be a dealbreaker, or the suggestion to be a pointless defense because this is a Linux community and there is a cultural pressure to pretend that the account problem is a massive dealbreaker (as opposed to most normies just going with it, just like they do on their phones, which is what actually happens), but OSs aren’t football teams. You can both criticise MS for having an online activation requirement, rightfully so, and acknowledge a potentially useful mitigation for anybody who needs or wants to use the OS without being constantly logged in.

Hah. “Kid”, right.

First off, don’t be disrespectful to young people, some of them can make decent points sometimes.

But also, man, I wish. I was using DOS before this guy was working on it.

Man, I don’t really care what you think, but the way you can only parse this as taking sides or being personally attacked is… kinda not healthy?

Just maybe come back to it in a couple of days and give it some thought.

No, I have an issue with both him misrepresenting Mac OS and with you misrepresenting his point.

Because for the fifteenth time, what matters is what’s true. I’m not taking sides with you and assuming every fallacious argument you make is fine and every fallacious argument this guy makes is not, or viceversa. Your fallacies don’t justify his, and importantly, his don’t justify yours.

Look, at this point you’re being obtuse because egos and the Internet and whatever, so whatever, you do you. This conversation is deep into “I’m not mad, I’m disappointed” territory.

Yes. People have been correcting him on the Mac OS thing. Which you said was irrelevant several times.

I, remember, said it is not. Because again, this is not about what you like, it’s about what is true. Given what I’ve seen so far I’m assuming that a) his workaround is valid, and b) his statement that MacOS works the same way is not. I’m open to changing my mind on both of those because, one more time, it’s about what is true.

On that note, the breakdown of what is sent, how and when is absolutely dependent on your account login. If it was not then there would be nothing to complain about. That doesn’t mean they don’t send anything without an account (unless you’re not online at all, obviously), but the payload of information will be different and in some cases some calls may be dependent on you having an ID in the first place. Plus there’s the question of whether unsigned users leave any connection to the account that activated the Windows install. Which I don’t know about and you clearly don’t care about.

Oh, and… yeah, I would love to help Linux get more mainstream. If only egotistically, it’d be super nice if the parts of it that don’t work right for me due to missing drivers got more first party support, but having the underpinning of home computing software revolve around open source software? Yeah, I wanna help with that. I do agree with you that “I installed Linux for my grandma” is not “helping”, either, but I didn’t say I do that, either.

Nnno? To any of that?

I mean, he’s biased, you’re biased, whatever. The question is whether his information is accurate. Which I’m assuming it is. I haven’t tested it, but nobody seems to be disputing it. I’d personally like to know how much an activated Windows using an offline account phones home, if at all, and what data it shares and stores, but I’ve noticed nobody seems to care about the specifics of that in this fanboy flamewar, which is frustrating.

In any case, accurate information from biased sources is still accurate, and not sharing the same biases you have isn’t deception.

Also, nobody presents these workarounds as permanent anything, he hasn’t made that statement or even implied it. Most people sharing the previous workarounds actively warned that they seemed like an oversight and MS may patch them out at any point. Which they ended up doing.

Again, this seems like you equating caveats with dealbreakers for the sake of pushing an agenda. And as someone who uses both Windows and Linux on the daily I’m just gonna say you’re not helping. Misinformation makes people who notice it less likely to side with you and everybody here can notice it because we’re all tech savvy enough. I guess being the hardcore guy acting all uncompromising makes you feel cool or whatever, but it’s not doing much of use.

…

I mean he used to work there, so yeah?

You saying the accuracy of the account requirement in MacOS is irrelevant makes me wonder if it is incorrect, because… well, no, it’s not irrelevant. I’d like to know. I mean, I will continue to use Windows because I need Windows things, but if I was in a position where I’m mad about this to the point of making me look for a clean break that would be a fairly relevant thing to know.

What I’m hearing here is that people are mad about what he’s saying, not because he’s wrong or because it’s not useful, but because this is a Linux community and people want this problem to be as big as possible to wield it as a dealbreaker to specifically promote the OS they like. Which is, I’m guessing, why you don’t sound stoked about MacOS not having the same issue?

Weird as it is to root for specific pieces of software, I also don’t find that particularly useful because, frankly, people using Windows already know how good or bad Windows is. Trying to overplay it is not particularly constructive to promote alternatives. You can acknowledge the ways in which people can work around annoying Windows stuff and still point out you don’t need any workarounds on Linux, if that’s what you want to do.

Yeeeeeah, the headline in isolation is a bit misleading and unfortunately this seems in line with some recent Nintendo moves where they go after people who slipped on something adjacent.

I have no idea how things work wherever this guy lives, but over here soliciting remuneration would be the difference between this being a problem or not.

That said, I still hope they lose this and I have so many serious questions about how Reddit wouldn’t be liable if the content is illegal and they didn’t do anything to moderate it. This is a weird one and it’s worth keeping an eye on, although I would imagine Nintendo is hoping the lawsuit itself acts as a deterrent regardless.

This is astoundingly weird.

I mean, he didn’t show up from the ether to make this tweet, he’s a semi-well known youtuber, his anecdotes about his time at Microsoft have been reported in specialist press often and to my knowledge nobody at Microsoft ever went “hey, we don’t know who that is”. No matter how many grains of salt you take on uncited Wikipedia content, there are enough citations there to verify his identity, from local newspaper coverage of his career to links to public talks mentioning his background. He has frequently namedropped coworkers at the time, who to my knowledge haven’t contested his accounts. The Wikipedia page in question isn’t even a hagiography, bringing up his failed companies and legal issues surrounding them.

I don’t mind skepticism, but this is paranoia. Is it possible the guy is a bullshitter whose wide reaching lies have somehow not triggered a rebuke from the people he has specifically named? I guess weirder things have happened. Would you be questioning his background if he was saying something you don’t perceive as disagreeing with you? Absolutely not.

I have no more reason to question this guy having worked at Microsoft (and on the Task Manager specifically, which is a really weirdly mid-tier thing to brag about for twenty years if you didn’t do it) than to think Niccolo Venerandi didn’t contribute to KDE Plasma because he has a Youtube channel. It’s just a strange way to react to this.

I mean… is it? I’ll take everybody’s word for it that he is incorrect, since I’m not a Mac OS user, but while it certainly makes it sound that Win11 is doing something common he’s still providing a workaround for that thing. He can simultaneously be going “it’s not that uncommon” and “but also, here’s how to work around the problem” in the same post.