Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post, there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    6 months ago

    Kevin Beaumont got access to Copilot+ and hoo boy it’s even stupider than it sounds:

    I got ahold of the Copilot+ software.

    Recall uses a bunch of services themed CAP - Core AI Platform. Enabled by default.

    It spits constant screenshots (the product brands then “snapshots”, but they’re hooked screenshots) into the current user’s AppData as part of image storage.

    The NPU processes them and extracts text, into a database file.

    The database is SQLite, and you can access it as the user including programmatically. It 100% does not need physical access and can be stolen.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        12·
        6 months ago

        you know what really fucking gets me about this thing? even “before” all of the security and DV etc arguments (and, really, they are all valid)

        consider the average consumer-human (present version of) windows desktop/laptop/workstation that has survived for more than a year or so without having been re-imaged. those are already often an unusable nightmare of built-up cruft in sticky corners

        and now there’s going to be something that’ll do constant capture and analysis every fucking moment it’s running?

        how the fuck is this not going to go wrong? imagine the first time that sqlite table shits the bed. a dodgy character format goes into it, or a bit of disk corruption hits, or a file locking (lololol) issue hits, or …

        I just … I just really can’t imagine any of this is going to go very well at all in the real world

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
        11·
        6 months ago

        love how the MS shill eventually reaches:

        Okay, here’s a question; when has the casual consumer ever cared about privacy?

        • self@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          6 months ago

          every fucking time! and the answer seems to be: they care enough that privacy’s a core part of Apple’s marketing, but microsoft’s core competency is still managing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs enough that their users are on average just barely more inconvenienced by switching operating systems than they are dealing with whatever new shit’s being sprung on them (and this latest new shit’s gone from annoying to actively dangerous, so the tactic is to convince users it’s irrelevant to them until it’s made mandatory, as Microsoft does, and then the pain of suddenly switching operating systems will be even greater)

        • deborah@awful.systemsEnglish
          10·
          6 months ago

          As someone who did come to love a lot of microsoft products despite the way I felt about them in the 90’s, their slow slide into whatever they are now makes me hate them more, not less. Microsoft genuinely spent a lot of the oughts making genuinely good general purpose stuff, and they absolutely dominated at accessibility for 20 years. So when people simp for them as they destroy everything I found great about their products, instead of holding them to account, it’s awful.

          Guess who bought the dictation software I rely on for everything I do and then basically abandoned the useful consumer product and is now sticking gippity-4 into it? Stick it in GitHub, stick it in Windows, add it to your complete breakfast, wear it on your head.

            • deborah@awful.systemsEnglish
              6·
              6 months ago

              My Windows machines have all been skinned to work like XP for 20 years, and sometimes I have to use other people’s computers and I don’t even understand how they get anything done. My start menu is predictable and the items in it are in the same place and with the same keystrokes every day. There’s no ads in it. It doesn’t tell me the weather or the sports scores when I don’t ask for them. My taskbar shows me the names of all the windows I have open. This should all be normal.

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        6 months ago

        LOL, the first thing I saw of these new lappys was a breathless Verge article saying “finally MS will release the Macbook Air killer” and the very next thing is the poisoned chalise that is “you want a fast efficient Windows machine? well you just have to accept the AI recording everything you do on it”. Fucking own goal.

        • self@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          6 months ago

          the incredible efficiency of writing OCRed screenshots to SQLite constantly

          so Linux on laptops is frequently a shitshow in terms of power management, but bespoke Linux hardware that comes tuned (like the Steam Deck or laptops from Linux vendors) seems to do a lot better than Windows for efficiency. I’m hoping this is an area where shit gets better for Linux as hardware vendors start to take it more seriously.