I view this a little like those Nigerian prince email scams. True or not, once upon a time I heard that they deliberately did not fix the obvious spelling and grammatical errors in the scam emails -- they acted as an excellent first pass filter to exclude scam effort against targets who wouldn't fall for it anyway.
When Microsoft allows local accounts via more complicated loopholes, or activation via massgrave, or the removal of bloat/ad components via scripts or cmdline processes -- they lose little. But what they can gain by having an account for all the 'regular' users is a share of that giant ad revenue pie mostly dominated by google (and more recently a few other companies) in the last 20 years. And if you bypass those processes anyway? Probably worth being filtered out to Microsoft: you likely install an ad blocker later, change your search engine, browser, et al.
Knowing what their users do, being their search gateway, their default AI system (eventually..) and generally having an eye on their whole user experience gives Microsoft a formidable profit line in the future. And maybe the present too, I don't know.
It is a distasteful feeling to have installed windows 95 (or win7 or whatever your favourite flavour) and then try and install windows 11. But for the majority of their customer base (corporate and residential) this isn't relevant.
N=1, but this week my family member asked for advice on a new laptop and their only specification was that it could not have windows on it. They don't have any Apple products but are happy to shift, or use Linux.
This is a good comment! But I'll add that many classical learners use tab, and I think there's absolutely no shame there. The music is what counts, and I think rarely would someone look down on a learner.
Guitarists love other ppl learning or playing guitar!
I watched the lecture and did not find it compelling. It was a very literal interpretation, discussed alongside the evidence presented in the text of what was and wasn't more or less traveled by.
There was an interesting series of points made about American culture, and their sense of need for an affirmation / self-deception -- but I don't find his actual critique of the poem's words particularly enlightening.
So if you are interested in American cultural thought, involving over-rationalisation of choices, the lecture might have value. If you are particularly interested in the poem itself outside of that context, I don't recommend viewing.
I would love a way to regularly discover and watch some top, 'hit' TV shows or movies from outside of America or Australia (my home country), or sometimes England. I have no issues watching things with subtitles, but it is quite difficult to organically find things to watch, that perhaps have 'not English' as their primary language.
For example, I will now look up the UFO Sweden show to see if I might like to watch it -- because I discovered it through here.
I have tried subscribing to a few different regular streaming services, but none seemed to work even if I pointed them in the right direction. I'm really not particular about which country of origin the production has, so long as it's "the best" or "very popular" in recent times from that place, it's worth me checking the genre and style to see if it piques my interest.
Any advice on this? [ nb. I have a similar issue with podcasts! ]
You might enjoy https://easterneuropeanmovies.com/, https://sovietmoviesonline.com/ or https://asian-movies-online.com/. They have both movies that are popular hits and that have been important to the craft and history of the art. Subtitles are usually from open sub-style sources so not professional quality, but I find it sometimes help with learning the language when it's more literally translated than idiomatically.
The rest of Melikyan's movies are also quite interesting and fun.
They also distribute post-Soviet russian movies and television series. You should watch the two takes on The Master and Margarita, both high profile projects based off one of the most beloved books in Russia, from two very different times in russian society:
The Soviet was especially good a adventures for kids and science-fiction, of which you'll find a lot there, for example Alice in Wonderland and Hard to be a God. You should watch the takes on the latter to get a feel for differences between soviet and post-soviet societies. If the younger version feels hard to watch you might need to watch The Green Elephant and other movies from the russian nineties to prepare yourself and better understand the feelings and mindset of the time.
And if you want you can watch old propaganda movies about the Donbass or whatever, you'll learn a lot about places you likely know very little about.
Movies done behind iron curtain, despite (and sometimes thanks to) everpresent censorship and oversight ended up with pretty deep existential messages that avoided usually not that brilliant censors.
Bear in mind that most artists abhored oppression even in toughest times, they are all free spirits after all, and I can imagine also in current russia there must be at least large pockets of similar folks.
Of course there were more shallow mainstream things more or less full of propaganda, and many actors overlapped between 2 categories. If one was clearly in critical camp then no work in industry, either some menial soul breaking job, prison or kicking out
I'm learning a language, and I'd love to be able to filter Netflix titles by language, but they absolutely refuse to do it (I assume because allowing users to filter content would expose how bare the offerings are).
Netflix, and other streaming is absolutely the worst at stuff like this.
Another thing is Subtitles in every language. They ONLY show subs in a handful of languages, even though the subs are in every language. For instance, I live in Norway, it's common to see subs in only Norwegian, which makes sense. But imagine you're a tourist/immigrant, etc. Maybe you want to watch this Japanese movie, well, now the audio is in Japanese, and the Subs are in Norwegian.
The app knows your language preference... but shows the subs for the country you're in. Even though Netflix/etc has the rights to the streaming.
It's baffling to me, and I must be missing a piece of the puzzle. But I'm forced as someone who's still learning Norwegian, to skip all Non-English media, OR pirate them so that I can get subs in whatever language I choose. (Yet another example of how piracy is the better UX)
Where the phone collects notifications silently for an hour, then if there are any meeting the "alert" bar, it just buzzes or tones on the hour. Or whatever interval I choose.
I think a few times a day is plenty for my notifications, except for a couple of close friends and family -- but they're all in the same bucket. An app I installed yesterday who's messages I need but are not urgent, and a lifelong friend? Same value to the phone OS.
I'm thankful for the star contacts on Android working through dnd, but would love an aggregate/timed system for bulk stuff.
I clicked this by accident, but then read the full thing after noticing the author was Matt Levine! I'm sure there are other readers here who might appreciate his knowledge and writing style, so I mention it.
[ To those who post opinion pieces: Is it against the site rules to have the author listed after the actual title? It would help me in this case and others ]
> To those who post opinion pieces: Is it against the site rules to have the author listed after the actual title? It would help me in this case and others
It's not "against the rules" as such, but moderators (at least those in my timezone) will consistently reverse any change in the title like that.
Lovely design. Just a quick note to say that here in Australia, people are coffee crazy and would probably find a home for your kit. That includes individuals at home, but also cafes and hotel foyers etc.
Might be worth considering an AU plug as an option (we run off 240v).
Application name must start with a letter and have only lowercase letters, numbers and underscore
So I changed to test_elixir_app, and got this output:
downloading https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/releases/download/v1.17.3/elixir-otp-27.zip
fedora is not supported
This was a spur of the moment thing, so maybe I'll try from an Ubuntu machine or something another time, but the friction was unfortunate. Grats on the launch though, the demo gif of using the project installer looked great.
It supports most OSes rather nicely, check the docs for a long list of config options. It creates a local package store and configures your user's path for it, each tool is managed with a custom plugin that IME works flawlessly and versions are handled better than anything else I've ever used. It's the only way I'll install Golang or NodeJS lately, and I had good luck with it for Java too.
Ah cool, maybe I'll check it out someday. JVM isn't a huge part of my daily work though so I'm pretty happy having it managed the same way as everything else for now. I like the intuitive simplicity of a .tool-versions file in a repo that supports a huge variety of tools.
I do enjoy some of the podcasts mentioned in this thread, but struggle to find good non-American ("foreign"?!) podcasts to listen to. Similarly to finding good quality non-US film and television, it can be hard to locate but I greatly enjoy it.
If anyone has suggestions for podcast collation sites that are for non American content that would be fantastic.
When Microsoft allows local accounts via more complicated loopholes, or activation via massgrave, or the removal of bloat/ad components via scripts or cmdline processes -- they lose little. But what they can gain by having an account for all the 'regular' users is a share of that giant ad revenue pie mostly dominated by google (and more recently a few other companies) in the last 20 years. And if you bypass those processes anyway? Probably worth being filtered out to Microsoft: you likely install an ad blocker later, change your search engine, browser, et al.
Knowing what their users do, being their search gateway, their default AI system (eventually..) and generally having an eye on their whole user experience gives Microsoft a formidable profit line in the future. And maybe the present too, I don't know.
It is a distasteful feeling to have installed windows 95 (or win7 or whatever your favourite flavour) and then try and install windows 11. But for the majority of their customer base (corporate and residential) this isn't relevant.
N=1, but this week my family member asked for advice on a new laptop and their only specification was that it could not have windows on it. They don't have any Apple products but are happy to shift, or use Linux.
reply