At this point Microsoft needs to start over with Windows, preferably build on Linux. Valve did it and built a better gaming OS. Microsoft can do it for the rest of us.
Jellyfin is great for this if you don't want to put the computer right next to the TV. Set up your torrent program to download to a particular directory and set up Jellyfin to watch it. The most seamless experience to watch anything.
The only downside compared to Netflix is you need to wait 10-15 minutes to let the torrent finish. Also sometimes you have to hunt for the subtitles if you want them.
Windows went through a pendulum swing of integrating touch (I think they ended up in a place where they expect users to use more of a multi-modal approach instead of touch-only).
I suspect Mac is going through the same thing right now as ipad is "growing up" and they're trying to reconcile all their UI. I'm a little surprised that Macs have never introduced touch.
Fundamentally any centralised message relay system will have enough metadata to know something about participants and maybe even things like message frequency. If you truly want anonymous communication it has to be p2p.
Microsoft is a multi-trillion dollar company. Is it too much to ask for them to develop and maintain two separate Windows flavors with different focus?
1. Windows 11 - keep doing what they are doing, add AI, ads, all sorts of guardrails, whatever the 80% of users need
2. Windows 11 Enthusiast - Bring back Win 2000 theme, no guardrails, best-in-class dev experience, hyper-optimised for gaming, no AI, no ads
I would pay significantly more for the special version that I did for my Win 11 pro copy.
I have never in my entire life wanted to "generate an image or video". I like taking photographs and recording videos because they represent the reality of my life. Who would ever want to "generate" fake images as a matter of normal daily activities?
That is indeed a really weird statement from them.
I mostly engage with text based social media or highly technical content so I know that I'm not exactly in the center of the bell curve.
I can see a use case for "AI let's go finding me holiday destination and help me plan my travel and stay". I can also see people wanting to "improve" images and videos etc to remove "blemishes".
But straight up generating random images and videos as content center pieces? That seems like a niche at best unless it's unwittingly done through the "algorithm".
But for mastodon, even if it technically "doesn't matter" nobody stops there. You see things written like "The hardest part of getting started on Mastodon is the first step,"[1]
They talk about chosing a server based on region, language, topics of interest, or which ones your friends use. I've even some mention that your server choice can signal your political leanings.
I don't worry about any of those things when I choose an email provider or ISP.
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