the reactionary opinions are almost hilarious. they’re like “ha this AI is so dumb it can’t even do complex systems analysis! what a waste of time” when 5 years ago text generation was laughably unusable and AI generated images were all dog noses and birds.
you have to do a lot of squinting to accept this take.
so his wins were copying competitors, and even those products didn’t see success until they were completely revolutionized (Bing in 2024 is a Ballmer success? .NET becoming widespread is his doing?). one thing Nadela did was embrace the competitive landscape and open source with key acquisitions like GitHub and open sourcing .NET, and i honestly don’t have the time to fully rebuff this hot take. but i don’t think the Ballmer haters are totally off base here. even if some of the products started under Ballmer are now successful, it feels disingenuous to attribute their success to him. it’s like an alcoholic dad taking credit for his kid becoming an actor. Microsoft is successful despite him
these days Hyprland but previously i3.
i basically live in the terminal unless i’m playing games or in the browser. these days i use most apps full screen and switch between desktops, and i launch apps using wofi/rofi. this has all become very specialized over the past decade, and it almost has a “security by obscurity” effect where it’s not obvious how to do anything on my machines unless you have my muscle memory.
not that i necessarily recommend this approach generally, but i find value in mostly using a keyboard to control my machines and minimizing visual clutter. i don’t even have desktop icons or a wallpaper.
it’s an analogy that applies to me. tldr worrying about having my identity stolen via physical access to my phone isn’t part of my threat model. i live in a safe city, and i don’t have anything the police could find to incriminate me. everyone is going to have a different threat model. some people need to brick up their windows
it’s not a password; it’s closer to a username.
but realistically it’s not in my personal threat model to be ready to get tied down and forced to unlock my phone. everyone with windows on their house should know that security is mostly about how far an adversary is willing to go to try to steal from you.
personally, i like the natural daylight, and i’m not paranoid enough to brick up my windows just because it’s a potential ingress.
this is just combining existing data scraping tools with LLMs to create a pretty flimsy and superfluous product. they use the data to do what they say. if they wanted to scrape data on you they can already do that. all they get from this is your interest and maybe some other PII like your email address. the LLM is just incidental here. it’s honestly not even as bad privacy wise as a “hot or not” or personality quiz.