xbkingx

Blu-rays can take up 25gb each, so just a decent collection of those could easily consume most of one of these drives. If you want to do basic model tuning in stable diffusion, each model variation can take 7gb. This level of storage would mean you could almost setup a versioning system for those. And finally, any work with uncompressed data, which can just be easier in general, could benefit from it.

I would love that, too, but it's not possible today. Everyone would offer 25 year warranties, close up shop in 5 years, and reopen as a new subsidy or company.

The only way I see it working is to hold some large portion of the revenue in a trust and relinquish it to the company over the warrantied lifespan. The company would have to operate at a loss for a while to books those reserves, so there would have top be something like a zero interest government loan to cover the cost, which can't be escaped through bankruptcy.

Or maybe a contract like the shitty cell phone plans in the US. Buyer agrees to pay for the full price of the appliance over the warrantied lifetime in installments. If you want to sell it or trade it in early, you either have to finish off the payment or transfer the contract. The company would have to service the product (within reason), or the contract is voided, releasing the buyer from payment obligations. Again, this system can be easily gamed, too, in today's market, but I just can't imagine a scenario that doesn't require a major paradigm shift.

I do a decent amount of 3d printing and I cannot count the number of random letter Amazon brands for filament that have popped up over the last year. Most are simply rebranded waste from larger manufacturers. Once the product gets below 3.5 stars, the brand disappears and a suspiciously similar new brand pops up with the same spool design and 20 5-star reviews overnight.

lol I wish it was this easy. I got through the simulator in 6yrs 11mos on the second try. At no point was hope above 40%, except once early on (ended at 33%).

The funny thing is that I had 1 conf paper, 1 major result, and 1 figure left over. That's a good year extra, so I assume a perfect game would be to get the 3x papers and GTFO (which is the second best outcome, after not enrolling). There were a couple folks I knew that made it out in 5 years, but more that took 7+. Our lab was notorious for taking over 10, which I skirted by.

Like others said, this was lacking outside events (social/political junk). Hopefully version 2 will take into account: at least 1 family death and 1 additional tragedy, at least two months lost to helping or waiting for help from another grad student or post doc (they did have the lab equipment breaking, which was good to see, but missed the lobbying for every little purchase), at least one scope change, a half dozen favors to gain some political cache, a few experiments and/or rewrites to satisfy faculty members that just read about a technical issue they should have known, but didn't so they're highly sensitive to it, at least 6 months of arranging the data/results in a way that faculty can understand, 3 months of arguing that the lab standard procedure for some basic component is a decade out of date, a few months worth of preparing premature data for unnecessary meetings, one (and it better be just one) instance of an offer to help getting waaaay out of control, the hope boost after your first big conference and subsequent conference hope drops, the drops with each thesis defense from folks a year younger, etc. There's more, but that's off the top of my head. Oh, and that slight boost in hope when you hear someone else has a worse problem than your current one. That's a fun one.

Tip for those interviewing - ignore all the year 1-3 folks. 1 and 2 are basically undergrads plus some extra classes. 3 probably hasn't hit the first pile of bullshit yet. Find a year 5 or 6 in your field and talk to them alone. There's a reason they generally don't have senior grad students at recruiting events, and it isn't because they're too busy. Talk to them long enough to get to their exhausted attempts to rationalize some aspect of the experience. If their demeanor doesn't change, you might be safe. If they start hemming and hawing, that's a problem. They haven't even gotten to a specific, non-personal problem and they're having trouble keeping up the facade. The layers are: 1) Hey, social event, I get to take my mind off lab problems. 2) Getting a little boost by talking to someone still excited. 3) The quiet whisper, "Let me give you some advice." 4) The realization that there's nothing but lab to talk about. That's the threshold. 5) The rationalization alpha - The view from 30,000 feet isn't terrible. 6) The rationalization beta - The rundown of broad problems they're having. This is the point where they will probably, as if by magic, remember that thing they were going to do needs to be done now. (I've got some analysis running I need to check, I need to feed some lab animals, I promised my parents I would call, I told a lab mate I'd help them with this thing and will be up all night, etc.) 7) The rationalization gamma - Specific cases of major problems they're seen other have. 8) The rationalization delta - Specific problems they're having.

The moment I saw the term "SEO" it was like a stopwatch ticked on until search was dead. It used to be frowned upon to do little tricks, like keywords in a tiny, transparent font picked up by crawlers, but not seen by users.

When gaming search engines became a profession, the end of search appeared on the horizon. Guess we're headed back to web rings and link indexes (which will be consolidated, heavily monetized, and abandoned). If we're lucky, we'll be back to dialup BBSes by the 2040s.

And the people that put significant effort into their work will reupload it to other services, if they haven't already. Similarly, exceptional work is probably saved by random folks elsewhere.

I'm pretty active in r/3DPrinting and r/FixMyPrint, and strongly support the blackout. I've been avoiding Reddit entirely and getting my news from other sources, while also exploring the fediverse. I had no idea about the rhombik instance/magazine/whatever.

The core problem with the migration is that the information on where to go EXACTLY is hosted on the platform being boycotted. I decided to not visit Reddit anymore and watch for instances to pop up on the fediverse. If others do the same, the migration will be slow. Don't be discouraged if it takes a few days to pick up steam. There's another 3DPrinting magazine that has some users already. https://kbin.social/m/[email protected] or https://lemmy.world/c/3dprinting

That leads to the second problem of on-boarding migrating users to a highly distributed platform. I've mentioned in the boycott server the need for "racks" (the subjects within instances are called magazines, this would be a collection). These would be moderated aggregators of instances, like the invisible step between lots of disparate subreddits. There would be no limit of the number of racks, so technically you could have a permutation of every associated magazine-instance combination. The purpose would be to have a single link new users can click on to get subscribed to a set of magazines all at once, basically making the federation concept seamless to less technical users while still highly flexible on the backend. I'm going to shoot the suggestion up the chain for kbin.

We want to avoid leaving folks like this: https://lemmy.world/post/97417

That leads to the third problem, which is all these alternatives are new and going through growing pains. Trying to add features comes second to keeping the service stable. I'm hoping others with more coding experience can assist kbin devs.

And I wanted to mention that last I heard (and saw evidence of), some of the main Lemmy devs were kinda garbage people (Tiananmen Square massacre supporters, not just questionable opinions on government). The more controversial instances have been defederated from the primary/intake server, but it's still worth mentioning. Kbin doesn't have that baggage, but there are only a couple devs, and really only one main dev, last I heard.

Kbin users can see and respond to Lemmy and Mastodon instances that are federated, so it has been the migration choice for most of the Reddit boycott groups.

edit: btw - I just looked at the comments on the one post. If you want to run a poll, fine, but most of the people protesting won't be there to vote. I thought the 3D printing subs were largely positive and supporting, if those comments represent the community I was supporting, I now have zero qualms about deleting my comments on Reddit.

What? You don't want to watch the full box set of Star Trek TNG between when you push a button and the animation ends? That ruins my plans of designing a scrollbar that plays 45 random tracks from you music library between lines scrolled.

OTOH, it IS very satisfying to realize you don't really need to do whatever requires those interactions in the first place.

It speaks to the more serious problem with vaccine hesitancy - the more virions (individual virus 'particles') that exist, the greater the chance of a mutation that finds a way around our defenses. It's just basic evolution.

The variants arise randomly and proliferate with the current major strains. The infected population adapts to reduce the transmission of the most virulent/contagious strains. Selective pressure (tug of war between infecting people and people fighting off the infection) increases on the new variants until one or a few maintain or exceed the transmission of the progenitor strain.

That's the problem with the, "I'll get over it/I'm not worried/My segment of the population doesn't die from it" mentality. The more infections - subclinical, asymptomatic, severe, fatal, undetected - the more rolls of the dice. We (humans) are selecting variants that are worse for us, hoping we can snuff out the infection before some key mutation that eludes our immune system and/or testing develops.

Two other thoughts with internal conflicts/points worth mentioning - First, recovered patients should be more resistant to new strains. Their immune systems threw everything at the virus to defeat it, so their response will be more diversified than those with mRNA vaccines targeting a specific protein sequence. (The magnitude and usefulness of the variations in immune response can negate that advantage.) Second, the reasons that a 'novel' virus is dangerous are that we, as a species, don't know if we can (naturally/innately), and we don't know how much the virus can change in protein sequence (to evade our defenses) or our response to infection.

Anyways, I'm rambling. Not a virologist, but a PhD (and as such, I think I know more about stuff than a really do) and that's how I think about it. :)

I kept waiting for it to get better than a light brown haze with flashes of green... but it never did. The fire looked okay, but even that looked weird at the beginning of the sequence.

What really made me laugh was the blue smoke followed by a headline implying that was all at night. The AI filled in pristine blue skies and inverted the wreckage colors. It actually made up history. I'm calling it: Unintentional automated disinformation.

I think it's more of an emergent pattern.

Mutant ABC is the target. First Mutant A becomes the predominant strain. There might be some Mutant AB or AC in the population, but the controlling factor is currently Mutant A.

Eventually, Mutant A therapies/vaccines are introduced and Mutant A starts to lose its hold. Mutant AB isn't treated by the new treatments (or they're less effective, or Mutant AB goes undetected longer, etc.). Mutant AB becomes king of the hill. Repeat with Mutant ABC.

All this would assume that there's no Mutant B or Mutant BC or Mutant AC that increases in prevalence. All the mutations would have to build up over time or occur simultaneously by coincidence (or you could get a combination).

It's just basic evolution - organism follows the niche. We have a hard time recognizing it because generation turnover is so rapid. Instead of taking ~30 years for 2.5 offspring, it's a few days for millions of offspring.

I don't think mode of reproduction matters much when we're talking at this scale. While the virus creates stable clones across generations, I would think they're more susceptible to mutations and any viable mutation is quickly amplified exponentially. Just like the old high school bio experiment to demonstrate antibiotic resistance, only your respiratory mucus membranes are the medium. Those bacteria reproduced asexually.

I had the same problem with and older Netgear router. It turned out to be a bug in the scheduling settings. It had the ability to disable network access between specific times on a daily schedule. The feature was enabled by default, but no times were set to disconnect. You'd think that would mean the connection would never go down, but a firmware update changed that. Every morning at ~3:00am the network would go down for 1 minute. Disabling the feature entirely resolved the problem.

Looks nice, but no ability to set default playback speed means I'll stick with (the rarely updated) Vanced. I never watch YT content at <1.25x speed unless it's to hear a music track.

It also looks like it doesn't have the option to login and sync, so I'd be seeing already watched stuff on between desktop and mobile. I understand why some people wouldn't want that, but I use the feature all the time and would like the option.

I might try it as a kind of backup app for things I want to track, but don't want suggestions for (mostly technical videos).

The problem for me is that I honestly can't think of more than a half dozen instances in the last 20+ years where ads made me aware of something new that I actually wanted, and zero of those were web-based. I can't think of a single time ads swayed my opinion to purchase something I didn't want or caused me to buy something earlier than I would have otherwise. At BEST there have been a few ads that have led me explore options within that market, but the company posting the ad had zero impact on my decision (it almost deters me, since that ad money could have been spent making the product better or cheaper, so the competition is probably a better buy).

Why would I want even 1% of the content I'm consuming to be polluted with irrelevant garbage? That's a huge amount of time and mental effort filtering out stuff like toothpaste ads because I googled directions to my dentist's office.

Nope. Ad blockers on EVERYTHING and custom CSS for sites that whine about ad blockers or display a sea of whitespace to inflate page view times.

There's no way 3 rubber bands turns a surgical mask into an N95 mask. There are studies that look at the abilities of different materials, removing the seal component entirely, and the two masks have very different profiles. (I don't have them saved, but I've come across several over the last few weeks when looking into alternative to N95 masks. Here's an article I found with 5 minutes of searching that has some refs to relevant studies: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/commenta...)

Better seal than a surgical mask without them? Even that I would contest because you are loading the area directly in front of the mouth with more moisture and higher air pressure than designed. Exhaling will puff a regular mask out slightly, which diffuses the exhaled breath across the surface. This straps a 3"x1" segment of fabric to the lips and nostrils and you lose that diffusion. I'd also imagine this would make reuse even more risky, since the rubber bands would wear the hydrophobic coating off and snare small strands of fabric. And then there's the sterilization/sanitization of the rubber bands. And the aging/failure rate of these bands. And then... you get my point.

Maybe they meant well, but this is the type of bad information that is actually dangerous. "Tell Martha in procurement that we don't need the fancy masks and put in an order for 10,000 rubber bands. Why? This MIT Apple Engineer said so."

I had a side job as a tech reviewer ~15 years ago and I can tell you why this is never going to happen. It's a classic case of "works in theory, but impossible in practice." What you're actually asking for is a database of every permutation of hardware, hardware revision, firmware/BIOS, benchmarking software, benchmarking software version, driver version, OS, OS patch, user selectable feature state, etc. is tracked and tested. It's a nearly infinite data set size, and you'll still miss things like ambient room temperature/humidity for CPU thottling, that one finicky USB device you spilled water on that sometimes disconnects randomly, and specific workflow quirks.

"Objective" benchmarks were an almost tractable problem 15-20 years ago, but with the way modern OSes run background tasks, access network resources, and perform self-maintenance, it's even more difficult to bridge the synthetic-to-real world divide.

So, you select a point of reference (e.g. - new GPU), you choose the most common system components and a selection of components that tell a story (usually "if you're building a new PC now, here are the options"), you assemble the current versions of all software/drivers, and run your tests x times. The good sites will have "sub-stories," like specific workflows or new/changed features, but once you get to around 4 of these, you start hitting too many permutations to clearly communicate the significance of your choices.

Even if you crowdsourced it, it's A) extremely difficult to verify the integrity of results and prevent manipulation from marketing departments or brigading, and B) an unrewarding, tedious process where the best practice is to leave the machine untouched for hours. Most of the crowdsourced benchmarking sites are set up to be little competitions and sanity checks when overclocking. For a pure review of shipping hardware/software, you run the benchmark and you're done. It isn't particularly fun, requires invasive cataloguing of system specs, and isn't very new-user/first time builder friendly.

Dynamic graphs would be nice (I love them), but I suspect many review sites have run the numbers and found they reduce overall web metrics. Many (I would argue most) people don't notice interactive page components, aren't interested enough to turn their quick article skim into a deep dive, or are reading in less optimal settings (e.g. - on phone on the toilet). Instead of getting 7 page views for 1 minute each with separate graphs, you're getting 1 page view for either 1 minute (probably 70%) or 10 minutes (probably 30%) with a dynamic graph.

I'm a total data junkie and I WISH there was a good solution to these problems, but there isn't a practical implementation that I've seen or dreamt up that doesn't have enough variance to render the point of having such fine-grained data moot.

Also check out Project Farm's channel. It's a little more automotive based, but the product comparison tests are extensive. If you ever wondered which type of drywall screw could resist the most sheer force or if you can use Zippo lighter fuel in an engine, this is a great channel.

My only criticism is sample size is usually small (3-5 samples), and no checking on variation between product lots. But, it's one guy doing all this for free, so I can't complain.

I dunno. Warframe feels "cool" from the start, while PoE requires $50 to not walk around with tin pot on your head and bad renfest garb at max level, even though the level 3 next to you is creating and destroying dazzling universes of light because they paid $250.

I have ~80 hours in PoE and started because it looked fun and the microtransaction system seemed reasonable. I stopped because it's pretty clear that what their system lacks in straight gambling mechanics, it more than makes up for in sly psychological tricks.

PoE's "micro"transaction system is much closer to a paid mod or DLC model. Yes, they're mostly cosmetic and QoL items for sale, but they certainly don't feel optional if you've ever played any other RPG or loot-heavy game. Like you mentioned, prices are stupid high and there's nothing "micro" when decent cosmetics run $40+ and a single full effects set is $150+.

The main story takes 20-40 hours, and pretty early on you'll almost HAVE to buy additional loot storage. It's a loot heavy game with no easy way to sell loot that doesn't require storing it (no gold or credits), so they're banking on people getting annoyed by their stash system (which really sucks) and purchasing the added storage. Rolling a new character uses that same storage, so you feel the pinch at each playthrough.

And even if you complete the story, store bought armor at level 2 looks infinitely better than anything you can actually earn through skill or play time. I mean, they already sell "supporter packs" with effects/pets/etc you can't buy a la carte or earn, so the whole facade of these cosmetics "paying to support the game" is already cracked.

They also play that game where you have to buy a custom currency (points) in $5 increments and the vast majority of the items are priced at odd increments, so you're almost always leaving money on the table.

They could offer multiple monetization schemes, like an unlock with each expansion to allow earning some variation of the nice skins and additional storage, while still keeping the game F2P (though I'd love to see them lock applying purchased cosmetics behind a level requirement). I'd be happy to pay $60 for the game and $30-40 per expansion, but I'm not going to just start dumping money into a game to get past the artificial stash constraints or rent worthless digital paint jobs.

There are too many sneaky little quirks that just happen to favor spending money for me to feel good about the game.

The missing code in question is from 2014? No one in the last 5 years suggested keeping a yearly snapshot, or making a backup prior to each major release? That's not an "Oopsy, I'm new to this field" error.

After skimming some of the Steam reviews, the cynic in me thinks they didn't want to bother supporting the game anymore after the one that followed (My Time at Portia) took off, so they made up a story that would get them more sympathy than an abrupt announcement that the MP portion would be discontinued. I mean, there's no direct evidence of this, but you'd think that in 5 years... hmm...

Looking at a Unity forum thread from 2015 that the U-Link dev responded in, it seems the writing was already on the wall, which should have triggered a reassessment of their game's use of that component. It's also mentioned that ULink support ended in a reply from 2016 and it released as open source. (https://forum.unity.com/threads/is-ulink-dead-update-devresp...)

That's as far as I care to look into it, but something feels off.

I call it "collapsing into the mean" - all recommendation engines (as the currently exist) will eventually corral you into the most vanilla, mass marketed set of recommendations and then fail miserably when any conflicting data is presented. We've effectively turned the web into cable TV circa 1990 - a finite set of junk food level entertainment sources that we voted for because they were "eh, good enough" and easy to find.

With as many YouTube videos that I've watched since 2005, you'd think they might recommend a video with less than 1000 views once in a while. I've found 1 new channel in the last 6 months and used the "Not Interested" option more times than I can count. And the rules are unclear. I don't want tech reviews from 5 years ago, but if I hit Not Interested, does that influence the channel, topic, age, keyword, etc recommendation frequency? I don't mind old DIY or woodworking videos, I'm subscribed to the channel, and watched the recommended video 5 years ago. (Of the current 12 YT Recommended videos, 2 are labelled Watched and only 2 are less than a year old.)

I think part of it stems from the lack of user organization features. Offer too many and you scare away users, while the people with vested interests dump money and time in to wash out any negative opinion (see Amazon reviews). Offer too few and you get poor recommendations during on-boarding/startup.

Which is why the author of the article didn't find the upcoming release for the book she searched. Searching for a book we can't make money on? Pffft GTFO.

It works almost too well. I've been using it for years and don't recall seeing a window it couldn't resize. I've seen it resize "unresizeable" windows in several programs that did not have scaling components, though. Consequently, you end up with the whole UI taking up a small part of the window.

Came here to mention WindowGrid and WinNumpad Position.

WindowGrid: Drag window with left+right mouse buttons brings up a customizable grid. Release RMB to set first corner, and LMB to set opposite corner.

WinNumpad Position: Win key+Numpad key to snap window into corresponding position (eg- 7 for top left corner). Hit number multiple times to cycle through sizes. https://pbrs.weebly.com/win-numpad-positioner.html

Both are basically abandoned, but they work well along side the built in Aero Snap features.

Other old alternatives that have various levels of functionality (and clearly inspired many of the tools posted in this thread):

GridMove (free): Used to be my go to, but hdpi scaling and the Modern UI window elements borked it. Based on AutoHotKey, but surprisingly responsive, extremely customizable (though not very user friendly). Would love to see this make a comeback. http://www.dcmembers.com/jgpaiva/ https://github.com/jgpaiva/GridMove

MaxTo (paid): User friendly and pretty, but less useful since Aero Snap. Rarely updated, but alive. Nice if all you want is a slightly more control over the built in Aero Snap. https://maxto.net/

AquaSnap (paid): Very similar to MaxTo, but more refined. Free personal version is limited to single display functions. Updated rarely, but alive. https://www.nurgo-software.com/products/aquasnap

Windock (free): Crashes for me but works for some. https://www.ivanyu.ca/#/windock/

Freesnap (free): Not maintained, but used to be great. Haven't tried it in a while, but thought it deserved mentioning. https://mike-ward.net/freesnap/

Eh, I don't agree at all. Maybe that's the case if you don't use adaptive brightness and your whites are max intensity. I prefer a dark theme I can use all day and let the brightness setting modulate the contrast. That way, direct sunlight kicks in the high contrast capability to make the theme usable during the day (which destroys these gray "dark" themes), while dropping the overall contrast ratio to something similar to these gray themes and emitting less light overall at night.

Pure black doesn't feel like I'm looking at a box light and makes transitions between text and media much more consistent. I end up futzing with the brightness for mixed media (like embedded videos or images) far more when using a gray dark theme, since the true brightness will be much more intense for "media white" than "text white", and the perceived brightness between them will be even higher than that.

Dark themes used to be about practicality and health. Current gray dark themes seem to be born from poor contrast ratio LCD limitations and justification for the aesthetics around the old Holo theme. As someone that has religiously converted their most common sites to dark themes with custom CSS (a few hundred as of now), gray on gray themes feel foggy and I only use light-but-still-dark gray backgrounds on sites that change frequently so I can see if there's a new text element that needs to be styled.

(But, I'm probably in the minority. I also drop font sizes to reasonable levels, delete rounded corners on elements, and remove the miles of whitespace from sites unwilling to accept that a two paragraph "story" isn't worthy of the engagement metrics they get by wasting the reader's time scrolling.)

I'd agree if they're was any oversight of the review process. Instead, they have the same score gaming problem as app stores. There are literally sellers that send competing products and their own products to random people so they (the sellers' themselves) can post fake reviews as verified purchases. Hell, even having to mark reviews as verified should be enough to make people doubt the legitimacy of all reviews on the store.

Unless the product is failing in catastrophic ways that inspire loads of pissed off customers, 3 stars is the new 0 stars and be suspicious of anything with a high number of reviews. High review count means the seller had to stuff the ballot box to make up for lower score real reviews or a fake review battle with a competitor.

My latest way of weeding out the more egregious fakes (in addition to ReviewMeta and FakeSpot) is to look for customer pics that are either just pictures of the box, item not being used, or, to a lesser extent, promo styled (nice lighting and odd angles). Also, a quick scan of early reviews to see if there were more low ratings or mentions of a completely different product. Some sellers will pay for or get legit good reviews on an item, then swap the item number to a new item in the same category. Same goes for having multiple very different items in one listing as purchase options (4 options for a keyboard - red color, blue color, travel mouse, fishing lure set).

100% agree.

Looking at just the block-telemetry.ps1 script in this repo tells me the creator is a novice. Changing the Group Policy does NOT block telemetry in Win10 Home or Pro. Furthermore, adding MS's own domains to the hosts file or firewall aren't great techniques either, since the OS doesn't have to honor them and those domains may serve other functions.

In disable-services.ps1:

- Home Groups was discontinued and these services aren't installed by default anymore. Even if they are present, the default config is manual and they'll use zero resources if you don't have a HomeGroup set up

- Futzing with remote access services is a minefield and could kill VPNs, network shares/printers, and domain access. It's one piece in a set of dependencies that might be okay to disable, but tends to pop up in unexpected situations. RaRA is disabled by default, so if it is enabled, there is probably a reason.

- Distributed Link Tracking Client - I mean, I like my shortcuts working, but okay.

- Windows Security Center Service - Disabling this basically makes it harder for you to actually access the security center and will break 3rd party AV/firewall/security tools.

- Xbox services - Disabling kills any games bought via the Windows Store and possibly controllers. Doesn't use resources, since it's set to manual.

Almost everything else the scripts say they're doing can be done within the Settings app. I phrased it that way because the toggles may be changing multiple settings to get the desired effect and changing a single registry value isn't enough. There are some sound tweaks mixed in (some that I use myself), but nothing new and nothing to make me think the author is particularly knowledgeable about Windows configurations. I prefer something like http://www.blackviper.com/

I wanted to add that I've been pretty heavily tweaking Windows since the Win9x days, and modern Windows is a different beast compared to even Win7. Lots of services and features have not-so-obvious dependencies.

For example, the Your Phone App can't be uninstalled via normal means, but there are plenty of articles that detail the steps to uninstall it with Powershell. The problem is that this app also hooks into the experience continuity features MS is pushing heavily, and forcing an uninstall will cause issues with syncing settings across devices and the timeline feature.

Also worth noting is that simply undoing some tweaks isn't always straightforward. Delete a registry entry? Hope you noted that it was owned by Installer, because adding it back as owned by admin ain't gonna cut it.

Lastly, 90%+ of the tweak guides/scripts I've seen would completely break programming IDEs, VPN access, and systems on a corporate network. They assume you want everything stripped and will add back individual pieces as situations present themselves, but it never works out that way. Instead, the whole process approaching those situations gets borked (e.g.- program checks for a service at launch, can't find it, and closes immediately or dumps the user into some config that's not appropriate once they untweak their OS).

Most of my tweaking now is simply changing settings, disabling a few scheduled tasks and services I'm familiar with, and making a couple dozen registry changes that are reversible and not tied to vital components.

That first article is just a random journalist (user) Windows rant. I'd give it a 90% chance the root cause was user error.

The second mentions:

1) Drivers being replaced, which is often cited as the overwhelming contributing factor of system instability. It was a huge factor specifically when the driver model changed in Vista and shotty 3rd party drivers is often credited as the single biggest reason Vista flopped. They're anal about drivers, but MS provides ways to prevent drivers from being updated automatically. They list printers being uninstalled as a separate thing, but probably same root cause. Printers and their software hold the top ranking on the "WTF is all this shit?" Scale.

Ads turned back on? Never happened on any of these systems. There might have been some feature that was added in an early release (both articles were written in 2017), but if there was, it was a toggle in the settings to disable it.

Default apps being reset actually DID happen to me once, now that I think about it. It's literally a 5 second fix, which is why I forgot about it.

That article also links to MakeUseOf articles that promote installing 3rd party apps to do things like redirect Cortana, set default programs, etc. Gee, use some rando internet person's hack to change default apps and at the next update the default apps are reset to default? Must be Microsoft's fault. Let's mess with Cortana, which can be used to recommend (advertise) apps and services by examining the user's history (telemetry). What? All the telemetry tweaks and ad settings have changed. OMG MS you so bad! Sorry, M$ you so bad! (Gotta have that late 90s childish Developers Developers Developers rage.)

The overwhelming takeaways are:

A) If you're going to spend hours of your life at the computer, spend 30 minutes looking over the settings for each major release, which happens once every year or so. Same goes for your phones/tablets.

B) Use the tools provided to tweak first and resort to 3rd party hacks only if they're reversible, you know exactly what they do, and you could perform the same changes manually.

IE still ships in Win 10, even though Edge is the default.

Yes, it sucks, but there are tons of archaic corporate programs and government sites that require it. Some oddly coded old programs will still launch IE if you click links in their About windows (probably hardcoded to launch IE instead of using the system's default url handler).

Odd. On the dozen Windows 10 PCs I've maintained from mixed vendors and self builds, some fresh installs, some upgrades from 7 or 8, I've never had any of these options reenabled. No fancy registry hacks or 3rd party blockers on 3/4 of the machines. A few have more aggressive telemetry disabling changes, and let me check this one... yeah, no changes. And this system has been abused, tweaked and untweaked 15 ways to bacon over the last 2 years on the same install.

My guess is that people screw up their machines in a way that triggers some type of registry repair, or they encounter a problem and do a rollback or refresh in safe boot themselves, which will reset things like active services and scheduled tasks. Those fire up, see an unrecognized configuration, invalid entries, or missing entries, and reset those settings to a default.

Seriously, I see these comments on things happening by magic in Win 10 - full apps installing themselves, setting gremlins flipping switches, advertisements eating people's children, etc.- and I've literally experienced NONE of them. Actually I had Error Reporting reenabled once after using the troubleshooting settings to clean the DNS cache instead of ipconfig. I've had plenty of issues to troubleshoot, mostly from my own tweaking, some out of my control, but the level of Win10 FUD is bizarre.

tl;dr - More MS FUD. Don't use every hack posted by internet randos and check any deep customizations after using any automated repair tools.

New title: Security researchers did a thing. Article body: See title.

"Oh boy! A whole bunch of people are going to be really boned by a malicious app, but we're not going to let you know any details. Hey, do you bank on your phone? Ooooo you might be realllllly screwed. The competing platform is better and/or worse for thee pedantic reasons, says some random person you've never heard of and will probably never hear from again."

If you're not reporting the name of the company or apps involved, don't waste everyone's fucking time. It's even more egregious than the news doing the whole, "Something in your pantry could kill everyone you ever loved. Details after these commercials."

Sure it puts pressure on device makers to be on the ball with security updates, but at the end of the day there's nothing anyone can do. They don't tell you the symptoms of being infected, how to prevent becoming infected (don't click ads to prevent activating the virus, but do I just never install another app from here on out), or even what to do if you are infected (will a factory wipe work, or does it install to recovery, too?).

I submit the following similarly useful mini-article:

Something in 500,000 grocery stores is causing customers to experience explosive diarrhea. Local law enforcement is investigating, so we're not going to tell you what the item was. Oops! We mean itemS. I mean, there were a LOT of them. Dr. Flabenpoop of the Central Alabama Subcommittee for Safety of Food and Other Eatin' Things reminds consumers that eating is essential to remain among the living and excessive diarrhea can lead to dehydration and death. He recommends NOT experiencing excessive diarrhea while maintaining a balanced diet. He also notes that the two-fingered spotted wallaby cannot get diarrhea, which begs the question: Is it better to be a wallaby or a human? Or a stick? I mean, sticks don't poop at all, so they must feel lucky. Or sticky. But not sticky from poop.

That is the linked article. Both reports provide the same level of actionable information, the same who cares commentary, and same less than half-heartedly rehash of some inane comparison to pad the word count.

tl;dr - Zero useful information released by the research team, zero useful information in the article.