Sure, until they start spying on you in real time through your school issue comptuer’s webcam. (Or listening via its microphones, or snooping your wi-fi traffic with preinstalled malware, or…)

Anyway, the asshats even try to snoop on students’ social media activity outside of school and not done on school hardware.

From TFA:

The research team identified 14 companies actively marketing online surveillance services frequently beyond school-issued devices and outside of school premises, raising concerns about privacy, equity and oversight.

Emphasis mine.

Separately, Microsoft warns that Windows 11 version 23H2 will reach end of support on November 11, 2025.

I.e., the one that still supports WMR virtual reality headsets and hasn’t had the functionality for those artificially pulled.

It seems it’s a fairly cookie cutter program that wastes an awful lot of bytes and CPU cycles on just emptying your recycle bin, removing “internet clutter,” (i.e. clearing your cache and temp files), removing broken shortcuts, twiddling your run-on-startup apps, etc., which are all actions that are not only fabulously unlikely to make your Windows machine perform any faster but are also all things you could do yourself in about thirty seconds.

I lifted that screenshot from this video, chosen purely on the merits of this guy’s hat.

You can also find plenty of places to download the installer found on the Win Cleaner USB drive (it’s just a cheap USB storage stick in a funny shaped housing) and try it yourself… possibly preferably inside a virtual machine.

Edit: Oh, and also. Banning a user from a community does not appear affect that community’s visibility to that user, i.e. they can still see it. They just can’t participate in it. I am banned from a smattering of communities either due to my own chutzpah (one of them is clearly a troll sub, you probably know the one) and a few at dubvee.org (presumably because someone there thought I pissed in their cornflakes at some point, though search me as to why or how since I never went there) and I can still see all of the content in those places.

It does prevent them from downvoting anything in it, though. At least it should if the world still makes any sense.

Or they figured out that downvoting stuff does not produce the desired result of telling the “algorithm,” which we don’t have around here, that they’re not interested in that type of content in their feed.

I get a smattering of 2 or 3 downvotes on all of my posts from completely random users who I therefore have to assume have no agenda other than not being interested in silly knives. That’s fine and all, but it’s also not how it works on Lemmy.

You can disable Edge if you don’t want people launching it… “accidentally.” There are a myriad of ways. Most recently I’ve used Edge Blocker, which does what it says on the label. Note that this will cause the opening of any file types associated with Edge by default to silently fail if you don’t reassign them to some other program.

The install Firefox and uBlock origin. Unless your parents deliberately go out of their way to download and install Chrome (and depending how heavy-handed you want to get you could even prevent this by busting them down to a limited user account) they won’t have any choice but to use the correct browser installed on their system. That is to say, the only one.

It’s virtually impossible to exist online these days without generative AI bullshit being shoved in your face with no means to opt-out. It’s clearly not consumers driving this so-called “demand,” because savvy people don’t want this to begin with and never did. Rather, it’s the desperate speculative hype around this dumb nonproduct that’s causing big businesses to set electricity and money on fire with AI slop to no tangible benefit.

A saner response from the UK government would be to tell these companies to either power their AI datacenters with renewables or get out, rather than trying to guilt trip individuals over, of all the goddamned stupid things, undeleted emails.

OP hit the nail on the head. This is once again shifting the blame (and guilt) onto individuals who even collectively have fuck-all impact on the problem in question.

The worst of it is, some people will believe this shit.

+1 for a Chrono Trigger ranking. For as popular as it still is in retrospect, I think people still don’t quite give it the full recognition it’s due for smashing pretty much every dreary console RPG convention that the genre had been persistently saddled with up until that point, while still remaining a console RPG. Believe it or not the developers had plans to make it even more ambitious at the beginning but they weren’t able to pull it off in the time allotted.

There are a lot of subsequent RPG titles (like even Final Fantasy goddamned Seven, not to mention Pokémon) that should have learned a bevvy of lessons from Chrono Trigger, but still didn’t. It was well ahead of its time.

Who’s gatekeeping? You’re putting an awful lot of words in my mouth. I’m pointing out that a lot of people are effectively gatekeeping themselves.

I think you rather missed the point.

Everyone has fantastic resources available to them through the internet that didn’t exist in the early 1980s, or whenever. And yet, people with four kids and cars and mortgages and taxes managed back then. It’s even easier now. The only obstacle to anyone is apathy.

Sony got big enough to see themselves become the villain. They’re no longer the plucky company pushing technology forward by releasing off the wall or risky products that become groundbreaking. Rather, now they’re the highly conservative greedy assholes who are always last to market with anything, are obsessed with trying to make their version of everything proprietary (cables, memory cards, batteries, software…), try to install rootkits on your computer if you want to listen to music, and sue people for watching a Youtube video.

Sony deserves to crash and burn, so any talented employees they may have left can be released from the shackles of lifetime employment at a massive Japanese conglomerate and freed to work somewhere where they might be able to make some positive contribution to society again.

Fuck Sony. Never give Sony a single red cent.

The LSTC IoT editions also have it built right in, and come without the ancillary Windows bloatware (except Edge, which you’re stuck with) for niche applications that require running Windows-only software that can’t be avoided. Even on lower end hardware.

And the thing of it is, back in the good old days you actually had to learn how to use your computer. This took effort, comprehension, and skill. And probably reading some manuals. Like, actual words printed on dead trees, bound up into a book. This was normal and expected, and you would build up your skillset to operate the machine you probably paid thousands of dollars for. No one had a problem with this then.

Learning to use Linux is no different, but nowadays everyone just wants everything handed to them and they’ll steadfastly refuse to put forth any effort while simultaneously failing to realize that figuring out whatever the next workaround is to get around something that Microsoft broke for them in the last update is basically exactly the same thing. Think back when you were learning to use DOS or trying to install your VESA local bus video card drivers in Windows 3.1, or desperately fiddling around with EMM386 in your config.sys file to try to get enough conventional memory freed up at startup to run Doom. If you had the amount of online resources we have now to just get the answer and not have to call tech support (and probably pay for it), or paw through a manual, or just be fucked and have to figure out by trial and error on your own, we would have all been stoked.

Entitlement breeds complacency, and complacency leads to the Dark Side. If you go out of your way to teach yourself to be helpless, you will be helpless.

Back then you owned your computer. By and large outside of some specific special purpose fuckery with licensing dongles you physically possessed the software you ran. Like, on a disk. You controlled what you ran, not some outside source. With all of the commercial operating systems (this includes OSX and iOS, Android, and Windows all to various degrees) this is now actively being taken away from you. The only way to claim it back is to run one of the open source platforms.

No it doesn’t.

https://massgrave.dev/

Mine is also Holy Grail themed. My ringtone (which is pretty much never heard because like everyone else here my phone is always on silent) is the fanfare from “Homeward Bound.” My text message alert is one of the Knights Who So Ever So Recently Said “Ni” saying, well… You can guess.

This was an actual response that Google’s stupid Gemini LLM really gave somebody. The notion was lifted from a satirical Onion article which the LLM regurgitated as if it was an established fact.

The 7th gen iPod Nano which you’re referring to (not the 6th gen the commenter above posted, which had a rated 24 hour battery life) had a 200 mAh battery.

A lowly Garmin Forerunner 230 like the one strapped to my wrist right now has a 150 mAh battery and achieves five weeks of battery life with notifications enabled (which I did not “forget”) and the BLE radio twittering away all day, GPS time and position updates, activity tracking, and the screen displaying content all the time. Not 30 hours. 840 hours.

Just acting as a plain watch with the connectivity turned off Garmin claim it’ll last 12 weeks (2016 hours).

I should not have to point out to anyone that it is physically impossible for an iPod to achieve a significantly shorter runtime on a larger battery without consuming more power in the process.

Given that an iPod nano only lasted a few hours on a charge and most smartwatches can last multiple days, I’m pretty sure that’s not so. Even if they had apples-to-apples identical functionality I think a modern device would consume less power simply due to current chips being more power efficient via using smaller dies and lithography processes.

Plus, an iPod has to crank its weedy little processor full time as long as it’s playing music. Your smartwatch pretty much only has to do anything when an external stimulus wakes it up, be that pressing a button or tapping its screen or receiving an alert or whatever. I’ve developed software for some of the Garmin models myself and I can tell you that the power consumption and processing time limitations imposed by the system are extremely stringent. The majority of the time even in a second-by-second basis your watch is completely idle, specifically to consume as little power as possible and conserve the battery.

My mother did this in the back of her Mazda Protege with about a cubic yard of potting soil. No tarp or tote or anything in it, she just managed to talk whoever it was at the garden center into dumping it straight into the trunk with a bucket loader. I have absolutely no idea what the fuck she was thinking, but this resulted in her moaning about the trunk being “dirty” as if it were someone else’s fault (presumably mine) right up until the very day she got rid of that car.

It does not work with either my Fenix 6 Pro Solar (specifically that one, other Fenix 6 variants are listed as working) nor the Forerunner 230 that somebody just gave me. Both of which are a drag, and I can’t be arsed with learning how to add my own support right now at this minute.

Honestly, I’ve just been using my Fenix unconnected and it’s really surprising all it can still do. The only function I don’t have that I cared about was receiving notifications. The sensors and topo map and all still work fine and you can even still track rides and hikes, but you have to offload thr GPX tracks via USB and figure out what to so with them yourself.

It’s almost like the dumbass limitations of the app are all just artificial, to the surprise of absolutely no one.