• How dare That Devil Trump and his Ventriloquist Puppet Vance suggest that the government take action against Google?  (The Verge)
  
  They are clearly fascist racists and their racist fascism is illegal under the First Amendment and they and everyone they know and all their families should be imprisoned without trial immediately and forever.  Also, Peter Thiel!!!1!
  
  
  
• A federal judge has ruled that Google is maintaining an illegal monopoly in the search and advertising markets.  (The Verge)
  
  Amit Mehta of the District Court for DC, an Obama appointee, ruled in favour of the Biden Administration's antitrust lawsuit against Google, saying that the company had violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.
  
  This is clearly the work of That Devil Trump.  His perfidy knows no bounds.

• Andy Warhol's lost Amiga art has been found.  (The Silicon Underground)
  
  A former Commodore engineer - the same person who trained Warhol on how to use a computer - came forward and said he had had copies of the art on display in his home for the past forty years.  He just didn't realise that nobody else had a copy.
  
  
  
• The most expensive bug ever.  (Quora)
  
  Now sadly the second most expensive bug ever.
  
  
  
• Silicon Valley parents are sending kindergarten age children to AI-focused summer camps.  (San Francisco Standard)
  
  This is actually a lot less worse than the headline would suggest.  The younger kids are playing with Lego robots, and the older ones working with image recognition systems.  
  
  Nothing to do with generative AI.
  
  
  
• Video game actors are on strike over AI.  (The Verge)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• Is the Asus ROG Ally X any good?  Yes.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  This is a hand-held gaming PC similar to the Steam Deck - or the Nintendo Switch or PlayStation Vita - only more powerful and more expensive than it's competitors.
  
  If that's what you want, it fills the role pretty well.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, August 06 2024 11:51 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 07 2024 12:11 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, August 07 2024 12:22 AM (PiXy!)

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• Venture capitalists have flushed $1.6 billion down the drain trying to make lab-grown meat a reality.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The most optimistic proponents are now hoping to someday capture 0.03% of the global meat market.
  
  Farm grown meat is cheaper, tastes better, is readily available, and probably won't devour the world in a Gray Goo apocalypse.
  
  Though the chickens might try.  You can't trust 'em.
  
  

• How to run DOS on modern hardware.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The way the economy is going this might be useful information.
  
  
  
• Adding RAM to an RP2040.  (Dmitry)
  
  This is the chip used in the Raspberry Pi Pico.  It doesn't have a memory bus in the usual sense, but supports external serial (SPI) ROM and has an onboard cache to keep things fast.
  
  You can also wire up SPI RAM - but it will be read-only because the RP2040 is expecting ROM, not RAM.
  
  You can get around that, but it's, uh, interesting.
  
  
  
• The Breville Oracle Jet is a $2000 computer that makes coffee.  (The Verge)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• KOSA - the Kids Online Safety Act - is dead.  For now.  (TechDirt)
  
  I haven't linked TechDirt much lately since Mike Masnick went insane, but he seems to be having a lucid day.  He praises the House GOP for killing the train wreck bipartisan Senate bill, and approvingly quotes Rand Paul's scathing letter.
  
  
  
• Need for Speed: SSD Edition.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is Kioxia's (formerly Toshiba) latest datacenter drive aimed at low latency rather than transfer rates.  It's about twice as fast as typical SSDs - access times of around 25 microseconds vs. a more typical 50 microseconds.
  
  It's intended to replace phase-change drives in heavy workloads, now that Intel and Micron have abandoned phase-change memory entirely.
  
  Intel's Optane drives could get access times down to 10 microseconds, but they were power hungry and expensive, and ultimately not commercially successful.

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, August 05 2024 09:43 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 05 2024 11:21 PM (MItL9)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 05 2024 11:30 PM (MItL9)

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Monday, August 05 2024 11:53 PM (/VxY7)

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• Should we try cooling the planet with sulphur dioxide? (Japan Times)
  
  I mean, we know that it works. What's the catch?

  "The whole notion of spraying sulfur compounds to reflect sunlight is arrogant and simplistic," Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki said. "There are unintended consequences of powerful technologies like these, and we have no idea what they will be."

  Yeah, we have no idea what would happen if large amounts of sulphur dioxide were suddenly released into the upper atmosphere because such a thing has never happened before.

  Raymond Pierrehumbert, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Oxford, said he considered solar geoengineering a grave threat to human civilization.
  
  "It's not only a bad idea in terms of something that would never be safe to deploy," he said. "But even doing research on it is not just a waste of money, but actively dangerous."

  I'll just pause here to say that this is a wonderful case of nominative determinism, because this is precisely what you would expect to hear from someone named Raymond Pierrehumbert.

  Opponents of solar geoengineering cite several main risks. They say it could create a "moral hazard," mistakenly giving people the impression that it is not necessary to rapidly reduce fossil fuel emissions.

  In other words, I don't want to solve the problem. I want global communism.

• The Starbook from Starlabs is a 14" burger with the lot. Starlabs)
  
  A 4k screen, the Four Essential Keys, a 16 core Intel 165H processor, up to 96GB of DDR5 RAM, an M.2 2280 SSD (there's also what looks like an M.2 2230 slot but that may be for wifi), two Thunderbolt 4 ports, three USB ports, HDMI, a micro SD slot, and a headphone jack.
  
  It comes with a choice of six flavours of Linux preinstalled, or you can load Windows onto it yourself.
  
  
  
• The Ars commentariat is absolutely foaming at the mouth at the thought that Congress might have to write laws that actually say what they mean. (Ars Technica)
  
  This is probably the craziest I have ever seen them.
  
  
  
• Intel knew about its CPU oxidation issue in late 2022. (WCCFTech)
  
  That's 18 months before the company told customers about it.
  
  Some people have asked if Intel CPUs can be considered reliable once the new microcode update is out. Unfortunately, we don't know, because information from Intel itself has not been reliable.
  
  
  
• Though Puget Systems says it has seen more failures with AMD chips than with Intel. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Sort of. Worth taking a look at the article if you plan to buy.
  
  Failures in Ryzen 5000 CPUs seem high, but those are approaching four years old now, much older than Intel's 13th and 14th gen chips. Failures in Ryzen 7000 are also high, but those failures are almost all before systems are sold to the customer.
  
  The best reliability on this chart comes from Intel's 12th gen chips, which you basically can't get anymore.
  
  
  
• Zen 5 benchmarks show that hyperthreading provides 18% better performance for 2% more power consumption. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel is removing hyperthreading from its own chips to make the performance cores smaller. Instead the plan is to add more efficiency cores - which never had hyperthreading - in the space saved to get back that performance.
  
  That will certainly work, but it's also part of why Intel's consumer chips don't have AVX-512 support right now. The efficiency cores don't have it, only the performance cores, and that made software support just too complicated. Moving a task from one core to another in the same chip could cause it to fail.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, August 04 2024 11:00 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, August 05 2024 02:32 AM (rcPLc)

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• Intel shares are down 30% overnight.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oops.  How did that happen?
  
  And down 50% for the year so far.
  
  This helps explain why AMD delayed its biggest CPU release in years over a much smaller problem.  They basically did exactly the opposite of Intel: Catch the problem before selling the CPUs and recall everything.
  
  AMD hasn't been entirely forthcoming on the nature of their problem either, but they weren't selling chips with known faults.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The DOJ is suing TikTok over violations of privacy of children on a massive scale.  (Ars Technica)
  
  They allege that not only does TikTok knowingly allow children to register as adults, but that even the children's version of the app violates COPPA.
  
  Which allows for a $50,000 fine per infringement, which given the scale of this could run to $100 billion or more.
  
  COPPA is impossible for online platforms to enforce perfectly, but you are expected to at least not issue internal instructions instructing your employees not to enforce it.  Which TikTok apparently did.
  
  
  
• Looks like Net Neutrality is dead.  Again.  (KSL)
  
  The Sixth Circuit, which had already issued an administrative stay, has now blocked the rules pending a full hearing to begin late October.
  
  
  
• Apple is apologising for one of its ads again.  (The Verge)
  
  This time the company seems to have annoyed Thailand specifically, where the "Crush" add was more generally offensive.
  
  What's the ad?  I don't know, they seem to have scrubbed it from the internet.
  
  
  
• Meanewhile Google is in full retreat over its own "Dear Sydney" ad, showing how you can use AI to write a heartfelt personal letter.  (Tom's Guide)
  
  These people literally never talk to anyone outside their own bubbles.
  
  
  
• Bitcoin is the new orange.  (The Verge)
  
  Yes, the people at The Verge are having another totally normal day, meandering between foaming outrage and passive voice like a grammarian on peyote:

  A panel that was ostensibly about the risks and rewards of public mining companies gave way to discussions of President Joe Biden's "whole-of-government attack" on cryptocurrency, as Jason Les, the CEO of the Bitcoin mining company Riot Platforms, put it. "President Trump, on the other hand, has been very positive."

  This is no secret.  Biden's SEC has been virulently anti-crypto, though they somehow managed to miss FTX's $10 billion fraud entirely.

  A bullet had narrowly missed Trump’s skull at a rally two weeks prior, so security was extra tight.

  Yes, a wild bullet attacked Trump out of nowhere.
  
  
  
• Sam Altman has been accused of being shady about OpenAI's safety efforts.  (Ars Technica)
  
  I am shocked, shocked, to find that shading is going on in here.
  
  
  
• Metropolis 1998 is an isometric city builder that lets you customise every building.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Looks cool if you like 90s pixel art aesthetics.
  
  It's very much not a 90s game though; it's designed to individually simulate over 100,000 people and vehicles.
  
  Free demo is available on Steam.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, August 04 2024 04:54 PM (bg2DR)

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• Intel announced its earnings report for Q2 of 2024, and it's less than wonderful.  (AnandTech)
  
  While the company did post a profit and issue a dividend, it also announced plans to slash costs before things going into freefall.
  
  This includes suspending future dividends, cutting capital and operating expenses, and...  Firing between 15,000 and 17,000 workers.
  
  
  
• The company also bit the bullet and announced two years of additional warranty on its failing 13th and 14th generation desktop processors.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which would be a bigger deal if Intel hadn't been rejecting warranty returns for the past year, all the while knowing that the problems were of its own creation.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Intel is also running into production issues with its next-generation Meteor Lake desktop CPUs.  (AnandTech)
  
  These are needed to replace the fault-ridden 13th and 14th generation chips.  Meteor Lake actually has multiple chips on the package, similar to some AMD CPUs, and the problem lies with the components manufactured by Intel itself.
  
  The response has been to crank up production - since Intel owns the factories, it can do that - and discard the failed parts.  That will allow Meteor Lake to launch on time but it will not come cheap.
  
  
  
• Micron meanwhile has announced its new 276 layer 1Tbit TLC flash chip.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is about 30% smaller than its previous 1Tbit TLC chips, or about the same size as existing 1Tbit QLC.
  
  
  
• Testing out a 5Gb network card.  (Serve the Home)
  
  These are great because they use much less power than a 10Gb card, are twice as fast as common 2.5Gb Ethernet, and run just fine over twenty year old Cat-5 cables.
  
  They are less great because 5Gb Ethernet switches basically do not exist.
  
  
  
• With the Boeing Starliner capsule now entering the eighth week of its planned eight day stay at the ISS, NASA is facing up with its most difficult choice yet: Admitting failure and asking Tony Stark Elon Musk to rescue its astronauts.  (Ars Technica)
  
  There is a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule docked at the ISS right now, but that's the lifeboat in case of catastrophic failure, so the plan would be to send up a second capsule to ferry Butch and Suni home.

Posted by: normal at Friday, August 02 2024 11:30 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 03 2024 12:48 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, August 03 2024 02:52 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, August 03 2024 03:19 AM (LADmw)

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• Dating sites Bumble and Hinge allowed stalkers to pinpoint users' locations to within two meters.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They were among a long list of sites with similar problems, allowing malicious users to very precisely triangulate the locations of others.
  
  This has since been fixed, with most sites diluting the precision down to 1km, though Grindr still lets you track people to within 100m.

• Delta Airlines says the CrowdStrike debacle cost the company $500 million.  (CNBC)
  
  If that's accurate, and a majority of affected customers sue CrowdStrike for damages, that could easily send the company into bankruptcy.
  
  
  
• Ampere has announced a new generation of 192 core Arm server chips priced at $5555, as well as a 512 core AI processor.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  192 cores is a lot if the cores are good individually.  If this is the CPU in question, though, the cores do not seem particularly good.
  
  512 AI cores on the other hand could mean anything at all.
  
  
  
• Best Buy seems to have leaked the official prices of the new Ryzen 9000 desktop CPUs which were supposed to be on sale today.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They cost around 10% more than the existing Ryzen 7000 models.
  
  But that's comparing the MSRP against the heavily discounted retail price of the previous generation.  Compared to the original MSRP the new models are up to $100 cheaper.
  
  Availability is now expected on the 15th.  It does seem that the problem goes beyond mere labelling, and involves some chips not delivering on the rated clock speeds.  (YouTube)
  
  AMD has recalled and is re-testing all chips produced so far and will replace any that don't meet the spec before they are sold.
  
  If you watch that video it mentions that Intel also doesn't expect to be selling working CPUs before mid-August.  At least AMD has Ryzen 5000, 7000, and 8000 that work just fine.
  
  
  
• The Venezuelan election results are as real as death statistics out of Gaza.[/urk]  (Columbia)
  
  The official numbers are clearly calculated from the percentages, rather than vice-versa.
  
  
  
• Amazon is quietly killing a whole list of "devops" services.  (DevClass)
  
  "DevOps" is the deliberate intersection of software development and operations, as opposed to the usual process of this simply being the unavoidable 11th Ring of Hell.
  
  The list includes S3 Select (not S3 itself), CloudSearch, Cloud9, SimpleDB, Forecast, Data Pipeline, and CodeCommit.  None of these have been shut down - yet - but they are not accepting new customers.
  
  
  
• Why we may never know the truth about ultra-processed foods.  (BBC)
  
  Because it's all pseudo-scientific bullshit.
  
  
  
• Reddit says Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity need to pay to play.  (The Verge)
  
  Google and OpenAI are already paying Reddit for search and AI training data.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, August 02 2024 01:32 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, August 02 2024 01:37 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: David Eastman at Friday, August 02 2024 01:58 AM (rmrII)

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• Kids have been banned from the internet.  (The Verge)
  
  That's not what they are saying, but that's the likely result of the Senate passing the Kids Online Safety Act, which requires online services to actively monitor children using their services and protect them from all possible sources of harm, real or imaginary.
  
  Which is more than parents do.
  
  Far cheaper and easier to just ban children outright.
  
  Of course this nonsense passed by a 91-3 majority.  Senator Rand Paul called it a "Pandora’s box of unintended consequences."  
  
  I call it dogshit.
  
  There is a matching bill in the House but the article doesn't indicate the current status except that it hasn't been passed yet.

• Wait until it goes on sale.  (The Verge)
  
  The Amazon Echo Spot has no camera.  And no ads because the limited screen can't handle them.
  
  But it's also kind of dumb.  Smart for a clock/radio, which is what it really is, but still dumb.
  
  
  
• Apple is skipping Nvidia and going to Google for its AI platform.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not Nvidia's fault that everyone is throwing billions of dollars at them right now, but it's still annoying.
  
  
  
• Other companies are also seeking alternatives to Nvidia: AMD's datacenter revenue increased by 115% year-on-year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Partly due to increased server market share but also partly thanks to the company's own datacenter GPUs for AI and other numerical loads.
  
  
  
• Meta (Facebook) is paying Texas $1.4 billion in fines over using customers biometric data without permission.  (Texas Tribune)
  
  Facebook was running facial recognition on every photo uploaded to the platform, without ever asking for permission.  This has been illegal under Texas law since 2009.
  
  
  
• Perplexity AI, an answerbot recently caught stealing everyone's content, has offered to share its stolen revenue with the people it stole it from.  (CNBC)
  
  Very generous.
  
  Also, many people are accepting the offer, because (a) it's cheaper than a decade-long lawsuit and (b) it gets Perplexity on your side to sue the next company that tries this.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 01 2024 02:12 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 01 2024 02:14 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, August 01 2024 03:09 PM (PiXy!)

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• AI has been determined by the State of California to cause rats in laboratory cancer: SB-1047 - legislation introduced by Scott Wiener, so you know it's bad - aims to make it illegal for AI to do things which are illegal in the first place and which it cannot possibly do in the second place.  (Ars Technica)

  The bill lays out a legalistic definition of those safety incidents that in turn focuses on defining a set of "critical harms" that an AI system might enable. That includes harms leading to "mass casualties or at least $500 million of damage," such as "the creation or use of chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapon" (hello, Skynet?) or "precise instructions for conducting a cyberattack... on critical infrastructure." The bill also alludes to "other grave harms to public safety and security that are of comparable severity" to those laid out explicitly.

  It's illegal to kill people, even in small numbers.
  
  It's illegal to destroy property that is not your own, even when it's less than half a billion dollars in damage.
  
  It's illegal to create chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons.
  
  It is trivially easy to find information on how to do any of these things, and that information cannot be erased, because people have done all of these things.

• The Asus ProArt PX13 is another Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 laptop.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Now there are two of them.
  
  Again it lacks the Four Essential Keys, which is a shame because the specs are great.  Though the cheapest model is $1999 (with 24GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and RTX 4050 graphics) and it goes up to $2999, so I wouldn't have been in the market anyway.
  
  Also, it seems that these chips don't support regular DDR5 DIMMs.  There's no particular reason that they couldn't use CAMM2 modules instead of soldered LPDDR5X, but there are very few laptops supporting CAMM2 modules at the moment.
  
  
  
• You're blocking it wrong.  (404 Media)
  
  Not a huge story but a handy guide to how to block the scourge of new AI web crawlers from your site.
  
  
  
• The Dasung Paperlike Color is a 12 inch 2560x1600 USB-C display weighing just under a pound.  (Liliputing)
  
  When you see a display specifically named as "color" you can be pretty sure it's e-ink rather than LCD or OLED, and it is.
  
  One problem: It costs $849, so you'd need to really want an e-ink display for this to be worthwhile.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk reposted a parody video of Kamala Harris and the usual suspects are rioting.  Virtually.  (The Verge)
  
  It would be a lot funnier if these idiots didn't vote.
  
  
  
• microjs is a collection of JavaScript libraries, many of the under 1k in size.  (microjs)
  
  Since it's literally impossible for any single piece of data to measure one microbyte, I'll accept it for what it is.  
  
  There are a lot of libraries on there and many of them seem useful.
  
  
  
• FastHTML lets you write web applications in Python.  (fastht.ml)
  
  I'm not sure I like this.  If you don't know HTML and CSS and JavaScript and don't need to fine-tune your website, I can see how it would be useful.
  
  And you can customise the HTML, CSS, and Javascript; you're not stuck with what it generaties.
  
  But the home page for it is kind of ugly, which is not a great start.
  
  
  
• If you are running VMWare ESXi and you create a group called "ESX Admins" it gives that group admin access.  (Ars Technica)
  
  And if you are running Microsoft Active Directory, you don't even need to do this on the ESXi server.  If you can create a group on Active Directory it will apply just fine to ESXi.
  
  I don't run any of that stuff, but a whole lot of people do.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 31 2024 12:33 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 31 2024 12:35 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 31 2024 12:36 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 31 2024 12:38 AM (MItL9)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, July 31 2024 03:56 PM (bg2DR)

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Posted by: madrocketsci at Monday, July 29 2024 09:50 PM (hRoyQ)

Posted by: normal at Monday, July 29 2024 11:18 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, July 30 2024 03:13 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: madrocketsci at Tuesday, July 30 2024 08:27 AM (hRoyQ)

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• Now you can go hiking without all that exhausting having to walk by yourself nonsense.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  There are many uses for powered exoskeletons, from restoring mobility to people with injuries, to giving rescue workers superhuman strength on demand.
  
  But renting them to lazy people at tourist sites is certainly something.
  
  
  
• On the other hand, balloons in space is not an altogether bad idea.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  If your hazards are moving at sixteen thousand miles per hour it doesn't matter much if they hit sheet metal or a clever polymer fabric.  They'll go straight through without even noticing.  The key is what the material does afterwards.  If it retains its integrity apart from the actual puncture, it's worth trying.

• Intel's Arc A750 graphics card lines up against AMD's RX 6600.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The cards are roughly equal at 1080p, with the Intel card pulling strongly ahead at 4k resolutions.
  
  Though at 4k even the Intel card can't manage 30fps, so you might want to look at spending more than $200 on a video card if that is your goal.
  
  
  
• Wizards of the Coast (owner of Dungeons and Dragons) wants to ship one or two computer games per year starting in 2025 or maybe 2026.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is going to be a disaster.

  It's not the first time we heard [CEO Chris] Cocks talking about a push toward the videogame industry, particularly for the Dungeons and Dragons franchise. However, last year Wizards of the Coast canceled five games, including two D&D projects in development at Hidden Path Entertainment and OtherSide Entertainment.

  So that's negative five so far.

  Wizards of the Coast is also in talks with various partners to continue the Baldur's Gate franchise following Larian's decision to find its own path elsewhere.

  The popular Baldur's Gate series of games recently returned after twenty years, with Baldur's Gate III seeing huge success - 2.5 million copies sold in early access, and over 10 million to date..
  
  The developer, Larian, hated working with Wizards of the Coast so much that they refused to consider a sequel or even an expansion, even though they were guaranteed hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.
  
  
  
• LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman has brain damage.  (The Register)
  
  He recently contributed $7 million to a Kamala Harris PAC, stating that he regarded Harris as better for business than Trump, with the demand attached that Harris fire FTC chairman Lina Khan.
  
  Hoffman is apparently unable to grasp that (a) Harris is a Marxist, and (b) the easiest way to get Lina Khan out of Washington is to elect Trump.
  
  
  
• Decrappifying Windows with Windows.  (Notebook Check)
  
  This is something you need to do at install time, and if you install a lot of Windows systems you'd already know this, but by dropping an Unattended Windows Setup file onto your install drive you can get rid of almost all of the crap Microsoft wants to shovel at you.