I thought the Notepad > Wordpad > MS Word progression was pretty much perfect. A zero complication plaintext editor, something with a bit more formatting, and outright typesetting for print.

Granted I use a combination of Notepad++, Obsidian, and haphazard LaTeX venvs now so who am I to talk. I don’t represent most Windows users and especially not the Linux daily drivers. I’d like to think there’s still a lot of people in my situation.

It says a lot that none of the reasons I like Notepad++ were brought into Notepad when they changed it. A copilot button in the place where I write immediate notes and edit batch files? What could possibly be the use case? I just need it to be able to open massive text files and have a decent search UI and that’s it

I love/hate that this is a common experience. Someone did this to me too, although this was sort of a work friend taking the piss.

I have straight up backhandedly implied people senior to me who get paid 5x more than I do are throwing any possible expertise they might have out of the window. To their face. My stance on these slop extruders is well known among my colleagues.

I’ve even told people who used them in front of me, in a gentle but unflinching way, that their willingness to use them uncritically is a red flag for me and that comparing my genuine work to general machine output is something I can’t simply decide not to take as an insult. Including people who are supposed to review my work. As a professional I have to do something that exceeds the first page of Google in specificity. I do the long yards. Why is that suddenly a problem? If our work was this simple why are we getting paid to do it?

Some of these people trust me enough that they’re getting queasy about the whole AI thing after initially giving in. Yeah it’s decent at summarizing mass emails from corporate. Summarizing mass emails from corporate is not our fucking job. At least two people were paid subscribers to OpenAI’s product and no longer pay for chatbots. Proselytizing against the death of critical thinking is not a lost cause.

I have to get the fuck out of corporate.

There was an idea tooted over on Mastodon

It’ll just be called Microsoft Copilot.

None of you are in an abusive relationship with the cruel mistress that is Windows and her accursed family and it shows.

Personally I’m excited for when they rerelease regedit as Windows Copilot, MFS as (Co)Pilot, and Purble Place as Copilot Kids Demo.

I’m writing Lebanese Arabic so the vowels are all a bit off, mind you. Here is the standard Arabic and the Lebanese dialect equivalents, alongside what I would consider a relatively unambiguous non-IPA transcription.

إمّايَة = /ʔmːaːja/ (MSA) = Immaya(h) (MSA) ≈ /ʔmːeːje/ (LA) = Imméyé (LA)

خِزّانات = /xizːaːnaːt/ (MSA) = Khizzanat (MSA) ≈ /xizːeːneːt/ = Khizzénét

The ء below the ا is basically an ـِ for it, and the ز is easily confused for a ذ. Thanks for playing!

My kidneys hurt just reading this. I guess that makes sense. I knew about the mineral layer and the lead being “fine” if left alone, but it’s really hard to shake off the thought of drinking water having to run through so much surface area being a liability. Shows you how little you know about things you take for granted as just how the world works.

Documentaries and relief programs only show you places that admit they are poor. We are too self-important to acknowledge what we are.

Neither of those would help us more than a sharp, lubricated guillotine at a string of well-timed political summits. We are ~200 heads and a fascist expansionist apartheid ethnostate neighbor away from being a functional country. We live under feudalism and unless all 200 heads go at the same time things get worse and not better. Don’t ignore the neighbor either, it’s hard to have nice civilian bridges if your civilian bridges get bombed every decade.

We pay like 20 USD per month for 24L water dispenser things of drinking water, delivered straight to the front door. Not ideal, but not a disaster on its own.

My entire country is built on individual little compromises that add up to a disaster. So much of my daily concerns are just worrying about the water supply. Who needs bullshit culture war nonsense when your populace is busy stealing their neighbors’ water in the dead of night for the decadent criminal luxury of not smelling like shit over Christmas lunch?

Fixing the water network is extraordinarily expensive and won’t enrich the twenty odd feudal lords who stand to profit from it so it’s not happening soon.

I’m in Lebanon. Your comment is reminding me how unusually flat the ground is where most of you live lol.

Most of us live on mountains with very messy elevation changes. Water towers are extremely uncommon. Generally, water is poorly filtered by the public water companies, then pumped uphill by dirty old pumps through dirty old pipes. Lebanon generates something like a third of its electricity demand, so… pumping is not constant.

Also single family homes are much rarer, most of us live in buildings that are 3-6 floors high. Water happens on the building level.

The water usually fills into a sort of well, a بير (pronounced like “beer”), not all buildings have that. Where I live, that’s the main bulk storage for water split among all the neighbors in the building. The water then gets pumped up to a large central holding tank on the roof (إمّاية ≈ “mother” tank), from which it then trickles it down to the individual apartments’ tanks (خزّانات = tanks) on the roof. Top floors need a pressure pump if they’re too close to the roof. Keep in mind that pumps need electricity, which we don’t always have. Floater valves everywhere. In my own building, my family and I have set up a rudimentary rainwater collection system. It’s not much, it’s not exceptionally clean, but it wasn’t ever either of those things. You can call a cistern man to fill your بير (“beer”).

We’ve had a main pop on our street before. It was a pathetic dribble of water seeping through cracks in the asphalt.

Re: wells, we used to be able to drink from the old town wells, but years of neglect and improper sewage handling means that you really really should not drink from them. I remember drinking from them as a kid, although my parents disapproved. Situation is worse now, I don’t drink well water anymore. The bad part is that well water was only drinkable in pretty rural towns, the worse part is that climate change has wrecked our groundwater supply and the wells I drank from as a kid have run dry. There’s less gentle rains and melting snow, and more summery Decembers with catastrophic, sudden storms. There are rivers I’ve swam in that are now stagnant little green spots. Cisterns are getting more expensive and more essential, and they’re struggling to fill them.

When my parents were kids they claim they could drink tap water. 15 years of brutal civil war and twice as much crony neoliberal “reconstruction” years later and nobody has dreamed up a contrived enough profit incentive to reliably deliver water and electricity. There are tribes warring in Sub-Saharan Africa with better basic utilities than we do because we live in an utterly dysfunctional feudal society. We’re technically in a continuous drought, but we have no mechanism to declare a drought season with drought measures.

That can’t be thaaaaaaaaat uncommon, riiiiiiiiight?

Here’s a funny story: when I was a kid, we got a dishwasher, and one of the first things you do is use the water hardness test strips and configure something in the machine. We rapidly learned that each cisternful of water was completely different and the only way around it was to underfill the salt tank and inshallah. Worked fine and still does.

Now you know why we pay 2-3 water bills per month. Come back tomorrow for the two power bills (power company and power mafia) and two Internet bills (it’s complicated). Surely I can bang out a few more manic 5 am comments this Christmas season.

I’m aware of how the system works, just not how common it is. Although I don’t see how boiling would help if some pesticides or industrial chemicals get into the water supply.

To me it looks like you’re all washing floors and filling toilets and watering golf courses with precious drinking water.

These threads are always a sad look past the curtain. Is drinkable tap water really that common around the world? I thought that was a rich people thing when I saw it in cartoons as a kid.

Knowing vaguely how municipal plumbing works I find the idea that so many pipes and fittings could be clean enough to drink from to be utopian fan fiction. We have storage for water since there’s really only pressure a few hours per week, at its best. I have the contact info of over ten water cistern drivers in case it’s out for too long - and it very often is.

Our tap water’s good enough to shower and wash dishes and clothes in, but not nearly enough to drink. It even doesn’t taste like the smell of diesel 300 days out of the year. Yeah we have filters, no sand is crusting up my washing machine’s valves anytime soon, but it won’t keep the bacteria out.

Drinking from plastic containers of various sizes between 300ml and 24L is the only fucking option for most people on the planet right now. It’s cheap in these places too, obviously.

AFAIK there was a memory leak in PowerToys. But it’s definitely ballooned in scope since it was first released. I suppose turning off the parts you don’t need would help but it really should still be more efficient. Doesn’t help that the Microsoft Department of AI Department seems to have started sinking its teeth into it as of the last few updates.

It’s the most popular sporting event on the planet in a country with 300 million people, this is nothing like the Club World Cup that was held this year. The lack of tourists might not be a problem, save for maybe atmosphere.

This chart, with the huge ticket prices, is why the US was chosen.