Some of the many ways to bypass making a Microsoft account required hitting the shell in the installer for a moment, but the example screenshot looks more like someone removing shit post-install.

The short guide to not performing CBT with Windows is:

• Grab install media for Pro or LTSC (Pro is better if you aren’t a turbo-nerd willing to troubleshoot more)
• Strip out the versions you aren’t installing from the install media (forget the tool for this, probably dism)
• Install updates to the install media so you aren’t stuck with it updating for a day post-install (forget the tool for this part too, sorry)
• Strip out bloat and unneeded shit (such as onedrive) using DISM
• Install using whatever the current workaround is to not have to make a Microsoft account
• Keep the damn thing offline, adjust settings, configure GPO, use powershell to remove anything more you want out, etc to your desires
• Notably: Disable “reccomendations” in the various spots, those are ads. Set updates to be delayed considerably and to not force restart until a week after first notification (you can no longer disable this entirely). Disable web search from the start menu/search bar.
• Maybe move a few “cleaning/configuring” tools over via USB and run them
• Use MASgrave to spoof a license you horrible degenerate
• Keep detailed notes of every step you do, as sometimes games amd shit will have dumbass dependencies on system parts that they don’t expect you to remove

Not as much as we have to now.

I’m usually a Windows shield-bearer around these parts, because it’s not quite as much of a dumpster fire as people say (please for the love of god don’t debate me on this, I prefer Linux and have better things to do), but this is inarguably something Windows has gotten far far worse at. Out of the box experience (besides having to shove drivers into the install media) used to be a pretty definitive thing that Windows beat Linux on. Install and it “just werkd”. It used to be the cornerstone of pushback, that Linux required you to tinker and Windows didn’t. But Microsoft destroyed their lead in that so they only have (fast dwindling) business appeal and entrenchment to lean on now.

Ugh yeah. I’ve been slowly backing up my wife’s, my parents’, and my own music CDs, and while it thankfully hasn’t gotten to many of them, it’s ate enough to be annoying.

Especially because my wife’s collection is mostly very specific performances of classical music and operas, which can make finding rips difficult when it’s not a particularly popular recording.

And the CD-Rs are almost all toast. I’m lucky the old family PC HDDs still have most of the old family photos, so I’ve been able to back them up. Can’t believe we used to think that backing up the pictures to disc would last longer.

Jesus. I don’t think an adblocker would help if she couldn’t manage the fucking volume buttons.

Lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink and all that.

WOOO BROTHER! COME JOIN US AT [email protected] FOR ALL SORTS OF FUN HOG CRANKING ACTIVITIES!

mata

AnalogNowhere is leaking.

I know, right?

For a while it looked like everyone was just going to stick with calling the older folks boomers and the younger folks millenials, but I guess some intelligence leaked through into the “futile generational hate” machine.

Is every generation working to make things better than it was? No! Clearly the old folks don’t want the young ones to have anything good, otherwise the world wouldn’t have any problems by now!

Just give yourself some more years, time for life experiences, and to be shocked and apalled when you learn how hard it can be to coordinate a group of people who all want the same outcomes to a concentrated cooperative effective course of action. Hell, how hard it can be to get them to even agree on the same path to the desired outcome.

Had a project recently that was effectively “Hey other teams, you have until $date to make this change or you will lose $feature”

The deadline was extended by a month, and we still quietly didn’t make the breaking change on our end for another month after. Every team impacted (until they made the change needed) got emails weekly about it, even into the “quiet” extended deadline. Emails went to whole teams so it couldn’t be lost by one person going on vacation or something.

Day after breaking change (more than three months after first contact) I sent out the final email to any teams that still hadn’t done the needful. “Hey, looks like your shit was still wrong when we did the thing we warned about. It’s broken now.”

Over a week after breaking change, ten minutes before I’m off for the weekend: “Hey, we’ve been troubleshooting for a while trying to figure out why $feature no longer works. This is business critical for $reasons. How can we get this resolved?”

“Please see the attached email from over three months ago (attached).”

That’s always the fucking worst. “You have all the responsibility, but none of the power”.

It’s all internal “customers” at my workplace. So very often by the time it comes to my team the contract is already signed, and they of course didn’t get proper vendor support in the contract. So my team is left to scrape together whatever we can from public info about some obscure industry specific system. Always great to ask support questions and told “we can’t answer that, it’s proprietary”.

We can say “you need to negotiate vendor engineer support for this” until we’re blue in the face, but at the end of the day when the shit doesn’t work how they were sold it by the sales guy they end up trusting the friendly smiley sales guy when the vendor blames us, rather than the fucking professionals in their own workplace because we tell it to them straight, so interactions with us don’t always leave them feeling warm and fuzzy.

Our tech side’s upper management has switched up in the last few years, and they say that it’s been codified into the purchasing approval process that tech gets a seat at the table before shit gets inked. So I was optimistic.

Then we signed the first new vendor/external support contract for our own tech side shit in a long time, no way for us not to be at the table.

Additional support rebuiling our cloud infra that was previously hacked together as needed, but this time do it “right”. Templates, automated tagging, top down more easily managed governance and security controls instead of a messy mix of shit, the works. The plan is to automate a shit ton as infra as code. No one on my team has previous experience doing this as we’re not very cloud heavy.

All of this hinges on infra as code and resource templates, and the fucking contract expicitly doesn’t include any coding/cloud template building assistance. It wasn’t forgotten, they decided against it.

I’m the best script/code monkey on my team. I know I can figure it out, but I was looking forward to having a break from spending 90% of my time staring at code. From being on projects that succeed or fail entirely on my own efforts. I’ve been stuck on this sort of shit for multiple years while some of my coworkers have been able to be important, but not a bus factor of 1.

Guess it’s nice to have job security 🫠

The Who - Won’t Get Fooled Again

Another legitimately great strategy is the Wally Deflector (hate that Dilbert’s creator turned out to be an asshat). Force them to do some work. Anything really works, just something to slow down the firehose and enforce that it’s a partnership working towards a solution. Usually the best way is to just ask for clarification and actual hard requirements.

So many things just shrivel up and die when the person asking for it realizes IT isn’t going to just outsource their full responsibilities including domain specific knowledge or basic fucking thought for them just because it’s going to become digital or automated.

Sounds like someone needs to figure out email filters. Probably best to send it to a folder and mark as read instead of delete it, that way when it does inevitably concern you (something you use isn’t working) you can check them for notice of what’s going on.

Trading firms have been using ML and Neural Nets for trading and investment insight for ages before the current LLM “AI” boom started. I knew someone working in that space on investment derivatives in the mid 2010s.

You don’t really need to speculate on it. It’s old news. This is just a joke about how there’s a new crop of suckers who are absolutely using LLMs for stock advice.

Guess we’re all gonna ignore all the drama about LTT from last year?

Saying he’s the one who breaks is an understatement.

They’ve kept it up for 5 months. Downvotes and disparaging comments haven’t stopped them. Just block them if it bothers you.

Huh, why do I hear someone shouting about Windows 11 requiring TPM?

Nice, an analognowhere I missed!

I’m so thankful that I didn’t buy into the 3000 series hype and just bought a 2060 Super the moment one became available at MSRP after the 3000s launched. Everyone said it was a waste paying that price for less performance, but I had a card and they still didn’t 4 months later.

I’d say that the way around the shortages is to just not go for the latest and greatest new hardware, but that’s not really helpful for GPUs anymore anyway. Even the desirable last gen cards are still going for scalper prices.

But why is she smuggling a pumpkin in her dress?That one must be extra magic!

As someone who works as a sysadmin/systems engineer in a Windows environment, I find your analogy is a bit extreme. Not denying the issue, it’s a constant frustration and problem. It’s just that I find you can get a lot farther than most people think.

So less “hood’s welded shut” and more “Why the fuck are the headlights a single unit? I just need to fix the high beams! Why is the transmission welded shut? Who in the fuck wired the radio and power steering together? And why in the hell is none of this documented anywhere?” Maybe that’s worse, tbh. You can get very deep, but most of it is horrors.

Literally a plot point in Dresden Files. MC is a wizard who lives in Chicago doing private eye work. Regularly carries a blasting rod (wand) and a revolver. One big wizard gets taken out by a sniper rifle fired by a demon. He has semi-regular backup from non magical friends who are just well armed.

A regular human mafioso who is just so good at being a conniving and ruthless piece of shit that he can hold his own with the magic folk is a recurring character. Your spells don’t mean too much if four goons get the drop on you with a metal pipe when you weren’t prepared.