We’re excited to announce the new Sony WH1000XM6 headphones, enhanced by the power of spanners!

I don’t see why my headphones need a sp-

Conveniently built in to your headset, you can use the spanner to adjust bolt tightness on-the-go!

Okay, but that’s not wh-

We’re proud to be leading the market in spanner-augmented products to bring a new level of convenience to your life.

…

Spanner may sometimes only appear to tighten bolts. Please don’t ask us the energy cost of manufacturing the spanner.

I’m weeping at the damage to those floorboards. Could they not have been lifted first?

Mark Gurman, who’s normally dead on the money when it comes to Apple, thinks they’re unlikely to keep up annual releases (though I should note the linked article suggests the new iPhone model schedule is unlikely to change for now).

There’s no safe way to answer this without giving away plot points, I don’t think. Most important thing is that it’s sci-fi, not a drama about developers in the way you might expect.

I loved Season 1, but I felt it became bogged down after that - almost a soap opera.

It was a joke, but the article itself does explicitly conclude this as one of its observations:

The findings raise big questions about the limits and future of polling, which relies on voters giving responses reflecting their real-life political behavior.

“Significant minority of people lie in polls, a poll reveals.”

“Am I being detained?”, my inner monologue screams.

There’s a definite industry problem, but that doesn’t excuse Spotify.

Apple Music pays artists 50-100% more than Spotify do per play, and Tidal pay triple to quadruple. Even Amazon pay artists more than Spotify; only YouTube is worse.

It’s been a little while since I used a KDE or Gnome desktop in anger; I can’t remember how they tackle issues where user attention is needed on an inactive app. What do you figure the best solution is? Make the taskbar/dock icon visually distinct (flashing, jumping, a badge, or similar) but don’t permit focus switch?

Curious about this - you mean in Windows? What’s the solution as you see it?

Good list! We differ on some of them…

I take issue with the settings menu still relying on the old menus while having shuffled things around so I’m forced to look for settings

This is still an issue, but I feel it’s diminishing as they (annoyingly slowly) do move all of the functionality to the new app. It was much worse in Windows 10, I think.

I can say that the start menu is horrendously slow, it can take up to 5 seconds for it to load.

“Works on my machine” is a profoundly unhelpful answer for me to give, but I’m fortunate enough not to have experienced this. If you’re looking for a workaround and don’t mind a further Microsoft app, the launcher in Powertoys is pretty solid.

Sometimes keystrokes disappear in the start menu only to magically appear some time later.

God, I hate the search from the start menu - but I would say that it’s been profoundly broken since Windows 8 and is marginally better in Windows 11.

They made the right click menu worse and only changeable in regedit.

100% agreed. I do think Windows 10 and earlier had a growing issue with the context menus getting unwieldy (Visual Studio is a great demo of how this can get really out of hand) but the solution Windows 11 have brought is annoying more than useful. I suspect at one point I made the registry change and forgot about it, because I’m back to a big Win10-style list.

They made RDP credentials only saveable using CMD.

Agreed again. That said, you’re a masochist if you’re not using an RDP manager like mRemoteNG! I wish Microsoft had a decent RDP app that wasn’t tied into Azure.

They removed vertical taskbars.

I found vertical taskbars incompatible with hotdesking on desks with different monitor configurations, but I do agree this one sucks.

how to unfuck up windows 11 so it works how you expect it to.

I think “how you expect it to” goes to the core of my point - needing to adapt to change isn’t inherently bad. But I’m not pretending Windows 11 is a wholesale improvement, and I do concede many of your arguments.

Agree with all of those points, I just don’t love the reductive notion that every change is a bad change and nothing’s been for the better. In several ways it’s a better OS - but as you say, they are also getting more contemptuous of the end user with things like privacy, anticompetitivity, and ads.

At the risk of being unpopular, I think a lot of what people perceive as unintuitive or worse in terms of settings and OS features is just change. I’m on Enterprise Windows 11 at work and I wouldn’t willingly go back to Windows 10.

I think because it’s Enterprise I’m dodging a lot of the worst of it - ads, telemetry, surprise updates, etc - but the unified settings are better once you learn them, tabbed File Explorer is better, dark mode switching is way better - there’s plenty to like.

I want to see the rise of the Linux desktop as much as anyone, but implying Windows 11 is all bad isn’t that fair an assessment.

Yes, but not deliberately - I think it depends on the species, but they’ll eat decomposing plant matter, faecal matter, carrion, soil, fungi. They’re not too picky. If the bird guano contains tiny flatworm eggs, bad news for the snail.

The EFF have a bit more general information about location data brokers. Well worth a read.

The larvae (possibly not quite the right word) eaten by the birds lodge in the intestinal tract near the cloaca. The eggs they produce are passed out, and snails eat the eggs.

~This comment is best read with Hans Zimmer’s “The Circle of Life” playing in the background.~

Ideally read in a terrible mock-Texan accent:

Give him all the fowl language you like, he won’t quack easily.

Don’t tell anyone, but I am not a trained duckologist.