Yes, but the other poster is correct with the other half of the argument. Right now at this very moment in history, appliances are the cheapest adjusted for the median household income than they’ve ever been. Why? Because that’s what consumers demand. The manufacturer knows full well they can’t make a durable machine at the price point consumers are willing to pay, but it’s okay for them because they also know consumers will happily buy another one in 5 years.

Don’t like it? Buy a Speed Queen washer or dryer.

“But there’s no way in hell I’m paying $1449 just for a damn for a washing machine!!!”

Yeah, my point exactly. And theirs, too.

Guess what, my dudes and dudettes: That oldschool classic Kenmore or whatever-the-hell washer your parents had when you were growing up that’s still trucking? Adjusted for inflation, that’s about what it would cost in today’s money, give or take a couple of percent.

(I sourced that Sears pricing by stealing it from here, by the way. The management apologizes deeply in advance if you wind up pissing away your entire afternoon going all nostalgic over the contents of that link.)

And if you need a full sized machine from either Miele or Bosch, you get to employ the GTFO option early since neither of them make one.

And for the ones that do, you can just go sit in your car. No need to stand there staring at the stupid thing for half an hour.

That talk about substitutes happened when it was initially handed over to said data miner, and anybody concerned should have switched back then. I did, moving to Lawnchair, and never looked back. Oodles of other options are doubtlessly available.

I’ll take an 8k computer monitor though. In fact, send two. Kthnx.

But it’s still fun to shake the jar and watch 'em fight!

Darn Tough. The hold up pretty well, but they also have (caveat: I haven’t had to invoke it in a while) a lifetime pretty much no questions asked replacement warranty.

Especially since VBA can make calls to the Windows API directly and through that avenue do all kinds of funky things to your system.

This is totally expected and also absolutely peanuts compared to Intel, who once released a processor that managed to perform floating point long division incorrectly in fascinating (if you’re the right type of nerd) and subtle ways. Hands up everyone who remembers that debacle!

Nobody? Just me?

Anyway, I totally had — and probably still have, somewhere — one of the affected chips. You could check if yours was one of the flawed ones literally by using the Windows calculator.

Well, it doesn’t financially support Microsoft for a start.

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.

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.

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/