Lol, this is why we don’t tend to give software engineers local admin, and why most places hire separate UX designers.

Don’t even need to go that far. Pro and using Group Policy covers most of it. A registry entry here, a powershell command for uninstalling some bloat there… LTSC just saves uninstalling some of the bloat still on Pro.

If your laptop doesn’t have enough ports built in.

I don’t know what this guy is smoking. Copilot had administrative controls before it rolled out, through Intune and Group Policy.

I won’t deny it’s godawful to have shit split across AD, Group Policy, Regedit, and Azure/Entra/Intune.

But they very much still have controls for all this shit, almost always available before the feature rolls out. I’ve literally never seen this shit make it through to our end user devices in an un-intended fashion.

Hell, just hold non-security updates for a period of time for review before pushing it to your entire environment if this (not actually happening) issue is a concern. That’s like basic table stakes for Windows environment administration: update cadence management and pilot machines.

Please don’t claim to speak from a place of authority on this and then spread falsehoods. There’s plenty of shit to hate without making things up.

Like the third party app approvals in Azure and Teams defaulting to allow any non-admin user to be able to approve any azure app access to all of their data with no oversight. You can (and should) lock that the fuck down. It’s a batshit default, not a lack of controls.

With PXE boot you don’t even need a USB. Boot into the imaging “OS” over the network.

My workplace has a couple of dedicated network switches on a dedicated “imaging” VLAN in the hardware room, that way normal users can’t accidentally reimage their own machine. I think the desktop guys can get 32 going at once, and the complete automated setup time for one is like 40 minutes.

I grew up with that too, but the only time I’ve had any sort of slowdown from grouped icons is when I’ve been juggling like 4 excel sheets. I don’t often find myself with that many instances of the same program open often enough for it to matter.

It was an adjustment at first back in… Windows 7 I think, but I really haven’t missed it since.

There are also various browser extensions to show you an image from the middle of the video instead of a thumbnail. I personally prefer that.

I have some bad news for you

Yeah, layering the black border behind the letters for readabiltiy, then jamming the white letters together so tight you can’t see the border between most of them is definitely a choice.

Awesome! I’ve been practicing that since I was 13, and let me tell ya, I’m very good at it.

Lol, lmao even. Welcome to the grind. There aren’t many/any easy ways, it wildly varies based off your situation and skillset, and anyone who found any sort of “trick” isn’t about to share it.

The “easiest” way online, assuming no particular skills, is probably mechanical turk work. Amazon has a system for it. mturk.com

You get paid barely anything, I mean like literal pennies, to go and do stuff like fill out surveys, categorize photos for AI training datasets, etc. Most people who make any halfway reasonable amount from it are using all sorts of scripts and stuff to maximize how much they can do in the least amount of time.

If you already have money, giving it to an investment banker to handle for you can be enough to live off of, but you need an absurd amount of money to start with in order to just live off dividends.

The scale is a significant part of the problem though, which can’t just be hand waved away.

Yeah, didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but that detail was quite absent from the blog post.

Also his claim that email chains end up creating an extra copy of an attachment every time? That’s not how most email clients handle attachments. They usually only carry forward in forwards.

And even if his idea is true for his setup somehow, data deduplication at the storage level isn’t particularly difficult to set up, and I would argue is table stakes for any business doing self hosting.

Similar when it comes to data retention policies, quotas, auto deletion of spam after a shorter time window. It’s not fun and for some setups may not be easy, but it’s part of the bare minimum for email. So yeah, you absolutely do it yourself or pay someone to do it for you.

Edit: and if you pay someone to do it for you, you have to abide by whatever dumb hoops they make you jump through, or find someone else to pay.

Thank you, I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but his setup seemed like a convoluted way to have Google handle the storage at no cost to himself. Glad I’m not the only one with that takeaway.

This is awful, but while I see the huge impact for personal users, I’m not sure I see the business case for his current setup. I’m sure this will inpact business setups, but his specific use case just seems off.

He really buries the lede about why the weird setup of why address@businessdomain.com (to my mind the professional business email) had to be accessible from businessname_address@gmail.com (to my mind a misused personal email) in the first place. It’s down in the comments:

You can’t be serious. Especially for a company he runs, this is silly. Just tell them they have to use the business domain for business email. The whole @gmail.com thing also opens up potential regulatory issues depending on the details of the business.

With his current setup Google is already accessing all his company mail data. I don’t really get his objection to having the MX record directly route to them at this point.

I’m probably missing some big detail, but I don’t get why he has his current setup to begin with.

Edit: Didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but I’m not the only one with the takeaway that this seems to be jwz trying to use google/gmail for email storage without paying for google workspaces for his employees. Maybe that isn’t the case, but it sure looks like it.

Go ahead back to .ml’s China comm. Your blatant attempts to keep people fighting amongst each other instead of doing anything better with their time won’t be missed.

Mmmmm yes daddy billionaire business mogul, feed me more headlines, tell me what to think! Seed and manipulate my entire worldview harder! I love it when you twist my point of view! Twist it harder! Oh, you’ve brought vague state-sponsored talking points to double team me? Yes. Yes! Make me your sloppy anxiety ridden mess daddy! Let me slurp up your scum! Make me forget about how innacurate articles about my field of expertise are while I swallow every other article you give me! Fill me with your news daddy! ❤️

Dropping the shitposting though? (Not that you really deserve it with the blatant patronizing)

There are so many better targets for your effort than people choosing to not be led around by corporate interests through intentionally emotionally charged news.

There are fucking 20 year old studies that show that over exposure to news media causes people to overestimate crime rates to a ridiculous degree, and even more so with violent crime rates. The news has only become significantly more polarizing and emotionally charged in the many years since.

Save your efforts for careful organization and planning locally. Understand that 90% of the news will have no impact on you and those around you and is only meant for shifting public opinions. Not for actually informing. Shut the fuck up online and stop painting a target on your back. Practice fucking OPSEC if you have absolutely any seriousness about this, otherwise admit to yourself that you’re just larping or not going to take any action yourself.

I sure as hell aren’t taking any action that could put the people I care about at risk before shtf. It’s not a judgement or impugnment of your character, it’s just that you should stop being so damn openly judgemental if that’s the case for you.

Most importantly, as I called out in my first fucking sentence of my last comment responding to you, it’s a massive fucking false dichotomy. It is entirely possible to stay informed and up to date on events without fucking wallowing in the nonstop deluge of “sky is falling” headlines.

And even if this black and white dichotomy was in any way valid, your insistence that only “duh libruls” do it is even more absurd. Get outside and meet people. I’m fairly introverted and I still regularly meet and see people from all across the political spectrum multidimensionalhypercompass showing the full variation of news awareness from “What do you mean ICE has built a Guantanamo on US soil for illegal immigrants?” to “I read every headline from 6 different news sources and cross reference each article”. Yes, that means I see fucking MAGATs that are absurdly tapped into the vein of fresh news but somehow still deluding themselves into MAGA. One is a relative of mine unfortunately.

A VPN should have you covered.

Beyond that you can check the fmhy guides or the piracy megathread (on !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com) for some tips and sources. There are options for direct download, which is generally safe from legal issues (for downloaders, not for the uploader) even without VPN.