In practice I don’t know if I’ve ever had a relevant short come up when I was trying to find how to do a specific thing. Usually if I need help with something it’s more complicated than a short would allow for. I have seen “How to” shorts for all kinds of stuff come across my feed though that were pretty good. So if one came up when I was looking for how to do something I would watch it. That quick, concise format is exactly what I want usually when I’m trying to figure out how to do something. It skips all the “Hi I’m xxxx, welcome to my channel, blah blah blah” shit that the longer videos have. My main point was that not all this content is worthless brainrot stuff. Regardless of if it’s useful to you or me in particular someone else may find it valuable.

Totally forgot Windows 8. We skipped it because of how shitty it was.

What is “half baked dog shit” about it?

The fact that they’re moving things over slowly instead of just fucking finishing it before they deploy it all at once. They’ve been doing this since Windows 10 came out, they have a trillion dollars. There’s no excuse to have it be half assed for so long especially considering “Settings” isn’t even an improvement.

What was easier to find in the control panel than it is in settings?

Literally everything? You don’t have to click through 14 different menus to drill down to what you’re looking for. It’s all on one window in Control Panel. Just look at Devices and Printers in Control Panel vs. Devices in settings or Programs and Features vs. Apps and features the newer versions have far less information available at a glance.

You’ve never actually used windows 11, have you?

I use it every day on my work PC. It runs like ass.

I know what the point is. It sucks.

Firstly they still have the control panel.

For now

Secondly they are slowly transitioning everything relevant from the control panel to the settings app.

The settings app is half-baked dog shit.

Thirdly even having everything in the control panel didn’t make it easy to find exactly what you wanted.

It was certainly easier than the current state of things.

This makes it so you can just say “set my power profile to balanced” and it would do so. That’s a nice, welcome addition.

Sure assuming the AI understands your request and the setting you want hasn’t been removed because they wanted to put everything in the settings app and the one you wanted conflicts with their data gathering and add presentation and it’s not running in the background bogging down your system all the time or trying to interject itself into whatever you’re trying to do without involving it.

Perhaps you could just make them easier to find by putting them in one location… You could call it a “control panel”.

I bought a safety razor, 50 blades, and a case of arko soap for like $40 in 2014 and I only just finished going through those blades. I still have 3/4 of the soap. This is shaving 1-2 times a week.

I don’t really try to consume shorts but YouTube presents them regardless of if you’re looking for them or not. I don’t even search out woodworking or gardening, I usually look for specific “how to disassemble things” videos or guides for video games but the algorithm always seems to get there sooner or later. Sometimes something will catch my eye and I’ll watch it which is how I discovered these guys. I don’t really doomscroll on shorts and if I start it’s usually only 2-3 videos before I hit something stupid that snaps me out of it but I’ve literally never watched https://www.youtube.com/@WorkshopCompanion full videos or seen one of them on my dashboard but their shorts are insanely dense with information. They’re my ideal YouTube “how to” video. If all content creators where like that we’d be living in the futuristic part of that one meme. My point was not all short form content is bad.

Here’s a few that have been coming up for me lately.

https://www.youtube.com/@WorkshopCompanion/shorts

https://www.youtube.com/@RexKrueger/shorts

https://www.youtube.com/@GrowVeg/shorts

For the AI one to restrict it from children you have to determine the age of the person accessing it. How do you do that and still allow them to maintain anonymity? You would need some identification to do that reliably which means for the adults using it this site now has a database of whatever ID you had to send them to verify. Or if it’s using a credit card or some government hosted verification then those entities have a database of what sites you’re using tied to your name.

For banning short form content. How do you quantify what counts? Is it just the length of the video? You’re going to be throwing out a lot of very useful videos along with the brain rot if you use that. I could point you to several craftsman channels that produce very informative shorts. If it’s case by case who is the judge? What are the criteria?

My experience with Linux is mostly "I need to do “thing”. Spend like 10 minutes searching for how to do thing. Find the app that does it. Spend another 10 minutes figuring out how to navigate the UI. Try to do thing. There’s some error due to the file being on a network share, or another package needs to be installed or it only works if you do it in one particular unintuitive way the developers came up with. Spend another 20 minutes to 3 hours looking online and trying to decipher documentation and trying shit to get it working. Probably about 50% successful overall.

I do not find it “Fun” the only reason I’m trying is because of the rate Windows is also breaking shit I do. Really just hating dealing with computers at all these days.

And sometimes things you really really didn’t want.

Instead I’m just doing 2 examples and keep it shallow :

Th is case: A 14yo should not have completely unsupervised access to an ai chat bot - it needs to be by family/child account, same as for e.g. Fortnite. Also, given the nature of the matter and looking at the article: if the chat turns ’disturbing’ the parent needs to be made aware. (Etc etc)

Another case is TikTok: honestly, I’d just ban it together with shorts and reels. IMO this rots the brains of the younger generation. I’m not even sure there is a healthy way of consuming this type of content.

My company decided we don’t need phones and makes us use Teams for calls. Every day I think about murdering the person who made that decision.

Okay. But by what mechanism would these things be enforced without encroaching on the privacy and freedoms of adults? It’s the same problems as policing porn or violent media. No one wants the government looking over their shoulder.

Regulated how?

Add mandatory therapy and counseling to that list.

If he was falling in love with a chat bot he wasn’t happy.

I tried having it on my new laptop for a bit. It took like a week for Windows to kill the secure boot key for my Linux partition. Even after I disabled secure boot I couldn’t get it to boot up so I had to reinstall. Just left it turned off afterwards.

Damn. Guess I’ll have to keep not paying for media.

There’s plenty of great games these days. The “golden age” wasn’t because of the quality of games. It was because I was able to delve into them deeply and enjoy them without all the concerns of my adult life running on the back of my mind pulling me out of it.