I'd say the exception is Demis. First, he's no wanker (in the AI space) and second he's done plenty of selfless things leading dm/googai. Obviously some of it is self-serving but not just self-serving, IMO.
whats crazy is that we got here and it isn't even the midterms yet, who knows how cranky folks are going to get if the midterms don't go well for them.
I get the sentiment. But for the record, O&O has been around for a long time, they were known for their excellent defragmentation tool, which isn't so much required nowadays. Their business model was never close to Adware (to my knowledge).
ShutUp has also been around for a while and always seemed to me like a O&O side project by someone who got really pissed at Windows taking the spyware tangent. The distribution model is still that of shareware / freeware (no source), because that's what O&O does. But as far as closed software goes, that's _probably_ as clean as it gets.
Windows has had built in defrag since at least WinXP. I can't remember if Win2000 had it - I think it did. It runs in the background and you don't have to worry about it. 3rd party defrag tools are snake oil, like registry cleaners and so on.
IIRC W2K didn't have one. Defragmentation can use different strategies which may impact the time it takes and additional perf gains if the right files are next to each other. The builtin defrag tool doesn't give any option. So "snake oil" I'm not so sure.
Also, a watching a proper defragmenter run was an OCD soothing experience before we had stray kitten and powerwashing videos galore. I know I'm not alone with this experience.
I know for sure NT4 didn't have defragging built in, because I was a Windows server admin back in the primordial soup that was sysadmin'ing in the 90's.
>OCD soothing experience
I've always felt it was a certain kind of person who found amusement in watching a defragger work. I'm absolutely sure that 3rd party tools made sure to incorporate the equivalent blinkenlights to give the impression that their tool did something useful.
I'm pretty sure some versions of DOS had a defrag tool, or at least windows 9x had a DOS mode equivalent where you could see the block map getting moved around.
I wonder if people who are down-voting you actually have children. I even know someone who's kid just died in a pool when no one was watching... My kids almost drowned themselves multiple times when they were below 5 yr old and they are trained to swim... My brother fell into a pool when he was little, and had to be saved... the list goes on and on... edit: Apparently it's the leading cause of death for 1-4 year olds...
A sizable portion of the blue collar economy collapses too if the white collar portion stops having money to spend or suddenly has an influx of time to do some of the stuff the blue collar workers were doing for them like lawns, home repair, painting etc.
Its all tied together. The current system cannot function if unemployment goes double digits.
The idea is to break the middle class. Blue or white collar it doesn’t matter. A politically active middle class is a danger to the designs of Silicon Valley ghouls.
They learned good from the tobacco industry about how to manage this properly. Getting way out in front of things and pretending to regulate themselves.
I think you are referring to GitHub Copilot, which is fine (even though their context windows are artificially truncated and their dev tooling leaves a lot to be desired). I was making fun of the Copilot that’s shipped with MS stack. “Hey summarize my Teams meetings and try not to fuck that up too badly” - that one.
