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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The dog whistle of “maybe it’s not for you” is pointless, since all we’re doing here is talking about preferences and opinions of design. Whether something is “complicated” or “poor design” is very subjective across many fields. It’s easy to laugh at someone pushing at a “Pull” door, but less so if there’s a pushbar there and they don’t speak English.

    I could easily be facetious and suggest “Maybe Windows is just too complicated for you” but that’s similarly needlessly talking down to people’s intelligence. The topic only came up because it’s frustrating there’s no operating system out there that:

    • Has wide support
    • Doesn’t nag you with AI features
    • Designs its filesystem paths in a way that is consistent, informative, and readable between devices, regardless of user preference or configuration.

    For now, issues like the last one are what keep me on Windows, and I’m not even claiming they’re easy to solve.



  • While it might be suitable for server environments with 400+drives, all home setups will have fewer volumes than there are alphabet letters, so it’s a suitable setup there.

    Someone else identified how you can run an extra command to identify actual location of a file, and while that’s useful, it’s an extra step that’s unnecessary when the design of the location string itself also identifies that. Unless you can tell me which drive /home/supra-app/preconfiguration/media is on - without running something different. (Vs windows: C:/Users/Someone/AppData/supra-app/preconfiguration/media) That’s what the design of WWW URLs was for - you never have to ask which domain a website is on, and it can even inform you about whether a site is trustworthy.

    I don’t think you’re helping your case by showing there’s no drive location convention at all. A friend plugs a USB device in your computer while you’re busy in the kitchen. He’s fine if he just uses a UI autopopup, but if he needs the full path, he has to ask you where you’ve set up auto-mounting, if you have at all.


  • This is what’s made me a little more okay with digital video games. The chance that some bizarre event will lead to that game becoming unplayable is non-zero. But, that’s the case for physical game discs as well.

    I’m upset at events like The Crew’s removal and hope for more laws to make such things unlikely. Still, I’m generally accepting that by and large, publishers don’t try to delete or remove access to people’s games. There’s no specific motivation in it for that particular evil.

    Movies, however, I’m reticent. I liked being able to buy a few cheap movies on digital services, but Sony’s mass deletion of their library makes me hesitant to continue there.



  • I know the filesystem is simple to Linux users, but the semantic form of physical drives getting a letter always made more sense to me.

    I have three drives in my computer. So they’re labeled C:, D:, and E:. You can’t place a file on “The Computer” - it’s stored on some particular drive. If I install a game on the E drive, and then later somehow remove that drive and bring it somewhere else, that game remains on that drive, even if it’s no longer E.

    On Linux, as best I understand it, if I have three drives, two of them are at /dev/hdd0 and hdd1. But they’re not actually there, they’re accessed at /media/hdd0 after mounting them (or at least, that’s the convention, and if it’s someone else’s computer, good luck). Then you either begin every game installation path with that annoying prefix, or you start configuring a dozen symlinks. If you place an item in /home/documents/notporn, then who knows which drive it’s on because you don’t know what symlinks someone set up to make that folder.

    Windows does have symlinks too now, which has been nice for hacking a few installation directories, but I appreciate that it’s an exception, and everything else follows relatively logical division of space, rather than this hybrid system where the filesystem isn’t just stored files but also devices, programming concepts, and more.


  • I don’t think customer support can be resolved by free market forces. If someone has purchased the product, has a problem, and is trying to contact support to resolve the problem, they’re a bit too far gone on the model of free consumer choice, and that instance won’t affect the free market.

    I feel like we need legislation that, when a customer has a problem, they must be able to contact the company for a refund or resolution, AND, communication with an “AI” does not count as that communication.



  • Katana314@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlplease
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    4 months ago

    They also should “know” that being forceful about backup prompts, AI features, and major version upgrades will irritate users into switching off their OS, and yet they’re doing it anyway. Logic is not driving their actions; greed for data is.


  • Katana314@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlplease
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    4 months ago

    When they’re specifically writing business plans designed for hospitals, sure, they can likely account for it. But not when designing end user services that are laissez-faire about user data privacy - on the random things people put in “My Documents”. As with many organizations, it’s very possible the two parts of the corporation don’t talk to each other.





  • Katana314@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlplease
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    4 months ago

    HIPAA applies to whichever entity consciously chooses to move/store data.

    Generally, after a patient downloads a healthcare-related item, they are that entity - and as the patient, they have full control/decisions about where it goes, so they can’t violate their own HIPAA agreement even if they print it and scatter it to the wind.

    BUT, if your operating system “decides” to upload that document without the user’s involvement, then Microsoft is that entity - and having not received conscious permission from the patient, would be in violation. It’s an entirely different circumstance if the user is always going through clear prompts, but their more recent OneDrive Backup goal has been extremely forceful and easy to accidentally turn on - even to the point of being hard to disable. As you said, encryption has nothing to do with it.


  • Katana314@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlplease
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    4 months ago

    The moment a lawyer saves their medical records in a way that unintentionally and without their consent uploads them to OneDrive, they have a pretty solid case to charge Microsoft for a HIPAA violation.


  • It’s a way of verification and trust in a system where no one trusts any central authority, but does trust an algorithm. That seems too specific to ever actually be useful. People will end up relying on services or instructions that make the system digestible and usable for them, but as long as they still rely on those giving the instructions, the same problem arises.

    And when an example case is brought up, it’s always one central authority that is pushing the idea - and could achieve the same more easily and without power waste using a central server.