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.

This looks pretty neat. I certainly hope it’s got some staying power and it’s not one of those deals where what they showed in the trailer is basically the entirety of the content of the game.

The difference in spelling between “brake” (as in, the thing that stops your car) and “break” (as in, what happens to your car when you don’t stop it in time and it hits a tree).

Another poster here suggested the High Capacity Color Barcode as well, which ought to already have some implementations available somewhere and sports an even higher data density if you’re willing (or able) to deal with color.

QR codes are limited to being square in aspect ratio (other than the not terribly helpful “micro rectangular QR” format) and have a maximum payload of ~3kB each. This may not be a great fit for plain consumer paper with a rectangular aspect, and you’d need to jigger some manner of batch reader so’s you don’t drive yourself insane recovering the data. Neither is an insurmountable problem; I’m just thinking out loud, here.

I’m going to buck the trend here and suggest a really physical storage medium: Print your data out. Or laser engrave it onto sheets of metal or polymer, or whatever you want to do. If you just print pokey old black and white ones and zeros as square pixels on a sheet of 8.5x11" paper at a humble 72 DPI you can store a shade under 47 kilobytes per page without having to resort to any additional trickery. Maybe a kB or two less if you need to leave margins. How much data are you really trying to store?

In a sealed container in the dark you could easily make paper last hundreds of years (we have perfectly intact books sitting on ordinary shelves from the 1800s already), and if you wanted to print on Tyvek or something it’d probably endure thousands.

Reading this back would not be a plug-and-play solution but would have the added advantage of being a purely optical process rather than having to interface with antique storage device electronics on whatever computer you may be using 30 years from now. All you’d need is sheet feed scanner or in a pinch any sufficiently high resolution camera, and the ability to run some kind of programming environment to run a script to read those pixels back into file data.

Maybe this wouldn’t be great for archiving your collection of 4k ultra-definition porn, but it’d be absolutely sufficient for storing text and executable data for small programs, plans and schematics, other knowledgy sciency data, and even images… with the added benefit of, if any gestapo thug happens to find this early and dig it up he won’t be able to ascertain what that image is just by looking at the piece of paper.

+1 for a Chrono Trigger ranking. For as popular as it still is in retrospect, I think people still don’t quite give it the full recognition it’s due for smashing pretty much every dreary console RPG convention that the genre had been persistently saddled with up until that point, while still remaining a console RPG. Believe it or not the developers had plans to make it even more ambitious at the beginning but they weren’t able to pull it off in the time allotted.

There are a lot of subsequent RPG titles (like even Final Fantasy goddamned Seven, not to mention Pokémon) that should have learned a bevvy of lessons from Chrono Trigger, but still didn’t. It was well ahead of its time.

Hope no more, because both things are already quite possible. Metal printing 3D printers are still prohibitively expensive — like, go to your bank and take out a mortgage levels of expensive — but they do indeed exist. And you can print a lower receiver for an Armalite quite easily which is the only serial numbered and tracked component in the US. Upper receivers are available via mail order because they are not the regulated part (except in certain states), so have at it.

You didn’t hear that from me, though.

So not only is she an awful human being, but she’s also an awful shot.

Like, with a fork.

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 Walmart ones apparently have some manner of AI/neural net/deep learning image processing going on to attempt to catch people stealing stuff at the checkouts.

Somehow they still don’t support contactless payments for some reason, though, so that’s neat.

And IDKFA takes away all of your weapons except for the staff, declaring thou art a dirty cheater.

We’ve had 24 years of UAC and somehow Microsoft still can’t figure out either of the following:

1. The UAC prompt is triggered by an application either directly requesting elevation, or attempting to do something (write a file, tweak a registry value, change a group policy setting) that requires said permissions. So the OS obviously knows whatever it was the application tried to do, but it doesn’t tell you what that is. It just says it needs to make “changes to your device.” I would feel a lot better about that if they bothered to inform me maybe which file or directory it was trying to write to, or if it’s a registry change, or what. Because, you know, maybe I don’t want to let randomdownloadedapp32.exe change my system language to Swahili if I knew that’s what it was about to do.

2. There still isn’t a way to permanently mark a specific app or executable as trusted so it won’t nag you about UAC elevation. If you’re running an account with limited permissions and need to enter an administrator password every single time you launch some damn fool program, for instance, that’s a big time problem for your peons who may accidentally close that application at any time and then can’t reopen it. The workarounds for this (if any) typically revolve around divining whatever action that app performs that’s got Windows’ knickers in a twist, rather akin to guessing what a fussy baby is crying about, and then manually applying permissions to that file, directory, or object. Maybe it’s trying to write to %systemdrive%\Program Files? Maybe it’s keeping a count of something in the registry? Did it try to change a protected system setting like, ye gods forbid, the clock? Did it trip Windows’ built in installer detection? Or maybe it just blithely demands an elevated runtime for no reason because its developers were morons. I don’t fucking know, because the UAC prompt doesn’t tell you; See point #1 above.

The thing about this that really absconds with my ovine is that moronic webdevs insist on reinventing the wheel for these input fields in a manner that is inevitably both disrespectful of your screen DPI and/or aspect ratio and also fail to correctly or competently implement shortcuts or keyboard functionality – or more often, don’t even bother to do so at all – not to mention any of the user’s potential accessibility tools. Because web form controls for all of these input fields already exist.

Earth to front end developers: You don’t need to do a halfassed job of building a drop down menu box using 3.7 megabytes of jquery and and CSS plus three application frameworks on every page load. Just put that shit in a <select> and let the browser do it for you. Knock it off already.

HTML already includes a perfectly good date picker tag, drop down menus, spinners, radio buttons, and checkboxes.

And if you do insist on reinventing the wheel, if the wheel you’re reinventing happens to be a non-searchable drop down menu that doesn’t even allow me to type to snap to the first letter of what I’m looking for, let alone the entire target value, I’m afraid I’m going to have to hunt you down and stick your keyboard somewhere you probably don’t want it stuck.

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.