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Microsoft, can you please let me remove recommendations from the start menu? Not just less recommendations. I want the category to not be displayed and taking up space.

That's hilarious, I didn't realize you couldn't turn it off. I just tried disabling all the recommendation options and it still shows the category, except now instead of recommended items, it says "to show your recent files and apps, turn them on in Settings."

This sort of thing used to bother me back when I took Windows seriously.


It can be ripped out using regedit, I'm sure.

It's been a while since I used Windows as a daily driver, but I did oscillate between W10 and Arch for about half a year, and the Arch mentality creeped into Windows. I ended up adding a context menu to Explorer so I could paste images on my clipboard directly to a the folder I had open. I had to create keys in the Explorer portions of the registry.

If I could do that, I'm sure you can root around in the Start Menu parts of the registry and rip it out.


I know I can because I've done it on my home machine, but my work computer is restricted by IT. I can't open regedit or install most software unfortunately.

Yeah I asked my director if I could rip out the shell and replace it with X Server running in WSL2 and he said it would make the IT people very upset.

If you use an X Server and environment to launch programs inside WSL2, what part produced by Microsoft is still providing some value to that setup? Wouldn't you just exec ELF programs to be run on top of the Linux kernel and Windows would be just some useless abstraction layer between the Linux kernel and the hardware? Or would you still use some actual Windows programs? How would that work with the X Server?

There was some utility I found a few years ago that would let me start an X Server and use it to replace the main explorer process. There was some support for standard Windows apps due to the background System processes still running. I think it ended up running the Windows desktop shell as a window in and of itself.

I wanted to use a tiled window manager and my dot files for continuity purposes. The Windows apps I need to use are stuff like anyconnect and Teams.


I used to bother with things like registry edits, until I eventually realized the technical difficulty of operating Windows has surpassed that of Linux.

Of course I still have to use Windows for work and even a few edge cases at home. But otherwise I've been quite happy since I swiched to Linux as my primary driver.


Win11debloat solves 99% of annoyances with Windows 11 in <5 minutes. I’ve used in as the first step on every Win 11 install for years. It’s mostly just a bunch of Powershell commands disabling/configuring features.

https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat

Nothing has ever reverted after an update for me, so it’s a one-and-done thing. Ironically, afterwards Windows 11 has fewer noticeable ads than my MacBook which still continually pushes Apple services/shows/etc in settings/push notifications.

The only setting that I’ve ever seen sneakily disabled in recent years is the Edge default search engine but that's out-of-scope for Win11debloat.


It's better to get rid of Windows completely. You should try Arch if you enjoy tinkering.

KDE Plasma community likes to recreate Windows environment and W11 application launchers instead of "recommendations" section have a more useful plain recently opened files. Which what Windows had not so long ago.

What I heard is you would like some highly relevant ads to be at the top of your start menu for your convenience every time you want to start a program.

Oh, and have you heard about OneDrive?


Is there some way to remove nuclear strikes from being a thing the AI knows about thus eliminating it as an option? Perhaps it is too important to know that your opponents could nuclear strike you.

I'd be interested to see what kind of solutions it comes up with when nuclear strikes don't exist.


Ultimately I think it will be a self correcting problem, but there is going to be an extremely long period of absolute hell. Global warming is eventually going to cause food and water scarcity on a level that will wipe out a huge percentage of the Earths population. Then the Earth will recover from there being fewer humans.

If in 3000 years we discover humans were completely wiped out to the last person I would be pretty surprised.


I agree that human extinction is very unlikely on anything like historical timespans. Maybe in a few million years, like any other species.

I do think there's a decent chance of civilizational collapse in the near to medium term. It seems like everything is getting very fragile. So much economic activity revolves around extremely sophisticated machines with many critical components that are manufactured in just a few locations, sometimes a single location. A major war could shatter that, or climate change could push us over a tipping point where those capabilities can no longer be maintained, or it might just be a cascading random breakdown due to the modern economy being so complicated.

If it happens, then I'm very pessimistic about the ability to ever come back from it. With all the easily accessible fossil fuels gone, getting industry going again is going to be a really tall order. So humanity might survive a long time, but it may consist of life the way it was in prehistory.



Agree, this is how excesses always get corrected in nature.

There are people that believe the warming, but don't believe it matters because the Earth used to be much hotter at some point in the past so it is a natural cycle. Yet they fail to realize that humans didn't exist then so there is no good reason to believe an Earth that hot can support human life.

Capitalism really is like a disease of the mind. The idea that you absolutely have to and there are no alternatives to extracting as much wealth from a system as possible.

It's always calories in and calories out. The idea is that intermittent fasting makes you less hungry over time and thus you take in less calories.

If they had their test subjects eat the same amount to see if intermittent fasting metabolized food better then it seems obvious that there would be little to no difference.


My SO did IF and strict calorie counting for around 2 weeks to a momth, and it drastically reduced their appetite to something more akin to a normal level. Now, they can barely finish a large meal at McDonald's without leftovers.

They've cut quite a bit of weight since then and mostly have just focused on keeping their appetite low, and eating healthier more fibrous meals in general.


But infinite population growth is unsustainable so it had to come to an equilibrium eventually. Maybe we overshot the maximum comfortable population by a bit and we are going to rebound for awhile.

Also an economy that requires an infinitely growing population feels like a pyramid scheme which is also an unsustainable system.


> But infinite population growth is unsustainable so it had to come to an equilibrium eventually.

Or not. It could be oscillatory and humanity could cyclically reverse-decimate itself while the descendants of the survivors get to enjoy millennia of the fun part of the pyramid scheme.

The big losers are whoever is part of the "perish in a holocaust" generations, and probably the first couple bootstrapper generations afterwards.


> But infinite population growth is unsustainable

Only if we don't explore and colonize the stars. From what we know, the universe is infinite.


How many years/generations are you willing to spend on a ship in the middle of space? Remember, Biodome didn't work. Are you going to join that prison for the off chance of your progeny occupying a land that we haven't even discovered yet?

And, before you suggest it, no, there will never be faster-than-light travel, and even relativistic travel is super unlikely.


The generation ship genre of science fiction is very interesting to me, but I've never read one that didn't seem absolutely horrifying. I don't think it is a realistic option. Especially if we aren't even capable of stabilizing our "closed system" known as Earth. A generation ship would be the same problem but 100 times more difficult.


Crypto should have stayed a silly tech demo that nerds used to trade with eachother for pizza.


The how would Epstein-esque pedo's and bad state actors transact?


It doesn't seem fundamentally different from a PC having multiple logins that are accessed from different passwords. Hasn't this been a solved problem for decades?


Apple's hardware business model incentivizes only supporting one user per device.

Android has supported multiple users per device for years now.


You can have a multiuser system but that doesn't solve this particular issue. If they log in to what you claim to be your primary account and see browser history that shows you went to msn.com 3 months ago, they aren't going to believe it's the primary account.


My browser history is cleared every time I close it.

It's actually annoying because every site wants to "remember" the browser information, and so I end up with hundreds of browsers "logged in". Or maybe my account was hacked and that's why there's hundreds of browsers logged in.


Multi-user has been solved for decades.

Multi-user that plausibly looks like single-user to three letter agencies?

Not even close.


Doesn't having standard multi-user functionality automatically create the plausible deniability? If they tried so hard to create an artificial plausible deniability that would be more suspicious than normal functionality that just gets used sometimes.


What needs to be plausibly denied is the existence of a second user account, because you're not going to be able to plausibly deny that the account belongs to you when it resides on the phone found in your pocket.


How about we just make a giant heatsink that reaches into space instead. Then we can cool the whole planet. Coming up with crazy ideas is cheap, but the logistics are obviously impractical.


Look into radiative cooling. Basically this, but more practical. Several companies working on it: https://www.skycoolsystems.com/


I don't quite believe this.

Is it really better than just using solar panels to run a heat pump?


> Our core innovation is a radiative cooling material that we’ve combined with a panel system to improve the efficiency of any vapor-compression based cooling system

A heat pump is a “ vapor-compression based cooling system” so that tech is an addition-to not an instead-of.

Whether it’s better probably depends on how expensive the additional efficiency is in practice.

> SkyCool’s Panels save 2x – 3x as much energy as a solar panel generates given the same area.

So if you’re area constrained maybe.


That's very hard to believe. Radiative cooling is really bad compared to any kind of fan in front of aluminum fins.

Air itself is an isolator, there is a reason you need to shove in fresh air to take on more energy from the heat source.


This looks like it depends on the outside air to cool the coolant. "Radiative" can mean that too, not just IR radiation.


We had one. It was that sulphur used in shipping fuel.


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