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Be better if there was a global "Disable AI" option easily found in the settings that is a flag everywhere.

Some of us (including very much me) simply do not want Copilot/AI anything and playing whackamole with settings is annoying but we'll do it anyway and it leaves a bad taste.

Since it's the software equivalent of been in a filing cabinet in the basement behind a door that has a sign saying "Beware the Leopard".

In reality it's a moot point, I disable AI features and Windows is a gloried steamos box for me at this point, I do my actual computing booted into Linux and have for decades.


This annoys me with Apple devices, iCloud and all it's related backups of..well everything are on by default and it doesn't ask at any point in the setup of the device.

You have to then go into settings -> icloud and disable the main one and then like 30 individual ones.

There should be a big toggle at the top that says "Disable All Cloud Backups" they can feel free to throw in a warning.


This is just... not true? I'm curious what you mean, because iCloud cannot be on by default since it requires you to set up an iCloud account. You're asked to sign into iCloud during device setup, which you can decline.

Do you mean that, after consenting to and signing into iCloud, all of iCloud's feature are enabled by default?


I don't disagree. But defaults are important, and you are in a tiny minority with wanting to disable iCloud. 90% of people using Apple phones want or expect things to be magically backed up for them

Not saying they shouldn't have that, Apple feels it necessary to ask if I want Siri, if I want a Dark theme and if I want to give them payment details during device setup, I feel like "Do you also want us to back all your data up to a remote computer" could be on that list.

The phone backup is one toggle. The 30 individual ones are for syncing data for apps.

If you aren’t using iCloud for any of this, why use it at all? I believe you can still use an iPhone without an iCloud account, can’t you? Without any cloud sync, I’m not sure what the value is, just sign out.

I’m sure you’d lose the ability to download apps, but most of those are also using iCloud to sync data.

For what it’s worth, Apple seems fairly decent about not opting users in to new stuff. When they released Messages syncing via iCloud, I had to explicitly turn it on for my various devices. The same was true for several other things.


> If you aren’t using iCloud for any of this, why use it at all? I believe you can still use an iPhone without an iCloud account, can’t you?

Nope, You have to have an apple account tied to a physical phone number or you can't sign in on the device or use it at all and they opt you in to the 5GB free plan and yes, the 30 sliders is apps but that doesn't alter the fact that I want to be asked before they exfiltrate my data, technology should exist to serve the user and part of that (at least in my opinion) is respecting privacy.

Yes you can sign out and you can untoggle the boxes but that is rather my point, it's opt out not opt in.

I don't want default exfiltration of data from my devices to a faceless American corporation without that been my choice.


I daily my work MacBook without an Apple account or phone number. And no, it’s not in ABM, or any other MDE. App Store is unavailable because of the missing account, but it does not prevent me from using the device like you’re claiming.

An iPhone with no apps is pretty hard to use. A mac doesn't need the app store, but when I last set one up, I needed to install the devtools from the appstore to bootstrap macports or whatever, so that pushed me into an account.

> Also, far-right parties in Europe seem much more dangerous than the right in the US.

Our far right parties are dangerous because they might get elected at some point, US far right parties are dangerous because they already did.


Agreed, which is why The Culture (series) isn't cyberpunk but The Polity (by Neal Asher) kinda skirts the line, in many ways they are similar except resource inequality still exists on a wide/policy scale in the latter.


I'm pro-EU and my country is no longer in the EU (annoyingly).

It's not perfect but it's better than the alternatives and we really need a power bloc (even if currently only economic) that isn't the US and China.

Alternatives to US big tech are always welcome.


Part of the reason why we have high electricity costs (here in the UK) is that we peg the price to gas generation, on the face of it people complain about that but the higher price allows investments in renewables to make sense on an RoI PoV, effectively it's a subsidy to build out renewables at a higher rate than would otherwise be the case.

Electricity prices are high in the UK but there is a net benefit to it at least some ways, as always the devil is in the details, all the details.


Isn't that just an excuse to justify the scam? Texas has very low electricity prices and at the same time a growing share of renewables.


Texas has some different choices in their electricity markets but they use the same pay-as-clear marginal pricing system that the above poster thinks is a secret UK plan to subsidise renewables. In reality it is the standard way to set the market price of commodities.


Texas famously had massive spikes in electricty prices and a near failure of the grid because of their electricity market structure, so it's not all sunshine and rainbows.


Been a while since I looked at a map but I don't remember us invading Texas and annexing them as part of His Majesties territories...


Well it kinda was, until the locals got uppity and threw their tea in the harbour.


Texas wasn't part of the US at that time.

It was annexed in the mid-19th century, they abused the Yorkshire Gold way before that.


That's why I said kinda. Texas is part of the United States. The United States was the group that got uppity.

If 2 European powers had a war over a territory that is now part of a third country we would still describe the war as being between the 2 original countries. Even if other territories that weren't part of those nations at the time now are.

But yes, on the other hand we are talking specifically about Texas so maybe you're right.

On the 3rd hand the chance to get superior with the colonies should never be passed up.


I suspect many AI startups will be on that list in 2-5 years.


An accurate summation of humanity over the last few thousand years.


Check you have MCR (Memory Context Restore) enabled, otherwise you train the RAM way more often than you need to (every boot).


You need to enable MCR (which trains the memory once and caches the result for (iirc) 30 days) otherwise yeah, booting is horribly slow, even the 64GB I have can take several minutes but with MCR it boots basically instantly.

Some motherboards have it off by default.


Memory training seems to be getting faster with each bios update. In 2024 when I upgraded to AM5, 64GB memory training took like 15 minutes. Now the same setup takes about a minute when it needs to retrain, then near instant with MCR (Windows 11 takes significantly longer to load than the POST process).


From my comment:

> The 30 minute boot time could be worked around by enabling the (off-by-default) memory context restore option in BIOS


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