I think Windows Defender is a fantastic line of defence and it’s definitely better than installing garbage from Trend, McAfee etc. That said, Lenovo, HP, MSI, Dell etc still preinstall crapware on their new machines from Norton or their ilk threatening that my machine is “at risk” if I don’t pay them money.

I wouldn’t turn it off unless I knew that I was only installing games from Steam. But if I did I think performance would improve. A game from Steam could still contain malware so you have to exercise some common sense. Even on SteamOS a game could be malicious but since its containerized the scope for damage is limited but not necessarily impossible to break out.

I remember watching some fox channels with a lot of rescue foxes including one called Finnegan. Was that her? So sad that anyone would harass somebody like that.

All modern versions of Windows will have Microsoft’s Defender antivirus/malware protection turned on by default. That means you incur a penalty every time a file is accessed from disk, or a process is launched, or a library loaded, or sockets are used or certain APIs are called.

It’s better than most 3rd party AV software but it’s still a performance overhead that could be turned off.

Very unlikely that has anything to do with it.

Drivers and “other stuff” have more impact than the OS itself. I would expect if you installed Windows 11 from a USB stick onto this device that it probably puts performance into “balanced” mode for example, fires up antivirus/malware protection, runs a bunch of esoteric services, throws in a WHQL (stable but crappy) GPU driver etc.

I think the article would have been fairer and more useful to install Windows, and optimize the life out of it and then compare performance and other factors (e.g. battery, heat, fan noise etc.)

Device made with software specifically for purpose performs better than generic machine with generic software designed to do a wide range of things. All of my machines are on Linux distros, but this just seems like a no brainer to me. It’s like years ago when the mustang had a 4.6L V8. It was the same engine used in the Ford explorer. Will the Mustang beat the Explorer to 60, of course. But the Explorer will also transport 5 people to the beach with coolers and beach gear and drive in the sand.

Exactly. I don’t think the comparison is very good here. A better article would say - how to performance tune Windows 11 on a Legion Go S for gaming and compare the results to Steam OS, which is already tuned for gaming. I expect the results would be close enough that the OS choice is less of a concern about performance than what games you want to play and any other uses you might have for the device.

I think a far more likely reason for any slow down is Lenovo’s Windows drivers suck, or Windows defaults to a power saving mode that improves battery life but impacts performance, or Windows has antivirus or some other impactful service running that they didn’t turn off. Since the article neglects to say if they tweaked Windows I have to assume they didn’t.

No love for Patchface in GoT? Creepiest jester ever.

Getting sand and bugs on their lips?

The ribbon was contentious but most people are familiar with it and it has advantages like taskcentricity and less clutter. LibreOffice has an experimental ribbon that I think should be worked on, mainstreamed and set during installation or in the settings.

UX in other areas should be improved. Lots of little annoyances add up for new users and can break their opinions. It’s not hard to look over the UI and see things which have no business being there, or should only appear in certain contexts, or could be implemented in better ways. I think the project should get some MS Office volunteers into a lab and ask them to do things and observe their problems. I’d have power Word, Excel, Powerpoint users come in and do non-trivial things they normally do and see where they trip up or even if they can do what they need.

Good evidence of astroturfing on Reddit. That Reddit took action and banned the Palantir agents only provides evidence that exposure of the op is the problem. Not evidence that Reddit acts in good faith.

A good question to ask, is what would happen if Lemmy was the victim of astroturfing. It’s decentralized for starters and groups might not even reside in the same place on the fediverse. Also I expect Reddit has monitoring, analytics and tools that could flag behaviour rather than somebody having to go through logs trying to find patterns.

I think Lemmy and other federated platforms have escaped having to deal with these issues simply because someone attempting to astroturf will do it on the biggest platform. So Lemmy escapes not by any technical or administrative virtue but by being smallfry.

An LLM is an ordered series of parameterized / weighted nodes which are fed a bunch of tokens, and millions of calculations later result generates the next token to append and repeat the process. It’s like turning a handle on some complex Babbage-esque machine. LLMs use a tiny bit of randomness (“temperature”) when choosing the next token so the responses are not identical each time.

But it is not thinking. Not even remotely so. It’s a simulacrum. If you want to see this, run ollama with the temperature set to 0 e.g.

ollama run gemma3:4b
>>> /set parameter temperature 0
>>> what is a leaf

You will get the same answer every single time.

I think if I were any non-US government I’d be very seriously thinking about not using Microsoft software at this time, particularly if it connects to the cloud. And that goes for companies with government contracts, or merely companies who are potential targets of industrial espionage.

That said, LibreOffice needs to tap the EU for funding to broaden its features and also improve the UX because it’s not great tbh. It can be extremely frustrating using LibreOffice after using MS Office, in part because the UI is so different, noisy with esoteric actions, and very unrefined compared to its MS counterpart. That needs funding and to get to the point that somebody can pick up LibreOffice for the first time and not be surprised or stuck by the way it behaves.

It’s even worse when AI soaks up some project whose APIs are constantly changing. Try using AI to code against jetty for example and you’ll be weeping.

All AIs are the same. They’re just scraping content from GitHub, stackoverflow etc with a bunch of guardrails slapped on to spew out sentences that conform to their training data but there is no intelligence. They’re super handy for basic code snippets but anyone using them anything remotely complex or nuanced will regret it.

Hardly surprising. Llms aren’t -thinking- they’re just shitting out the next token for any given input of tokens.

It’s was her certainty in a fucked up belief set that makes her like RFK jr.

She allowed the sick to suffer and die because it was god’s will they should. She fed and housed the sick for her own salvation but made them suffer for theirs. What did not occur to her, is to actually treat those in her care, or separate the ones with communicable diseases, or offer palliative care or other relief. People died in squalid conditions while Mother Theresa was being feted by dictators and raking in millions.

So that’s why I compared RFK jr to her. They have certainty to their beliefs and they will not allow the evidence of their own eyes or those around shake that belief from them. And it is other people who suffer and die because of it.

RFK jr reminds me of Mother Theresa - steadfastly certain of his rightness and while perpetrating the most terrible suffering through his actions. He is the worst kind of evil - stubborn and blind to the demonstrable suffering and harm he is causing.