I’ve been told that Artemis Fowl in the books is actually a nice and smart person. In the movie he comes across as an arrogant dick for a larger part.

Which is likely true, but kinda weird to me. I do not have a tendency to select the movies I watch based on the actors. But I assume that isn’t true for most folks. I mean apparently.

Nah it doesn’t. He is being a dick. You probably can Google that. He missed the point of the entire topic. Nobody was positing how to remove it because this topic wasn’t about that. If someone would have asked about it in the first place people would probably have provided solutions.

It’s about it being annoying or not. Microsoft is in a market position where they can leverage their different departments to heavily upsell you on other services. They have an unfair advantage that shifts the entire market to their favor, thus making it hard for any competitor to keep up or even enter the market.

E.g. they use every service / product they have to integrate Bing, they artificially limit the use of their chat bot to Microsoft Edge, they show Bing advertisements when you visit their competitors sites, they allow you to use Teams for free under certain conditions (if you already bought other products), they use their foot in the door with Microsoft Office / Windows go upsell you on Azure, …, Game Pass, …

I can go on and on. Some of them aren’t necessarily bad on their own. Some are. It paints a pattern of what Microsoft used to be. They actively used their position to try and create market conditions that would break their competitors or make it at least hard for them to even compete. About 15 years ago a lot of folks believed Microsoft had changed and were playing fair (in certain bounds), they invested a lot into open source and were generally a more friendly company. What we are currently witnessing is them going back to their old ways of doing things. Slowly tying everything back together. Probably under the assumption that this time the governments are sleeping and not really regulating it anymore. A lot of that is happening in the somewhat non-regulated cloud market anyways.

One thing though: I’m likely not to stop and consider looking closer at an app if I can’t judge if it’s going to be what I’m looking for. I’m not going to go over random GitHub repositories and create screenshots for their projects. So if the assumption is that the user contributes screenshots I don’t think it will ever change anything for the majority of projects.

Same. Found it to be better with some and worse work others. With some of those where it provides worse results compared to ChatGPT it just feels like it’s missing the fine tuning. It provides pretty similar results as when ChatGPT 3.5 came out a while ago. People just tend to forget about it.

It’s not very far away from injecting it into a webpage though. I feel like at this point it wouldn’t make any difference. Except on a meta level.

Just wait until they open a little popup or sidebar with bing search results every time you search on Google, DuckDuckGo or whatever competitor.

Don’t you think it’s different if Google says this on their own sites vs Microsoft showing this when visiting their competitors?

Both isn‘t good. But I feel like one of those is clearly worse.

I don’t see those as alternatives. Skype was always really buggy, sometimes it worked, other times it didn’t. Didn’t have great cross platform support and wasn’t suited for meetings without 500 - 1000 people. I used it in the past and it was always a huge pain to deal with.

Hangouts is nice for 1:1 chats, but it feels lacking. Last time I tried to have a screen share in a separate window it already failed to do so.

Discord isn’t really an enterprise tool.

Like… I don’t really want to defend Zoom, but the one thing they do just works.

What were the alternatives? One thing I can say about zoom is that it’s easy to use, barely ever has any issues and handles a huge number of participants without a sweat.

I recall having used MS Teams before. But it often wouldn’t work, had server issues and couldn’t handle large audiences well.

I’ve been using F5 in the past. Not doing that anymore though.

Correction: FOSS Android Lemmy apps. It’s missing a few.

I wish they would make their configuration better. At this point even MacOS easier in that regard. And that is saying something. I constantly find myself googling how to open the old configuration pages because it’s either impossible to find where some of the configuration options went or they don’t exist on the new UIs in the first place. It’s a real down grade. They are trying to go the MacOS route but stopped half way through. Windows 11 feels like a real downgrade compared to Windows 10.

I don’t think that’s important, given that it’s all just propaganda anyways.

TIL there are people configuring firewalls via GUIs. Okay … I‘m do that too on my private equipment because I’m lazy. But it feels wrong doing so in an enterprise context.

I mean I’ve seen a few recordings of Chinese officials calling folks abroad and making „suggestions“. That was more than just reading headlines.

But I guess you are right. It’s likely all propaganda and China is a paradise.

I mean the nice thing about the internet is that you can at least find videos documenting what the article claims. I mean sure… it could all just be propaganda. But somehow there is a little much of it from so many different sources.

But movie studios not owning their own cinemas is a very good thing. This used to be the case in the US and it was really really problematic for competition and the free market. That’s why this was introduced in the first place.

Does that mean that preventing direct sales of cars is a good thing as well?

It’s also about the people though. Been living in the south for some time. Hard to talk to people, even harder to make friends, very rural for the most part. I even would describe a city like Stuttgart as rural. At work people approached me and said „hey you also aren’t from the south right? I noticed“ and were happy to have someone to chitchat with.

Just my own experience… I’m very happy to have made the decision to move away again.

Maybe it’s easy if one isn’t a German since there are kind of expat communities? I don’t know.

While it wasn’t entirely automatic they’ve showed ads for it in Instagram that easily fooled you into assuming, that the only way you can continue using Instagram was by creating a Threads Account.