Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-29:/2402644] "RP2350 A4, RP2354, and a New Hacking Challenge"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-28:/2402376] "Windows 11 is a minefield of micro-aggressions in the shipping lane of progressl"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-24:/2401424] "Efficient Computer's Electron E1 CPU"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-22:/2400766] "A Professor’s Search for the MingKwai, a Lost Chinese Typewriter"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-21:/2400386] "Vibe coding service Replit deleted user’s production database, faked data, told fibs galore"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-21:/2400437] "NIH limits scientists to six applications per year"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-21:/2400421] "An artificially complex XML schema as a lock-in tool"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-22:/2400779] "MakeShift: Security Analysis of Shimano Di2 Wireless Gear Shifting in Bicycles"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-18:/2399996] "Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with a VIC-20, an Abacus, and a Dog"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-15:/2399026] "Marc Andreessen Is a Traitor"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-08:/2397262] "GlobalFoundries to Acquire MIPS"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-04:/2396489] "Nvidia won, we all lost"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-04:/2396473] "Ubuntu 25.10 to drop support for effectively all existing RISC-V hardware, focuses on future RISC-V hardware instead"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-03:/2396128] "AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-03:/2396110] "Surveillance Used by a Drug Cartel"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-02:/2395852] "Why The Latest Linux Kernel Won’t Run On Your 486 And 586 Anymore"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-01:/2395685] "Donkey Kong Country 2 and open bus"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-29:/2395064] "Wayback: experimental layer to run X desktop environments on Wayland"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-29:/2395059] "“I want a good parallel computer”"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-27:/2394461] "Apple Just Patented an Image Sensor with 20 Stops of Dynamic Range"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-26:/2394371] "Microsoft is moving antivirus providers out of the Windows kernel"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-26:/2394230] "Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-25:/2394054] "Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-24:/2393676] "Microsoft extends free Windows 10 security updates into 2026"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-24:/2393476] "Magic Lantern Software for Canon Cameras Is Back"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-18:/2392274] "Senate passes GENIUS Act—criticized as gifting Trump ample opportunity to grift"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-18:/2392074] "Scientists once hoarded pre-nuclear steel; now we’re hoarding pre-AI content"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-18:/2392100] "Keeping Snap and Crackle under Control with Prunt Printer Firmware"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-17:/2391828] "KiCad and Wayland Support"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-16:/2391596] "Retrobootstrapping Rust for some reason"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-16:/2391591] "Reddit user surprised when 1960s computer panel emerged from collapsed family garage"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-12:/2390501] "CP/M 2.2, CP/M 3.0, CP/M-86, Concurrent CP/M-86 listings by Digital Research"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-08:/2389388] "Windows 7: a 2025 perspective (rose-tinted or not)"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-07:/2389179] "Bill Atkinson has died"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-06:/2388900] "Dystopian tales of that time when I sold out to Google"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-06:/2388826] "Switch 2 rooted on day 1"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-05:/2388731] "New book uncovers radical networks that existed before the internet"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-04:/2388405] "Endangered classic Mac plastic color returns as 3D-printer filament"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-04:/2388311] "The IRS Tax Filing Software TurboTax Is Trying to Kill Just Got Open Sourced"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-03:/2388022] "Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-05-29:/2386728] "New Guide! USB Chording Keyset #3D Printing #AdafruitLearningSystem"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-05-27:/2386129] "Ransomware attack on MATLAB dev MathWorks – licensing center still locked down"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-05-26:/2386011] "Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-05-23:/2385466] "College Board keeps apologizing for screwing up digital SAT and AP tests"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-05-22:/2385014] "Deadlocked Supreme Court Rejects Bid for Religious Charter School in Oklahoma"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-05-22:/2385087] "Nvidia’s RTX 5060 review debacle should be a wake-up call for gamers and reviewers"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-05-22:/2385080] "Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-05-21:/2384758] "By default, Signal doesn't recall"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-05-20:/2384477] "Under RFK Jr., COVID shots will only be available to people 65+, high-risk groups"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-05-18:/2383916] "KDE is finally getting a native virtual machine manager called “Karton”"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-05-12:/2382103] "US, China agree to roll back tariffs – but only for 90 days"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-05-12:/2382021] "US Copyright Office found AI companies sometimes breach copyright. Next day its boss was fired"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-05-06:/2380536] "Testing different temperature sensors for a DIY thermostat"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-05-05:/2380199] "Signal clone used by Trump official stops operations after report it was hacked"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-05-05:/2379948] "Matrix-vector multiplication implemented in off-the-shelf DRAM for Low-Bit LLMs"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-05-04:/2379884] "Design for 3D-Printing"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-05-04:/2379773] "Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development"
Article note: I did the OOTB experience with a new consumer-class (Ideapad) laptop running Windows 11 in the last few days.
It's _unimaginably_ bad.
The "Welcome" process is a series of updates, followed by clicking through a fire-hose of unwanted features like "No, No, What?! No! No. Never. No. Gotta fix that. Where did they hide? No." followed by another series of updates that happen partially in the background and make the computer wonky during fist use.
Some of the preinstalled crapware or updates or a bad vendor image or something on this example self-destructed so badly after a few hours it required a reinstall. Repair attempts involved repeatedly typing out a long encryption unlock key that can be extracted from Microsoft online so does little against a real adversary, somehow capturing most of the downsides of FDE and no encryption at once, after which it would do nothing (because somehow it corrupted its ESP?) and repeat. Windows media is now apparently twitchy about how it is imaged and you get _bootable but buggy_ media if you just image an iso to a flash drive like we've done for decades, so you have to make your Windows media with a piece of Windows-only media creation software. I had to inject drivers (randomly downloaded from the internet, albeit at least from Lenovo) from an extra flash drive by bringing up a command prompt with a magic key combination to run an installer during install to get it online so it could finish the install... I haven't had to do that shit with a Linux installer in like 20 years.
Unless you're _very_ attentive, once installed your user storage is on OneDrive in a way that will unexpectedly upload everything you touch to Microsoft then start breaking the instant you use any meaningful amount of storage in your user folder.
It's not rose-tinted glasses, Windows 7 was peak Windows. Windows 8 was a flail toward things the rapidly expanding mobile market were doing, trying to catch the already departed bus by copying it, Windows 10 was just-tolerable because they hadn't figured out how to maximally enshittify, and 11 is an aggressive enshittification engine that happens to boot on top of an NT kernel.
For compatibility and not-being-instantly-added-to-a-botnet reasons, you probably shouldn't try to daily Windows 7... but you shouldn't try to daily Windows 11 either. No wonder my students' machines are always fucked up.
Quite often, I wonder how much nostalgia plays part in our perception of past events. Luckily, with software, you can go “back” and retest it, and so there’s no need for any illusions and misconceptions. To wit, I decided to reinstall and try Windows 7 again (as a virtual machine, but still), to see whether my impressions of the dross we call “modern” software today are justified.
The conclusion is that, yes, you can still get quite far today with Windows 7, and I honestly don’t fault anyone for longing for those days. Windows 7 sits dead smack in the middle between the dreadfulness of Windows XP and pre-patches Vista on one extreme, and the ad-infested, “AI”-slop that are Windows 10 and 11. Its Aero look also happens to be experiencing somewhat of a revival, with both Apple and Google borrowing heavily from it for their latest software releases. Transparent blurred glass is making a comeback, but I doubt the current crop of designers at Apple and Google will be able to top just how nice Aero Glass looked in Windows 7.
Still, I don’t think you should be using an out-of-support version of Windows for anything more than retrocomputing and as a curiosity, for obvious reasons we’re all aware of. With the end of support for Windows 10 – still used by two-thirds of Window users – approaching quickly, a lot of people are going to have to make the same choice that fans of Windows 7 made years ago: keep using what I like, risks and all, or move on to what I don’t like, but is at least maintained and supported? That is, assuming you can even make that choice in the first place, since in the current economic uncertainty, most definitely cannot.
Maybe the Windows world will dodge a bullet, and the circumstances force Microsoft to extend support for Windows 10, like they did with Office applications. Let’s see if they blink, again.