Cricket [he/him]

Now comic books are kinda out of date, they used to assume you couldn’t be that evil and say you are while no one stops you from your plan while you talk about it non stop.

I don’t have an answer for your first two questions, but I hear you on your comic book take.

Got it, thanks for the clarification.

Thiel’s Antichrist scenario is one in which a unified government suppresses technology to impose order, or armageddon, wherein AI takes over and ushers in the end of the world.

Another attendee said the talk revealed a less well-known, more scholarly side of Thiel.

Scholarly, lol. What is it that makes people think that billionaires are more intelligent than they really are, while those billionaires are actually going off the deep end?

Ten years is a very long time for support. If you need support past that length, you need a different OS.

I strongly disagree. Ten years should be the bare minimum required. Windows used to support hardware way longer than 10 years and probably more than 15, until Windows 11 came out.

The older hardware gets the harder it is to keep supporting it. Case in point, there reason you can’t get TLS 1.2 that pretty much every site now requires onto Windows 95 era machine is the underlying hardware cannot keep up with the required computational needs to support that encryption. And if you happened to install Windows 95 onto modern hardware, the number of changes to the OS to get access to the underlying hardware is pretty much an upgrade to Windows 7.

Windows 95 is a bad example since it’s a 30 year old OS. It’s a completely different era with different OS architecture and different OS environment. Let’s instead use an example of an OS from the time frame being discussed: Windows 7, released a little over 15 years ago. There’s very little reason why a computer that was made since Windows 7 was released shouldn’t be able to run Windows 11. I think that this is a profit maximization decision on Microsoft’s part (less hardware support, less development and testing cost). They basically said screw the customers and screw the environment.

would this not be a good idea for a start up company that recycle computer parts?

I really don’t think so. Computer recycling already seems to be a low profit business, as evidenced by there not being any large companies that do it (that I’m aware of). This number of computers flooding the market would probably make it even less profitable. Sure, it may be profitable for some small businesses, but nothing on the scale required to address the problem.

Windows used to support really old hardware, I believe more than 15 years old until they introduced the new requirements for particular CPU models and TPM 2.0 chips. If anything, I feel that 15 years is too short. iPads and Hadoop have nothing to do with PC hardware.

Hmmm, I don’t agree. The trend is in the opposite direction. Microsoft Windows used to have a larger market share and supported hardware indefinitely. Now that their market share has shrunk, they are also limiting support for older hardware. This only shows correlation, not causation, but it does show that more competition has not improved the issue and that we need laws to do that instead. MacOS, the primary competitor to Microsoft Windows which also has Microsoft Office available, only supports their hardware for 6-8 years as well.

Edit: just to add, if anything, this actually shows that more competition and reduced market share probably increases the pressure to cut support for older hardware because it probably becomes less profitable to do so.

I kind of wondered the same thing in the past, but the other day I read an LA Times article that illustrated the extent of the problem of water loss (not particularly related to data centers although we know they contribute to it). The main problem with evaporating water seems to be that it was water that we could have used which ended up in the ocean instead.

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-09-03/global-drying-groundwater-depletion

I infer that evaporation is worse than flushing it down the drain, so to speak, because if it were flushed you would at least be able to treat and recover much of it using much less energy than recovering it from the ocean. So it sounds like evaporation is largely (but obviously not completely) a one-way street, especially in arid regions, since only a tiny portion of the evaporated water would come back there as rain.

I bought a used PC specifically to run Windows 11. It had a 6 year old AMD Ryzen CPU which turned out not to be supported so I returned it.

That’s worse than Apple. If hardware could run Windows 10 it absolutely could also run Windows 11 if it weren’t for completely arbitrary requirements.

You forgot to mention the great new start menu feature that makes it spike the CPU when you merely click it!

The biggest problem Microsoft has is that the biggest selling feature of Windows is its ability to be backwards compatible and run on older hardware.

Absolutely, a gazillion percent this. My main desktop doesn’t have TPM. I bought a cheap micro form factor Lenovo that I thought would run Win 11, but it didn’t. It had a 6-year old CPU and that wasn’t supported by Windows 11. 6 years old. I realized then that this eliminated one major reason to get a Windows PC over a Mac. I think that both Mac and Linux are going to make huge gains in market-share in the next months and years.

You can just bypass those hardware requirements fairly easily.

Microsoft specifically warns people not to bypass Windows 11 requirements:

Installing Windows 11 on a device that doesn’t meet Windows 11 minimum system requirements isn’t recommended. If Windows 11 is installed on ineligible hardware, your device won’t receive support from Microsoft, and you should be comfortable assuming the risk of running into compatibility issues.

Devices that don’t meet these system requirements might malfunction due to compatibility or other issues. Additionally, these devices aren’t guaranteed to receive updates, including but not limited to security updates.

Roku used to have something called “private” channels that you could add through the web, but it seems that they removed that functionality a few years ago: https://community.roku.com/discussions/apps-and-viewing/unable-to-add-a-private-channel/1049374

There used to be several porn apps/channels you could install this way, basically simple front-ends to pornhub, etc. I don’t recall what else used to be available.

Is this also the end of Software-Defined Radio in Europe?