In 2009, Microsoft made it a focus of the Windows 7 user experience guidelines to reduce pointless notifications. They point out notifications like the classic “There are unused icons on your desktop” as being in the Windows XP Hall of Shame™. Seriously, it’s in there: https://learn.microsoft.com/windows/win32/uxguide/mess-notif

In 2026, Windows interrupts you to ask if you want to clean up printers you haven’t used in a while. The intent is unclear (which printers?), there are too many choices, and it stays visible until you click an option.

For a good while, Microsoft were limping their way to good UX, and this doc was finally a clear set of guidelines. Now, it feels like they’ve slipped back into the Windows XP Hall of Shame™ era, and any good UX they happen to come up with is an accident.

#windows #windows11

Learn to self host now. While you still can.

Age verification is spreading like cancer.

First they came for adults site and social media; now they are already discussing about putting VPNs and app stores behind #AgeVerfication 🇬🇧🇦🇺

What’s sold as “online safety” means #surveillance via IDs checks or face scans.

Privacy & anonymity protect journalists, whistleblowers & activists.

We must fight against age verification - or the free web dies!

👉 More: https://tuta.com/blog/age-verification-kills-anonymity

dying laughing here:

https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/16750

Duckduckgo has a survey for pro/anti-AI and I cackled so hard at the (current) results

https://voteyesornoai.com

The server will now go down for maintenance.

The server is now back online.

Rumoredly, YouTube is getting rid of custom ".ytt" subtitles from their website. Here's a quick shell script if you need to archive them in a few formats for all languages:

#!/bin/sh
for i in vtt ttml srv3 json3; do
    yt-dlp --write-subs --all-subs --sub-format "$i" --skip-download --compat-options no-live-chat "$1"
done

I really wish we could get a secure replacement for email already, one that’s incompatible and not just bolting on and becoming an optional feature by necessity.

And SMS.

And phone networks.

And credit card networks.

And

Remember, we are causing the AI boom to falter because we keep using the term "slop":

https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/05/microsofts-nadella-wants-us-to-stop-thinking-of-ai-as-slop/

This is not very nice of us and is costing Microslop, and its slopholders and inveslops, real money.

RE: https://social.vmbrasseur.com/@vmbrasseur/115922995190919975

Mozilla wants your input. Here's mine:

Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:

1: Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
2: Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
3: There is no 3.

Mozilla should have NOTHING to do with AI. Nobody wants it. Stop forcing AI into every corner of every project because your VC-brained management have completely lost the plot.

https://mozillafoundation.tfaforms.net/201

so ai is going great

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/20/pwc_ai_ceo_survey/

LIQUID GLASS? MORE LIKE LIQUID ASS! WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? THIS IS AN ABOMINATION OF MANKIND!

Just pointing out that a US parent company owns the European sovereign cloud 🙃

@vkc@linuxmom.net a point in favour of the association between the sparkle emoji and generative AI: gnome's new icon set contains a sparkle icon called ai-slop, which is also tagged with generative and bullshit

The platform will have stricter privacy and data protection standards than other social media platforms. When it opens to the general public, they'll need to provide photo ID to post on the platform

How can you out these two sentences next to each other and still take yourself seriously?

https://www.pcmag.com/news/w-emerges-as-x-alternative-aimed-at-combating-systemic-disinformation

Il CEO di Microsoft avverte che dobbiamo "fare qualcosa di utile" con l'intelligenza artificiale o perderanno il "permesso sociale" per consumare elettricità.

I lavoratori dovrebbero apprendere competenze di intelligenza artificiale e le aziende dovrebbero utilizzarla perché è un "amplificatore cognitivo", sostiene Satya Nadella.

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/microsoft-ceo-warns-that-we-must-do-something-useful-with-ai-or-theyll-lose-social-permission-to-burn-electricity-on-it/

@aitech

@Tubsta@soc.feditime.com @emaste@mastodon.social

We are not sure where you folks are getting your info, but it is dead wrong.

FreeBSD users will still be able to boot into Plasma with any other login manager that works on FreeBSD, including SDDM, which is upstream from Plasma anyway.

Linux users will just have one more option.

Plasma has no hard systemd dependencies.

@kanazir@mastodon.social @emaste@mastodon.social @kde@floss.social The larger problem we have is that when we (KDE) ask for help for supporting the alternate paths, nobody steps up to help. If nobody shows up, what are we supposed to do?

The DrKonqi situation happened because nobody showed up when @sitter@fosstodon.org reached out and asked for assistance to solve this for those.

Supporting these codepaths isn't free. It requires expertise, maintainership, and continuous productive feedback to keep things working. We want to, but we can't do it alone!