DarkThoughts

Eroding / taking away user agency. It’s always little bits they chip away but over the time those chips amount to a huge cut off edge of things you cannot do anymore, or only through very convoluted and potentially breaking third party tweaks & tools. Every Windows installation ended up with a growing shit-list of things to do. Disable this, tweak that, download tool X, Y & Z just to further disable & tweak shit, and whoop-de-doo several hours have already passed when you’re finally “done”. Then, in the middle of doing shit, Windows update! “No! Go away!” 10 minutes later… “Hey, I think you forgot about me?” - “NO, I UPDATE WHEN I SHUT THE DAMN PC DOWN, NOT IN THE MIDDLE OF THINGS! GO AWAY!” … “BUT HAVE YOU HEAR ABOUT OUR LORD AND SAVIOR, THE WINDOWS UPDATE?! OH AND BY THE WAY, WE RE-ENABLED OUR SPYING OPTIONS AGAIN AND WILL SEND ALL THE UNSENT DATA BEFORE YOU CAN DISABLE IT AGAIN!”

At some point I just realized that using Windows became more of a hassle than using Linux. And when you finally do the switch, you suddenly realize how fucking awesome it is that your OS is not constantly nagging you, not constantly spying on you, not constantly fighting you, not constantly changing its configuration to re-enable the things you purposefully disabled. I finally have an operating system again that does what I want it to do, a system that respects my privacy, as well as me as a user.

The biggest joke is that the LLM in Windows is running locally, it uses your hardware and not some big external server farm. But you can bet your ass that they still use it to data harvest the shit out of you.