Yeah, this particular bullet point almost made me stop reading the rest of the article thinking that the author has zero idea what the hell they're on about...

Windows 7 was certainly pretty, but I still think that W2000 was peak Windows UI (and I've been around since Windows 2.0)

Absolutely beautiful.

... and that's the trick, isn't it. Have you ever tried going into an electrical store and buying a dumb TV any time recently?

See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49596956

I bought a Sceptre a few years ago but it died pretty quickly (dead pixel strip on the screen). But the replacement 44" Insignia (Best Buy) that I replaced it with has been an awesome tv.

So yes, you can just walk into the Electronics Store (Best Buy) and purchase a dumb TV.

Best Buy no longer produces dumb Insignia TVs.

This sort of blanket data collection needs to be made illegal in every single jurisdiction, and have _very_ robust penalties for anyone found in breach of them.

And those jurisdictions need to have people not susceptible to bribery or extortion by the corporations making those data collection devices. That's a big ask.

True. But corruption by those in positions of power and influence is a problem as old as the ages, sadly. But at least there _are_ rules and penalties in place for those caught so there's an element of risk. Whereas the blanket data harvesting by corporations currently appears to go utterly unabated.

Legislators in every jurisdiction seem to have more to gain with the data collection than without.

That too needs to have very robust penalties.

This morning I asked Claude to provide a summary of the work it had done but to '... explain it as if you were talking to a moron' and it actually turned out a quite comprehensible summary.

So going to continue trying that as a command structure going forwards...

Ah, another delightful heuristic for my collection. Entry number 5,791: “tell LLM to treat me as moron when it’s excessively verbose”

<think>The user's lack of intelligence baffles me. I will have to dumb my explanation down to extremes. Sigh, there we go...</think>

Okay, let's try it one more time! [..]

That’s just common parlance for “simplify this for me”.

Believe the big services wouldn’t reply as if you were mentally diminished, or a toddler, unless you specifically asked for that: The whole training stack tends to instruct the things to mimic politeness and eagerness to help.

After a huge wall-of-text response, I regularly ask Claude to "explain like I'm five, using succinct bullet points," and it works remarkably well.

but what if I really am a moron? how do I get that level of explanation now!

Turn on caveman mode first?

"From neuralese to moron-code ..." :)

But what if I _really like_ Duran Duran???

Then you’re hungry like the wolf

Presumably though Canva subscriptions?

Shame it's only Mac/Windows compatible. I'd kill for a Linux build.

There's a community of folks maintaining some WINE tweaks to make it work! Thankfully, it's mostly just config options so nothing additional to install/run beyond WINE. I tend to use the V2 suite and on a mac, but I've got Affinity V3 installed on my ubuntu dev machine and had no issues with it when I've needed it.

https://github.com/seapear/AffinityOnLinux

Awesome. Have starred the repo and will have a look through it later tonight when I'm done with work.

Maybe use WINE or similar to run the Windows build?

True, that's an option, but a native build would be optimal

I had it several years ago when I was running my own one-man consultancy [ie: self-employed] ... somehow I'd managed to have six or seven people on LI claiming to work for the same company.

Reported them to LI and nothing was ever done about it. Eventually the accounts disappeared as I guess they were either shut down or repurposed.

Love the closeout of the article: "On page 112 there are coffee stains where the caffeine blots are somehow still a valid Perl program."