> There are ways to robustly clean this up analytically but it is largely beyond the capabilities of current tech stacks.

Can you expand on that? Even just conceptually that sounds really hard, how would you know whether you're measuring genuine (unexpected) changes in the environment rather than the result of (possibly sophisticated and coordinated) deliberate manipulation?

If you don't trust your measurements, and you shouldn't because all physical world measurements are proxies, the alternative is to find several unrelated and redundant proxies for "ground truth" and have them corroborate and correct each other. There is a lot of errors, bugs, noise, idiosyncratic behavior, etc degrading the data even ignoring intentional manipulation so you really should be doing this anyway.

Stitching unrelated proxies and sensing modalities into a coherent data model is a spatiotemporal graph reconstruction problem. The join predicates require non-trivial inference algorithms if you want to avoid being buried in false positives. From this you can derive an estimate of ground truth and a model of uncertainty at a point in space and time.

The model of uncertainty is dynamic and unpredictable. It is difficult to manipulate the measurement without producing data that falls outside the uncertainty model across every proxy by which someone might construct that uncertainty model. This is similar to how e.g. GPS spoofing is detected in military systems. All GPS updates must fit within a (classified) dynamic uncertainty model relative to INS; if an update falls outside the model then the GPS signal is presumed compromised and updates ignored.

At the limit, this restricts manipulation to values within the uncertainty model. If you have a lot of unrelated proxies, you can make the window of uncertainty tight enough that manipulation becomes effectively impossible. At a minimum, the adversary would need to be able to manipulate every proxy and modality feeding your uncertainty model simultaneously.

These graph, spatial, and spatiotemporal algorithms scale very poorly on traditional data infrastructure and these data models easily run into petabytes if you are stacking multiple independent data sources.

I recommend for you to read Feyerabend's Science in a Free Society.

I'm not sure I see the relevance?

Yours is a rather pedestrian dorm-room take on epistemology and relevance of the moral dimension to social progress whose flaws are addressed in longform by Feyerabend.

What a bizarre response.

I was relaying the technical details of working in these data environments based on deep, real-world operational experience in the domain. There is no "moral dimension" to it, I was describing the world as it exists.

Does Feyerabend also have an opinion on compiler flags and sorting algorithms?

There is a moral dimension, you're just choosing not to acknowledge it.

Feyerabend speaks to things that add context and nuance to the effects, consequences, and provisions of the things you've felt comfortable discussing so far.

Hence the recommendation. Your awareness could use some expanding, if I may be so blunt.

I agree. Don't have a citation now, but I remember reading that this was a copyright problem. They wanted to name it "Linux Subsystem for Windows", but apparently the Linux foundation does not allow unaffiliated projects to have a name beginning with "Linux", or something like that.

You can parse it as "Windows (Subsystem for [running] Linux)"

also bad for your product name to start with a competitors brand

The featured article.

Maybe you are saying the same thing, but couldn't that be explained better by those people being afraid to be made obsolete? Or at least, afraid if having to retrain?

This isn't new. I've seen it for decades, including in situations where no one is at risk. I don't think it's often a fear thing.

His last name sounds very close to the German word for boredom (Langeweile), that's kind of funny...

To see it as "kek" you'd have to be Alliance.

Those ads are not for workers, they're for the employers.

Not sure about the underlying reason, but I use Windows for work and the only program I've encountered in the past two years with this behavior is the Eclipse IDE. Everything else deals very well with rescaling and docking / undocking to 4k displays.

> It's a terrible long term lubricant (because it's designed to evaporate, it actually concentrates gunk and grime).

I recently read that WD40 isn't actually a lubricant but a lubricant remover. So as you write you'd use it to remove gunk but then follow it up with an actual lubricant.

On the last two bottles of WD40 I came across (im Germany) I checked the back and it indeed said that it's not a lubricant but a lubricant remover.

(Disclaimer: can't read the article past the intro where it does call it a lubricant...)

Yes, it's more correctly labelled as a solvent. Part of their marketing secret is that their product is inherently "addictive" in a way - it can loosen up things quickly but also make them seize more quickly. Which gives users a sense that they constantly need to re-apply WD-40 when most of what you are doing is cleaning up the mess of the previous application.

Just like Carmex lip balm. The stuff everyone was “addicted” to in the 90s

Two years ago I did some cleaning up and finally sorted out the gaming PC from my youth. I believe I bought it around 2007. Ran some old AMD dual core (may have been an Athlon 64 4400), still had an HDD. Installed on it was Windows Vista, which wasn't exactly a crowd favorite. So as I went to backup the final remnants of those gaming days I was flabbergasted by the snappiness of the explorer. Folders just opened instantly! So snappy, it was actually fun just navigating through all the folders. I had been expecting this PC to run at snail's pace, yet the windows experience was much better than on my desktop PC built in 2021 running Windows 10 on an NVMe drive. I have no idea how that is possible, but since then with every interaction with modern Windows there's just this tiny tinge of sadness...

HDD performance on Windows just died after some Windows 10 update. Sure, it took two minutes to boot 7 of an HDD, but once it was going, Explorer ran fine, and Firefox would run fine after that (probably cached after boot).

Same goes for day one Windows 10 (they probably didn't touch the relevant parts). I remember having to deal with a Windows 10 machine on an HDD, and it was mostly fine after it booted, but even clean installs on more recent version are just horrible. There's probably been some optimisation done which works fine on SSDs but just thrash HDDs, and HDDs as boot drives just aren't a thing anymore (within margin of error), so it didn't matter.

The fact that they've managed to throw so much bloat on top that even SSDs start struggling though, that really is something.

A major culprit is background processes that scan the drive in the background, like CompatTelRunner.exe. Works fine if you're on an SSD, but grinds an HDD to a halt. They also forgot about their own I/O prioritization API from Vista, so it also spammed I/O at Normal instead of Background priority in the early versions. Not to mention the periodic Defender scans, the Malware Removal Tool scan that runs before each major update, etc.

Similarly, Windows Update used to consume ungodly amounts of CPU time because the update system would write a multi-hundred megabyte text log and then spend forever compressing it for upload. Then they remembered their own ETL system and switched to much more efficient binary logs.

Firefox also has problems on HDD, I remember it locking up for minutes at a time doing cache maintenance until I switched permanently to SSDs.

With write-amplification, SSDs are being thrashed even more than HDDs would be, the SSDs just accomplish it quicker :\

Much worse than it was only a year ago.