Random Software topics

Anyone know how to get rid of the waving smiley GIF in Skype's main interface?
Alternatively, replace it with a static—it's the animation which distracts.

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I can use the split interface, and minimize the smiley part, if there's nothing better—but that uses 2 Taskbar slots and hides list of chat people.
 
Is the world prepared for the coming AI storm?

'Among the countless panels at South by Southwest, there was one titled "How Congress is building AI policy from the ground". After roughly 15 minutes of waiting, the audience was told that the panel had been cancelled because the participants had gone to the wrong venue.'

Oh dear. A microcosm of why I answer a resounding "NO!" to the question.
 
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AI in Bing

♣ It doesn't seem to work in other browsers if you make Bing the SE—but I only tested Opera GX, where I got standard SERPs to my searches.

♦ So I launched Edge and got invite to try the new AI-powered search. Sure, why not? Just yesterday Anton Petrov—my fav science YTer—found a tricky answer using it. Typed following in address bar:

video game, open world, first-person perspective, no platforming, single player

Got a bunch of "searching for…" lines, but nothing else—ie no results of any kind. Hmm.

♥ Okay, Anton had used a natural language query—ie as if he was talking to a human—so I tried this variation:

list of video games which are open world and first-person perspective, have minimal platforming, and are single player

Bingo, now we're suckin' diesel, here's what I got:

— … —

Here are some open-world first-person perspective single-player video games with minimal platforming that you might be interested in:
I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions or if there’s anything else I can help you with.
Learn more:
1. gamerant.com 2. en.wikipedia.org 3. gamerant.com 4. gamicus.fandom.com 5. techradar.com 6. store.steampowered.com

— … —

♠ Interesting the difference that couching the query in natural language makes. I'll definitely try this again when I have trouble finding an answer to one of the 5 Ws—altho Anton warned that he got one wrong answer during his trial, and the AI was very sure its answer was right. So it's not there yet, but very promising start.
 
Alt Codes

Anyone here use these for typing shortcuts? Like Alt+0163 gives pound symbol £ or Alt+4 gives the Ace of Diamonds ♦

For me, the codes which have 4 digits, with the first digit being 8, don't work. Such as for sevenths and ninths fractions—eg 3/7 and 5/9—don't work, I get different output. Others work fine, eg ½ ¾.

Any ideas?
 
That program has a dumb file name for its driver, as one guy pointed out. Naming a driver dump_wmimmc.sys is just asking for confusion as the windows memory dump files are named similar. Name driver anything else, not that... I assume they trying to hide its name. Vanguard swapped its main driver after too many people learned vgk.sys = Vanguard.

anti cheat programs expect too much access to windows kernel. Only thing that should have that much access is windows, not some anti cheat for 1 program on PC. They can stop other programs running.

I see them as viruses more than useful tools. I wouldn't play a game that requires them.
 
I see them as viruses more than useful tools. I wouldn't play a game that requires them.
I agree with your assessment and noble stance, which sadly I didn't have the spinal fortitude to maintain when a game I lusted after included one of these dreckwares :(

♣ Denuvo—Far Cry New Dawn
♦ Securom—Red Alert 3, Bioshock
♥ StarForce—don't recall specific titles
♠ SafeDisk—various CD/DVD games

Wiki:
"Richard Leadbetter of Digital Foundry compared the performance of a pirated version of Resident Evil Village which had stripped out Denuvo and Capcom's additional copy protection against the release version for Windows, and found that the DRM-stripped version performed far better than the released game."

I got lucky tho, DRM never affected my PC in a bad way.
 
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23H2
Windows Co pilot AKA you don't get any privacy with the bot "helping" you along
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsde...developers-with-windows-copilot-and-dev-home/

I don't need help thinking really...

I wonder if its just Bingchat in disguise. That thing is invading all my spaces.

Features update:
Now to find a way to disable the MSN feed part of Widgets screen without just disabling entire thing.
I only use at max two of the widgets and I don't care to see the feed at all.

I wonder if the update will fix a graphical bug I had with it last week that led to a blank screen and me logging out of user and back in to fix. Its possible restarting explorer would have fixed it too.
 
blank screen
Dunno if either of these are relevant to you, but for what it's worth:


 
I doubt it.

What happened was I opened widget panel and clicked on the little X in 1 article to close it, and the panel didn't respond. So I clicked on desktop to close the panel and instead it left ghosts of the widgets on the screen.
I was going to take a screenshot so I closed Firefox to get it out of the way. At this point screen turned black.

I don't remember if taskbar was showing. As if it were, restarting explorer probably fix. Logging out and back in also refreshed screen.

Desktop Windows Manager had issues probably.
 
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AtlasOS

AtlasOS is a severe tweak for Windows 10, which trims Win10 down to the bare bones for gaming—nor recommended for a dual-purpose PC which is also used for work, but could be useful for an older PC which is feeling the gaming strain.

 
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In particular, it removes Windows Defender and Restore Points, and System Reset. So it might be a worry for security and restoring your system.

another one that slims down by removing security... been here before?
 

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