snielson

My wife runs a food blog and sometimes uses AI to come up with recipes she tests on us first. One of the best dishes she’s ever made (and one of the best I’ve ever eaten) was pork with an apricot sauce. The pork was fine, but the sauce was absolutely incredible! I’d put it on any kind of meat. Funny thing is, I don’t even like apricots, but the sauce was amazing. My wife does have one advantage, which is that she knows when the AI has hallucinated something crazy and makes appropriate adjustments. I guess it's like anything. AI can be a big help to those who already have a threshold level of background knowledge in a field but can cause big problems for those who don't.

Yeah, I really like Windows 11. I'm not a developer; just an ordinary user. I guess the difference is that I fully embrace the MS ecosystem—i.e., OneDrive, M365 Family account (the storage alone is worth the cost), Power Toys, Edge (sync'd across computers), etc. It works great.

The only problem I’ve had was with a family member who refused to restart the computer. Eventually, something got corrupted. Fixing it was simple—I just reinstalled the current version of Windows. It was so much easier than in the past, when it meant reinstalling everything from scratch or reverting to a saved snapshot.

The "Files-On-Demand" feature of OneDrive makes it possible for everyone in the family to login into any computer with OneDrive and quickly access all their files (I have 500/500 fiber). Because some/most of the files are stored on the cloud and only downloaded when they are accessed, the hard drive of the computer can be smaller (1TB) than the total sum of all the files stored by all the users (6TB). It's very nice. I can also turn off Files-on-Demand and everything will be stored locally on my computer. It sounds like many people are bothered that Files-on-Demand is enabled by default.

I love OneDrive. I don't know why everyone hates it. I save things in OneDrive, and they are backed up to the cloud and synced with the other computers I use.

Some computers are shared by six family members, each with their own MS account and 1TB of storage. OneDrive makes it so the computers can have a 1TB hard drive but still give everyone ready access to their files by not storing them all on the hard drive.

If I don't want something synced to Onedrive then I usually save it in my downloads folder or another separate folder I create outside Onedrive. I've never had any problems.

The comments by people who hate make me wonder why my experience is so different than theirs.

I'm not a developer, but I consider myself relatively tech literate. That said, I really like Windows 11 and many other MS products such as M365, Edge, new Outlook, One Drive, and even Teams is tolerable (maybe not as polished as Zoom). Copilot is still struggling to find relevance, but I just chalk that up to MS pivoting rapidly to figure out how to make it useful (I currently use the enterprise version solely to draft emails, which is a huge time saver even if it is a bit pricey at $30/mo). The complaints I see on here so frequently just don't register with me. For example, I never see any ads. Maybe there is a setting I turned off long ago, but I cannot recall ever seeing an ad. The setting must be persistent with my Windows backups because no ads show when I reinstall Windows and restore the settings and configuration from a backup. Things are not always perfect, but the issues I have encountered are relatively minor all things considered.

Additionally, every colleague, counterparty, outside-counsel, and client a lawyer ever works with uses docx. To introduce a new format into this ecosystem would introduce friction into every single interaction.

As an attorney, this is what kept me from switching to LibreOffice or Google Docs. I gave it a shot, but since the other attorneys I work with (both in and outside the US) and my clients all use Word, I ended up wasting a lot of time fixing files after converting between formats. In the end, it just wasn’t worth it.

I’m fairly tech-savvy, but many of my coworkers struggle with the mental effort required to switch to new software. Two colleagues I greatly respect still use WordPerfect and Word 2003 because they dislike change so much. It's too much of a lift for these people to wholesale switch word processors.

Ublock origin can be installed in Edge mobile.

Assistive access mode for an iPhone is fantastic for the elderly. It's the only way my 85-year-old father can even use a phone. One of the best features is that it can be set to allow incoming calls only from people in his contacts. It's such a lifesaver.

The solution proposed by Kagi—separate the search index from the rest of Google—seems to make the most sense. Kagi explains it more here: https://blog.kagi.com/dawn-new-era-search

I use Paint.net for simple tasks like those you listed. I paid $10 for it in the Microsoft store but I think you can get it for free from the website.

I use Contacts+. It's not free, but it syncs Google and Microsoft contacts nicely, which is my primary need.

According to my testing, Claude 3 Opus makes drafting patent applications about 50% faster.

T-mobile business has a backup plan for $30/mo ($15/mo on a promo a month ago) that can be used for up to 7 days of internet per month. I signed up for it so I will still have internet if my fiber goes out (my router will automatically switch over in an outage).

Lehi offers 1Gbps fiber for $80/mo, which is about the same as Utopia. The pricing seems pretty good for dinner in Utah.

Utopia provides an active ethernet connection to each subscriber with the specified bandwidth. This is superior to most fiber deployments, which are passive optical networks (GPON) where groups of 16-32 homes share a connection (usually 2.4 Gb down and 1.2 Gb up).

I live in Utah and actively worked to get fiber in my small city. Utopia requires cities to guarantee a take rate (40% if I recall correctly) and taxpayers must make up any deficiency. I've never heard of taxpayers actually doing that but it was enough to scare people from adopting Utopia in my city.

Ultimately what brought fiber to my city was covid. The monetary tsunami unleashed by the federal reserve and the government made it possible for a local private company to build a fiber network. I just got hooked up last week. It is great.

The other thing that happened is that the wireless companies offer high quality internet service. For a time I had both Comcast and T-Mobile home internet. I regularly got speeds of 1.2-1.4 Gb down on T-Mobile (100 Mbps up). Verizon also offers home internet but it was too unstable when I tried it.

All this is to say that I have three high quality Internet connections at my home (fiber, T-Mobile, and Comcast), one marginal connection (Verizon), and one garbage connection (Century Link; however, they have also been installing fiber in the area). Competition is great!

Having been to Guatemala, the culture is to throw most trash on the ground. The trash is then washed into the rivers during heavy rains. It's sad to see. The country has a lot of natural beauty, but there is trash everywhere.

Set kagi as the default search engine in edge on android (you need to install edge) and add the edge search widget to your home screen. I also switched to the MS launcher so I could get rid of the Google search bar.

I live a little north of Bountiful. I was a big advocate of municipal fiber and pushed my city to build a network. In hindsight, I'm glad the city didn't do it.

The neighboring city (Kaysville) voted down a municipal fiber network in 2019 (the vote was super close). The fiber contractor (Connext) Kaysville planned to use to build the network decided to build it themselves (they were a small WISP in the area).

Covid happened and suddenly there was a lot of money for infrastructure like fiber networks. The fiber contractor expanded and it's now installing fiber throughout many cities in northern Utah including mine (the fiber is in the box in front of my house but hasn't been run inside yet).

I'm the meantime, T-mobile and Verizon began offering home ISP plans for low rates.

All of this means that most people in my area have a choice between five ISPs--Comcast, CenturyLink, T-mobile, Verizon, and Connext. Our city has also granted a franchise agreement to another company (Allwest) to build a second fiber network. I'm doubtful it will happen, but who knows.

If my city built a fiber network, I don't think its prices would have been low enough to get the required take rate for it to be self sustaining, especially with the entry Tmobile and Verizon as ISPs. The fiber contractor, on the other hand, is able to offer low prices because it is building the network at cost and making profits off the subscriptions. The end result is great for our community. Lots of competition and low prices.

Thanks for this! The summarizer is great for quickly getting the gist of legal cases.

Kagi is great. I've had to find some obscure things recently and it was fantastic. No ads, no irrelevant garbage designed to make money for the search engine. Instead my interests and that of kagi are aligned - find the best search result - and it is great.

Yes, PDF-XChange is the best pdf software.

PDF-XChange pdf software. I often have to edit/manipulate pdf files for work. I've tried so many (including Acrobat DC, Power PDF Advanced, Nitro PDF, Phantom, etc.) and this software is hands down the best. It is even reasonably priced.

Other mentions: Bitwarden, Roborock vacuums, Emporia home energy monitoring products and EV charger, Shelly (diy home automation products), Nvidia Shield Pro streaming device, Weawow weather app (android), Progressive car insurance (saved me a fortune), Relay Pro for reddit (android), and pocketcast (android).

Transfer your domains to cloudflare.

Kagi is listening. Sign up and give it a shot. I've tried them all (Neeva, Brave, Bing, Yandex, etc.) and I like Kagi the best. They are planning to make it a paid service when it gets out of beta.

I recently had to deal with this. I created a free Outlook account. I transferred the domain from Gsuite to cloudflare and signed up for the email beta (all email is forwarded to the Outlook account).

I moved the email using Outlook on Windows (I have a separate MS365 plan for my family so I have access to Outlook). I just connected both accounts to Outlook and then dragged and dropped the emails from the Gsuite account to the Outlook account. Honestly, this was the easiest part of the whole process of leaving Gsuite.

This setup doesn't allow me to send email from the domain, but it does allow me to receive email. It's for a small HOA so I'm fine with this arrangement. If I wanted to send email, then I'd probably sign up for o Microsoft plan that allows me to do that. These are described in other comments.

I can confirm that moving email is the easiest of all the migration tasks. I connected my Google account and a destination email account to Outlook and moved all my email in less than 5 minutes.

Microsoft has recently been pushing a new centralized web based feedback portal: https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/

It looks like they have imported feedback from other places such as the feedback hub.

I've been using Kagi for a couple months and generally like it. It's the default search engine in my browser.

My only complaint is that occasionally I run a search and get zero results, like the page is literally blank (I try the search again and it is still blank). I then try the search on Google and get what I'm looking for. I guess this happens because Kagi's index is smaller, but I don't really know.

I recently switched to neeva for search and it's great. No ads. The search results seem much more relevant.

I have the Tmobile service. I use at least 500 Gb/mo without problems. Others on the reddit forum use over a Tb without problems. The terms of service say Tmobile will deprioritize us when there is congestion, but I haven't experienced it. Also, it appears that Tmobile is limiting the number of subscribers in a given area to prevent degraded service. Overall, I like it (full disclosure: I have a dual Wan setup with xfinity being the other provider)