I recently tried to fully rid myself of OneDrive and it took me over 48 hours to accomplish. The only working method I found involved fully enabling OneDrive, signing in, and waiting for a full sync. Only then was I able to tell it to stop syncing and finally remap Documents, Downloads, Pictures, etc.
The fact that I needed to log in, wait 24 hours for my account to unlock due to inactivity (!!!), and enable sync in order to disable it was enough for me to finally decide that Windows 10 will be my last Microsoft product. It may be a small annoyance, but to me it was the straw that broke the camel's back.
That is truly insidious, but FWIW, you don't need to abandon Windows entirely because of this. There are ways of creating a custom Windows installation disk that removes OneDrive, along with other bloatware, spyware, and pretty much anything else you don't like. Look into tools such as Tiny11 Builder, MSMG Toolkit, NTLite, etc. This is a decent guide[1] for setting all of this up.
The process is quite tedious and takes a few hours, but in the end you end up with a personalized version of Windows, without any of the garbage. You still need to be vigilant of Windows Update undoing some of this, but you can also disable it altogether and manually cherry pick the updates you want to install.
It's insane that Microsoft is building such a user hostile OS that forces users to resort to this, but if you absolutely must use it, the experience after doing the above is not so bad. I've been running a custom install of Windows 11 for about a year now without any issues.
Maybe this tool is a bit more comprehensive. After configuring a stripped down image, Windows can be installed in what is almost like a headless mode in literally 5 minutes with no user intervention:
Thanks, I'll take a look into this! I'm still probably going to move to a linux distro for my desktop, but I'm always down to try breaking things on another system.
After a certain point anyone paying attention can see it's not accidental. Oops sorry! No. Their goal is your technological enslavement. Mis-features like that don't accidentally just always end up being evil and oops sorry when there is a real backlash. They wanted to see if they could get away with it, like they do.
I abandoned MS products in 1998 for good. Win98se pushed me over the edge.
Wim98SE was actually good though! Well, it was way way better than win98. Win2k and 7 (the last windows OS I ever had for personal use) were good too. The writing was on the wall back in the 98 days for sure though. MS decided that your computer was theirs.
And I can almost guarentee you it will magically all turn itself back on/reinstall itself eventually after the OS force updates/reboots itself in the not too distant future.
500-600 million years: The Sun's increasing luminosity begins to disrupt the carbonate–silicate cycle; higher luminosity increases weathering of surface rocks, which traps carbon dioxide in the ground as carbonate. As water evaporates from the Earth's surface, rocks harden, causing plate tectonics to slow and eventually stop once the oceans evaporate completely. With less volcanism to recycle carbon into the Earth's atmosphere, carbon dioxide levels begin to fall. By this time, carbon dioxide levels will fall to the point at which C3 photosynthesis is no longer possible. All plants that use C3 photosynthesis (≈99 percent of present-day species) will die.
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800-900 million years: Carbon dioxide levels will fall to the point at which C4 photosynthesis is no longer possible. Without plant life to recycle oxygen in the atmosphere, free oxygen and the ozone layer will disappear from the atmosphere allowing for intense levels of deadly UV light to reach the surface. Animals in food chains that were dependent on live plants will disappear shortly afterward. At most, animal life could survive about 3 to 100 million years after plant life dies out. Just like plants, the extinction of animals will likely coincide with the loss of plants. It will start with large animals, then smaller animals and flying creatures, then amphibians, followed by reptiles, and finally, invertebrates. In the book The Life and Death of Planet Earth, authors Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee state that some animal life may be able to survive in the oceans. Eventually, however, all multicellular life will die out.
The only times I've been asked "Do you know why I pulled you over?" was when I had a tail light out. I figured the reason they asked was to see if I was already aware of the problem. In one case, I was literally on my way to buy a new headlight, and they accepted that as an answer and sent me on my way.
And it's a fair question; I'd guess you were met with downvotes because so much Pronoun Discussion is made in bad faith, but I don't get the sense you were. So I wish more people would use these moments as an opportunity to explain their points of view!
Part of what I mentioned in that other comment is the sparse availability of good gender-neutral words in English ("spouse" is a good one I should have mentioned—great on its own but sadly not applicable to the unmarried!), and something I didn't mention but should have is that it's not uncommon for people to use they/them pronouns while still identifying as male or female to some extent, whether by choice or upbringing or simply to make things convenient when signing paperwork.
You may have heard of the Kinsey scale for sexual preference; there's no widely accepted equivalent for gender identity, but in some cases it offers a similarly useful mental model. One person smack in the middle of "equally (or neither) male nor female" might swear off words like boyfriend and wife entirely, but another person who falls slightly off to the side into the "somewhat but not entirely /exclusively male" camp might use a mix of masculine and neutral terms, but probably not many feminine terms, if any. And then someone who falls into the "entirely and exclusively male" side of the chart would almost certainly object to being called someone's wife, lol.
it's pretty scary that comments that question such things get nuked before chance at a legitimate discussion even on fairly rational discourse sites like hn
I'm not here to defend Hoffmann specifically -- I don't personally know the guy -- but I also don't understand the point you're making here. He makes youtube videos, so of course he wants views. Is there some dishonesty in what he does that you'd like recognized?
The fact that I needed to log in, wait 24 hours for my account to unlock due to inactivity (!!!), and enable sync in order to disable it was enough for me to finally decide that Windows 10 will be my last Microsoft product. It may be a small annoyance, but to me it was the straw that broke the camel's back.