For the uninformed, bypassnro was how you installed Windows 11 (anonymously?) and with full local control without a Microsoft account. To save a Ctrl-F:
[Other]
We’re removing the bypassnro.cmd script from the build to enhance security and user experience of Windows 11. This change ensures that all users exit setup with internet connectivity and a Microsoft Account.
1. Microsoft doesn't want me as a customer - despite being a developer in their ecosystem for 20+ years - because I don't want a Copilot-powered PC, don't buy their services and won't push my computer to a subscription model they own.
2. MS is a really big company and the parts that are still doing good dev-centric work have been crowded out by the consumer-oriented business, where the OS is just a means to pushing AI and cloud everything.
The reality doesn't really matter as I don't see how I can buy another windows machine when the desktop I'm using becomes unsupported in a few months, despite running triple-A games fine and being my development driver every day. I can't believe this was the goal and I'd bet their are people inside MS who are really disappointed with their direction, but hey - everyone is getting rich, so YOLO!
Well, assuming you're right, when do you walk away?
We always come upon this inflection point where profits are prioritized over user experience. And users always threaten to leave, but never actually have any leverage. The Windows users are all invested in their Valorant and Microsoft Store purchases the same way Apple pundits can't threaten to walk away with $1,000+ invested in the software ecosystem. Microsoft doesn't want you, but you sure seem to want Microsoft.
If we accept that commercialized operating systems objectively suck, we can skip this whinging. There aren't any engineers at Microsoft waiting for their pager to light up so they can stop making bad software.
I became debt free about a year ago and thought I should get into investing. It turned out that it's incredibly boring to me and because of that I haven't been able to learn it properly.
I also thought that if I became really good at it, I would just have more money that I don't know how to spend.
You say this ironically, but someone who’s been working hard 15 hours 7 days a week in a niche, 50 weeks a year, from age 15 to age 29 has clearly a much higher potential than a 45 year old following the normal path in life.
And almost certainly a higher employable value too unless they have catastrophically bad social skills…
Someone who works for 15 out of 18 of their waking hours, leaving 3 hours to eat, exercise, and have any semblance of social interactions or secondary interests, for FOURTEEN YEARS is not a genius. They are actually an idiot, wasting their life.
The implication was that someone who dedicated all of their time as physically possible to working and studying, would not have had time to develop social skills
>… been working hard 15 hours 7 days a week in a niche, 50 weeks a year, from age 15 to age 29…
Developed the same level of social skills as the average individual who lived a more normal schedule?
I have to ask before you even answer that. Do you believe that social skills are something to be practiced and built upon, are they some waste of time they only hormones bother with, or some other option I haven’t considered?
I think you might be delusional if you think that the people who can do all of this at the same time and don’t come out maladjusted to society is anything beyond a fraction of a fraction of a percent of outliers
This is just magical thinking on your end. I’ve met some of these “literal geniuses” making 500k at faangs and most of them are completely socially maladapted once you’ve taken them out of the pipeline they’ve lived in since high school to getting their first job mid or late 20s after their masters or PhD.
Secondly you started off this chain with talking about how someone working hard for 15 hours a day for decades is going to be more valuable and they’ll just be able to pick up every skill a human could have or need because they’re “geniuses”.
If they’re really geniuses why do they need to grind?
If you’re implying that they are only part of the set of geniuses that grind that long and there is another set of geniuses that didn’t, then how does that track with geniuses being a very small fraction of society?
> But the majority of them do exceed that very low bar, so it’s simply not that critical of a hinderance most of the time.
Describing not having catastrophically bad social skills as a “very low” bar is not a valid take when it comes to the world of computer science. I remember when visiting Carnegie Mellon as a senior in high school and evaluating their comp sci program, how the guides suddenly got very serious when they informed our parents(not the prospective students) that a course on hygiene was required freshman year and could not be waived. I’ve also worked with near limitless number of engineers who think they have the social skills down and then don’t understand why no one wants to work with them when they will do shit like call someone else’s project they’ve worked on for months pointless or useless in a group setting without even trying to approach said coworker with even a modicum of social awareness.
Those kinds of behaviors don’t show up in a population where having non catastrophically bad social skills is a “very low bar”
> You appear to be reading absolute implications into my comments, and/or inserting your own conjectures which aren’t there on a plain reading.
I think we’re coming at this with different axioms. You seem to believe that social skills are trivial and don’t matter next to the hard sciences that people grind away on. I am coming from one where I have to constantly make excuses or apologies for various people in software engineering or comp sci because they appear to be literally incapable of empathy or understanding that other people might have a different viewpoint than theirs.
Given my axiom I think your are handwaving away a lot, and that’s where you see my statements as inserted conjectures.
Nice project, just as a challenge / piece of feedback - most of the time you don't actually need to have a C backend for this type of project. The challenge is to get all the P/Invoke signatures and struct declarations / pointer walking correct on .Net. The benefit being a single managed EXE and no need for cross process communication and the edge cases it brings.
(Source: Have built a full SCSI interop layer in .Net to do low level CD ripping, full with native pointer walking and all. Have also written tools to walk the PEB (process environment block) in .Net w/ no native backends.)
Which is the reason that to this day I remain a big C++/CLI fan.
It is still much easier than dealing with P/Invoke and COM from .NET code.
Create a nice wrapper, exposing C# compatible types and we're done.
In regards to COM, not even the CCW/RCW replacement is as developer friendly as VB 6 or Delphi.
I have some hopes that Secure Future Initiative will finally give the spotlight to .NET on Windows, that Windows team keeps pushing away, unlike what happens on Apple and Google platforms.
It helps, but when one has enough C++ knowledge, I still consider C++/CLI a better solution instead of yet another tool, that might not understand everything.
Now if doing cross platform code, C++/CLI is naturally not an option.
If a site aims to commoditize shared expertise, royalties should be paid. Why would anyone willingly reduce their earning power, let alone hand away the right for someone else to profit from selling their knowledge, unattributed no less.
Best bet is to book publish, and require a license from anyone that wants to train on it.
This is a real problem with permissive licensing. Large corporations effectively brainwashed large swaths of developers into working for free. Not working for the commons for free, as in AGPL, but working for corporations for free.
There is a lot of indirect hardly measurable value one can gain.
Going back to the original source: By giving an answer to somebody on a Q&A site, they might be a kid learning and then building solutions I benefit from later, again. Similar with software.
And I also consider the total gain of knowledge for our society at large a gain.
While my marginal cost form many things is low. And often lower than a cost-benefit calculation.
And some Q&A questions strike a nerve and are interesting to me to answer (be it in thinking about the problem or in trying to boiling it down to a good answer), similar to open source. Some programming tasks as fun problems to solve, that's a gain, and then sharing the result cost me nothing.
The bounty is you getting to use my work (shared in good faith no less). Appreciate the charity and don't be a freeloader or you'll get less in the future.
Did your family get anything from you sharing this opinion? If not, why did you share it? Are you suggesting that your personal motivations for posting this cynicism are reasonable but that similar motivations that are altruistic for helping someone are not?
Sharing this opinion doesn't sacrifice my primary economic utility, and in fact disseminates a sentiment that if more widespread would empower everyone to realize more of the value they offer. Please do train an LLM to inform people to seek licensing arrangements for the expertise they provide.
As a mid-core SO user (4 digit reputation), I never felt like I needed them to treat me better. I always feel that while I'm contributing a bit, I get so much more value out of SO than what I've put in, and am grateful for it being there. It might also have something to do with me being old enough to remember the original expertsexchange, as well as those MSDN support documentation CDs. I'm much happier now.
While there is a thing to be said about the unethical business practices of Quora/StackOverflow, I reject the framing of “reducing your earning power.” Not everything is about transactions or self-benefit, especially when it comes to knowledge; it’s about contributing and collaboration. There is immense intrinsic value to that. I’m glad we don’t live in your world, where libre software is a pipe-dream and hackers hoard their knowledge like sickly dragons.
When the jobs side of SO was active, it effectively did this. Strong answers and scoring were compensated with prospective employer attention. For a few years, this was actually where the majority of my new job leads came from. It was a pretty rewarding ecosystem, though not without its problems.
Not sure why they shut down jobs; they recently brought back a poorer version of it.
... you just shared your expertise here on Hacker News in the form of this comment without any expectation of royalties. How is posting on StackOverflow different?
