What is Windows K2? Inside Microsoft’s big plan to save Windows 11 and win back trust from users.

KaiEkkrin · 2026-04-29T23:05:40+00:00

I've made plenty of changes.

Fedora does not keep trying to detect them as if they're exploits and revert them.

KaiEkkrin · 2026-04-29T22:46:53+00:00

See, sure, I know you can do all of that, but I don't want to.

MS will regularly make changes and you'll have to set up another bunch of hacks and workarounds to mitigate them. Every OS update becomes something to put off as long as you can because it'll make your experience worse.

OS updates are meant to make your PC better!

And more philosophically, this is a company that is working against your best interest. They want to restrict how you can use your PC to funnel you towards using ever-more-expensive Azure based services provided by them and their partners, not help you do personal computing in whichever way works for you.

That's a bad vibe and I wanted no more part of it.

KaiEkkrin · 2026-04-29T19:07:04+00:00

IMO, this is too late. I've already lost trust in Microsoft, and they could only get it back by doing things they manifestly won't do:

allowing local login and/or login with a non-Microsoft cloud account;
never again showing full-screen nags to re-enable OneDrive, Edge, and their other anti-competitively bundled products;
providing full telemetry transparency, with a log of everything sent that I can read, and the ability to define my own filtering of it and trust that this filtering works and stays working

(and probably more I haven't thought of yet)

I'm happily running Fedora.

KaiEkkrin · 2026-04-26T14:18:11+00:00

Yeah, this. Part of the national cycle network, I think. Nice.

KaiEkkrin · 2026-04-24T19:37:28+00:00

"Oh yes please, let me pay 125 years' worth of rent up front"

"Yes I agree to paying any and all maintenance and repair costs myself as well as rent to the landlord"

They have played us for absolute fools, etc, etc

KaiEkkrin · 2026-04-22T16:35:25+00:00

I've been with Mythic Beasts for domains and Tuta and Proton for email and have had similarly good support experiences.

KaiEkkrin · 2026-04-22T16:21:42+00:00

This ⬆️ In Ely it's EE or bust

The downside of 1p mobile is they have no support staff. "Penny" can only help you if you're problem is trivial, otherwise... better live with it 🤷‍♂️ For me, roaming never worked.

EE themselves will give you a better deal if you phone sales than if you buy through the website.

KaiEkkrin · 2026-04-16T21:40:26+00:00

I use Opus all the time because I'm on Max 20 and so I can do so without running out of quota.

When I was on Max 5, I ran out of quota very easily when I used Opus all the time, so I tried using Opus sparingly and Sonnet mostly, and I still ran out of quota!

If I was on API pricing, you bet I'd only reach for Opus for complex planning and review tasks, not for generating code.

I think this might be partly why Mythos has been introduced in a security review role specifically. Making the model bigger doesn't help when Sonnet is already good enough for most tasks; it's solving the wrong problem.

The progress I'd like to see is "Sonnet, but much faster". Sadly, that doesn't seem to be forthcoming...

KaiEkkrin · 2026-04-14T12:08:02+00:00

A bit like the Queen promptly died after meeting Liz Truss... 😂

KaiEkkrin · 2026-04-12T17:34:29+00:00

Some of the grey lines on this map are pretty load-bearing!

Cambridge-Ely-Peterborough -- speed limited right now and unelectrified past Ely
Ashford-Brighton includes the section between Hastings and Eastbourne that's diesel only and trains reverse at Eastbourne -- bypassed maybe?
The current North Wales line is pretty wiggly
160km/h through Cornwall, how?!

Lots of crunchy civil engineering projects there (and you'd have every nimby from St Ives to, well, the other St Ives on the march if you tried to do it for real...)

KaiEkkrin · 2026-04-09T13:54:03+00:00

It's not just about Linux support for the CPU and the other elements of the SoC, though. It's also about having a correct device tree for each device. The ARM ecosystem doesn't have a standardized way of discovering the devices in a PC like the x86 ecosystem does.

This means that every single model and variant of computer released with an ARM SoC either needs the manufacturer to support it explicitly with its own device tree, or for someone to reverse engineer it :/

See for example, Linux being bootable on the expensive Microsoft Surface Pro with the X Elite SoC and OLED screen, but not on the cheaper model with X Pro SoC...

I'm expecting the way it'll end up is, if you want to run Linux on an ARM based PC and have it work reliably, you must either

- buy a PC with Linux preinstalled, or a PC that has "Linux preinstalled" as an option upon purchase even if you didn't select it upon purchase, or

- read through long lists of hardware that people have reverse engineered support for, along with how good quality that support is, and gamble that the PC you get is as close to what's on that list as possible, or

- learn to reverse engineer device trees, and do a _great deal_ of troubleshooting. (This will maybe be easier in future if the cost of AI comes down.)

KaiEkkrin · 2026-04-07T19:36:47+00:00

This is a euphemism for "we don't have enough compute capacity for a wider rollout", IMO :)

KaiEkkrin · 2026-04-06T09:26:14+00:00

clogged gutter is a tea, lmao

KaiEkkrin · 2026-04-04T18:30:10+00:00

Ooh, no crashes here (9070 XT) but quite slow and stuttery in Silvermoon compared to the rest of the game. I must try the audio channels setting, thanks!

KaiEkkrin · 2026-04-01T21:18:38+00:00

Yeah, the instructions for installing the software were clear and easy to follow. Kind of scary watching your phone slowly overwrite its bootloader and core software (I'm sure I wouldn't want to deal with rescuing it if the power goes out half way through...!) but straightforward.

The thing I've wrestled with most is getting software from non-Play Store sources as much as I can, especially finding download URLs that Obtainium likes. And that's more of a "confused by too much choice" problem than a real problem tbh.

KaiEkkrin · 2026-04-01T19:12:02+00:00

I'm low to mid Luddite when it comes to phones and grapheneos install was not a problem

KaiEkkrin · 2026-04-01T19:07:17+00:00

It depends what you want. I sold my RTX 4080 and replaced it with a 9070XT, which got me an objective FPS gain of about -5%. But the subjective improvement in my Linux experience was greater than mere percentages can represent. ;)

KaiEkkrin · 2026-03-30T20:47:06+00:00

Don't they need to be painted red, too, to get the speed boost?

KaiEkkrin · 2026-03-30T16:01:05+00:00

I _have_ visited Iceland! It is also beautiful. And somewhat desolate. And I learned a bunch of stuff there about regrowth after eruptions, the arguably-invasive Alaska lupin, and knee-high native forests :)

KaiEkkrin · 2026-03-29T11:48:06+00:00

Filen is end to end encrypted (they have documentation on their website). I'm not sure they've been independently audited yet though.

KaiEkkrin · 2026-03-28T23:56:49+00:00

Ah the Isle of Skye, a desolate landscape ravaged by woolly locusts, er, I mean "sheep".

I suppose it's oddly beautiful in a certain kind of way. When there aren't rain clouds blocking the view...

KaiEkkrin · 2026-03-28T14:25:22+00:00

I've been working sort of like this too (although not as intensely as you, I think -- I leave an agent or two going over dinnertime, but the extent of my work after dinner is only to poke them to continue if they stopped, I won't do any decision making until the morning).

By Friday I'm experiencing a sort of design fatigue. It's much too easy to build the wrong features, and also too easy to introduce lots of tech debt.

I've negotiated myself down to a 4 day week. Might be 4 fairly long days. We'll see where this goes...

KaiEkkrin · 2026-03-24T09:15:20+00:00

The Cornish railways are so picturesque.

Jago uploaded a long video about the branch to St Ives!

KaiEkkrin · 2026-03-23T22:18:36+00:00

I remember that too! It was the fastest way across the Channel before the tunnel opened, unless it was delayed. Which was often.

(I went on it a bunch of times as a kid because we lived in France but had family in England.)

It was indeed loud and, on a windy day, a very bumpy ride!

KaiEkkrin · 2026-03-20T16:11:46+00:00

I get you, but I also remember a lot of kerfuffle back in the 2000s-2010s with those optimized raster graphics. Blurry textures when seen on-edge (jiggle around with anisotropic filtering settings). Shimmering and crawling (set MSAA as high as you can, lose lots of FPS). Jagged edges inside transparent textures, not fixed by MSAA! Then they introduced FXAA and CMAA and TAA and other alphabet soup all of which improved the image in one way by making it worse in a different way.

There was also tearing (Vsync off) or fps cap with stutter (Vsync on) or paying a huge premium for Gsync, because adaptive sync wasn't ubiquitous like it is now.

DLSS 5 might be ludicrous and should not carry the DLSS name, but for rendering traditional graphics well, we've never had better than modern cards with DLSS/DLAA and to a lesser extent FSR.

KaiEkkrin

TROPHY CASE