Windows

Voytko lists what the old days actually looked like: blue screens from drivers, no autosave, screensaver passwords anyone could bypass, 20-minute boots, scratched CDs and corroded NES cartridges you could never patch. He still concedes that today's software is bloated and worries about delegating it to AI agents.

Commenters accepted the history but disputed one metric.

The arrest exposed that Microsoft keeps a Global Device Identifier for every Windows install and can correlate it with the IPs it used and the URLs it reached. What unsettled the thread is the scope, not the ID itself.

The sharpest question is which layer does this. A machine ID sitting on disk is normal; an OS vendor tying it to your live network activity is not. Nobody could say for sure whether it's Edge, Defender, or something lower in the stack.

A micro.blog writer described his weekly ritual of rebooting his Mac on Saturday mornings, force-quitting the unsaved-work warning for the small thrill of it. He isn't worried about losing anything: work syncs to OneDrive, files sync via Syncthing.

The 220-comment thread split by tribe. Linux and BSD users bragged about months of uptime and treated a forced reboot as a sign something is broken. A fleet admin countered from the trenches: it's pulling teeth to get 10,000 Windows users to accept one automated reboot a month.

Bohun argues that without builders there's no software and no users, so a clean Win32-only OS would win developers back and eventually replace mainline Windows while costing less to maintain. The price: $49, permanent, no subscription.

The catch several engineers flagged: dropping .NET guts one of the main things developers build on. Others said the product already exists quietly as LTSC, and that Microsoft wants you subscribed to OneDrive and Office, not buying a $49 disc once a decade.

On Medium, Ś vanished while the eight other Polish accented letters typed fine. Marcin Wichary traced it: the Polish 'programmer's layout' makes Ś with Right Alt+S, Windows remaps Right Alt to Ctrl+Alt, and Medium's save handler was swallowing anything with Ctrl+S to block the browser save dialog.

The one-character fix: stop firing on Ctrl+S when Alt is also held. The flip in the thread is that browsers still give developers no clean way to tell these key combos apart, so the bug keeps coming back.

Raymond Chen pulled the 100 most recent crash dumps for one third-party program into a pivot table. They looked like four separate bugs: 11 stack overflows in shell32, 23 access violations in an unknown component, more overflows in ctxapclient64. One cause produced all of them.

An engineer who reproduces Windows bugs under virtualization had a sharper question than the diagnosis: what support tier do you need before the legendary Chen ever looks at your coredumps?