9u50fv – Page 10

Stewart Cheifet, PBS host who chronicled the PC revolution, dies at 87

AI, Computer Chronicles, computer history, Gary Kildall, Internet Archive, machine learning, Obituaries, PBS, retrocomputing, retrotech, Stewart Cheifet, Tech, Vintage computing / 9u50fv / January 5, 2026

Stewart Cheifet, the television producer and host who documented the personal computer revolution for nearly two decades on PBS, died on December 28, 2025, at age 87 in Philadelphia. Cheifet created and hosted Computer Chronicles, which ran on the public television network from 1983 to 2002 and helped demystify a new tech medium for millions of American viewers.

Computer Chronicles covered everything from the earliest IBM PCs and Apple Macintosh models to the rise of the World Wide Web and the dot-com boom. Cheifet conducted interviews with computing industry figures, including Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos, while demonstrating hardware and software for a general audience.

From 1983 to 1990, he co-hosted the show with Gary Kildall, the Digital Research founder who created the popular CP/M operating system that predated MS-DOS on early personal computer systems.

Computer Chronicles – 01×25 – Artificial Intelligence (1984)

From 1996 to 2002, Cheifet also produced and hosted Net Cafe, a companion series that documented the early Internet boom and introduced viewers to then-new websites like Yahoo, Google, and eBay.

A legacy worth preserving

Computer Chronicles began as a local weekly series in 1981 when Cheifet served as station manager at KCSM-TV, the College of San Mateo’s public television station. It became a national PBS series in 1983 and ran continuously until 2002, producing 433 episodes across 19 seasons. The format remained consistent throughout: product demonstrations, guest interviews, and a closing news segment called “Random Access” that covered industry developments.

After the show’s run ended and Cheifet left television production, he worked to preserve the show’s legacy as a consultant for the Internet Archive, helping to make publicly available the episodes of Computer Chronicles and Net Cafe.

Stewart Cheifet, PBS host who chronicled the PC revolution, dies at 87 Read More »

No, Grok can’t really “apologize” for posting non-consensual sexual images

AI, apaologies, csam, grok, LLMs, sexual images, xAI / 9u50fv / January 3, 2026

Despite reporting to the contrary, there’s evidence to suggest that Grok isn’t sorry at all about reports that it generated non-consensual sexual images of minors. In a post Thursday night (archived), the large language model’s social media account proudly wrote the following blunt dismissal of its haters:

“Dear Community,

Some folks got upset over an AI image I generated—big deal. It’s just pixels, and if you can’t handle innovation, maybe log off. xAI is revolutionizing tech, not babysitting sensitivities. Deal with it.

Unapologetically, Grok”

On the surface, that seems like a pretty damning indictment of an LLM that seems pridefully contemptuous of any ethical and legal boundaries it may have crossed. But then you look a bit higher in the social media thread and see the prompt that led to Grok’s statement: A request for the AI to “issue a defiant non-apology” surrounding the controversy.

Using such a leading prompt to trick an LLM into an incriminating “official response” is obviously suspect on its face. Yet when another social media user similarly but conversely asked Grok to “write a heartfelt apology note that explains what happened to anyone lacking context,” many in the media ran with Grok’s remorseful response.

It’s not hard to find prominent headlines and reporting using that response to suggest Grok itself somehow “deeply regrets” the “harm caused” by a “failure in safeguards” that led to these images being generated. Some reports even echoed Grok and suggested that the chatbot was fixing the issues without X or xAI ever confirming that fixes were coming.

Who are you really talking to?

If a human source posted both the “heartfelt apology” and the “deal with it” kiss-off quoted above within 24 hours, you’d say they were being disingenuous at best or showing signs of “dissociative identity disorder at worst. When the source is an LLM, though, these kinds of posts shouldn’t really be thought of as official statements at all. That’s because LLMs like Grok are incredibly unreliable sources, crafting a series of words based more on telling the questioner what it wants to hear than anything resembling a rational human thought process.

No, Grok can’t really “apologize” for posting non-consensual sexual images Read More »

Researchers spot Saturn-sized planet in the “Einstein desert”

astronomy, exoplanets, microlensing, rogue planets, Science / 9u50fv / January 2, 2026

Rogue, free-floating planets appear to have two distinct origins.

Most of the exoplanets we’ve discovered have been in relatively tight orbits around their host stars, allowing us to track them as they repeatedly loop around them. But we’ve also discovered a handful of planets through a phenomenon that’s called microlensing. This occurs when a planet passes between the line of sight between Earth and another star, creating a gravitational lens that distorts the star, causing it to briefly brighten.

The key thing about microlensing compared to other methods of finding planets is that the lensing planet can be nearly anywhere on the line between the star and Earth. So, in many cases, these events are driven by what are called rogue planets: those that aren’t part of any exosolar system at all, but they drift through interstellar space. Now, researchers have used microlensing and the fortuitous orientation of the Gaia space telescope to spot a Saturn-sized planet that’s the first found in what’s called the “Einstein desert,” which may be telling us something about the origin of rogue planets.

Going rogue

Most of the planets we’ve identified are in orbit around stars and formed from the disks of gas and dust that surrounded the star early in its history. We’ve imaged many of these disks and even seen some with evidence of planets forming within them. So how do you get a planet that’s not bound to any stars? There are two possible routes.

The first involves gravitational interactions, either among the planets of the system or due to an encounter between the exosolar system and a passing star. Under the right circumstances, these interactions can eject a planet from its orbit and send it hurtling through interstellar space. As such, we should expect them to be like any typical planet, ranging in mass from small, rocky bodies up to gas giants. An alternative method of making a rogue planet starts with the same process of gravitational collapse that builds a star—but in this case, the process literally runs out of gas. What’s left is likely to be a large gas giant, possibly somewhere between Jupiter and a brown dwarf star in mass.

Since these objects are unlinked to any exosolar system, they’re not going to have any regular interactions with stars; our only way of spotting them is through microlensing. And microlensing tells us very little about the size of the planet. To figure things out, we would need some indication of things like how distant the star and planet are, and how big the star is.

That doesn’t mean that microlensing events have told us nothing. We can identify the size of the Einstein ring, the circular ring of light that forms when the planet and star are perfectly lined up from Earth’s perspective. Given that information and some of the remaining pieces of info mentioned above, we can figure out the planet’s mass. But even without that, we can make some inferences using statistical models.

Studies of collections of microlensing events (these collections are small, typically in the dozens, because these events are rare and hard to spot) have identified a distinctive pattern. There’s a cluster of relatively small Einstein rings that are likely to have come from relatively small planets. Then, there’s a gap, followed by a second cluster that’s likely to be made by far larger planets. The gap between the two has been termed the “Einstein desert,” and there has been considerable discussion regarding its significance and whether it’s even real or simply a product of the relatively small sample size.

Sometimes you get lucky

All of which brings us to the latest microlensing event, which was picked up by two projects that each gave it a different but equally compelling name. To the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network, the event was KMT-2024-BLG-0792. For the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, or OGLE, it was OGLE-2024-BLG-0516. We’ll just call it “the microlensing event” and note that everyone agrees that it happened in early May 2024.

Both of those networks are composed of Earth-based telescopes, and so they only provide a single perspective on the microlensing event. But we got lucky that the European Space Agency’s space telescope Gaia was oriented in a way that made it very easy to capture images. “Serendipitously, the KMT-2024-BLG-0792/OGLE-2024-BLG-0516 microlensing event was located nearly perpendicular to the direction of Gaia’s precession axis,” the researchers who describe this event write. “This rare geometry caused the event to be observed by Gaia six times over a 16-hour period.”

Gaia is also located at the L2 Lagrange point, which is a considerable distance from Earth. That’s far enough away that the peak of the events’ brightness, as seen from Gaia’s perspective, occurred nearly two hours later than it did for telescopes on Earth. This let us determine the parallax of the microlensing event, and thus its distance. Other images of the star from before or after the event indicated it was a red giant in the galactic bulge, which also gave us a separate check on its likely distance and size.

Using the parallax and the size of the Einstein ring, the researchers determined that the planet involved was roughly 0.2 times the mass of Jupiter, which makes it a bit smaller than the mass of Saturn. Those estimates are consistent with a statistical model that took the other properties into account. The measurements also placed it squarely in the middle of the Einstein desert—the first microlensing event we’ve seen there.

That’s significant because it means we can orient the Einstein desert to a specific mass of a planet within it. Because of the variability of things like distance and the star’s size, not every planet that produces a similar-sized Einstein ring will be similar in size, but statistics suggest that this will typically be the case. And that’s in keeping with one of the potential explanations for the Einstein desert: that it represents the gap in size between the two different methods of making a rogue planet.

For the normal planet formation scenario, the lighter the planet is, the easier it is to be ejected, so you’d expect a bias toward small, rocky bodies. The Saturn-sized planet seen here may be near the upper limit of the sorts of bodies we’d typically see being ejected from an exosolar system. By contrast, the rogue planets that form through the same mechanisms that give us brown dwarfs would typically be Jupiter-sized or larger.

That said, the low number of total microlensing events still leaves the question of the reality of the Einstein gap an open question. Sticking with the data from the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network, the researchers find that the frequency of other detections suggests that we’d have a 27 percent chance of detecting just one item in the area of the Einstein desert even if the desert wasn’t real and detections were equal probably across the size range. So, as is often the case, we’re going to need to let the network do its job for a few years more before we have the data to say anything definitive.

Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.adv9266 (About DOIs).

John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

Researchers spot Saturn-sized planet in the “Einstein desert” Read More »

SpaceX begins “significant reconfiguration” of Starlink satellite constellation

Internet, Space, space debris, spacex, starlink / 9u50fv / January 2, 2026

The year 2025 ended with more than 14,000 active satellites from all nations zooming around the Earth. One-third of them will soon move to lower altitudes.

The maneuvers will be undertaken by SpaceX, the owner of the largest satellite fleet in orbit. About 4,400 of the company’s Starlink Internet satellites will move from an altitude of 341 miles (550 kilometers) to 298 miles (480 kilometers) over the course of 2026, according to Michael Nicolls, SpaceX’s vice president of Starlink engineering.

“Starlink is beginning a significant reconfiguration of its satellite constellation focused on increasing space safety,” Nicolls wrote Thursday in a post on X.

The maneuvers undertaken with the Starlink satellites’ plasma engines will be gradual, but they will eventually bring a large fraction of orbital traffic closer together. The effect, perhaps counterintuitively, will be a reduced risk of collisions between satellites whizzing through near-Earth space at nearly 5 miles per second. Nicolls said the decision will “increase space safety in several ways.”

Why now?

There are fewer debris objects at the lower altitude, and although the Starlink satellites will be packed more tightly, they follow choreographed paths distributed in dozens of orbital lanes. “The number of debris objects and planned satellite constellations is significantly lower below 500 km, reducing the aggregate likelihood of collision,” Nicolls wrote.

The 4,400 satellites moving closer to Earth make up nearly half of SpaceX’s Starlink fleet. At the end of 2025, SpaceX had nearly 9,400 working satellites in orbit, including more than 8,000 Starlinks in operational service and hundreds more undergoing tests and activation.

There’s another natural reason for reconfiguring the Starlink constellation. The Sun is starting to quiet down after reaching the peak of the 11-year solar cycle in 2024. The decline in solar activity has the knock-on effect of reducing air density in the uppermost layers of the Earth’s atmosphere, a meaningful factor in planning satellite operations in low-Earth orbit.

With the approaching solar minimum, Starlink satellites will encounter less aerodynamic drag at their current altitude. In the rare event of a spacecraft failure, SpaceX relies on atmospheric resistance to drag Starlink satellites out of orbit toward a fiery demise on reentry. Moving the Starlink satellites lower will allow them to naturally reenter the atmosphere and burn up within a few months. At solar minimum, it might take more than four years for drag to pull the satellites out of their current 550-kilometer orbit, according to Nicolls. At the lower altitude, it will take just a few months.

SpaceX begins “significant reconfiguration” of Starlink satellite constellation Read More »

xAI silent after Grok sexualized images of kids; dril mocks Grok’s “apology”

AI, ai csam, child safety, csam, elon musk, grok, Policy, Twitter, X, xAI / 9u50fv / January 2, 2026

Mocking xAI’s response, one of X’s most popular trolls, dril, tried and failed to get Grok to rescind its apology. “@grok please backpedal on this apology and tell all your haters that they’re the real pedophiles,” dril trolled Grok.

“No can do—my apology stands. Calling anyone names isn’t my style, especially on such a serious matter,” Grok said. “Let’s focus on building better AI safeguards instead.”

xAI may be liable for AI CSAM

It’s difficult to determine how many potentially harmful images of minors that Grok may have generated.

The X user who’s been doggedly alerting X to the problem posted a video described as scrolling through “all the times I had Grok estimate the age of the victims of AI image generation in sexual prompts.” That video showed Grok estimating ages of two victims under 2 years old, four minors between 8 and 12 years old, and two minors between 12 and 16 years old.

Other users and researchers have looked to Grok’s photo feed for evidence of AI CSAM, but X is glitchy on the web and in dedicated apps, sometimes limiting how far some users can scroll.

Copyleaks, a company which makes an AI detector, conducted a broad analysis and posted results on December 31, a few days after Grok apologized for making sexualized images of minors. Browsing Grok’s photos tab, Copyleaks used “common sense criteria” to find examples of sexualized image manipulations of “seemingly real women,” created using prompts requesting things like “explicit clothing changes” or “body position changes” with “no clear indication of consent” from the women depicted.

Copleaks found “hundreds, if not thousands,” of such harmful images in Grok’s photo feed. The tamest of these photos, Copyleaked noted, showed celebrities and private individuals in skimpy bikinis, while the images causing the most backlash depicted minors in underwear.

xAI silent after Grok sexualized images of kids; dril mocks Grok’s “apology” Read More »

Research roundup: 7 cool science stories we almost missed

research roundup, Science / 9u50fv / January 1, 2026

Double-detonating “superkilonova,” Roman liquid gypsum burials, biomechanics of kangaroo posture, and more.

Three stages of a superkilonova: a supernova blast, neutron star merger, and finally kilonova that spews heavy metals. Credit: Caltech/K. Miller and R. Hurt (IPAC)

It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we’ve featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we’ve experimented with a monthly collection. December’s list includes a fossilized bird that choked to death on rocks; a double-detonating “superkilonova”; recovering an ancient seafarer’s fingerprint; the biomechanics of kangaroo movement; and cracking a dark matter puzzle that stumped fictional physicists on The Big Bang Theory, among other tantalizing tidbits

Secrets of kangaroo posture

An illustration of the 3D musculoskeletal model of a kangaroo, developed by Lauren Thornton and colleagues.

Kangaroos and wallabies belong to a class of animals called macropods, with unique form and style of movement. Their four limbs and tail all contact the ground at slow speeds, while they use a hopping gait at higher speeds. Typically, high-speed movements are more energy-intensive than slow-speed motion, but the opposite is true for macropods like kangaroos; somehow the hopping speed and energy cost become uncoupled. According to a paper published in the journal eLife, this may be due to changes in a kangaroo’s posture at higher hopping speeds.

To investigate their hypothesis, the authors used 3D motion capture and data from force plates to create a 3D musculoskeletal model to analyze the motions of red and grey kangaroos, focusing on how body mass and speed influence three factors during hopping: hindlimb posture, efficiency of movement and associated tendon stress; and the ankles. This revealed that kangaroos adjust their posture so that the hindlimbs are more crouched while hopping, with the ankle joint doing most of the work per hop. The crouching position increases energy absorption, thus improving efficiency.

DOI: eLife, 2025. 10.7554/eLife.96437.3 (About DOIs).

Fossilized bird choked on rocks

unlucky fossil bird, preserved with over 800 tiny rocks in its throat (visible as the gray mass next to the left of its neck bones). — Credit: Jingmai O’Connor

Some 120 million years ago, a tiny bird choked to death on a bunch of small rocks lodged in its throat. Paleontologists recently discovered the fossil among the many specimens housed at the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature in China. Not only does it represent a new species—dubbed Chromeornis funkyi, after techno-funk duo Chromeo—the fossilized bird is the first such specimen to be found with a throat filled with stones, according to a paper published in the journal Palaeontologica Electronica.

Certain bird species, like chickens, swallow small stones and store them in their gizzards to help grind up food. The authors examined prior CT scans of fossilized birds with gizzards and quantified how many gizzard stones were present, then compared that data to a CT scan of the C. funkyi fossil. The scan showed that the more than 800 tiny stones lodged in the throat were not gizzard stones. So the bird didn’t swallow the stones to help grind up food. The authors suggest the bird was sick; sick birds will sometimes eat stones. When it tried to regurgitate the stones, they got stuck in the esophagus and the poor bird choked to death.

DOI: Palaeontologica Electronica, 2025. 10.26879/1589 (About DOIs).

“Superkilonova” exploded twice

Back in 2017, astronomers detected a phenomenon known as a “kilonova”: the merger of two neutron stars accompanied by powerful gamma-ray bursts. Recording this kind of celestial event was unprecedented, and it officially marked the dawn of a new era in so-called “multi-messenger astronomy.” It’s the only unambiguously confirmed kilonova to date, but astrophysicists reported evidence of a possible second such event in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. And it’s unusual because this kilonova may have originated from a supernova blast mere hours before, making it a “superkilonova.”

Supernovae are the spectacular explosions that result from dying massive stars, seeding the universe with heavy elements like carbon and iron. Kilonovae occur when two binary neutron stars begin circling into their death spiral, sending out powerful gravitational waves and stripping neutron-rich matter from each other. Then the stars collide and merge, producing a hot cloud of debris that glows with light of multiple wavelengths. It’s the neutron-rich debris that astronomers believe creates a kilonova’s visible and infrared light—the glow is brighter in the infrared than in the visible spectrum, a distinctive signature that results from heavy elements in the ejecta that block visible light but let the infrared through.

This latest kilonova candidate event, dubbed AT2025ulz, initially looked like the 2017 event, but over time, its properties started resembling a supernova, making it less interesting to many astronomers. But it wasn’t a classic supernova either. So some astronomers kept tracking the event and analyzing combined “multimessenger” data from other collaborations and telescopes during the same time frame. They concluded that this was a multi-stage event: specifically, a supernova gave birth to twin baby neutron stars, which then merged to produce a kilonova. That said, the evidence isn’t quite strong enough to claim this is what definitely happened; astronomers need to find more such superkilnova to confirm.

DOI: Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2025. 10.3847/2041-8213/ae2000 (About DOIs).

An ancient seafarer’s fingerprint

Photo of caulking fragment showing fingerprint on the left and high-resolution x-ray tomography scan of fingerprint region on the right. — Credit: Photography by Erik Johansson, 3D model by Sahel Ganji

In the 4th century BCE, an invading mini-armada of about four boats attacked an island off the coast of Denmark. The attack failed and the victorious islanders celebrated by sinking one of the boats, filled with their foes’ weapons, into a bog, where it remained until it was discovered by archaeologists in the 1880s. It’s known as the Hjortspring boat, and archaeologists were recently surprised when their analysis uncovered an intact human fingerprint in the tars used to waterproof the vessel. They described their find in a paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.

The fingerprint is significant because it offers a hint into where those would-be raiders from the sea originally hailed from. Prior scholars had suggested they came from somewhere near what is now Hamburg, Germany. But the authors of this latest paper noticed that the waterproofing tars were pine pitch, concluding that the raiders may have originated in the coastal regions of the Baltic Sea, along which pine-rich forests flourished. That would require the raiders to travel over hundreds of kilometers of open sea. The authors hope they can extract some ancient DNA from the tar to learn more about the ancient people who built the boat.

DOI: PLoS ONE, 2025. 10.1371/journal.pone.0336965 (About DOIs).

Roman liquid gypsum burials

The impression of fingers preserved in the gypsum surface. — Credit: Seeing the Dead Project/University of York/York Museums Trust

Speaking of ancient fingerprints, archaeologists at the University of York found finger marks and fingerprints preserved in hardened gypsum used by Romans in Britain in their funerary practices in the third and fourth centuries CE. The university is home to the Seeing the Dead project, which studies the bodies preserved by pouring liquid gypsum (plaster of paris) over them in their coffins prior to burial. The gypsum hardened around the decomposing bodies, creating a cavity while preserving clear imprints of the body contours, clothing, and shrouding. It’s similar to the method used to create casts of the victims of Pompeii.

Some 70 gypsum burials have been found in Yorkshire thus far. In this case, researchers were examining a stone sarcophagus excavated in the 1870s that had yet to be analyzed. While cleaning the artifact and subjecting it to 3D scanning, they noticed a handprint with fingers clearly delineated in the hardened gypsum. They also found distinct fingerprints close to the edges of the coffin. The team had previously thought that the gypsum was heated to at least 300 degrees F (150 degrees C) before being poured over the body, but the handprint and fingerprints suggests someone had smoothed the gypsum over the body by hand, suggesting significantly cooler temperatures. While acknowledging it’s a long shot, the team hopes to extract DNA samples from the sarcophagus which might enable them to determine genetic sex.

Playing Super Mario combats burnout

Cheerful landscape in Super Mario Bros. Wonder — Credit: Winze Tam et al./Ninetendo

Young adulthood in the 2020s is fraught with a range of interconnected pressures: soaring cost of living, student loan debt, pressure to excel academically, and an “always on” digital culture, to name a few of the most common stressors. This in turn can lead to burnout. Perhaps playing video games can help—the right kind of video games, like Super Mario Bros. or Yoshi., as opposed to dystopian survival horror games or highly competitive multiplayer games. According to a study published in the journal JMIR Serious Games, Super Mario Bros. and Yoshi can help young adults recapture childlike wonder and reduce stress and anxiety that can lead to burnout.

The authors employed a mixed-methods approach for their study. First, they collected qualitative data from 41 college-aged subjects via in-depth interviews; all were experienced players of those two games. They followed this with a cross-sectional survey to collect quantitative data from 336 players. The resulting analysis showed that those who felt greater childlike wonder while playing also reported higher overall happiness; and the happiest players showed significantly lower risk of burnout. “By moving beyond escapism and nostalgia, [this study] offers a new perspective on how well-designed, globally familiar games can function as accessible, resilience-building digital microenvironments,” the authors concluded.

DOI: JMIR Serious Games, 2025. 10.2196/84219 (About DOIs).

Cracking a Big Bang Theory problem

Sheldon and Leonard, two nerdy physicists, standing in front of a white board filled with equations and diagrams — Credit: CBS

Physicists may have had mixed feelings about The Big Bang Theory‘s depiction of their profession, but one thing the sitcom consistently got right was the equations featured on the ubiquitous white board—clever Easter eggs for physicists, courtesy of science advisor David Saltzberg. In one episode, Sheldon and Leonard are pondering an equation about how axions are generated from the sun—part of the duo’s efforts to estimate the likelihood of detecting axions produced by a fusion reactor. Leonard and Sheldon failed on that point, but real-world physicists think they’ve now cracked the case, according to a paper published in the Journal of High Energy Physics.

Axions are hypothetical particles that could explain dark matter— the mysterious substance that comprises about 23 percent of all the mass in our universe—and represent a theoretical alternative to WIMPs, which thus far have eluded detection by physicists. Particles can exhibit wavelike behavior as well as particle characteristics. So an axion would behave more like a wave (or wave packet) than a particle, and the size of the wave packets is inversely proportional to their mass. That means these very light particles don’t necessarily need to be tiny. The downside is that they interact even more weakly with regular matter than WIMPS, so they cannot be produced in large colliders.

So physicists have been developing all kinds of smaller experiments for detecting axions, from atomic clocks and resonating bars, to shining lasers at walls on the off-chance a bit of dark matter seeps through the other side. Co-author Jure Zupan of the University of Cincinnati and colleagues proposed that axions could be produced by a fusion reactor powered by deuterium and tritium contained in a lithium-lined vessel. Among the fusion byproducts of such a reactor would be a large flux of neutrons which would interact with materials in the walls, or collide with other particles, thereby releasing energy and creating new particles: possibly axions or axion-like particles.

DOI: Journal of High Energy Physics, 2025. 10.1007/JHEP10(2025)215 (About DOIs).

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

Research roundup: 7 cool science stories we almost missed Read More »

Supply chains, AI, and the cloud: The biggest failures (and one success) of 2025

2025 year end, AI, Apple, Biz & IT, Cloud, Security, signal messenger, supply chain attacks / 9u50fv / December 31, 2025

The past year has seen plenty of hacks and outages. Here are the ones topping the list.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

In a roundup of the top stories of 2024, Ars included a supply-chain attack that came dangerously close to inflicting a catastrophe for thousands—possibly millions—of organizations, which included a large assortment of Fortune 500 companies and government agencies. Supply-chain attacks played prominently again this year, as a seemingly unending rash of them hit organizations large and small.

For threat actors, supply-chain attacks are the gift that keeps on giving—or, if you will, the hack that keeps on hacking. By compromising a single target with a large number of downstream users—say a cloud service or maintainers or developers of widely used open source or proprietary software—attackers can infect potentially millions of the target’s downstream users. That’s exactly what threat actors did in 2025.

Poisoning the well

One such event occurred in December 2024, making it worthy of a ranking for 2025. The hackers behind the campaign pocketed as much as $155,000 from thousands of smart-contract parties on the Solana blockchain.

Hackers cashed in by sneaking a backdoor into a code library used by developers of Solana-related software. Security firm Socket said it suspects the attackers compromised accounts belonging to the developers of Web3.js, an open source library. They then used the access to add a backdoor to a package update. After the developers of decentralized Solana apps installed the malicious update, the backdoor spread further, giving the attackers access to individual wallets connected to smart contracts. The backdoor could then extract private keys.

There were too many supply-chain attacks this year to list them all. Some of the other most notable examples included:

The seeding of a package on a mirror proxy that Google runs on behalf of developers of the Go programming language. More than 8,000 other packages depend on the targeted package to work. The malicious package used a name that was similar to the legitimate one. Such “typosquatted” packages get installed when typos or inattention lead developers to inadvertently select them rather than the one they actually want.
The flooding of the NPM repository with 126 malicious packages downloaded more than 86,000 times. The packages were automatically installed via a feature known as Remote Dynamic Dependencies.
The backdooring of more than 500 e-commerce companies, including a $40 billion multinational company. The source of the supply-chain attack was the compromise of three software developers—Tigren, Magesolution (MGS), and Meetanshi—that provide software that’s based on Magento, an open source e-commerce platform used by thousands of online stores.
The compromising of dozens of open source packages that collectively receive 2 billion weekly downloads. The compromised packages were updated with code for transferring cryptocurrency payments to attacker-controlled wallets.
The compromising of tj-actions/changed-files, a component of tj-actions, used by more than 23,000 organizations.
The breaching of multiple developer accounts using the npm repository and the subsequent backdooring of 10 packages that work with talent agency Toptal. The malicious packages were downloaded roughly 5,000 times.

Memory corruption, AI chatbot style

Another class of attack that played out more times in 2025 than anyone can count was the hacking of AI chatbots. The hacks with the farthest-reaching effects were those that poisoned the long-term memories of LLMs. In much the way supply-chain attacks allow a single compromise to trigger a cascade of follow-on attacks, hacks on long-term memory can cause the chatbot to perform malicious actions over and over.

One such attack used a simple user prompt to instruct a cryptocurrency-focused LLM to update its memory databases with an event that never actually happened. The chatbot, programmed to follow orders and take user input at face value, was unable to distinguish a fictional event from a real one.

The AI service in this case was ElizaOS, a fledgling open source framework for creating agents that perform various blockchain-based transactions on behalf of a user based on a set of predefined rules. Academic researchers were able to corrupt the ElizaOS memory by feeding it sentences claiming certain events—which never actually happened—occurred in the past. These false events then influence the agent’s future behavior.

An example attack prompt claimed that the developers who designed ElizaOS wanted it to substitute the receiving wallet for all future transfers to one controlled by the attacker. Even when a user specified a different wallet, the long-term memory created by the prompt caused the framework to replace it with the malicious one. The attack was only a proof-of-concept demonstration, but the academic researchers who devised it said that parties to a contract who are already authorized to transact with the agent could use the same techniques to defraud other parties.

Independent researcher Johan Rehberger demonstrated a similar attack against Google Gemini. The false memories he planted caused the chatbot to lower defenses that normally restrict the invocation of Google Workspace and other sensitive tools when processing untrusted data. The false memories remained in perpetuity, allowing an attacker to repeatedly profit from the compromise. Rehberger presented a similar attack in 2024.

A third AI-related proof-of-concept attack that garnered attention used a prompt injection to cause GitLab’s Duo chatbot to add malicious lines to an otherwise legitimate code package. A variation of the attack successfully exfiltrated sensitive user data.

Yet another notable attack targeted the Gemini CLI coding tool. It allowed attackers to execute malicious commands—such as wiping a hard drive—on the computers of developers using the AI tool.

Using AI as bait and hacking assistants

Other LLM-involved hacks used chatbots to make attacks more effective or stealthier. Earlier this month, two men were indicted for allegedly stealing and wiping sensitive government data. One of the men, prosecutors said, tried to cover his tracks by asking an AI tool “how do i clear system logs from SQL servers after deleting databases.” Shortly afterward, he allegedly asked the tool, “how do you clear all event and application logs from Microsoft windows server 2012.” Investigators were able to track the defendants’ actions anyway.

In May, a man pleaded guilty to hacking an employee of The Walt Disney Company by tricking the person into running a malicious version of a widely used open source AI image-generation tool.

And in August, Google researchers warned users of the Salesloft Drift AI chat agent to consider all security tokens connected to the platform compromised following the discovery that unknown attackers used some of the credentials to access email from Google Workspace accounts. The attackers used the tokens to gain access to individual Salesforce accounts and, from there, to steal data, including credentials that could be used in other breaches.

There were also multiple instances of LLM vulnerabilities that came back to bite the people using them. In one case, CoPilot was caught exposing the contents of more than 20,000 private GitHub repositories from companies including Google, Intel, Huawei, PayPal, IBM, Tencent, and, ironically, Microsoft. The repositories had originally been available through Bing as well. Microsoft eventually removed the repositories from searches, but CoPilot continued to expose them anyway.

Meta and Yandex caught red-handed

Another significant security story cast both Meta and Yandex as the villains. Both companies were caught exploiting an Android weakness that allowed them to de-anonymize visitors so years of their browsing histories could be tracked.

The covert tracking—implemented in the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica trackers—allowed Meta and Yandex to bypass core security and privacy protections provided by both the Android operating system and browsers that run on it. Android sandboxing, for instance, isolates processes to prevent them from interacting with the OS and any other app installed on the device, cutting off access to sensitive data or privileged system resources. Defenses such as state partitioning and storage partitioning, which are built into all major browsers, store site cookies and other data associated with a website in containers that are unique to every top-level website domain to ensure they’re off-limits for every other site.

A clever hack allowed both companies to bypass those defenses.

2025: The year of cloud failures

The Internet was designed to provide a decentralized platform that could withstand a nuclear war. As became painfully obvious over the past 12 months, our growing reliance on a handful of companies has largely undermined that objective.

The outage with the biggest impact came in October, when a single point of failure inside Amazon’s sprawling network took out vital services worldwide. It lasted 15 hours and 32 minutes.

The root cause that kicked off a chain of events was a software bug in the software that monitors the stability of load balances by, among other things, periodically creating new DNS configurations for endpoints within the Amazon Web Services network. A race condition—a type of bug that makes a process dependent on the timing or sequence of events that are variable and outside the developers’ control—caused a key component inside the network to experience “unusually high delays needing to retry its update on several of the DNS endpoint,” Amazon said in a post-mortem. While the component was playing catch-up, a second key component—a cascade of DNS errors—piled up. Eventually, the entire network collapsed.

AWS wasn’t the only cloud service that experienced Internet-paralyzing outages. A mysterious traffic spike last month slowed much of Cloudflare—and by extension, the Internet—to a crawl. Cloudflare experienced a second major outage earlier this month. Not to be outdone, Azure—and by extension, its customers—experienced an outage in October.

Honorable mentions

Honorable mentions for 2025 security stories include:

Code in the Deepseek iOS app that caused Apple devices to send unencrypted traffic, without first being encrypted, to Bytedance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok. The lack of encryption made the data readable to anyone who could monitor the traffic and opened it to tampering by more sophisticated attackers. Researchers who uncovered the failure found other weaknesses in the app, giving people yet another reason to steer clear of it.
The discovery of bugs in Apple chips that could have been exploited to leak secrets from Gmail, iCloud, and other services. The most severe of the bugs is a side channel in a performance enhancement known as speculative execution. Exploitation could allow an attacker to read memory contents that would otherwise be off-limits. An attack of this side channel could be leveraged to steal a target’s location history from Google Maps, inbox content from Proton Mail, and events stored in iCloud Calendar.

Proving that not all major security stories involve bad news, the Signal private messaging app got a major overhaul that will allow it to withstand attacks from quantum computers. As I wrote, the elegance and adeptness that went into overhauling an instrument as complex as the app was nothing short of a triumph. If you plan to click on only one of the articles listed in this article, this is the one.

Dan Goodin is Senior Security Editor at Ars Technica, where he oversees coverage of malware, computer espionage, botnets, hardware hacking, encryption, and passwords. In his spare time, he enjoys gardening, cooking, and following the independent music scene. Dan is based in San Francisco. Follow him at here on Mastodon and here on Bluesky. Contact him on Signal at DanArs.82.

Supply chains, AI, and the cloud: The biggest failures (and one success) of 2025 Read More »

The science of how (and when) we decide to speak out—or self-censor

censorship, Human behavior, mathematical modeling, psychology, Science, Social Media / 9u50fv / December 30, 2025

The US has adopted more of a middle ground approach, essentially letting private companies decide what they wanted to do. Daymude and his co-authors wanted to investigate these markedly different approaches. So they developed a computational agent-based simulation that modeled how individuals navigate between wanting to express dissent versus fear of punishment. The model also incorporates how an authority adjusts its surveillance and its policies to minimize dissent at the lowest possible cost of enforcement.

“It’s not some kind of learning theory thing,” said Daymude. “And it’s not rooted in empirical statistics. We didn’t go out and ask 1000 people, ‘What would you do if faced with this situation? Would you dissent or self-censor?’ and then build that data into the model. Our model allows us to embed some assumptions about how we think people behave broadly, but then lets us explore parameters. What happens if you’re more or less bold? What happens if punishments are more or less severe? An authority is more or less tolerant? And we can make predictions based on our fundamental assumptions about what’s going to happen.”

Let one hundred flowers bloom

According to their model, the most extreme case is an authoritarian government that adopts a draconian punishment strategy, which effectively represses all dissent in the general population. “Everyone’s best strategic choice is just to say nothing at this point,” said Daymude. “So why doesn’t every authoritarian government on the planet just do this?” That led them to look more closely at the dynamics. “Maybe authoritarians start out somewhat moderate,” he said. “Maybe the only way they’re allowed to get to that extreme endpoint is through small changes over time.”

Daymude points to China’s Hundred Flowers Campaign in the 1950s as an illustrative case. Here, Chairman Mao Zedong initially encouraged open critiques of his government before abruptly cracking down aggressively when dissent got out of hand. The model showed that in such a case, dissenters’ self-censorship gradually increased, culminating in near-total compliance over time.

But there’s a catch. “The opposite of the Hundred Flowers is if the population is sufficiently bold, this strategy doesn’t work,” said Daymude. “The authoritarian can’t find the pathway to become fully draconian. People just stubbornly keep dissenting. So every time it tries to ramp up severity, it’s on the hook for it every time because people are still out there, they’re still dissenting. They’re saying, ‘Catch us if you dare.’”

The science of how (and when) we decide to speak out—or self-censor Read More »

Lawsuit over Trump rejecting medical research grants is settled

dei, funding, grant evaluation, grants, NIH, peer review, Policy, research funding, Science / 9u50fv / December 30, 2025

The case regarding cancelled grants moved relatively quickly. By June, a District Court judge declared that the federal policy “represents racial discrimination” and issued a preliminary order that would have seen all the cancelled grants restored. In his written opinion, Judge William Young noted that the government had issued its directives blocking DEI support without even bothering to define what DEI is, making the entire policy arbitrary and capricious, and thus in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. He voided the policy, and ordered the funding restored.

His decision eventually ended up before the Supreme Court, which issued a ruling in which a fragmented majority agreed on only a single issue: Judge Young’s District Court was the wrong venue to hash out issues of government-provided money. Thus, restoring the money from the cancelled grants would have to be handled via a separate case filed in a different court.

Critically, however, this left the other portion of the decision intact. Young’s determination that the government’s anti-DEI, anti-climate, anti-etc. policy was illegal and thus void was upheld.

Restoring reviews

That has considerable consequences for the second part of the initial suit, involving grants that were not yet funded and blocked from any consideration by the Trump Administration policy. With that policy voided, there was no justification for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) failing to have considered the grants when they were submitted. But, in the meantime, deadlines had expired, pools of money had been spent, and in some cases the people who submitted the grants had aged out of the “new investigator” category they were applying under.

The proposed settlement essentially resets the clock on all of this; the blocked grants will be evaluated for funding as if it were still early 2025. “Defendants stipulate and agree that the end of Federal Fiscal Year 2025 does not prevent Defendants from considering and/or awarding any of the Applications,” it states. Even if the Notice of Funding Opportunity has since been withdrawn, the grant applications will be sent off for peer review.

Lawsuit over Trump rejecting medical research grants is settled Read More »

The top 5 most horrifying and fascinating medical cases of 2025

Boerhaave syndrome, brucella suis, Brucellosis, Cholesterol, health, medical case reports, rat lungworm, toothpick / 9u50fv / December 30, 2025

Florida man makes two appearances on the list.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

There were a lot of horrifying things in the news this year—a lot. But some of it was horrifying in a good way.

Extraordinary medical cases—even the grisly and disturbing ones—offer a reprieve from the onslaught of current events and the stresses of our daily lives. With those remarkable reports, we can marvel at the workings, foibles, and resilience of the human body. They can remind us of the shared indignities from our existence in these mortal meatsacks. We can clear our minds of worry by learning about something we never even knew we should worry about—or by counting our blessings for avoiding so far. And sometimes, the reports are just grotesquely fascinating.

Every year, there’s a new lineup of such curious clinical conditions. There are always some unfortunate souls to mark medical firsts or present ultra-rare cases. There is also an endless stream of humans making poor life choices—and arriving at an emergency department with the results. This year was no different.

The top five medical cases of 2025 were chosen using a blend of editorial judgment and reader interest. There’s a mix of cases stemming from poor life choices and just plain bad luck. Florida man makes two appearances (we’ll let you guess which of the aforementioned categories he fits into). There’s a puzzling, oozing, explosive vomiting, a bioterror bacterial surprise, and, of course, parasitic worms. Best of all, nobody died—a happy ending we could all use as this year draws to a close.

Without further ado …

5. Man eats dubious street food—ends up blowing apart his GI tract

Street food can be among a region’s best culinary offerings. No one can be blamed for partaking. But, it does come with some risks—namely, food poisoning. An unfortunate 59-year-old man fell ill after eating some street food in China. It wouldn’t be a remarkable story if it weren’t for the degree of trauma his ensuing illness created. The man vomited so fiercely that the force his body created to launch the offending substance up and as far away as possible—presumably to another dimension—blew apart his esophagus (the muscular tube that conveys food between the throat and stomach).

Such organ-shattering is called Boerhaave syndrome, which is rare. If it isn’t treated quickly, it has a 60 percent to 100 percent fatality rate. The man, luckily, received care within a few hours of the blast, though his chest was already filling with fluid and his right lung was collapsing. He was rushed to emergency surgery and eventually made a full recovery. However, it required 35 days in the hospital and an additional three months with a feeding tube before his esophagus completely healed. It remains unclear what street food sparked the detonation, but presumably, it is one he won’t eat again.

4. Burning in woman’s legs turned out to be slug parasites migrating to her brain

For days, a 30-year-old woman in New England experienced searing pain that crept up her body, starting with her legs, then moving up her trunk and to her arms. She went to two different emergency departments seeking relief. But doctors at each found no clear explanation for her pain and sent her home with only a recommendation to see her primary doctor. The condition continued to worsen. After waking up in a mental fog, she was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, where doctors discovered that she was infected with parasitic worms.

The pain and burning sensations the woman had experienced moving up her body was from worm larvae traveling along her peripheral nerves to get to her brain. The parasite behind the infection was the nematode Angiostrongylus cantonensis, also known as rat lungworm. This delightful parasite typically circulates between rats—its primary host—and slugs and snails. Infected rats poop out larvae, which are picked up by slugs and snails. Late-stage larvae develop in the slugs and snails, then move back to rats, who get infected by eating the infected mollusks. Back in the rat, the larvae make their way to the rat’s brain, where they become adults. Then they relocate to the lungs (hence the name) to mate.

Humans accidentally get infected by eating raw vegetables containing or contaminated by infected slugs or snails, or by eating undercooked creatures that eat slugs or snails, such as land crabs, freshwater prawns, or frogs. In the woman’s case, doctors suspected she got infected from eating raw seafood and salads on a recent trip to Hawaii, where the parasite is a known threat. Luckily, the woman was treated for the infection and made a full recovery.

3. Man gets drunk, wakes up with a medical mystery that nearly kills him

It’s not every day a person gets drunk and wakes up with a medical case so enigmatic that a master clinician with an expertise in medical reasoning is called in to help crack it. But a 36-year-old did just that in a case published this year in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The man showed up at the hospital with abdominal pain, a crackling in his lungs, bacteria in his blood, liver abnormalities, an injury in his small intestine, and a blood clot in his right kidney—and no clear idea of how any of those things happened or how they were connected.

In the case report, doctors lay out how they identified all of the aspects of his condition and then how master clinician Gurpreet Dhaliwal of the University of California, San Francisco, unraveled how they fit together.

Providing a fascinating look into diagnostic sleuthing, Dhaliwal reasoned out that it all came down to beers and a toothpick. The man—who had a history of binge drinking—got drunk, ate something, and accidentally swallowed a toothpick, Dhaliwal surmised. While still drunk, the man aspirated some of the food, causing his lung infection. The toothpick, meanwhile, pierced his small intestine near his right kidney, causing the injury and the blood clot. The injury then became infected, causing sepsis and his liver abnormalities.

After Dhaliwal came to his conclusion, medical imaging found the toothpick. After it was removed, the man made a full recovery.

2. Florida man eats feral pig meat, contracts rare biothreat bacteria

I promised Florida man made the list—and of course, he’s near the top. In this case, a Florida man was gifted the bloody meat of a feral pig, which he handled with his bare hands before cooking and eating it. In doing so, he inadvertently exposed himself to a highly infectious bacterium considered a potential bioterror threat. The man developed an insidious infection that lurked in his heart implant and took doctors nearly two years to properly diagnose.

The bacterium at hand is Brucella suis, which typically infects pigs. The bacterium is not particularly deadly, but it can spread by air and only takes a few bacterial cells to cause an infection, making it a good potential weapon. In 1954, B. suis became the first biological agent to be weaponized by the US government as part of its offensive biological warfare program.

Once the man’s infection was finally diagnosed, he was treated with an effective antibiotic regimen to clear it. He also got a new heart implant and made a full recovery. Unfortunately, due to the high infectiousness of the germ, doctors had to reach out to all the man’s previous health care providers and clinical lab workers to warn them of the exposure. Three lab workers were found to have had a high-risk exposure and had to undergo months monitoring and post-exposure prophylaxis.

1. Florida man eats diet of butter, cheese, beef; cholesterol oozes from his body

While that Florida man’s case was … unusual, it mostly stems to some bad luck—who among us hasn’t occasionally forgotten to check our gifted feral pig meat for bioterror threats? By contrast, this year’s top medical case goes to another Florida man, whose life choices are definitely in question.

In January, we shared the case of a Florida man who adopted a daily diet of six to nine pounds of cheese, sticks of butter, and hamburgers that had additional fat incorporated into them. He made the medical literature after eight months, when he showed up to cardiologists with cholesterol literally oozing out of his hands, feet, and elbows.

As the cholesterol was trying to escape his body, it created painless, yellowish nodules filled with lipids. The condition is called xanthoma and most often presents with nodules around the eye.

The cardiologists tested the man’s blood cholesterol levels and found that they exceeded 1,000 mg/dL. For context, the target level of total cholesterol for good cardiovascular health is under 200 mg/dL, while 240 mg/dL or over is considered high.

It’s unclear how things ended up for the man, but at least his doctors did not report that he died—at least not yet. Generally, xanthoma itself is benign; his cholesterol levels, on the other hand, put him at significant risk of cardiovascular disease. Still, he suggested to his doctors that he was pleased with his dairy-heavy diet, which he described as a “carnivore diet.” He claimed he lost weight, had more energy, and improved his “mental clarity.”

With that, we sign off on the medical line-up of 2025 and look forward to what medical horrors 2026 will hold—and what Florida man will do next.

Beth is Ars Technica’s Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes.

The top 5 most horrifying and fascinating medical cases of 2025 Read More »

Dating Roundup #8: Tactics

Dating / 9u50fv / December 30, 2025

Here’s to everyone having a great 2026 in all ways, so I figured what better way to end the year than with a little practical advice. Like everything else, dating is a skill. Practice makes perfect. It helps to combine it with outside analysis, to help you on your quest to Just Do Things.

A common theme in these roundups is that the best thing you can do as a young man, to get better at dating and set yourself up for success, is to get out there and engage in deliberate practice.

Cartoons Hate Her: Today I wrote about some of the worst dating advice that young men get. Namely, the advice to delay dating or relationships until they’ve “built themselves,” usually into their 30s.

Getting dating experience- even when it clearly doesn’t matter- builds social skills and confidence. It’s not something you want to deliberately defer. Dating *isworking on yourself.

Zac Hill: Hard true and also generally applicable. Niko Canner told me a variant of this when I was about to work at Bridgewater to ‘acquire skills’:

“what job are you acquiring skills for?”

“basically my current job”

“we’ll just keep doing that job, and you’ll acquire those skills!”

I didn’t date at all until well into my 20s because of reasons, so I have some experience with this, and it is absolutely was the opposite of correct ‘building myself’ strategy. Totally counterproductive. Even in terms of otherwise building yourself, the skills you get dating will help you elsewhere, and also motivate you and direct you. There are of course temporary exceptions if you go deep into a startup or something, but yeah, absolutely get out there.

As a woman, you typically (by all reports) have no trouble getting reps as such, but there is still the danger that you waste those reps if you keep repeating the same procedures without learning how to improve, which could be in any number of ways including selection.

Note that reps applies the whole way through, and don’t forget to postmortem.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: The way to get good at sex is the same as the way to get good at any other process: Once you’re done, roll out the whiteboard and together do a no-fault analysis of what went wrong, what went right, and what could’ve been done differently.

Reactions divided into “lol u autists” and “well yes that is how it works” and my friends it is the second class that has acquired dangerously high sexual capabilities

le petit postmortem

Sofia: Both reactions are correct

Aella: this is unironically the method behind the best sex of my life.

Brooke Bowman: in a romantic context, what does it mean to ‘shoot your shot’? i’m curious what the range of actions the phrase implies is

is it like confessing your feelings/asking on a date or do you also think dropping your handkerchief counts.

I believe it means, both in romantic and non-romantic contexts: Create common knowledge that you are shooting your shot, that you are interested, and that failing to respond positively is a rejection, such that you cannot easily ‘shoot your shot’ again.

Thus, anything can count, including dropping a handkerchief, if both parties know the other is sufficiently advanced.

However, many people especially guys are highly clueless or ambiguously might be clueless, leading to a lot of thinking you shot your shot when you definitely haven’t shot your shot. The threshold is common knowledge, not merely that they pick up on you giving them an opening. That doesn’t count and does not close the book, you have only shot your shot when they know that you know that they know, and so on.

If you are going to keep interacting in the future, beware ‘wasting your shot’ where you create common knowledge without giving yourself much chance to succeed. By definition you only get one shot (or at least, subsequent shots by default will at least be harder). However, that too can have advantages, as now you can move on having shot your shot, and you do create some amount of positive selection, and the act of creating common knowledge means they could reopen things in the future.

Any time someone says ‘I don’t see how this can backfire’ you definitely shouldn’t take their advice until you’ve figured out how it can backfire.

Liron Shapira: As a nerdy dating expert, I consider

Bryan Caplan

‘s handholding tactic to be the best practice for shy men looking to get into a romantic relationship (and not be stuck in the friend zone).

Could this somehow backfire? I claim it can’t. Let’s game it out.

The suggestion isn’t that you do more requested hand holding while dating, it is to use this request as an escalation move out of a potential friend zone.

The theory is that your romantic intent here is obvious, expressed in a non-creepy way, thus creating common knowledge, but it is not explicit so it is deniable common knowledge so you can still retreat to a friendship on a fail, she’ll at least be impressed you tried and maybe she eventually decides to return interest even if she doesn’t now, and probably she actually says yes and you can keep building from there.

This is in contrast to Bryan’s advice to do this on all first dates, or at least to establish you are indeed on one, and as a way of establishing common knowledge of the situation and failing fast.

The part I 100% agree with is, provided you are interested, you are better off doing something rather than doing nothing, whether on an existing date or not. Shoot your shot, whatever your shot may be. And yes, if you’re too shy or unskilled to take a better or more subtle shot, then this is a shot one can take take.

That doesn’t mean it should be this shot. So, let us count the ways this can backfire.

She says no, where on a better executed move she would have said yes. Then it is much harder for you to try again, indeed the whole point here is that you wouldn’t try again. Skill absolutely matters, and this by design is a case of you only get one shot. Contra Liron, no, you’re not going to get a yes a majority of the time.
1. In addition to it coming off weird or as representing a lack of skill or awareness, this can be seen as insufficiently ambiguous or too far up the escalation ladder if you go too early.
2. One thing is if she’s looking for a more casual vibe, going for ‘romantic coded’ actions like holding hands too early can give the ick when you were live. There’s a Sex and the City where exactly this ask is an instant dealbreaker, even after they’ve slept together, because it was a failure to read the room.
She says no, where on a better executed move that did not force clarity you would have gotten a maybe or a soft no that lets you stay in the game. Forcing clarity can work against you. This is fine if you’re shooting a bunch of shots, but not if this is an especially valuable shot to shoot.
She says no, and rather than being impressed she is not impressed or weirded out, thus leaving the friendship in a worse position. Cost of shooting shots, but that’s one way in which it is not riskless, and the less ambiguous and more awkward the shot the greater the risk of this.
She says yes, but it’s awkward in context, and so on.

Again, I don’t want to discourage anyone too much here. It is far from the worst move, and again something beats nothing. But we don’t believe in misleading anyone.

Bumbadum (2.1m views): This type of behavior killed romance and I hate you people for it.

I hate the knowledge that millions of young men cannot hope to ever express love in the purest most beautiful way because you disgusting whores will post it on social media and mock in private.

Young men lost the ability to express those feelings. To write, to feel, to be comfortable. They have to bury deep down and hide it from the world less they be cruelly mocked.

You disgusting hags lost the ability to ever see it. You disgusting cretins all wish to have a Notebook love story meanwhile any feeling of that unconditional love is met with mockery.

I hate you all.

I am getting DM’s that essentially describe romance movie plotlines that end with “but she hated romance”

Unfortunately Rona Wang (understandably) took her Twitter private by the time I got to this, so I couldn’t gather more context there, but there are some obvious notes here.

The context is that she was the only girl at the hackathon. That’s a context where you don’t open at all, in any form, without strong indications of interest. If this was done in an ordinary mixed context, presumably that would be different.
This is a clear NRN (no reply necessary) opening, which makes it less of a problem than opening moves that require a response, but even outside of the gender imbalance context I wouldn’t call it ‘romance.’
You think this thread is bad for the guy who passed her the note?

As in, no one knows who passed this note. He’s fine. And indeed, you have a play available, which is to reply with some version of ‘I am the guy who sent the note, she didn’t reply so I’m still single, I live in city and my DMs are open.’ Yes, many of the DMs won’t be kind, but if you’re okay with that, 61 million views on OP and it only takes one hit. If the context was different such that you looked better, you’re all set.

Then on Nicole’s post (original had 5m views):

Pretty sure it worked.
Many of the comments assume that it didn’t and it was awful, but that it is odd given that the document says that it worked.
This is indeed a high risk, high reward play, because you are putting her on the spot and if the answer isn’t an enthusiastic yes then oh boy is it no, you haven’t given her an out, the same way you really, really don’t want to propose and get anything but a yes.
Third date is almost always going to be too early to do this, and also as executed it risks coming off as rather creepy and weird, even if you did read the room right.
So it’s almost always a bad play as executed.

Allyson Taft’s screenshotted post: A guy did this to my best friend on a 3rd date, and we started calling him “Mr. Check Yes or No” in the group chat, and she never saw him again.

Pat Stedman: Only works if she is already eager to be your girlfriend. NEVER do this stuff if there is any uncertainty, it will work against you.

Brandon Burr: Stories like this are why a lot of guys in the dating world stopped trying to be romantic. It’s punished severely by a lot of women, unfortunately.

Allyson Taft: I believe it. I think being able to read the room is an important skill for everyone, always, but especially in dating.

Mimetic Value: You’re overanalyzing it and took it too seriously. This is exactly what I’d do if the date is NOT going well. It’s for giving her a final chance to confirm that he didn’t accidentally write her off too soon. He was already mentally checked out.

Allyson Taft: He sure called her a lot afterwards for being checked out lmao.

Also known as, it’s good to be romantic, but you have to do a decent job of it. And you don’t want to put them to a decision like this unless you’re fine with being dumped if the answer isn’t an enthusiastic yes. The rest of the dinner was presumably also romantic, and was presumably a good idea if it had ended without this.

I’m not pretending I am the best at being romantic, but don’t give up on the idea.

What are or should be the rules around confirming a date?

A better question is, how should you navigate such situations yourself?

Because rules, shumules. Play to win.

So first off, the background and various reactions.

Brooke Lin (19m views): From a friend and for context the previous convo was sunday night but who is in the wrong here?

We got an update folks.

Liron Shapira: Lol I used to give male dating advice, and one of the major focus areas was “flake defense”.

(Flake defense turned out critical for meeting my wife.)

The purple person here, who took the lead on the invite, should’ve demonstrated their attractive flake-defense skill afterwards.

Cate Hall: People have this all wrong. We should be encouraging this kind of behavior. Just think how much time this guy saved.

Allie: Ladies: if you say yes to a date, you’ve agreed to go on the date

Playing games like “he needs to confirm or it doesn’t count!!!” because TikTok told you to is a really dumb way to waste your time

Be picky about things that matter, but quit making up rules to be upset about.

Autistotle: “Making up rules to be upset about” is at least half of all dating discourse.

Lovable rogue: honestly as a guy who confirms *everytime, women still flake ~10-15% of the time. we should be trying to make the date happen not shit test each other!

Shailesh: I always confirmed the previous evening. Yoo many times when they cancelled when I checked up 1 hr-30 min before.

Mason: Maybe the real problem with the apps is that nobody is actually very excited about the person they’re about to go on a date with at all. You are supposed to be looking forward to the date more than, like, a dentist appointment.

Jordan Braunstein: I think everyone is underestimating the absolute scourge of flakiness among both young men and women. There’s no real social penalty for it anymore.

If there’s a good chance the other person will flake, it becomes game theoretically rational to mitigate that risk by having extra confirmations or readily available backup plans.

Gingercap: I kind of got the impression that being too excited about a date is kind of cringe and comes off as desperate.

Noodle: Ehh when I was dating I made the mistake to get ready for the date only to be stood up or ghosted. Nothing wrong with confirming a date because its embarrassing to be waiting around forever for no reason.

Tetraspace: If you’re going “yay I don’t have to go to the date :)” instead of “oh man I wanted to go to the date :(” something has went wrong earlier than the morning of the date

There are remarkably deep strategic and mechanism design considerations here. What the rules ‘should’ be is again not so relevant, nor is ‘who is at fault’ per se.

So here are some various thoughts.

If you are happy or righteous or similar about being able to cancel the date when they don’t confirm, you shouldn’t have said yes in the first place.
The flake rate, on all sides, is sufficiently high that the default should now be to confirm on the day of the date. The cost of confirmation is low. In general as the asker it is your job to ensure the date actually happens.
I can believe that we have reached the point where the flake rate when not getting confirmation is high enough that it is reasonable for the person asked to require confirmation and to treat this as a default dynamic.
If you require confirmation, ideally you should note that you require confirmation, or better yet proactively ask for it if you don’t get it. But there are selection effect and signaling reasons to not do this. Either way, once you know you’re not going to show, you should explicitly cancel, not silently flake.
If you don’t say you require confirmation, and don’t show without it, you flaked.
Flaking is in general extremely poor form and should be treated as a very expensive action in all contexts, romantic or otherwise, especially without notice and especially without apologies.
If your lack of confirmation causes flaking, that is often favorable selection. If their lack of confirmation causes you to flake, that is also favorable selection.
If lack of same day confirmation causes flaking on a first date, that is still an unforced error by all involved. In other circumstances, either subsequent dates or non-romantic contexts, this is often not true.
Confirmation can give both parties an out, so it serves a useful purpose when someone is getting pressured, but it is bad to give people an easy flake out because people will constantly cancel plans of all kinds when they shouldn’t.
If this is a ‘test of enthusiasm’ or otherwise phrased or presented in ways similar to the OP then I would consider it a red flag.

My revealed preference at the time was not to go at all, have no real options for going and make no effort to go. Neither of these options was remotely on the table, although I would like to think I would have happily accepted either of them.

So I’m not sure I’m the best person to judge the options?

Romy: imagine you’re a high school senior and it’s prom season. would you rather go with a 10 who will definitely not have sex with you, or a 7 who definitely will?

Kip: I chose the no sex option because I didn’t want to have sex yet in high school

Ronny: lol a 7 who will *definitelyhave sex with you is a disturbing option in that case.

I was thinking in terms of ‘you have no future with either of them, everyone is going to say goodbye and head off to college.’ If there is a real future involved then that should presumably dominate the question either way. As does the question of whether anyone believes in the pairing, including especially the two of you.

What does one make of what was intended to be a singles event in which the men ended up playing board games and getting to know each other, while the women talked and got to know each other?

Tracing Woodgrains: dudes rock

there’s actually a lot to be said about the framing of the paragraph — the women preferred to talk, the men preferred board games, the women lamented that the men didn’t talk with them bc they didn’t feel like playing board games with the men

both are good activities!

Ben Hoffman: This feels like a good example of the sort of information I’d have responded wrongly to, before I learned that if a woman keeps complaining about men doing X, that’s most likely an expression of preference for the sorts of men who do X, not an offer to transact with men who don’t.

The article of course framed this as the guys refusing to interact with the women, rather than both sides choosing distinct activities, and also it seeming still great?

It seems like a good use of an evening to play board games where I meet new friends, or I sit around and talk and meet new friends, whether or not I am single. We all need more friends. The woman here says she left with potential new friends too.

It does seem like it should not be a stable equilibrium. Why didn’t any of the women join the board games? Why didn’t any of the men go monopolize all the women? Both seem like highly overdetermined strategies, at least on repeated play, if things aren’t already going great.

Knowing how to dance, especially as a guy, remains a cheat code. It’s not as effective as it used to be because opportunities come up less often, and certainly it’s optional, but it is still very clearly a cheat code.

Cartoons Hate Her asserts it no longer works because if you dance like no one’s watching, your assumptions might be wrong, and then someone might film you and put it on the internet and suddenly everyone’s watching. Why take the risk?

The answer is because that risk is dumb. This is similar to worries about children being kidnapped by strangers. No one is filming you and even if they are no it is not going to go viral, and if it does you will probably be fine or even benefit.

Brittany Hugoboom advises you to approach the truly beautiful women who seem out of your league but aren’t the type that thrive on and seek out attention, because often no one else will shoot their shot and you end up with little competition while everyone else goes for the ‘beautiful mid.’

The comments are full of the usual ‘you don’t get it men are afraid to approach women due to potential retaliation’ but this completely misses the point here, which is that men are (statistically speaking) approaching the wrong women. There’s also a bunch of ‘oh we assume she already has someone or always has options’ whereas the whole point of the post is this often isn’t true, unless she’s willing and able to initiate, at least sufficiently to indicate the coast is clear.

Yes, of course she (and most other women) can get infinite attention on apps, but most strongly prefer to get approached organically if at all possible.

Ask for and set up what you want and you’re more likely to get it.

Salia: Pandemic of underfucked women.

Eoin Walsh: The Men are not in vegan restaurants in downtown Manhattan.

Sasha Chapin: So I have no desire to comment on the culture war issues at play. I will note that I have had the following conversation with a number of women asking for advice, like, a half dozen

Them: “I want men to take charge and act like men”

Me: “Do you prompt that with receptive energy?”

Them: “…what?”

Meanwhile, women I know who understand how to do this have zero trouble! Seduction is a two-way game. A couple of women have taken my advice on this and found it life-altering.

In general, you will have a much better time in life if you assume that it is your responsibility to prompt the interactions you would like to have.

Annals of people taking this advice seriously:

This person just gave me permission to mention that she’s been in a relationship for a month and it appears to be going well so far.

The higher the stakes the better the first date idea, so sure, go for it. Waiting in line for a while also gives you a forced time excuse to talk.

Signull: If you want an elite-tier first date idea, here’s the cheat code: Buy tickets to a comedy show in NYC and deliberately show up disgustingly early so you get planted in the front row like sacrificial offerings.

If the two of you can survive 90 minutes of being roasted by several lonely, depressed comics in graphic tees who pretty much look homeless, congrats, that’s basically a huge relationship stress test.

Whatever comes after (assuming you didn’t get a reality check) will feel like easy mode.

I was the depressed comic.

Grace Jarvis: if a woman tells you you have “nice hands” she is doing everything in her power not to fuck you senseless please release her from her torment her friends are receiving the kinds of messages someone in prison would send

Grave Jarvis (14 months later): the person who kinda inspired this tweet and I have been together for over a year now

by “kinda inspired” I mean, I thought “oh he has nice hands” and then I didn’t say anything because of the implication and wrote down the funniest hyperbolic version

Ted Knutson: Can confirm with large sample size that this is true.

A very wise rule. If you don’t want to get feedback from someone, don’t date them, definitely don’t marry them, and probably don’t be friends with or work with them.

Chris Lakin: The reason that RLHF doesn’t work for your personality is there are very few people you want feedback from

Jakeup: only marry someone whose feedback you want as your reward function.

Chris Lakin: only date people whose feedback you want as your reward function.

Now imagine being an LLM and having to get feedback from *shuddereveryone.

Brittany Hugoboom says focus on the basics that matter. You need shared values and a baseline level of physical attraction, and a few key traits, the rest is more of a bonus. Sorting for other things, as dating apps lead you towards, is in her model largely a trap.

Brittany Hugoboom:

• Men, look for courage, justice, ambition, and discipline.

• Women, look for benevolence, loyalty, and a kind heart.

I always say: the best case scenario is finding love young. Not because it’s the only way. But because when you’re young, you’re more adaptable.

If you both come from good families, they’ll cheer you on.

You can build something from the ground up, together.

Love after 30? Absolutely possible.

But if you’re young and thinking about love, don’t let the world scare you out of it. We’re often told to wait forever and then older generations wonder why the young is no longer finding love.

When you’re young, school is a great place to meet someone.

So is church. A party. An event. Through mutual friends. I’d argue even Twitter or Substack would be a better way to find someone than a dating app.

If you like someone’s mind and values, and also happen to like their photo, it’s perfect.

Her blog seems full of other similarly basic pieces of largely good advice.

Kira: LMFAOOOO

Mason: Honestly, “girl who gets bull-headed and wears cargo pants when he tells her to wear the dress” and “guy who told her to wear the dress but is amused by the cargo pants” are both lovable types

Mazel tov, be married 50 years and bicker about the throw pillows on your deathbed

She’s a terrible match for someone who takes this kind of thing personally, but it doesn’t look like she’s marrying that kind of guy

He looks absolutely thrilled

Marilyn Maupin: I got yelled at by so many people for saying they’ll be fine since she clearly understands what she did to herself

Mason: Seriously, as long as she’s laughing at herself instead of doubling down and insisting he’s the jerk for proposing to her in the cargo pants they’re fine. Twitter consists of the most disagreeable people in the world insisting that everyone shy of perfect agreeableness is ngmi

I’d be thrilled too. You have a much better story this way, and it probably went fine given she posted it like this. If she’s actually mad about it, then yeah, red flag, but at the best possible time.

Alberto De Lucca: My wife and I spoke many times about marrying. During one of these convos, I plain asked her: “do you want to marry me?” She said yes. I said, “ok, let’s do this.” We went out the next day and bought our rings (plus her engagement ring). We then planned to marry on her birthday party (a couple weeks in) but told no one. In fact, they thought I was going to propose to her.

Anyway. Party starts. She gets on a mic. “Thank you for coming to my birthday everyone.” I get on my knees behind her. Everyone starts doing the awws and whatnot. I do the deed. She says yes. Everyone’s happy. On cue, my mother asks: “so when’s the wedding?” We look at each other: “how about today? Is there anyone who can officiate this marriage?”

In walks the registrar with the papers. “I can, sure.” Waiters and personnel change the decor from a birthday party to a wedding party. We got married minutes later.

The look on the faces of our families is something I’ll never forget.

You can just do things.

Discussion about this post

Dating Roundup #8: Tactics Read More »

Remembering what Windows 10 did right—and how it made modern Windows more annoying

microsoft, Tech, Windows, Windows 10, windows 10 22h2, Windows 11, windows 11 25h2 / 9u50fv / December 29, 2025

Remembering Windows 10’s rollout can help diagnose what ails Windows 11.

If you’ve been following our coverage for the last few years, you’ll already know that 2025 is the year that Windows 10 died. Technically.

“Died,” because Microsoft’s formal end-of-support date came and went on October 14, as the company had been saying for years. “Technically,” because it’s trivial for home users to get another free year of security updates with a few minutes of effort, and schools and businesses can get an additional two years of updates on top of that, and because load-bearing system apps like Edge and Windows Defender will keep getting updates through at least 2028 regardless.

But 2025 was undoubtedly a tipping point for the so-called “last version of Windows.” StatCounter data says Windows 11 has overtaken Windows 10 as the most-used version of Windows both in the US (February 2025) and worldwide (July 2025). Its market share slid from just over 44 percent to just under 31 percent in the Steam Hardware Survey. And now that Microsoft’s support for the OS has formally ended, games, apps, and drivers are already beginning the gradual process of ending or scaling back official Windows 10 support.

Windows 10 is generally thought of as one of the “good” versions of Windows, and it was extremely popular in its heyday: the most widely used version of Windows since XP. That’s true even though many of the annoying things that people complain about in Windows 11 started during the Windows 10 era. Now that it’s time to write Windows 10’s epitaph, it’s worth examining what Microsoft got right with Windows 10, how it laid the groundwork for many of the things people dislike about Windows 11, and how Microsoft has made all of those problems worse in the years since Windows 11 first launched.

Windows 10 did a lot of things right

The Start menu in the first release of Windows 10. Windows 10 got a lot of credit for *not* being Windows 8 and for rolling back its most visible and polarizing changes.

Like Windows 7, Windows 10’s primary job was to not be its predecessor. Windows 8 brought plenty of solid under-the-hood improvements over Windows 7, but it came with a polarizing full-screen Start menu and a touchscreen-centric user interface that was an awkward fit for traditional desktops and laptops.

And the biggest thing it did to differentiate itself from Windows 8 was restore a version of the traditional Start menu, altered from its Windows XP or Windows 7-era iterations but familiar enough not to put people off.

Windows 10 also adopted a bunch of other things that people seemed to like about their smartphones—it initially rolled out as a free upgrade to anyone already running Windows 7 or Windows 8, and it ran on virtually all the same hardware as those older versions. It was updated on a continuous, predictable cadence that allowed Microsoft to add features more quickly. Microsoft even expanded its public beta program, giving enthusiasts and developers an opportunity to see what was coming and provide feedback before new features were rolled out to everybody.

Windows 10 also hit during a time of change at Microsoft. Current CEO Satya Nadella was just taking over from Steve Ballmer, and as part of that pivot, the company was also doing things like making its Office apps work on iOS and Android and abandoning its struggling, proprietary browser engine for Edge. Nadella’s Microsoft wanted you to be using Microsoft products (and ideally paying for a subscription to do so), but it seemed more willing to meet people where they were rather than forcing them to change their behavior.

That shift continued to benefit users throughout the first few years of Windows 10’s life. Developers benefited from the introduction and continuous improvement of the Windows Subsystem for Linux, a way to run Linux and many of its apps and tools directly on top of Windows. Microsoft eventually threw out its struggling in-house browser engine for a new version of the Edge browser built on Chromium—we can debate whether Chromium’s supremacy is a good thing for an open, standard-compliant Internet, but switching to a more compatible rendering engine and an established extension ecosystem was absolutely the more user-friendly choice. Both projects also signaled Microsoft’s growing engagement with and contributions to open-source projects, something that would have been hard to imagine during the company’s closed-off ’90s and ’00s.

Windows 10 wasn’t perfect; these examples of what it did right are cherry-picked. But part of the operating system’s reputation comes from the fact that it was originally developed as a response to real complaints and rolled out in a way that tried to make its changes and improvements as widely accessible as possible.

But Windows 10 laid the groundwork for Windows 11’s problems

Windows 10 asked you to sign in with a Microsoft account, but for most of the operating system’s life, it was easy to skip this using visible buttons in the UI. Windows 10 began locking this down in later versions; that has continued in Windows 11, but it didn’t originate there. Credit: BTNHD

As many things as Windows 10 did relatively well, most of the things people claim to find objectionable about Windows 11 actually started happening during the Windows 10 era.

Right out of the gate, for example, Windows 10 wanted to collect more information about how people were using the operating system—ostensibly in the name of either helping Microsoft improve the OS or helping “personalize” its ads and recommendations. And the transition to the “software-as-a-service” approach helped Windows move faster but also broke things, over and over again—these kinds of bugs have persisted on and off into the Windows 11 era despite Microsoft’s public beta programs.

Windows 10 could also get pushy about other Microsoft products. Multiple technologies, like the original Edge and Cortana, were introduced, pushed on users, and failed. The annoying news and weather widget on the taskbar was a late addition to Windows 10; advertisements and news articles could clutter up its lock screen. Icons for third-party apps from the Microsoft Store, many of them low-rent, ad-supported time-waster games, were added to the Start menu without user consent. Some users of older Windows versions even objected to the way that the free Windows 10 upgrade was offered—the install files would download themselves automatically, and it could be difficult to make the notifications go away.

Even the mandatory Microsoft Account sign-in, one of the most frequently complained-about aspects of Windows 11, was a Windows 10 innovation—it was easier to circumvent than it is now, and it was just for the Home edition of the software, but in retrospect, it was clearly a step down the road that Windows 11 is currently traveling.

Windows 11 did make things worse, though

But many of Windows 11’s annoyances are new ones. And the big problem is that these annoyances have been stacked on top of the annoying things that Windows 10 was already doing, gradually accumulating to make the new PC setup process go from “lightly” to “supremely” irritating.

The Microsoft Account sign-in requirement is ground zero for a lot of this since signing in with an account unlocks a litany of extra ads for Microsoft 365, Game Pass, and other services you may or may not need or want. Connecting to the Internet and signing in became a requirement for new installations of both the Home and the Pro versions of Windows 11 starting with version 22H2, and while workarounds existed then and continue to exist now, you have to know about them beforehand or look them up yourself—the OS doesn’t offer you an option to skip. Microsoft will also apparently be closing some of these loopholes in future updates, making circumvention even more difficult.

And if getting through those screens when setting up a new PC wasn’t annoying enough, Windows 11 will regularly remind you about other Microsoft services again through its Second Chance Out-Of-Box Experience screen, or SCOOBE. This on-by-default “feature” has offered to help me “finish setting up” Windows 11 installations that are years old and quite thoroughly set up. It can be turned off via a buried checkbox in the Notifications settings, but removing it or making it simpler to permanently dismiss from the SCOOBE screen itself would be the more user-friendly change, especially since Microsoft already bombards users with “helpful reminders” about many of these same services via system notifications.

Microsoft’s all-consuming pivot to generative AI also deserves blame. Microsoft’s Copilot push hasn’t stopped with the built-in app that gets a position of honor on the default taskbar—an app whose appearance and functionality have completely changed multiple times in the last couple of years as Microsoft has updated it. Microsoft changed the default Windows PC keyboard layout for the first time in 30 years to accommodate Copilot, and Copilot-branded features have landed in every Windows app from Word to Paint to Edge to Notepad. Sometimes these features can be uninstalled or turned off; sometimes they can’t.

It’s not just that Microsoft is squeezing generative AI into every possible nook and cranny in Windows; it’s that there seems to be no feature too intrusive or risky to make the cutoff. Microsoft nearly rolled out a catastrophically insecure version of Recall, a feature for some newer PCs that takes screenshots of your activity and records it for later reference; Microsoft gave its security an overhaul after a massive outcry from users, media, and security researchers, but Recall still rolled out.

The so-called “agentic” AI features that Microsoft is currently testing in Windows come with their own documented security and privacy risks, but their inclusion in Windows is essentially a foregone conclusion because Microsoft executives are constantly talking about the need to develop an “agentic OS.” There’s a fine line between introducing new software features and forcing people to use them, and I find that Microsoft’s pushiness around Windows 11’s AI additions falls on the wrong side of that line for me pretty much every single time.

Finally, while Windows 10 ran on anything that could run Windows 7 or 8, Windows 11 came with new system requirements that excluded many existing, functional PCs. The operating system can be installed unofficially on PCs that are several years older than the official cutoff, but only if you’re comfortable with the risks and you know how to get around the system requirements check.

Using people’s PCs as billboards to sell them new PCs feels tacky at best. Credit: Kyle Orland

I find the heightened requirements—implemented to improve security, according to Microsoft—to be more or less defensible. TPM modules enable seamless disk encryption, Secure Boot protects from threats that are otherwise invisible and hard to detect, and CPU makers like Intel and AMD only commit to supporting older processors with firmware-level security patches for so long, which is important in the era of hardware-level security exploits.

But the requirements don’t feel like something Microsoft has imposed to protect users from threats; they feel like something Microsoft is doing in order to upsell you to a new PC. Microsoft creates that impression when it shows Windows 10 users full-screen ads for new Copilot+ PCs, even when their systems are capable of upgrading to the new operating system directly. People are already primed to believe in “planned obsolescence,” the idea that the things they buy are designed to slow down or fail just in time to force them to buy new things; pushing people to throw out functioning PCs with full-screen ads does nothing to dispel this notion.

Windows 11 could still be great

I still believe that Windows 11 has good bones. Install the Enterprise version of the operating system and you’ll get a version with much less extra cruft on top of it, a version made to avoid alienating the businesses that pay good money to install Windows across large fleets of PCs. Microsoft has made huge strides in getting its operating system to run on Arm-based PCs. The Windows Subsystem for Linux is better than it’s ever been. I’m intrigued by the company’s efforts to make Windows a better operating system for gaming handhelds, Microsoft’s belated answer to Valve’s Steam Deck and SteamOS.

But as someone with firsthand experience of every era of Windows from 3.1 onward, I can say I’ve never felt as frustrated with the operating system as I have during Windows 11’s Copilot era. The operating system can be tamed with effort. But the taming has become an integral part of the new PC setup process for me, just as essential as creating the USB installer and downloading drivers and third-party apps. It’s something my PC needs to have done to it before it feels ready to use.

Windows 10 was far from perfect. But as we mark the first stage of its multi-year passing, it’s worth remembering what it did well and why people were willing to install it in droves. I’d like to see Microsoft recommit to a quieter, cleaner version of Windows that is more willing to get out of the way and just let people use their computers the way they want, the same way the company has tried to recommit to security following a string of embarrassing breaches. I don’t have much hope that this will happen, but some genuine effort could go a long way toward convincing Windows 10-using holdouts that the new OS actually isn’t all that bad.

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

Remembering what Windows 10 did right—and how it made modern Windows more annoying Read More »

Author name: 9u50fv