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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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A couple examples:

Modern Windows pushes searching using the start menu search bar. Which could have been a valid design choice. But I search for something on my computer and instead it gives me a bunch of Bing web results mixed in. If you accidentally click on one, it opens Bing in Edge.

I recently had to run some Python scripts using command line. I wanted to open a Python session in command line to do some simple testing. A trivial task I am familiar with. But this time when I typed python into the command line it opened the Microsoft store to download Python. Which is strange because I already have Python. After a bit of Googling I found an obscure setting to uncheck to make command line work the way it always has instead of opening the fucking Microsoft store. They broke basic obvious functionality for truly no benefit. And the settings are hidden so deeply in a scattered mess of settings windows that I can only restore basic functionality by Googling and reading a bunch of forum posts. I await the day that an update reverses all of my settings choices and I get to do this all over again. Looking forward to ads in my start pane and a crippled command line.

In an excess of fairness, I'm going to shout out Windows Terminal It is a really good command line program. It actually cures most of my complaints with TMUX. This kind of handy functionality should be Microsoft's norm, not a rare pleasant surprise.