🪟 The Old New Installer

Microsoft has finally put their hands on the Preinstalled Environment, which previously has been abandoned for around 10 years. Windows 11 Build 26040 ships with a new, redesigned installer, which is suspiciously reminiscent of the Media Creation Tool (or the autorun installer).

What really caught my attention is the unexpected rollback towards versioning Windows again. The new installer seems to explicitly state you're installing Windows 11 - not just Windows, as it used to occur in previous Windows 11 builds. Could it be silent acknowledgement of defeat and a sign that Microsoft is preparing to move away from their beloved WaaS (Windows as a Service) strategy?

🪟 Artificial requirements start turning real

Windows 11 24H2 now requires the SSE4 instruction set for the PopCnt instruction, which theoretically bumps up the actual CPU requirement to Intel Core 2 from Pentium 4.

That's a welcome change, but was it worth it? The USB XHCI driver seems to be the culprit.

Is it still possible to run Windows 11 on Pentium 4? Find out soon on my channel.

📦 I present to you... the Enderchest

After hundreds of hours, it's finally here! A full-scale blog with dynamic content support! I finally have a place to share my thoughts with everyone else that is entirely unmoderated and belongs to me. Written from scratch on Nuxt 3.

Yes, there are still many things to improve and add. But I can't express how happy I am to have a place where not a single algorithm is able to censor me. Thank you, YouTube, for pushing me to create my own space. It was a tough journey, but absolutely worth it!

You can now find me and all my work on enderman.ch! Even if I get banned from every single platform on the Internet.

It's long overdue. I purchased that vanity domain in 2018 with an intent to create my own little space online. Since then I lost it, regained it, made many mistakes, made new friends, lost a bunch, got a job. 6 years... the list goes on and on! At least I'm not married yet... 2024 is my year of redemption — I will try to finish as many projects I started as I can. I simply can't move on, the sheer amount of unfinished projects doesn't let me sleep well at night.

The good news is if I keep on going, I'll probably manage to finish most of them until the next year. These projects I'm perfectly capable of doing, they're just a little bit too time-consuming...

As a little celebration, I remade my first ever article from scratch to my current standards. There were a bunch of mistakes and inaccuracies, hopefully they're fixed now. 🙂

My awesome followers, if you happen to enjoy huge and beefy reads, you'll most definitely enjoy...

The Windows Context Menu – Is It a Lost Cause?

🪟 Dropped support for... Windows 8?

Honestly, that's kind of crazy to see in 2024... It's only been 11 years since Windows 8 released!

🤖 Try AI?

Except Microsoft Copilot (formerly Bing AI?) is significantly inferior to the free version of ChatGPT with the GPT-3.5 model at its core, despite being GPT-4.

Why?
Because Bing AI's moderation (read — censorship) is far stricter compared to ChatGPT. Any and all moderation is done on a vector math level. Content moderation within large language models is an active area of research, so any censorship comes at a cost. There is no optimal way to make the chatbot go «against the grain» of the dataset it's been trained on, and as a result the moderation overhead causes performance losses.

To further understand this subject, you can read on general moderation and bias prevention in language models.

However, Microsoft Copilot has a direct Windows 11 integration... what a banger of an offer, right? Right?

Another shameless Windows 11 plug from Microsoft...