I do say in my post that I performed a backup. I should have clarified that that was not merely for my benefit while performing the work. My final conversation with him involved handing off a clearly labeled USB drive, and an explanation that all the data from his laptop was copied to that drive and that he should store it somewhere safe.

> Try consoling a few people about how the pictures or files they hold dear are gone forever and then come back and talk about this "dark pattern".

I have, and pretty much every time I've had that conversation with someone it ended with them buying a portable storage drive and having learned a valuable lesson regarding the need for a real backup strategy.

Microsoft's design choices can be both a benefit and an abuse of its users. There's no excuse here for using important features and functionality of the software as an underhanded marketing exercise.

You described your client as:

> not tech literate.

Yet you expect him to understand the need to backup his data, manually, to a local device?

You want to use a 3-2-1 backup strategy:

- 3 backups

- 2 different mediums

- 1 (at least) offsite

A local USB drive satisfies only part of that and doesn't account for the most important (IMHO) offsite requirement. And again, unless there is a some automated process you can assume whatever backup you took will probably be the only one ever done. Perhaps they will backup manually a handful of times but it's just not realistic to expect anyone, even a "computer nerd", to manually backup their files regularly.

I'm really not trying to be a jerk here but I fear you have a call in your future about how their computer died and they plugged that "thumb thing you gave us" into the new computer ("actually, do you have a dongle? The new computer only has round holes, not these square ones") but I have the pictures I took last week (/month/year/since you took the original backup).

Same for me. It was slow but now I've fully joined the hate parade. I only use MS products as necessary to support my business.

I still have the old Win11 ISO that I used during my previous job. It still supported the 'oobe\bypassnro' command. I've read that Microsoft is phasing that one out in newer builds. I'll have to cling to that file with a death grip, lol.

I remember so many times offering to my customers a clean setup with a local account and automatic login. I can't remember a single instance of anyone preferring to log in with an MS account.

I have no idea what happened. I literally just copy and pasted my post title for the submission. I assume there's some form of active curation going on. I've only recently started posting my content to Hacker News so I'm not sure yet.

It's well-known that HN mods will edit submission titles to reduce chances of flamewars/axe-grindiness in the discussions. Not saying that's what happened here, but not a new thing.

Excuse? They don't need an excuse, "How Microsoft abuses its users" isn't very descriptive. The edited title reduces the heat and gives more info.

That's a fair point. I enjoy being a _bit_ provocative, but that title might have been a bit much.

Yes, it's fairly straightforward - if a title is too baity, we edit it, in keeping with this guideline:

"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

However, when we do that, we always try to find a representative phrase within the article itself. We try not to make up our own wording but rather to let the article speak for itself. In this case, we found this sentence:

> Microsoft is very obviously employing dark patterns in order to goad its users into paying for Onedrive storage

However, since that's also a provocative claim, we added a question mark at the end. This is also a standard moderation edit; it's basically shorthand for "the article argues for controversial claim X, but whether that's true or not is something each reader can decide for themselves". In this way the title that appears on the frontpage becomes more neutral, which is what we're going for.

The question mark is pretty bad though.

That was my impression too. I used to think I'd use nothing but MX Blues forever. The 'copycat' switches haven't just caught up, they've been innovating and Cherry seems to have given up.

I've heard this anecdotally. I'm enjoying my current setup but I do hold open the possibility of going back to membrane one day.

For me at least, the advent of coding AI has just forced me to finally accept a truth that I probably always knew: that I'm an average (at best) software developer, and that I don't have anything truly unique or impressive to contribute to the field. My side projects were always just for myself.

I love computing, and programming. If anything I'm better able to appreciate that now that I no longer care if my work has any impact.

That was both depressing and uplifting at the same time. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.