5 ms·

> Regaining trust is extremely hard after you've crossed an edge. Microsoft needs to learn consent. Everywhere there's a Yes and "Remind me later", there has t

> Regaining trust is extremely hard after you've crossed an edge. Microsoft needs to learn consent. Everywhere there's a Yes and "Remind me later", there has to be a No. And the No has to work and be remembered forever, not forgotten after the next update. Using Windows has to stop feeling like you're being roofied all the time.

embedding-shape 5mo ago
Good luck with that. I have a Windows computer I sometimes have to run stuff on overnight, like renders or what not. I've disabled everything I can related to Windows Update, plus setting "Active hours" or what not, so the computer doesn't reboot because of updates in the middle of the night. Today I woke up, went to check the progress and wouldn't you know, Windows Update updated the computer and rebooted, and what I was waiting for was aborted... So fucking tiresome to use shit like this.
- zombot 5mo ago
  Have you tried using a program that regularly simulates keypresses or mouse movements so the computer thinks the user is still active? The `SCROLL` key for instance can be pressed without causing unwanted side effects, but it stops my Windoze VM from going to sleep.
  - embedding-shape 5mo ago
    I have not, interesting idea and I'll definitively try it out. Thanks!
    - ethbr1 5mo ago
      There are some well-known scripts. All variants of the same pattern. E.g. https://gist.github.com/LuisAGC/843a2a45617d7ad05687c2f8a15c66ac https://gist.github.com/LuisAGC/843a2a45617d7ad05687c2f8a15c... or https://github.com/TheBear1616/CapsLock-PreventSleep-Script/blob/master/CapsLockPreventSleepScript.ps1 https://github.com/TheBear1616/CapsLock-PreventSleep-Script/... Scroll lock and F13 are commonly used
      - emeril 5mo ago
        I much prefer an ahk script to move the mouse a few pixels periodically...
  - vrighter 5mo ago
    haha this reminds me of what I did for my speakers. They turn themselves off after about 1 and a half hours of silence. So I added a cuckoo clock chime on the hour. Problem solved.
- Telaneo 5mo ago
  I've seen people resorting to disconnecting machines from the internet to prevent this. They load up the software they need, then it never goes online again, so updates can never bother them or otherwise get in the way. The software thus stays exactly as they want it to be. It's an appliance at that point. It's annoying to have to shuffle files over to it, if that's needed for its job, but I think it's still a worthwhile thing to consider (it's insane that we've gotten to this point, but such is life). If it isn't workable, then fine. But if it is, the hassle of shuffling files using external SSDs or whatever is probably better, or at the very least more consistent, than turning on your machine one day and finding it corrupted itself due to an update, or the software in question got a UI update which breaks your workflow for a month.
  - embedding-shape 5mo ago
    Hm, yeah, can't really disconnect it, I'm using it for (local) CI purposes as well. I could disconnect it from the internet though, keep the local connection, but maybe actually explicitly blocking anything windows/microsoft for the period I want it to stay online, might work sufficiently. Regardless, thanks for the ideas!
  - pndy 5mo ago
    > I've seen people resorting to disconnecting machines from the internet to prevent this. The Windows Update processes were really a stubborn bunch in W10 - not sure if anything have changed in W11. These probably were given the highest privileges that made them spawn periodically outside any scheduled tasks settings somehow. Some 3rd-party tools were able to neuter most of them but these were like zombies. Continuously rising up.
- ethbr1 5mo ago
  Windows power / restart has gotten absolutely fucked in the last 10 years. Hibernate? Gone by default. Sleep? Ineffective 1/2 the time because a Microsoft utility force-wakes it. It's sad that 15 year old Windows system was more usable than one today.
  - MiddleEndian 5mo ago
    Close Windows laptop and leave it on desk, open in morning... 50/50 chance: 1. Laptop has most of its battery life still because it slept successfully and predictably 2. Laptop drained battery to 5% and only then slept
- Tanoc 5mo ago
  That's the biggest reason why I stayed on Windows 7 for so long. I could run Blender for two or three days and not give a shit. Meanwhile my friends couldn't even play a game of Factorio without Windows hijacking the computer and rebooting. There was an infamous incident years ago, early in the life of Windows 10, where members of Achievement Hunter lost half of an episode because one of the computers that recorded the audio tracks decided it had to update while they were recording. This has been going on for a decade now and shows no signs of being stopped.
- projektfu 5mo ago
  Turn off almost all outbound connections in Windows firewall, except the ones your apps actually use. Then it never gets updates unless you install them yourself.
AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
Avast does this well. It has "do this" options for now, in an hour, in a day, and "next century".
nickjj 5mo ago
Yeah this seems to be a trend over the last few years. Google does this too. I don't have photos backed up to my Google account on a Pixel and every few days if I open the photos app it prompts me to backup to the cloud and I always have to click "maybe later", "not now" or whatever they decide to name it. It's messed up because if I were to accidentally ever click yes to that it would fill up my Google storage and I would no longer be able to receive email since I'd have 0% storage. I don't get how something so dangerous can be shoved in front of you so frequently. I know it's marketing / advertising to constantly remind you of something even if you don't want it, but I would have thought customer happiness would outweigh that.
- ttoinou 5mo ago
  Those are dark patterns for sure. I don’t know how big companies can still pull that in 2026
  - 3form 5mo ago
    People were eased into a defeatist attitude over time. Easily done when everyone's trying to achieve it.
    - ethbr1 5mo ago
      Management and PM kung fu: - Here's the KPI - Team can't figure out another way to boost KPI - Team implements dark pattern System working as pathologically-intended. The root problem is there are seemingly no user experience quality KPIs on the development side to counterbalance revenue / usage / adoption ones.
- duzer65657 5mo ago
  or every time you click a YT link in firefox on android it asks "do you want to open this in the YT App?" where you're options are Yes (with an always use app checkbox) and "Cancel" to open in the browser. Like "Cancel" means "no, get out of the way and do what I want before you injected yourself in this flow"
sigseg1v 5mo ago
This is how you can tell that they just don't get it. Microsoft, your users include developers and power users. We are not all someone's tech illiterate relative who needs constant reminding to check that backups are on, nor do we want to use OneDrive. If we turn it off, it means off. Updates off = they stay off until turned back on, don't worry, we'll remember. Backup off = it stays off. Edge off = it stays off. Ads off = I don't want ads. The battle they are fighting is that by using Google, tech illiterate people have found buttons like the ability to disable updates, but don't understand what they're doing, and then leave them off and now their OS becomes part of a botnet in a few months. So Microsoft believes that they are doing a greater good by not offering a real option to actually turn certain things off. But this babysitting behavior is annoying as shit when you want to leave something running that is going to take 6 days. Sure yes put it on a cloud vm. But if I was still using Windows as my OS, why should I have to? Just because your OS can't handle a developer doing something else than using Outlook and OneDrive to store pictures of aunties family get-together?
- xmcp123 5mo ago
  It's wild to me that they don't have an Android-esque "Developer mode" that requires an obscure thing that you need to look up to see the options that can harm you (Click X times on the "Build info", etc).
  - RGamma 5mo ago
    gpedit.msc
  - ethbr1 5mo ago
    Historically, Microsoft never had to consider that, because Windows was always in developer mode. The Windows pedigree assumed that everything would at most have an ini or registry setting or group policy to override 99.9% of Windows' behavior or at least an undocumented but accessible internal API to set it. The Windows 11 transition was the first time Microsoft shipped a sufficiently bullshit OS that it actually needed a developer mode. But most scathingly... and the original sin... was that some shit-for-brains Microsoft leader made the decision to disable configurability for purpose of boosting platform revenue. Fuck that person, because they knew exactly what and why they were doing it, and still made that decision. Tolerate or hate them for all their sharp business elbows, but Microsoft of yore (Gates and Ballmer eras) intentionally made the decision that if they built and owned a platform that most people used (because it worked for them) then there would be more than enough money for everyone. And that it was healthy to leave money on the table for their developers, because developers and the apps they built drove people to the platform (see "Developers, developers, developers!").
pndy 5mo ago
It's not just Microsoft but they do it in the one of most nastiest ways. I won't count how many times I was checking if my Windows settings weren't randomly reverted to Microsoft-safe-defaults back after updates. And I'm still doing that on iOS and Android today - at least my desktop is free of such gymnastics. We're at such point in the software history that perhaps this should be regulated. I know that such idea isn't particularly welcomed among hn but what else there left? A blind hope that some wind of changes will do the work? I don't think so. Truth is that nearly every commercial software and service operates with compromising user privacy by default. It's the same constant nagging up until user surrenders. All of this so someone on the top of the corporate structure could get higher bonus from statistics. This shouldn't be tolerated.

embedding-shape 5mo ago

Good luck with that. I have a Windows computer I sometimes have to run stuff on overnight, like renders or what not. I've disabled everything I can related to Windows Update, plus setting "Active hours" or what not, so the computer doesn't reboot because of updates in the middle of the night. Today I woke up, went to check the progress and wouldn't you know, Windows Update updated the computer and rebooted, and what I was waiting for was aborted... So fucking tiresome to use shit like this.

zombot 5mo ago
Have you tried using a program that regularly simulates keypresses or mouse movements so the computer thinks the user is still active? The `SCROLL` key for instance can be pressed without causing unwanted side effects, but it stops my Windoze VM from going to sleep.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  I have not, interesting idea and I'll definitively try it out. Thanks!
  - ethbr1 5mo ago
    There are some well-known scripts. All variants of the same pattern. E.g. https://gist.github.com/LuisAGC/843a2a45617d7ad05687c2f8a15c66ac https://gist.github.com/LuisAGC/843a2a45617d7ad05687c2f8a15c... or https://github.com/TheBear1616/CapsLock-PreventSleep-Script/blob/master/CapsLockPreventSleepScript.ps1 https://github.com/TheBear1616/CapsLock-PreventSleep-Script/... Scroll lock and F13 are commonly used
    - emeril 5mo ago
      I much prefer an ahk script to move the mouse a few pixels periodically...
- vrighter 5mo ago
  haha this reminds me of what I did for my speakers. They turn themselves off after about 1 and a half hours of silence. So I added a cuckoo clock chime on the hour. Problem solved.
Telaneo 5mo ago
I've seen people resorting to disconnecting machines from the internet to prevent this. They load up the software they need, then it never goes online again, so updates can never bother them or otherwise get in the way. The software thus stays exactly as they want it to be. It's an appliance at that point. It's annoying to have to shuffle files over to it, if that's needed for its job, but I think it's still a worthwhile thing to consider (it's insane that we've gotten to this point, but such is life). If it isn't workable, then fine. But if it is, the hassle of shuffling files using external SSDs or whatever is probably better, or at the very least more consistent, than turning on your machine one day and finding it corrupted itself due to an update, or the software in question got a UI update which breaks your workflow for a month.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  Hm, yeah, can't really disconnect it, I'm using it for (local) CI purposes as well. I could disconnect it from the internet though, keep the local connection, but maybe actually explicitly blocking anything windows/microsoft for the period I want it to stay online, might work sufficiently. Regardless, thanks for the ideas!
- pndy 5mo ago
  > I've seen people resorting to disconnecting machines from the internet to prevent this. The Windows Update processes were really a stubborn bunch in W10 - not sure if anything have changed in W11. These probably were given the highest privileges that made them spawn periodically outside any scheduled tasks settings somehow. Some 3rd-party tools were able to neuter most of them but these were like zombies. Continuously rising up.
ethbr1 5mo ago
Windows power / restart has gotten absolutely fucked in the last 10 years. Hibernate? Gone by default. Sleep? Ineffective 1/2 the time because a Microsoft utility force-wakes it. It's sad that 15 year old Windows system was more usable than one today.
- MiddleEndian 5mo ago
  Close Windows laptop and leave it on desk, open in morning... 50/50 chance: 1. Laptop has most of its battery life still because it slept successfully and predictably 2. Laptop drained battery to 5% and only then slept
Tanoc 5mo ago
That's the biggest reason why I stayed on Windows 7 for so long. I could run Blender for two or three days and not give a shit. Meanwhile my friends couldn't even play a game of Factorio without Windows hijacking the computer and rebooting. There was an infamous incident years ago, early in the life of Windows 10, where members of Achievement Hunter lost half of an episode because one of the computers that recorded the audio tracks decided it had to update while they were recording. This has been going on for a decade now and shows no signs of being stopped.
projektfu 5mo ago
Turn off almost all outbound connections in Windows firewall, except the ones your apps actually use. Then it never gets updates unless you install them yourself.

AnimalMuppet 5mo ago

Avast does this well. It has "do this" options for now, in an hour, in a day, and "next century".

nickjj 5mo ago

Yeah this seems to be a trend over the last few years. Google does this too. I don't have photos backed up to my Google account on a Pixel and every few days if I open the photos app it prompts me to backup to the cloud and I always have to click "maybe later", "not now" or whatever they decide to name it. It's messed up because if I were to accidentally ever click yes to that it would fill up my Google storage and I would no longer be able to receive email since I'd have 0% storage. I don't get how something so dangerous can be shoved in front of you so frequently. I know it's marketing / advertising to constantly remind you of something even if you don't want it, but I would have thought customer happiness would outweigh that.

ttoinou 5mo ago
Those are dark patterns for sure. I don’t know how big companies can still pull that in 2026
- 3form 5mo ago
  People were eased into a defeatist attitude over time. Easily done when everyone's trying to achieve it.
  - ethbr1 5mo ago
    Management and PM kung fu: - Here's the KPI - Team can't figure out another way to boost KPI - Team implements dark pattern System working as pathologically-intended. The root problem is there are seemingly no user experience quality KPIs on the development side to counterbalance revenue / usage / adoption ones.
duzer65657 5mo ago
or every time you click a YT link in firefox on android it asks "do you want to open this in the YT App?" where you're options are Yes (with an always use app checkbox) and "Cancel" to open in the browser. Like "Cancel" means "no, get out of the way and do what I want before you injected yourself in this flow"

sigseg1v 5mo ago

This is how you can tell that they just don't get it. Microsoft, your users include developers and power users. We are not all someone's tech illiterate relative who needs constant reminding to check that backups are on, nor do we want to use OneDrive. If we turn it off, it means off. Updates off = they stay off until turned back on, don't worry, we'll remember. Backup off = it stays off. Edge off = it stays off. Ads off = I don't want ads. The battle they are fighting is that by using Google, tech illiterate people have found buttons like the ability to disable updates, but don't understand what they're doing, and then leave them off and now their OS becomes part of a botnet in a few months. So Microsoft believes that they are doing a greater good by not offering a real option to actually turn certain things off. But this babysitting behavior is annoying as shit when you want to leave something running that is going to take 6 days. Sure yes put it on a cloud vm. But if I was still using Windows as my OS, why should I have to? Just because your OS can't handle a developer doing something else than using Outlook and OneDrive to store pictures of aunties family get-together?

xmcp123 5mo ago
It's wild to me that they don't have an Android-esque "Developer mode" that requires an obscure thing that you need to look up to see the options that can harm you (Click X times on the "Build info", etc).
- RGamma 5mo ago
  gpedit.msc
- ethbr1 5mo ago
  Historically, Microsoft never had to consider that, because Windows was always in developer mode. The Windows pedigree assumed that everything would at most have an ini or registry setting or group policy to override 99.9% of Windows' behavior or at least an undocumented but accessible internal API to set it. The Windows 11 transition was the first time Microsoft shipped a sufficiently bullshit OS that it actually needed a developer mode. But most scathingly... and the original sin... was that some shit-for-brains Microsoft leader made the decision to disable configurability for purpose of boosting platform revenue. Fuck that person, because they knew exactly what and why they were doing it, and still made that decision. Tolerate or hate them for all their sharp business elbows, but Microsoft of yore (Gates and Ballmer eras) intentionally made the decision that if they built and owned a platform that most people used (because it worked for them) then there would be more than enough money for everyone. And that it was healthy to leave money on the table for their developers, because developers and the apps they built drove people to the platform (see "Developers, developers, developers!").

pndy 5mo ago

It's not just Microsoft but they do it in the one of most nastiest ways. I won't count how many times I was checking if my Windows settings weren't randomly reverted to Microsoft-safe-defaults back after updates. And I'm still doing that on iOS and Android today - at least my desktop is free of such gymnastics. We're at such point in the software history that perhaps this should be regulated. I know that such idea isn't particularly welcomed among hn but what else there left? A blind hope that some wind of changes will do the work? I don't think so. Truth is that nearly every commercial software and service operates with compromising user privacy by default. It's the same constant nagging up until user surrenders. All of this so someone on the top of the corporate structure could get higher bonus from statistics. This shouldn't be tolerated.