snielson

I don't live in BE county, but I live a little south of there. I'm also familiar with water allocation in Utah and you're correct that the data center will use less water than the farms it replaces. The water saved will stay in the underground instead of being pumped out, which is a good thing.

The only legitimate criticism I've seen of the data center is by the USU professor who calculated the heat output and determined it would raise the ambient temperature of the area by 5-9F (if my memory is correct). Also, while it will provide a net tax benefit, the data center is getting some tax breaks compared to any other run of the mill industrial project.

My wife runs a food blog and sometimes uses AI to come up with recipes she tests on us first. One of the best dishes she’s ever made (and one of the best I’ve ever eaten) was pork with an apricot sauce. The pork was fine, but the sauce was absolutely incredible! I’d put it on any kind of meat. Funny thing is, I don’t even like apricots, but the sauce was amazing. My wife does have one advantage, which is that she knows when the AI has hallucinated something crazy and makes appropriate adjustments. I guess it's like anything. AI can be a big help to those who already have a threshold level of background knowledge in a field but can cause big problems for those who don't.

Yeah, I really like Windows 11. I'm not a developer; just an ordinary user. I guess the difference is that I fully embrace the MS ecosystem—i.e., OneDrive, M365 Family account (the storage alone is worth the cost), Power Toys, Edge (sync'd across computers), etc. It works great.

The only problem I’ve had was with a family member who refused to restart the computer. Eventually, something got corrupted. Fixing it was simple—I just reinstalled the current version of Windows. It was so much easier than in the past, when it meant reinstalling everything from scratch or reverting to a saved snapshot.

The "Files-On-Demand" feature of OneDrive makes it possible for everyone in the family to login into any computer with OneDrive and quickly access all their files (I have 500/500 fiber). Because some/most of the files are stored on the cloud and only downloaded when they are accessed, the hard drive of the computer can be smaller (1TB) than the total sum of all the files stored by all the users (6TB). It's very nice. I can also turn off Files-on-Demand and everything will be stored locally on my computer. It sounds like many people are bothered that Files-on-Demand is enabled by default.

I love OneDrive. I don't know why everyone hates it. I save things in OneDrive, and they are backed up to the cloud and synced with the other computers I use.

Some computers are shared by six family members, each with their own MS account and 1TB of storage. OneDrive makes it so the computers can have a 1TB hard drive but still give everyone ready access to their files by not storing them all on the hard drive.

If I don't want something synced to Onedrive then I usually save it in my downloads folder or another separate folder I create outside Onedrive. I've never had any problems.

The comments by people who hate make me wonder why my experience is so different than theirs.

I'm not a developer, but I consider myself relatively tech literate. That said, I really like Windows 11 and many other MS products such as M365, Edge, new Outlook, One Drive, and even Teams is tolerable (maybe not as polished as Zoom). Copilot is still struggling to find relevance, but I just chalk that up to MS pivoting rapidly to figure out how to make it useful (I currently use the enterprise version solely to draft emails, which is a huge time saver even if it is a bit pricey at $30/mo). The complaints I see on here so frequently just don't register with me. For example, I never see any ads. Maybe there is a setting I turned off long ago, but I cannot recall ever seeing an ad. The setting must be persistent with my Windows backups because no ads show when I reinstall Windows and restore the settings and configuration from a backup. Things are not always perfect, but the issues I have encountered are relatively minor all things considered.

> Additionally, every colleague, counterparty, outside-counsel, and client a lawyer ever works with uses docx. To introduce a new format into this ecosystem would introduce friction into every single interaction.

As an attorney, this is what kept me from switching to LibreOffice or Google Docs. I gave it a shot, but since the other attorneys I work with (both in and outside the US) and my clients all use Word, I ended up wasting a lot of time fixing files after converting between formats. In the end, it just wasn’t worth it.

I’m fairly tech-savvy, but many of my coworkers struggle with the mental effort required to switch to new software. Two colleagues I greatly respect still use WordPerfect and Word 2003 because they dislike change so much. It's too much of a lift for these people to wholesale switch word processors.

Ublock origin can be installed in Edge mobile.

Assistive access mode for an iPhone is fantastic for the elderly. It's the only way my 85-year-old father can even use a phone. One of the best features is that it can be set to allow incoming calls only from people in his contacts. It's such a lifesaver.

I use Paint.net for simple tasks like those you listed. I paid $10 for it in the Microsoft store but I think you can get it for free from the website.

I use Contacts+. It's not free, but it syncs Google and Microsoft contacts nicely, which is my primary need.

According to my testing, Claude 3 Opus makes drafting patent applications about 50% faster.

T-mobile business has a backup plan for $30/mo ($15/mo on a promo a month ago) that can be used for up to 7 days of internet per month. I signed up for it so I will still have internet if my fiber goes out (my router will automatically switch over in an outage).

Lehi offers 1Gbps fiber for $80/mo, which is about the same as Utopia. The pricing seems pretty good for dinner in Utah.