Windows, PassKeys, Gemini, RISC-V, Copilot

1. Windows update, oh joy. It prevents installing new programs, takes forever. And if you PAUSE updates, so you could get something else done, it actually doesn't PAUSE updates, but it first REVERTS the on going update process and then pauses those. Potentially taking several hours to pause the process. I'm not the first one to get crazy about this, and now I've got a few friends with the same experience as well. It's so nice that pausing updates isn't like, ok. Now it's paused. Instead it's extremely slow and complicated rollback process. - Lesson learned, always always pause updates well before you're going to do anything meaningful with computer. Once the updates make your life hard, you can't pause those in any sane way anymore. You've already lost the game at that point. No worries, only one working day lost to Windows update madness. - It's possible to install the Sandbox to the Windows Home edition as well. I think it's often best for home users, because they might not have system resources or skills to run more complicated and versatile virtualization platforms / solutions. Sandbox is simple and quick to use when necessary. - Two days lost to this problem. - Finally ended up using alternate solution. - Complete disaster in terms of efficiency.  

2. About PassKeys (@ Wikipedia) and FIDO2 and how handy those are. Now I've got one Google account stuck, which I can't administer anymore, because it requires key and Google managed to mess those up, as I've posted earlier. That's pretty darn lame. Let's see if I just need to discard the account, or if they have any sane recovery process. Totally bleeping great tech stuff again. I actually do have THREE separate and independent different security keys registered with this account, but because Google messed those up, none of the keys are working. - It's nice to make systems secure, so secure that users can't even login. - Fun part is that I've got plenty of login options listed, but the account management requires security key, which they did break. - My best guess is that the recovery turns out to be impossible. - Perfect example why you should NOT trust the cloud.

3. Google claims that hackers use Gemini (@ Wikipedia) to generating hacking tools and phishing messages. - How would they know, if they don't monitor everything that's happening on the platform? - So much about the privacy. Well,  I guess nobody got surprised by this. Lack or privacy, or bad guys using AI as well as everyone else.

4. Ahaha, these expensive certification programs are absolute joke. When the certification authority, itself has issues like this. One of their certification management portals now returns error:
   PHP Warning: Undefined array key "USBTokenSetup" in D:\Webspace\the-site\wwwroot\index.php on line 367

5. Honesty? Again, I really don't think what I should think about this... High trust and perfection and yet they've got the most bleeping stupid issues possible. Usually those won't work too well together.

6. RISC-V (@ Wikipedia) 64 bit platform on Scaleway (@ Wikipedia) - Elastic Metal RV1 (EM-RV1). I tested it and it seems to be working surprisingly well and it is cheap to run. Hardware: T-Head 1520 SoC, with Xuantie C910 processor which includes four RV64GCV cores. Interestingly 7-zip compression tests shows that it's lot slower compressing than decompressing. I've seen that with Atom CPUs as well. I guess it has everything to do with caches, and memory bus speed. Decompression: 3735 KiB/s, Compression: 76833 KiB/s. Also number of cores and the memory channel matters a lot. Ref:  isa : rv64imafdcsu mmu : sv39 - Interesting that compressing with 7-zip with the RISC-V is about 50% slower than with similar performance i3 Intel. Decompression speeds are the same. It's likely that the instruction set, cache size and memory bus speeds play large role in this disparity.

7. Copilot (@ Wikipedia) & Teams - It's nice that the Microsoft Teams client now includes Copilot directly, and there's no need to install a separate client for it, nor use it via M365 Copilot or it's browser based version. - After quick chat with colleagues nobody objected this change, even if the Teams usually is seems as bloated, resource hungry, ridiculously slow and buggy software. - Maybe they're using AI to generate that bad bloating?

8. Technology, Experiences other blogs. Worth of checking out: Software development topics I've changed my mind on after 10 years in the industry (@ chriskiehl.com), We are destroying software (@ antirez.com). Well, I agree with both. I've posted about the same topics, over and over again in my random ramblings blog.

2025-09-14