I love computers. I love them so much. I even make videos about loving computers.
But every once in a while, I just grind my gears. Like when you're typing and then you go to press
enter and then a dialog box pops up and you press enter and it goes away and you're like,
oh my gosh, what did I just agree to? And I am not the only one. Around here, we've got a huge
list of problems. So why don't you join us in this therapeutic exercise and let it all out?
Who knows? Maybe you'll even find a solution to one of your problems.
For example, here's a problem. You want to change the subject,
solution? You segue to our sponsor. Google might be too easy of a target for tech gripes,
but I'm not letting them off the hook. They've burned me too many times. I mean, I'm still sore
about them ripping Google Play music away and then just never re-implementing some features.
Like native streaming to Sonos Wi-Fi speakers. That was so good. Gmail used to be good too.
I cannot be the only person who's ever thought, gosh, who's my new PR contact at MSI again?
And tried to get autocomplete suggestions for anyone at that corporate domain,
only if they have Gmail go, you mean you want to find people with the name MSI?
Okay, Gmail, how about we get Boolean on this business? No dice there either? I mean,
I guess asterisk at MSI.com could technically be an actual person. So fine. I'll use the search
at the top of the page and come on. I was so specific. With quotes even? No? No. If you want to
find all of the emails from a particular domain, you need to make your way all the way to advanced
search and filter by incoming address. Now to its credit, this does finally work and it even
adds the Boolean operators for you, but I still think it could be more streamlined. And so could
spam management. Coincidentally, right as I was sitting down to write this up,
I found a very important email in my spiced ham folder from none other than snazzy Labs
inviting me to do a collab. I'd be happy to, by the way, Quinn. I'm sorry for the slow response,
but I assure you there's a good reason. You see, first of all, even though we've corresponded
before and have even shared you on internal documents, your email was sent to the bowels
of my spam folder. Second, as you can see, I organized my inbox with unread at the top to
help with prioritization. Well, thing is, when I marked your email as not spam, it sent it back
to my inbox, so far so good, but as a read email. That's not technically wrong. I have read it,
but I haven't responded to it yet and now it's buried with old stuff and I would only ever find
it again if I manually searched for it. The good news is that in theory, it'll never happen again.
A message came up when I moved it to the inbox indicating that I only need to mark your email
as not spam one time. But in practice, I've found a lot of issues with that function. Fortunately,
though, there is another way. And again, it's filters. For each person that you want to never
show up in your spam, you can create a filter. Yes, it takes a lot longer than just clicking one
button, but hey, maybe you can use this tedious busy work time to think about how other filters
could enhance your life. Like maybe a filter for local concert promotional emails or those
Google Calendar invitations that are clogging up your inbox. You can even use or and and operators
if you want to try to catch more types of emails. Like maybe you want to block out, buy tickets,
but not see your tickets. Seriously. Filtering your email is a game changer and worth every minute
spent customizing them. Totally unrelated, but I've still got about 30 seconds left.
Google Drive sucks for navigating folders with no obvious way to access a full folder tree structure.
And by the way, why does this button not jump to the parent folder for a file?
Also, I hate that YouTube music can't be signed into a separate account within the same browser.
It's not a ton of work to sign into my personal email where I have YouTube premium in another
browser, but just why? Okay, I'm not like a UX designer, and I also know nothing about
making operating systems. And I'm sure it's very, very difficult. And I respect the hell
out of all of the devs down in the trenches, making sure that the 1991 version of TurboTax
will still run on my system in 2024. But Microsoft, what the hell is wrong with you?
I mean, Windows 11 is a mess and nothing irks me more than your unhinged settings menu.
First off, why can I only open one settings window? If I want to adjust Bluetooth settings
and audio settings, I gotta bounce between two separate sections. The operating system's called
Windows. Give me Windows. Why don't you have Windows? You know what sucks about your settings
menu? The power saving menu. How come all of the real power settings aren't there? I have to go to
the old control panel and go to power plant to find that stuff there. That's where all the useful
stuff is. Is there an easy way to get there from the power section of the settings app? Of course
not. And also, what the hell is the difference between a power mode and a power plan? And how come
when I'm on a certain power plan, I can't change my power mode? Why aren't they one thing? Also,
the related support sections are useless. At the bottom of the power page, we have a link that says
changing power mode. And if you click on it, it takes you to a page that tells you how to get
to the page you're already on. I mean, at the very least, it gets me an answer that's from
Microsoft. Other questions send me to Bing search where the top result is from a third party website
that could never be hijacked by evil SEO websites and a response from co-pilot that doesn't even
give the correct answer. I mean, Google has been lowering their search engine bar, but Microsoft
are treating it like a limbo competition. Speaking of limbo, how come my battery life's in limbo
whenever I turn on the battery saving mode? You replace the dynamic icon that shows me the
remaining life left in my battery with a leaf? A leaf? At the time where I want to know how much
power I have left, I cannot see it easily because you want to make me feel good for doing my part
for the environment while I'm racked with anxiety about whether I'm going to get to the next bench
in Hollow Knight. I'm on a 75 watt hour laptop. Draining it uses half as much power as it takes
to boil a cup of water, a cup, 250 milliliters. And you're telling me I need to watch my carbon
footprint when you are happy to cut down another hectare of the rainforest so co-pilot can hallucinate
Excel functions that don't exist? Oh, well, it's a good thing that I'm doing my part.
Like, I get it. I'm supportive of reducing waste and consumption. But the whole concept of the
carbon footprint was popularized by BP, an oil company, in 2004 to take the onus of change off
of them and put it onto you. Focus on your own minuscule contribution to the world and feel like
you're doing your part. And while you're looking at yourself, the oil companies will continue
destroying the environment for profit. Think about it like this. If we all just murdered a little bit
less, then there would be no more murder, says the man with the massive murder machine. Like,
come on. Sorry, that was a big problem. These are supposed to be small problems.
Let's go back to annoyances I have with the settings tray. Why do the Ethernet and audio icons
act as a single button with a left click, but two separate buttons as a right click?
It's confusing and it's not how it works literally anywhere else. Even the combination
clock notification button that's directly beside it acts as a single button with your right or left
clicking. And while I do enjoy the redesign of your quick settings menu, could we make the
buttons just a little bit smaller? I also appreciate that you finally put a sound mixer in the quick
settings. But why did you do it in such a not quick way? I don't need spatial sound options
above the mixer. Sure, there are alternative solutions like ear trumpet, which are great.
But now that you've made it so that I can't hide the audio icon like I could in every version of
Windows before, not even through a group policy setting, I got to sit here with two different
icons in my tray. Sadly, we don't have any real fixes for these problems. But as a thank you for
listening, I'll give you a few cool configuration tools. Chris Titus Tech's Windows utility. It's
an easy to use GUI that allows you to quickly install programs that you'll actually like,
and you can do a ton of quick tweaks like removing telemetry, removing adobe bloat,
web search from the start menu, and so much more. You can even use it to set up a custom
Windows ISO that's de-bloated and stops trying to trick you into linking a Microsoft account.
If you're more interested in just changing the way things look, check out Windhawk. It's a
collection of visual NUX tweaks like middle click to close Windows from the taskbar,
adjusting the height and icon size of the taskbar, or the look and feel of the Windows 11 start menu.
My personal favorite is Modernized Folder Picker Dialog. We always recommend exercising
caution with these tweaks because changing system level stuff can present risks to your system's
security and stability. But maybe they'll lower the risk to your sanity, unlike modern games.
My biggest gripe is modern gaming. Micro transactions, rampant gambling, bland hero
shooters and service games, obnoxious DRMs, always online BS. It's all bad, all gross,
but what really makes me want to pull my hair out is compiling shaders at runtime. There is no
worse feeling than getting a Discord message from your friends. They ask you to boot up Halo
Infinite, which of course needs an update because it's been about two weeks, and don't worry,
they still haven't added anything that you're missing. Then you wait for the game to load,
and oh my god, you're greeted with another 10-15 minute loading screen waiting for this stupid
bar to go across. If this happened every once in a while after a major update, sure, but every
miniscule update? Just for us to get the pleasure to sit through this whole process again? But why
do my games even need to compile shaders every time? I loaded it already, shouldn't it just be
saved? Well, yes, actually. But before we explain why it might need to do it every time,
let's break down what this bar even means. The simple answer is shaders are what makes the game
look, you know, like the game, whether that's the vertex shaders to affect the shape of an item,
pixel shaders to determine color, or even geometry shaders to change the shape of things,
such as grass or snow. Due to the complexity of modern rendering, trying to compile these shaders
during gameplay will result in long hitches and stuttering, making the experience just terrible.
Instead, the game compiles those shaders at first launch before you get into the game to make sure
you have a smooth experience. It's kind of like chopping your vegetables up before you even start
making the stir-fry. That way, when you actually start cooking, you can just toss in the prepped
vegetables. But if you didn't, you'd be constantly stopping to peel an onion or crush a garlic,
and that would risk ruining the meal. But what if the recipe suddenly changes? Well,
that's why we need to redo our prep, things like swapping out your GPU, updating your drivers,
or even if the dev changes some setting in the game that alters the usage of those shaders,
those are all reasons why you may need to recompile. And if the devs, you know, goof up real bad,
then that compilation can take a long time, especially if you have older, slower processors.
So what's the solution? It's pretty easy. Never update your game, your computer, or your hardware.
Finally, my shaders are all done. You know what else took forever? Apple adding window snapping to macOS.
For the uninitiated, window snapping allows you to easily snap an app you have open to one side
of the screen, a corner, or even full screen by dragging the window to the edge of the screen.
It's awesome. It's intuitive. And it's a feature that Windows has had since Windows 7,
which launched in 2009. But no fear, as of macOS Sequoia, you can easily snap applications on
your Mac. I'll show you on this 14 inch MacBook Pro M4. And boom, snapped. Great, right? No, not great.
The way they implemented this is so unfathomably stupid. I just, I can't even. Sure, the window,
it's snapped. But why the f*** is there this massive f***ing gap? It's a tiny screen. I don't
want to waste half an inch of my f***ing precious screen real estate on your stupid f***ing bull***
Apple. What the f***ing f*** is wrong with you? I just, so what, I can see my desktop background?
Why? I swear, this kind of bull*** makes me physically angry. Do they even try this before
they release it? And it gets better. Remember the notch Apple is graced practically every modern
Mac with? I mean, how could you forget, right? But don't worry, I'm not going to complain about
that, even if it does look ridiculous. Because hey, I'm a fan of extra screen real estate.
It's just that Apple really seems like they aren't. You know macOS is full screen mode? When you
click this little green button, it's supposed to, and I quote, take advantage of every inch of the
screen. So what is this? Why does the extra notch space do nothing until I mouse over it? Why? The
screen space is there. I thought we were trying to take advantage of it, Apple. But Jake, it's to
help you focus on what you're working on. Yeah, except every app has its menus baked into the menu
bar you're hiding from me. And you know what's more disruptive to my flow? Having to move my
cursor to the top, wait for it to show the stupid menus before I can figure out where I need to
click. Fortunately, both of these gripes can be remedied. For the first one, change the settings
to have the menu stick around. And for the second, disable Apple's built-in snapping and continue
using a third party app like Rectangle. It's free and wasn't designed by a psychopath.
What I don't have an answer to, though, is how we still don't have a standard way to transfer
files between operating systems. To Apple's credit, AirDrop works like a dream. And Google's
nearby share and quick share on Android are also pretty great. But what if you want to send a file
between your iPhone and a Windows computer? Email maybe? But what if it's a new computer? It almost
certainly has hardware capable of sending and receiving data at high speeds like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.
But there's just no native software to do it. Now, there are some third party solutions like
PairDrop, a browser-based AirDrop clone that allows you to send files peer-to-peer over your
local network or the internet and works without having to install or sign up for anything.
But seriously, it would take a Microsoft engineer like, what, maybe a few days to build a
concept for this? Instead, they're too busy trying to cram AI into every device with a pulse,
which is exactly what my friend Alex is here to tell you about. I frigging hate AI. Okay, that isn't entirely fair. It can be very useful. But the willy-nilly
bolting of AI onto everything that I own is infuriating. Look at this. We can come in here.
This is a test. Right beside send, this stupid button, I accidentally hit it all the time.
What am I going to do with this? Okay, let's make it funnier. This is only a test,
but don't worry, you're probably going to fail anyway. Thank you, AI. That is so worth it.
Similarly, Microsoft have removed my right Windows key and replaced it with the co-pilot key. And
given I have the habit to hit Windows plus L every time I leave my computer, I accidentally hit
consume enough electricity to power light bulb for 20 minutes button instead all the time.
Logitech have also built AI into their mouse drivers. Guys, it is a mouse. I do not need AI
built into it. And also, anybody that has ever used your software before can very easily make a
chat GPT macro by just going in there. It would take them seconds. You do not need to do this.
Also, Google. Oh my God, Google. I love how you so confidently use AI to grab me the incorrect
answer to a question while also stripping that answer of all of the context required to easily
tell it is incorrect. In fairness to Google, AI SEO farming has completely ruined their old way of
doing search. But that doesn't make me like AI more. And again, I want to say there are loads
of great uses for AI. DLSS is awesome. Protein folding and data filtering improvements are
genuinely good for the world. But if you make an AI chat bot to help your customers and then claim no
responsibility for its answers, you're just a dickhead. And I'd be a dickhead if I didn't segue
to our sponsor. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe you'll enjoy the one where people rant
about us instead and we respond to your mean comments.