woe to the republic

HOUSE OF THE DRAGON SEASON 3 COUNTDOWN ↳ Day 2: Relationship(s)

For everything we do here, please be sure to be careful with what you edit, and restart your computer to lock things in. If you don't have access to the Group editor, (likely to happen if you're on base windows) you can do this as well by opening your Registry Editor app, then inputting this after your 'computer' or whatever the initial segment is. (Mine is computer. If I just try and paste the below string it gets SO mad at me)

\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot

Navigating to your "turnoffwindowscopilot", hit modify, and set the value data to 1.

If done correctly, it'll look like this.

While we're at it, you can also get rid of the integrated search, (or that thing where it searches the web when you search anything, whether or not you want it to) and such through regedit as well.

Integrated search will have you going to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer

Navigate to your "DisableSearchBoxSuggestions" bit, if you don't see it, you can make it by right clicking and creating a new registry D-Word key of that exact name. Edit the key, set it to 1. It'll look like this if you do it right!

To get rid of Windows Spotlight, (The thing where it pulls up ten billion pages on windows start page, shoving ads in your face and cluttering everything) we go to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DesktopSpotlight\Settings

And set "Enabled State" To 0. If you do it right, it'll look like this!

Disabling edge on startup will also help a fair deal with processing speed and the like. This you can do in all sorts of ways, the easiest being turning it off entirely on startup through settings in the like.

If you want to kill it *entirely*, though? :)

In regedit, run along to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft

Navigate to your MicrosoftEdge key subcategory. If you don't see it, you can make one! Note, this is a KEY, not a d-word. *inside* that subcategory, we want to either make or find the D-Word key of PreventLaunchEdge and set that to 1 in the same way as all the others. It'll look like this.

Aaaand while we're here, I'd HIGHLY recommend shanking Killer Networking Services. It's just bloatware. (Ostensibly it's supposed to monitor your network bandwidth and even things out, but that really means it's constantly monitoring and pinging things, which eats up the bandwidth you DO get, and also chunks your computer's processing power.) Getting rid of it entirely is borderline impossible, since it's set to redownload on regular updates and intel is very pushy with its updates.

This you can do by opening your Services.msc, which basically shows you all the background stuff that Windows does. Find Anything with Killer in the name, right click it, go to properties, and disable startup. It should look like this, if done successfully. It will probably reenable itself in time/in later updates for windows, but it's a quick fix. I'd also check your TaskScheduler app to make sure that nothing's scheduled to open up there, either.

If you CAN completely kill Killer services through uninstalling and the like, I would warn that at very least for my computer, the only ethernet/lan support applications that are available ARE Killer's. When you download updates, you really do have to do it manually and ONLY download the ethernet services, or just be cool with not having Lan functionality.

One last thing, not a shit application but is a shit service. If your computer's constantly overheating or just warm, you likely have Turboboost enabled. (Default setting that you can't change) If you want to be able to turn it off and drop your temps by like 40 degrees, in Regedit go to

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b740d00\be337238-0d82-4146-a960-4f3749d470c7

(Note- This isn't the string copy paste from the reddit thread, this is mine that does the same thing. If my string doesn't work for you, check the reddit thread string. If that doesn't work either, you can follow the path and find it pretty easily. Probably has like, one letter of difference somewhere. The bits all start the same, though, so it's easy to find.)

and go to "attributes". Set the value from 1 to 2, and now in your advanced Power Plan settings in control panel, you'll be able to *see* turbo boost and turn it off.

It'll look like this, and in power options, a successful disabling of boost should look like this.

Turning off quick startup's also a good call, since that basically stops your restarts from actually shutting things down properly.

I had to turn this off, but it's something that allows Windows and anyone using your device to generate text/images.

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.

so then it's really like:

like yeah. no WONDER the inquisition found nothing of use in the 10 years they were hunting for solas. they were busy becoming a new branch of the chantry. they're not going to find any useful info on the heretical elven gods or the blight or the ancient magisters - that's not maker-honouring! they end up descending rapidly into corruption within years, and had zero possible leads except for "send varric and his single random protege to intercept solas, i guess?" which doesn't work.

and then it turns out the protege is both really incompetent, and not taking the issue very seriously, while the inquisition itself struggles and fails to protect southern thedas from the enormous amounts of blight and chaos being loosed on it.

so, you know how rook can inexplicably encourage lavellan to reunite with solas, and THEN stab him? and lavellan does nothing? well. let's say they do actually interfere, try to stop rook, and then rook has to kill them before stabbing solas and sticking him in the omelas containment prison.

yay! thedas has been saved from being drowned in demons, by drowning half of it in blight. high fives all around.

so let's say that... after being stabbed by rook, elgar'nan is either dead, or dead-ish. so at best, he'll probably pop back up in a host mythal-style, but he's probably not powerful enough to put the moon back in orbit?

this causes widespread Tidal Chaos and natural disasters as the moon is thrown into a random direction away from planet thedas. ghilan'nain was mentioned to have all kinds of deep sea creatures, that would probably be disturbed by this - thedas now has pacific rim style beasts coming out of the water and stomping around.

there's also the issue of, uhh. where is the moon going?? and is it coming back? personally i do not know about astronomy, but i think the coolest option is that the moon gets further and further away for a while, becoming very small in the sky, and then rapidly getting much bigger. the last surviving thedas astronomers (probably in tevinter, bc it's the diplomatic hub <3) announce that the moon is going to fully crash into the earth and obliterate it within a few decades at most. this causes mass panic and religious crises.

and this is when the ragged pathetic mortal squad + reva, dredge solas out of the black city and try to fix the world one last time, in the shadow of all these compounding mistakes that have led to unavoidable doom.