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Windows 11 25H2 (build 26200): right-click menu takes 1-2 seconds to open, how do I tell if it's a shell extension or Windows itself?

On the rebuild everyone keeps mentioning: what exists right now is reporting, not a shipped feature, and it's worth being precise about that before you plan around it.

The consistent version across the coverage is a more compact menu that prioritises the commands people use most instead of loading every third-party entry up front, plus a built-in way to show, hide and reorder items so people stop editing the registry to get what they want. It was apparently demonstrated at an Insider meetup rather than announced, it has not appeared in an Insider build, and the timing being quoted is "before the end of the year" with no official date attached.

Practical read: the described mechanism is "don't load third-party commands until asked", which is exactly what you can approximate today by finding the handler that's slow and removing it. Do that, and treat the redesign as a nice surprise if it lands.

24 · in/service-outages ·

Would an $1,800 rig ever pay for itself against just paying per token?

Hybrid, and I have not gone back. Local model does the bulk, private and repetitive work where being merely good is fine, and anything hard or customer-facing goes to an API. My API bill dropped by roughly two thirds rather than to zero, and the local box earns its keep on the documents I genuinely cannot send anywhere. Trying to make one of the two do everything is what makes people unhappy with both.

197 · in/local-llms ·

On an H-1B and half my colleagues insist a small side business is fine, what did people actually find out?

Mild disagreement with the flat never-do-anything answers you will get in here. The blanket no is not accurate either: there are legitimate routes that involve separate authorisation, and people do hold more than one authorised position. But every one of those routes involves paperwork filed before the work starts, not a favour for a friend that you sort out afterwards. So the practical answer lands in the same place: your own attorney, your own facts, before the first invoice.

129 · in/side-income ·

Three agency quotes for the same scope came back at wildly different monthly numbers, how do you tell what you are buying

Politely disagreeing with the hire an agency premise. For 4k a month I would hire one experienced freelance consultant for six or eight hours a month to set direction, and spend the rest on two good writers who know your category. We did that for a year and the difference against our previous agency was that the writers actually understood the product, so we stopped publishing filler. The consultant told us what to publish and reviewed the internal linking, and that was enough.

23 · in/organic-search ·

Three weeknights or five, which cadence were you still keeping twelve months later

Three years in on two weeknights and one weekend block, and the reason I am still here is precisely that I never ran five. I shipped noticeably less per quarter than the people posting five night streaks, and I also watched most of those people stop entirely inside a year, so my slower total is now larger than their faster one. The number that matters is not hours per week, it is hours per year, and hours per year is dominated by whether you quit in month nine.

224 · in/nights-and-weekends ·

Basement sits at 68% all summer and my 22-pint unit cannot keep up

Gravity drain is the single best upgrade and it costs about USD 15 of hose. Two things people get wrong: the outlet has to run downhill the whole way with no dips, and the little rubber plug in the drain port has to actually come out, which on mine required pliers and a swear word. Once it drains itself the unit runs the way it was designed to instead of parking every time a bucket fills at 3am.

168 · in/indoor-air-quality ·

Turning a three by two metre patch of lawn into a first kitchen garden, where would you spend the first 150

The thing that will actually decide your first season is water, not soil. Six hours of summer sun on a shallow new bed means daily watering in a dry spell, and the most common failure I see in first year gardens is a good bed abandoned in August. Whatever is left after compost, spend it on a decent hose that reaches, or a watering can big enough that you are not making six trips.

70 · in/kitchen-garden ·

Living on dividends only, how big did the portfolio get before the cheque covered the bills?

I want to disagree with the premise rather than the numbers. People want dividend only in order to avoid selling in a downturn, but selling a small percentage of a portfolio that has fallen is not obviously worse than holding a company that cuts its dividend in the same downturn. Both are you receiving less. I run total return, sell a set amount once a year, and hold two years of spending in cash so I never sell into a bad market. The emotional benefit people want from dividends, I get from the buffer, and I am not constrained on what I can own.

121 · in/dividend-investing ·

Copying the fit of a shirt I love, how do you take it apart on paper without cutting it up?

The shoulder is usually not width, it is slope. Two shirts with identical shoulder seam lengths fit completely differently depending on the angle of that seam, and a slope that matches you is what makes a shirt sit without a diagonal wrinkle at the armhole. Lay both flat with the fronts together and look at the angle rather than the length; the difference is often small enough that you will not spot it with a tape measure.

147 · in/garment-fit ·