"When you think about having the taskbar on the right or the left, all of a sudden the reflow and the work that all of the apps have to do to be able to understand the environment is just huge."

Unless I am understanding something really, really wrong... all those apps are windowed, and can and do resize all the time, taskbar or not

Yeah it makes no sense. The resize logic already exists in the OS for other purposes (e.g. when changing screen resolutions), plus it was not a problem in Windows 10.

Now I wonder how big of a mess the Windows shell codebase is...

The problem isn't the Windows Shell, rather the pivot to bring UWP into Win32 instead of the original Project Reunion goal.

Check the GitHub repos for WinUI 3.0, WindowsAppSdk, CsWinRT, C++/WinRT, specially the issues and commit rates per week.

It is as if everyone left to Azure, but there are a few left still trying to make the UWP reboot happen.

Most of the community that really bought into it, moved back into plain Win33/.NET, fed up with the WinRT reboots since Windows 8.

Regardless of the possible mess in the Windows Shell, there is a bigger one in management.

Clicking on a cookie prompt would be admitting it will do something useful, which is a clear falsehood. The problem is "some cookies are being abused for tracking", and the purported solution is to shove in your face a message claiming "this uses cookies, click here to acknowledge the fact because the real problem is that you're an ignorant who does not know this uses cookies". It's not just useless, it's insulting and patronizing.

"If the computer knows I’m missing a semicolon here, why won’t it add it itself?"

The computer does not know that. The computer is being too smart. And probably wrong.

That would mean adding a rule to the language. The rule of "you can use 'print' as an statement". A rule that, time after time, has been shot down.

Which leads us to the real issue at hand: if the compiler is going to do anything by itself, that means it is following well defined rules. Therefore, whatever automatic thing the compiled does is part of the language. And, sometimes, the design rules of said language plain and simply do not allow for that.

Strictly speaking, yes. Strictly speaking, invading a territory that is just a border away from the Atlantic Treaty's borders, with no clear indications that the advance will stop at any point, is very clearly 'akin to declaration of war', too.

And what will be a clear indication?

Packing up and going home? :)

What do you know, I tried, and found it to be impossible. You cannot block msn.com at the DNS level, not inside Windows anyway. It's been discussed and everything:

https://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2006/Apr/509 [RE: Microsoft DNS resolver: deliberately sabotaged hosts-file lookup]

So the only answer is, as pointed out, a pihole or similar outside approach.

Wow, that’s next level evil. I didn’t know.