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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

This definitely happened to me a while ago. I'm not that upset about it, except that I spent some time changing all my local accounts from "jon" to "jrockway", and signing in with my email address made my local account "jon". Now when I ssh places, I have to supply -l or properly add an entry to ~/.ssh/config because this is the only account I have that's not named "jrockway". All in all, this reduces the enjoyment in my life by 0.0000000000000001% but I'm not losing too much sleep over it.

(My favorite Windows 10 update was the one where you installed it, and instead of getting your desktop on reboot, there was this weird slideshow that said "HELLO" "ALL YOUR FILES ARE EXACTLY WHERE YOU LEFT THEM". I thought it was malware, but that's apparently something a large team of experts at Microsoft thought would be fun for their users. Maybe they were really excited about some filesystem bug that they fixed? I'll never understand.)

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You should be able to fix your local user name in lusrmgr.msc (select your account and press F2).

I’m using a Microsoft account, but to avoid this nonsense, I created it as a local account (because this laptop shipped with Windows 11 Pro RTM, so I could still do that) and converted it to a Microsoft account. If I didn’t have this option, I would probably create a Microsoft account with the dumb default name, then create a local account, delete the old account, and convert my new local account.

I now have an exact sequence of log ins so that I know exactly the path on Windows everything will be. And the naming / pathing of online MS accounts is confusing and annoying.

God, the number of panicked IT support calls I got over that particular phrasing. It was quite the month.

Let me try guessing it... most people thought it was some kind of ransomware smiling at them?

That was my thought. I mean, it was a little bit too cinematic and I don't think things like this happen in real life, but I had a WTF moment.

Exactly so. It didn't help that it occurred right around the same time as the bitcoin/ransomware attacks starting increasing in frequency.

I honestly always thought it was some sort of GLaDOS/Hal 9000 style joke. "don't worry Dave, we're still watching all your files" or something, I actually laughed out loud when I saw it. It's even more hilarious to me if that was supposed to be serious.

You can add a wildcard entry (Host *) with the username to your ssh config. That will make it the default (can still be overridden by host-specific settings).

I don't know why I didn't know that. That is very helpful!

In French, we once had a poor translation that said: "Laissez-nous tout". Well the "leave everything to us" original was maybe already kind of weird.

I think the “files are where you left them” dialogue is meant to assuage the concerns of people who just did a big OS upgrade and are a bit anxious about it all.

It’s still a pretty poorly thought out dialogue, though.

You know what reassures me that nothing has gone wrong? When unexpectedly I am greeted with big white text insisting everything is okay. Imagine if you got a letter through the post out of the blue saying "You don't have cancer." I can only imagine how I would probably suddenly be a lot more worried about having cancer than before having gotten that letter.

Whoever came up with that idiotic dialogue is unhinged and detached from reality and has no business touching a user interface.

It's ironic that years after Microsoft created that dialog, Windows 10 comes out with an update that deletes your files from where you left them: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-confirms-major-wind...

Don't worry your kidneys are where you left them!

Did it switch you magically or something?

I actually don't mind the microsoft account integration but I also have a name issue. Microsoft will name my account the equivilent "jons" instead of "jsmith" but all my ssh logins are the latter.

I just make an offline account first and then change my account to a microsoft one in user settings and it seems to keep the first name.

I think I consented in some sense; a condition to upgrade Windows 8 retail to Windows 10 or something like that. It is one of those things like "I'm going to close my eyes and punch the air wildly, if you get hit it's your fault". It was my fault, but kind of rigged against me if that makes any sense. Like I said, though, I'm not that mad about it.

You have to be really vigilant to not end up with a microsoft account instead of a local account. Especially if you work with anything microsoft store or minecraft.

Given that some Microsoft employees no doubt frequent this forum, I hope they see and address this issue.

Something like an advanced checkbox to customize the local account’s username. Maybe also having a default local user account name tied to the online account for any new machines set up with the online account.

The same Microsoft that "knows what's best for us" - don't count on it

It seemed very suss, like why are you telling me that, were they not where I left them at some point and you've fixed it.. or...

Yes, I remember that slideshow.

There was also something in the lines of "Leave it all to us, your data is safe". The irony was that with part of the text displayed was overflowing off the screen was was not readable. The absolute proof my data was safe in the hands of clowns.

I believe I still have a picture of that somewhere..

The one I liked the most was saying "Leave everything to us" in full screen... everything what? Give all my belongings to MS? :-P

That could have been be the update after the one that famously deleted the content of your download folder.

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