Earlier this week, PCWorld published a roundup of Windows 12 rumors translated from PCWelt that does not meet our editorial standards. We’re deeply embarrassed by it, and I personally apologize that the article was published. It should not have been, but we’re keeping the article live (with an editor’s note at the top) so it remains in the public record.
Windows Central published a response detailing its errors. Thanks for keeping us accountable, guys — genuinely. In the same spirit of accountability, I want to explain how this happened, and what we’re doing to ensure a mistake like this never occurs again.
Let’s start by discussing how PCWorld handles translated articles, and then I’ll dive into the issues with the article itself.
I wasn’t sure about that article at the time, but it did inspire me to finally try out bazzite on a spare nvme and I found that a lot of my issues in games went away. Particularly fallout 4, the painfully slow loading screens between map changes are like 70% faster now. So I’m sticking with it for my gaming rig.
I never would have though running games through a translation layer could actually improve performance. Id heard a lot of people say so but I assumed it was just Linux devotees being fanboys. They were absolutely right.
There’s a mod to basically remove loading screens in Fallout 4. It “unlocks the framerate” when load screens are detected, and it functionally eliminates load screens. It’s fucking insane that that’s all the game actually needs. It’s lile Bethesda put a goddamn “wait” command in just to slow the game down.
You are playing it on hardware that’s 10 years newer than the game was designed for. That mod even lists SSD as the primary reason for the advancement, with it not making much difference running on an HDD.
Sounds like a great mod for today’s equipment though.
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You can run DXVK (DirectX -> Vulkan) in Windows, too.
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Antivirus (even Windows Defender with defaults) can massively slow down disk IO in some games. As an example, my Rimworld loading times were over 2X as long with Defender realtime active, and it caused all sorts of hitching.
I’m not trying to dunk on Linux here; it can help a ton, sometimes. Sometimes it is Linux that provides the massive boost.
…But sometimes it’s just about a good default configuration, with linux gaming OSes provide. Windows can be like this too, once it’s stripped down.
Again, not trying to dunk or tout either OS; I use both, though linux mostly. But I think attribution is important. And the assertion that Linux provides a big performance boost is not always true; I’m still stuck on Windows with several games just because (in spite of my best tweaking/modding efforts), they still perform better on Windows in A/B tests.
I get all that, they’re all very good points. I had windows tuned to the best of my abilities, I try to use windows whenever possible at home because I manage windows servers professionally and it’s helpful to get as much hands on time with the platform as I can. But this was such a dramatic difference out of the box that I’m going to stick with it for now at least. I’m not willing to invest the time into tweaking windows to run this well (if I even can) and it’s a dedicated gaming rig so many of the “Linux on the desktop” complaints won’t apply to my use case.
Mostly I’m shocked that getting significantly improved performance when running through a compatibility layer was even possible. I expected proton to be almost as good as native. In this instance it ended up being a huge improvement.
Yeah. Wine/Proton is an incredible achievment. DirectX->Vulkan translation is a miracle by itself.
EDIT: Also, stripping Windows is not daunting. It comes down to:
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Install it fresh.
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Don’t install anything unless something absolutely doesn’t work without it.
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Delete apps you don’t need, like (say) Xbox.
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Tweak the power profile to minimum 0%/maximum 100% CPU, if it isn’t already.
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Run a Windows debloating script.
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Disable realtime AV.
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(Optional) auto-undervolt your GPU with MSI Afterburner’s curve optimizer.
…And that’s about it, really. There’s tons of other Windows performance mysticism, but it’s (mostly) either very situational, or straight up nonsense.
Thanks for the tips but I’m a very experienced windows user, I did all of that immediately after install lol. To put it in perspective, my first step after installing bazzite was to join it to my personal AD domain that lives on my hyper-v cluster. If there’s something I could have done to get this performance on win 11 it would have probably been significantly more complicated and time consuming than any of the basics.
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it seems if game hasnt been specificially made in such way it will not work on linux or uses some intrusive “anti cheat”, it will work much better than on windows ever. For me, not a single game i have wanted to play has failed to work on linux. I even got star citizen to work by installing it according to guide and using windows emulator. On steam, even some really old game, longest journey (from 2000) worked flawlessly when i tested how it will run.
Yeah I ran my steam library past protondb before I started and a surprising number of games had Linux native versions. Of the rest, everything I actually want to play was rated either gold or platinum.
The developers at a previous job swore that their Windows installation ran faster and better on a virtual machine inside of Linux.
I never tried it myself, but I trust their judgement. They knew what they were doing for sure.
See the same people that circle jerked over that article, now try and act like they knew it was fake all along.
You telling me, they didn’t have anyone with German skills reviewing their translation prior to publication?
Perfect!
You mean the slopomatic made up looking article that ran everywhere despite looking as genuine as a three pound note? The one with real “it’s true my uncle works for Bill Gates” energy? That article?
To be fair, that has been exactly Microsoft’s energy for a few years now
Somewhat this mistake makes me think PCWorld is genuinely synced with MS at QA level.
we accidentally windows 12
It could happen to you.
Article did not provide any specific corrections. Is windows 12 subscription only or not?
They basically retracted the article. There’s no windows 12.
It seems crazy to me for journalists to trust machine/AI translated articles enough to use as a source in their own articles.
I’ve always seen them as things to treat as unreliable, but something to use when there’s no other options available and to get a gist of what it might be about.
If using them as citation I’d need a native speaker to confirm content before being confident enough to include it if I were a journalist.
There’s another alternative: not reporting it as fact, butbeing open about the degree of certainty and the methodology.
“Someone says”, “rumor”, and “uncertain automated translation” don’t make for very convincing sources or journalistic credibility, of course. But being open about context does moreso than hiding it.
Good response. Love it when peeps own up to their mistskes.
Journalistic integrity in this day and age? Hasn’t that been outlawed yet?
It made Microsoft look bad.
They left out “The Microsoft marketing team called us and complained about our last article. We were so compelled by their plight that we decided to correct ourselves.”
I thought this was a very well written, transparent article that took accountability as seriously as it should. I am still not sure why people are using AI for translation when translation software already existed. People mention that AI is more context aware, but I feel like when you saw those friction points in old translation software it prompted you to look further into the context, whereas AI will just make an executive decision and people feel like it must be right because it’s AI. I guess it’s possible old language software, or even a translator, would have done the same thing, but I still think people would have less inherent trust in the old software alone. I do want to point out that this AI issue was just a small part of the problem and they addressed plenty of other issues and how they plan to remedy those.
There is a difference in translating, and interpreting. And interpreting can be difficult even for the best as you need a deep cultural understanding of both parties. Just machine translating articles is an obvious recipe for disaster.
In my experience. Since they mentioned they translate article from the Swedish branch as well. As a Swede. Translation software has never been particularly good at translating Swedish. There is just too much nuance and contextual words for a software to provide reliable translations.
We have lots of words, that have multiple meanings, often very, very different from eachother, based entirely on context.
Any Swede will know what “får får får?” Means. This is a real sentence. Translation software does not understand it one bit, unless it’s been hardcoded in.
Edit: another funny one. “en bar man bar en bar man i en bar” you have 4 “bar” but they mean 3 different things.
This wasn’t even an AI issue nor even a translation issue. They published an article that lacked sources, and still wasn’t good enough once sources were added.
Yea, I mentioned in my comment that there was a confluence of issues, but the article does point out that the AI translation made the statement more definitive.
Edit to add:
As part of our post-mortem on this article’s evolution, PCWelt’s executive editor pointed out that the translation makes the article sound more definitive than its native German. He says that in the context of the article, the German word “soll” signals a rumored expectation, but the English translation used “will” instead of something more akin to “is rumored to.”
i’d translate sollen as should personally but my german is very poor
It depends on contract. Your interpretation matches use as “should”. But there’s also use as “claims x” or “is claimed or said to be” which the quote refers to.
Ich soll - I should or I am asked to. Es soll [sein] - it is supposed to be or it supposedly is.
Translation is what the transformer architecture was designed for. It is the state of the art, and translation software has been using ML for a long long time.
This feels like an appropriate use of AI, but failure of editing.
Not with general purpose LLMs. They start off ok, but become much more interested in continuing the text they’ve already translated, rather than looking back to what it is they’re meant to translate. So they drift off course as the translation gets longer.
General purpose LLMs’ failure to do a task like translation must be very funny for their investors. Even the more translation-gocused ones seem to have issues.
[DeepL] translation is said to be generated using a supercomputer that reaches 5.1 petaflops and is operated in Iceland with hydropower.
In general, [convolutional neural network]s are slightly more suitable for long coherent word sequences, but they have so far not been used by the competition because of their weaknesses compared to recurrent neural networks.
The weaknesses of DeepL are compensated for by supplemental techniques, some of which are publicly known.
(ETA I need to edit my comments to federate them?)
That’s very odd. The translations built in to Firefox run on the local device - like a phone, even a dumpy old phone - and they’re pretty okay.
I am still not sure why people are using AI for translation when translation software already existed.
Pre-existing software was also never terribly accurate.
AI is now the dog you blame for your flatulence.
Yes the word for cat is “chat” but the word for chat, in the online sense is also “chat” and it’s pronounced like the English word. It should also be capitalised because it’s a proper noun, eliminating the ambiguity that may exist.
Next time I shit in my bosses coffee I’ll blame AI. After all he required me to use it more.
Me: “Should I shit in my boss’s coffee?”
ChatGPT: “This is probably not a good idea. Most people do not like shit in their coffee.”
Me: “I really think my boss would like it.”
ChatGPT: “You’re absolutely right. You should definitely shit in your boss’s coffee. He’s sure to appreciate it.”
(And then, when your boss is mildly irritated, show him this conversation.)
“AI made me do it.”
Admitting their mistakes makes me want to read their articles more. If only Microsoft could bring themselves to do the same.
