In two banks I was in in last 20 years before and after Payment Services Directive implementation, I was a secondary user to the account. I could do almost anything on the account which saved my mother lots of stress. It's enough for her to check balance and outgoing transactions and rest lies in my hands. Wouldn't that help you as well?
In Poland we have a rather well-functioning digital services platform. Tho, two weeks ago news outlets raised a small tantrum that our digital identity wallet application may be non-compliant with the upcoming EU standards. But as for now, once you log into the application (there are few ways - ID card with chip, 3rd party login by bank and so on), the session is kept for a year.
After that's done you can log on desktops by QR code or pass data from app to app.
mObywatel app tries to include all the essentials: from digital ID copy (identity confirm, validation for you and someone else) your DNI-equivalent protection (won't allow to process your personal information in some cases). There's healthcare services handling (prescriptions, but we also have a dedicated app), inbox/outbox for official matters, payments and taxes, section for car and vehicles (penalty points, accident reporting), environment (reporting accidents, air quality, flood alerts) and travel (rail tickets wallet, tips and warning for traveling destinations - atm it shows that Spain is on 4th level terrorist threat). Tbh, it's way better than used to be few years ago with complex login flow that could break midway.
It's all convenient stuff but older generations are already digitally marginalized and we may indeed head into the future where we won't be able to do anything without a smartphone, in both real and digital life.
Many banks restrict the number and capabilities of secondary users. In the end I had to get a power of attorney, but for me observing these changes is just a warning. I see a pervasive use of a phone as means of authentication and the compulsory nature of hardware-bound digital IDs is penetrating our society. That is a barrier for elderly people but also for other groups, specially when those requirements are not accompanied by standards (i.e. why does a French person need to get a new ID to work with Spanish bureaucracy) and also because the phone itself is an unsubsidized cost. Not to mention when one is travelling to countries with locked networks, losing the phone or, closer to the topic here,the lack of trust on generic phone platforms, which enforces a duopoly (Google Android + iOS) preventing new technologies to enter the market.
KDE Plasma community likes to recreate Windows environment and W11 application launchers instead of "recommendations" section have a more useful plain recently opened files. Which what Windows had not so long ago.
Manuscript could contain handwritten errors and of course there could be misprints due to wrongly selected types but content wasn't generated out of nowhere. Unless we're talking about asemic or automatic writing due to some... "spiritual" influence.
The key here is human thought as you said. Whether these books were written by clerics or printed by the press these were still containing human produced substance. It's not a fair comparison.
It's due to both: the deranged AI push MS did in last 3 years and continuous degradation of their flagship product - Windows, for last 10.
I think no other company managed to get a punny nickname due to their questionable pursuits and actions around new trends. Tho most of them were ridiculed in memes and countless critical posts on the Internet when something have surfaced.
Also, it appears that Microslop was coined first in 1994, acc. to wikitionary [1]
XP in early betas released had that slightly upgraded 9x interface called Watercolor [1] and if they'd keep it, surely majority would pick it up over plastic Luna.
Early experiments with totally new theme were rather unpleasant [2] and Watercolor was abandoned in favor of more familiar 9x looking theme as an option. W11 still comes with that old 9x widgets look - slightly flattened because of that trend but it's still there buried beneath for compatibility reasons. And I'm pretty sure they won't escape with that like Apple did with Aqua away from Platinum.
I always installed Watercolor on a new computer. It's still beautiful and definitely the look they should have chosen and played to their strengths.
I think they were so caught off guard by how incredible Mac OS X _looked_, that they didn't realize it wasn't just veneer, but a genuine evolution and improvement of how Mac OS _worked_. This became Apple's competitive advantage for over a decade as Microsoft chased different styles while consistently botching how it would impact usability.
Both OS lines were developed concurrently up until XP release where DOS-based 9x was abandoned and NT became the basis for every subsequent product. Plus of course there's that whole part of the story where MS teamed up with IBM and worked on OS/2.
NT got new 9x shell with 4.0 release but a beta package could be installed on 3.51 as well - tho, that could render some compatibility issues.
Actually I'd say Win2K was the merge point: its internal version is NT 5.0, while XP is NT 5.1 & 5.2. The Win2K UI is the first NT truly usable in a home situation, and last and best iteration of the Win95 UI before the plasti-color of XP. (Yes, that UI was last available as XP's "Classic Theme", but I'm giving it to 2K because XP doesn't really change anything.)
However Win2K wasn't really marketed to consumers as there were still some minor compatibility issues: particularly the DOS emulation was not great, so getting things like older games to work often required lots of tweaking to the launch process, and some things still might never work. Those compatibility settings got more options, saner defaults, and more automatic settings, in XP and later to go along with the full commitment of NT for everyone.
So, while DOS-based WinMe was actually released after Win2K, it was just a stop-gap to bring some more internet things, directx, and media player stuff, to home users while NT 5.x got it's compatibility and driver model in order. Except it was notoriously unstable, generally hated, and mostly forgotten.
The road is bit longer when you decide to use Open Core Legacy Patcher.
I managed to install Sonoma or Sequoia on my 2011 mbp but it was barely usable - nearly every Apple application was broken due to lack of Metal support. So I've pick Manjaro and while every now and then Wifi stops working, it's bit more capable but nothing crazy tho since it's nearly 15 yo machine.
In Poland we have a rather well-functioning digital services platform. Tho, two weeks ago news outlets raised a small tantrum that our digital identity wallet application may be non-compliant with the upcoming EU standards. But as for now, once you log into the application (there are few ways - ID card with chip, 3rd party login by bank and so on), the session is kept for a year. After that's done you can log on desktops by QR code or pass data from app to app.
mObywatel app tries to include all the essentials: from digital ID copy (identity confirm, validation for you and someone else) your DNI-equivalent protection (won't allow to process your personal information in some cases). There's healthcare services handling (prescriptions, but we also have a dedicated app), inbox/outbox for official matters, payments and taxes, section for car and vehicles (penalty points, accident reporting), environment (reporting accidents, air quality, flood alerts) and travel (rail tickets wallet, tips and warning for traveling destinations - atm it shows that Spain is on 4th level terrorist threat). Tbh, it's way better than used to be few years ago with complex login flow that could break midway.
It's all convenient stuff but older generations are already digitally marginalized and we may indeed head into the future where we won't be able to do anything without a smartphone, in both real and digital life.
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