I just went into the settings for the widgets, turned off the "Start" or "News" experience or whatever it is and it's never come back. Just using the toggle it offers in settings. While I was at it I went into the taskbar settings and just turned off the widgets altogether, never came back. I wonder if sometimes we just assume the worst and resort first to "hack" ways to disable some of these things and when a new update comes along from your company or whoever, it gets re-enabled. Instead of just using the built-in functionality for turning things off.
I am excited about Panther Lake myself but where are you reading that it has higher performance/watt than M5? The chips aren't even out yet. All we have are Intel marketing materials with vague lines on charts. No one could have possibly done a performance/watt test on Panther Lake yet. I'm hoping they beat M5 but if I had to, I'd put my money on M5.
Copilot in VSCode supports local models through Ollama as well. Not sure about Copilot in Visual Studio. That's one of the most annoying things is VS is always behind VSCode in terms of Copilot features.
As of today (and going forward), there are two different flavors of Blazor server-side rendering. There is the original version where the component is rendered on the server and interactivity is provided via websockets. Now there is also static server-side rendering, which works very similarly to razor pages, pages/components are rendered on the server and there is no interactivity. You can then, of course, add interactivity wherever you'd need it with server-interactive or webassembly interactive sub-components.
I wouldn't necessarily say there's any benefit of Blazor over HTMX, it just depends on what you're most comfortable with and what works for you in your project. But you could architect your front-end in a similar way where you have small blazor components in your pages with interactivity.
I think Blazor is in a nice state now, where I can iterate very quickly on projects with just static server side rendering and add interactivity whenever it's needed. It gives me a very fast website, rendered on the server, and the option to add some interactivity whenever I need.
This is also a preview feature at the moment. They mention in the embedded video that it is not optimized or ready for production scenarios. They release these features very early in preview to start getting some feedback as they prepare for final release in November.
Don't hold your breath. My whole family are staunch Catholics and disliked Francis because of his more "liberal" leanings. Some Catholics believed he was the "anti-christ" and loved Trump. Seriously.