Yeah they are sneaky. You are forced to download everything.

Do a “manual search” on the Nvidia driver page.

Once the “Game Ready” drivers are downloaded. Uninstall the nvidia app (if it’s installed already.)

Now to install.

Basically for any windows software, always choose “Custom (Advanced)” installation, instead of “Express (Recommended)”.

For nvidia, the next page will show you 3-4 options. Untick everything accept “Graphics driver”.

Definitely ignore “HD audio”. It tends to mess up your sound (at least that’s my experience.)

and “PhysX System Software” unless this out of date or missing. Then you can tick this.

Then just your graphics drivers will be installed.

Obviously you will miss out on the various additional features the nvidia app provides, like auto tweaking game settings. But it’s always a tradeoff.

As I said above. Always do “Custom” installs on ANY software. 75% of the time you end up automatically opting into to various forms of telemetry, and at worst find your browers have new plugins, your search engine changed, and antivirus installed. It can be time-consuming to uninstall.

Hope that helps. Let me know if you have more questions. I tried to add screenshots but the Lemmy app wasn’t having it.

I use this - https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

But obviously get opinions from other sources first.

It claims to disable most Windows telemetry. Some Adobe. But I haven’t actually done any testing to prove it’s the case. It’s a pretty useful tool. Just use the restore point option first.

Last time I tried this method of disabling Adobe telemetry, photoshop stopped opening after a few days.

For nvidia/amd, just install the drivers, not their tool suite.

As the other posters mention, try to find alternatives.

Other than that, you can try and block at a firewall level. But few companies make it obvious like: http://nerferoustelemetry.pleasedontblockthis.adobe.com/

True. All I can think of is that before it gets to Halloween shops have sold off most of their stock and are in the process of getting all the Xmas stuff out. I’ve been places where they have a Halloween and Xmas mix of songs.

I’m not ruling out that a few hundred thousand completely random people around the world all decide to listen to Xmas music around the same time. I just think it’s more likely businesses switching to seasonal music as early as possible, and streaming Mariah Carey 20 times a day, causing the big sudden spike.

Is it just a load of stores/shops immediately switching to generic xmas playlists after Halloween? To me that’s the only reason I could see there to being a sudden spike. This song is bound to be in most of them. But we’d also need to track other popular xmas tracks.

(I know there used to be significant music licensing issues about what music could be played in a store, to the public. Don’t know if there is some special Spotify business account now?)

Obligatory link - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_finger

Don’t let a Seal bite you.

“Seal finger was first described scientifically in 1907. It can cause cellulitis, joint inflammation, and swelling of the bone marrow; untreated, the course of “seal finger” is slow and often results in a thickened, contracted joint. Historically, seal finger was treated by amputation of the affected digits once they became unusable…”