Project 2025 includes a detailed plan about how to dismantle the entire Federal government and replace thousands of government managers with alt-right extremists.

Project 2025 matches most of his campaign promises and is written largely by former Trump administration staffers.

The ultra-wealthy are terrified of reprisal from Trump. And they control the media (Bezos/WP) and social media (Zuck).

Democracy in America may fail next week. Terrifying to watch.

Isn’t it getting harder to find custom ROMs, now? Used to be basically everything was on XDA forums, but I’ve heard lots of custom ROMs are moving to they’re own websites/Discord servers/whatever.

I worry that age verification will backfire spectacularly; users can just tunnel their traffic through a VPN and then once on a VPN, they would also miss all harmful content blocking. Middle schoolers can figure out how to get around school web filters, and they, and everyone else, will figure their way around age verification just as easily.

I just wiped and set up a laptop as a favour… It forced updating Windows (to 11, possibly?) before booting. No option to skip, and no indication how much it was downloading.

Such a pain. I had to wait an hour for it when it already had a fully functional OS. What can’t it download in the background and update at 3am when idle? That’s what made me suspect it was as forced Windows 11 upgrade, since why else would they care to force it?

I don’t think you’re understanding how trivial this is to detect:

Set up an open WiFi network in an area without any other open WiFi networks. i.e. almost anywhere outside of dense urban areas. Then you don’t even need to inspect traffic, just look at connected devices in admin controls. No devices should be connected aside from your monitoring device.

There’s no way the TV manufacturers are going to risk the legal quagmire that would come from this when there’s no plausible way to keep it remotely secret.

… Or pay them for it!

There’s a prolific open-source dev that makes many plugins and themes for a widely-used OSS platform. He’s quite open when asked for new features if it’s something he’s already planning on doing anyway (with no guaranteed timeline) or if it’s not. But if it’s a reasonable ask, he’ll always mention that he can prioritise its development if they fund it. He even posts his current contractor rate; it’s quite transparent.

I think more OSS devs should be more open like that. “Yes, I can do that feature request. Sounds like about 2-3 hours work. My hourly is $120 for contract work. Email me here if you’re interested and I’ll send a contract.”

Super easy. Anyone who knows networking could detect new device connections on an open network they set up. I know next to nothing about networking and I could set it up in 10 minutes, 5 of which would be finding my old router in the basement.

So I’m not going to give this a moment’s thought until someone brings receipts. It’s not hard to check if this is happening.

Fake news, as far as I can tell. Lots of claims this is happening, but nobody has brought receipts. Considering how easy it would be to catch, and how likely illegal it is to connect to and use networks without permission, this is definitely an urban legend.

The author of the article is under the mistaken impression that bundling the “smart” features into the TV increases the price. It’s actually the opposite.

By injecting ads and bloatware into the TVs, the manufacturers earn more money, by far, than the cost of the features. A dumb TV would cost more.

The best solution is to decouple them; get the cheapest TV you can with the video quality/size you want, then attach your own device to stream content. I use a modified Fire Stick due to price, mostly with Stremio/Torrentio/Debrid, but there are lots of options.

Canada uses gc.ca for federal government sites, and I think every province gets their own, too, like .bc.ca (but I don’t know if they all use them.)

It’s satire. The author is pointing out how morally reprehensible it is, using irony.

The text is only fucked the the way that The Onion sticks are fucked: this is only labeled satire because of the tone of the article. The content is as true as “real” news.

The actual “fucked” content is that the author was correct, and that the wealthy benefit from hunger and the threat of starvation to maintain access to abundant cheap labour.

Wireless game streaming is another reason to upgrade WiFi. I couldn’t stream anything from my wired desktop to my Steam Deck on WiFi from the ISP-supplied router. I just finished upgrading to a WiFi mesh network partly because of that… but I haven’t tested game streaming yet.

I expect it should do great, though. My Fire Stick used to occasionally buffer even with ~1.5GB/hr content, but I just tried a 1080p remux at 15GB/hr and it worked great.

Just FYI, I’m pretty sure you’re confusing “AI” and “AGI”.

Even enemy behavior is videogames is “AI”, but obviously is not “General Intelligence”.

I think the problem is Hollywood confusing the two terms, so people think AI = Skynet, but that’s not the technical definition in Computer Science.

Err… That’s definitively AI.

AI is just any computer algorithm that does a task that would be aimed to require human intelligence.

Identifying text in an image is a non-trivial task, so OCR is a type of AI algorithm.

That said, I assume “AI phones” are probably not using the term AI in the general sense; presumably they just mean that it uses MM-LLMs somehow.

The cynic in me is wondering if this is just Google trying to get around the movement to stop children from being given addiction machines* before they’re ready for them. (*Smart phones with infinite-content-stream “social-media” apps)

There’s a push to ban smart phones for students below age 16 at schools (and educating parents to try to get them to just give their children dumb phones until age 16 outside of school hours, too.)

But maybe that’s just me being cynical. This movement only started gaining steam after The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt was published earlier this year, afaik, and Google is hardly an agile company anymore…

I pay whatever is needed to get the features I need, within reason. My current phone was ~$500 CAD (XPeria 10 V). It was the only narrow phone with good battery life at a reasonable price with 8 GB RAM at the time.

Out of curiosity, why do you need so much storage on mobile? Massive music library in FLAC or something?

I am totally content with 128GB. It’s enough that I’ll never run out of space for my usage. (Well, aside from photos, but those get backed up in full-resolution to Amazon Photos as part of my Prime subscription).

Granted, most of my media consumption is ebooks, which are tiny.