I deal with phoning home by router-level blocking LG domains and IPs (based on a community sourced list). Given that I’m not updating the TV to preserve jailbreak it’s unlikely that this list will ever have to be updated.

You could also jailbreak it and disabled it via homebrew ;)

I only have BT disabled though, still need networking to control DYI ambilight. I think blocking LG addresses on the router does the trick for phoning home, or at least it doesn’t nag me about updates anymore.

I believe this YouTube channel is AI slop cloning format of How Money Works.

US, China and Russia won’t sign it. The longer I live the more I wonder why small countries want to handicap themselves against aggression this way. Any country will withdraw from this, same as with mines and cluster munitions, when they get a whiff of being threatened. By then they will be late in development of those new weapons and forced to buy them from US or China or Russia, to double the irony.

I reject accusations that I think toilet paper is useless.

Comic book movies became about as disposable as toilet paper. It’s as much of an art as floral patterns on mine. At least my toilet paper isn’t propaganda for upholding status quo.

Completely forgot Neo existed. My brain seems to refuse to accept they didn’t name it SE. I’m going to write an angry letter to Apple now. They’re going to overdo it now with rumours of MacBook Ultra.

The reasons for forking Audacity were all valid but not necessarily important for the end user. It’s still GPL, you can still fork it and do whatever you want (GPL caveats apply).

• CLA requirement for contributors (not uncommon in open source projects)
• Adding telemetry and crash reporting (which is opt-in)
• Privacy policy written to be on the safe side of regulatory compliance (understandable given corporate stewardship)

Probably just „MacBook”. Apple segments their offerings into 3/4 tiers these days and it’s a bit unusual that there’s only 2 major product lines for their laptops, both of which having their name imply being adjacent to some regular one.

I’d argue that GPL is still counterculture, it’s just that permissive licensing is more common these days and both are conflated into single umbrella of free software. Permissive licensing culture made way into traditional free software spaces like Linux and we’re seeing results of that now.

Professional stuff!

It’s never been easier not to be a Sony customer, they don’t really do anything unique these days. Heck, I bought an old professional CRT monitor recently and opted for JVC one out of spite.

Platforms and communities I was part of before finding Fediverse were driven by user engagement and ultimately that was the reason why they ended up sucking. It’ll take longer doing things our own way and I estimate chance of success as very low but I think it’s a worthwhile goal and if by some chance those places ends up popular they’ll be a much more healthy.

I feel this is Americans being completely misguided as to their own interests, mostly due to shortsightedness, insider dealing and other forms of corruption.

One of the pillars of American imperialism is intellectual property law enforcement (can’t joint WTO unless you agree to TRIPS). If we now say that IP law doesn’t apply if you compress IP via LLM then creative work becomes unprofitable and US doesn’t have media to export. Trump and company might be deluded enough to think they can replace it with LLM output but would their Supreme Court agree? That US media made half of the world look at everything through American perspective, which gave them immeasurable advantage akin to cultural victory in Civilisation games.

I don’t think that’s the end of the story because US media still have their own lobbyists. It’s a clusterfuck but at least it’s „interesting” to observe.

Changing administrative name of this lake is local American news. A company making maps reflect administrative names is not world news. Nobody else should care, especially if they don’t want to feed American ego.

My advice is not to be afraid to block people, communities and even whole instances. I feel this unproductive political outrage is more common in crowded spaces where people are trying to impress others. Another option is to create new communities where this kind of behaviour is explicitly forbidden and enforce it without making any apologies to other people or yourself. Your own sanity is more important than creating a product for someone who won’t appreciate it.

Gentoo does a wild amount of work on $12k per annum but I don’t think $12m is that crazy - if it’s more than you can spend then you can pass it on to your dependencies. We shouldn’t expect open source contributors to do everything as a volunteer effort because then it becomes a rich person pastime. What’s infuriating here is that this $12m goes to people who aren’t exactly doing anything worthwhile.

1. We are machines made out of meat.
2. It’s irrelevant if the choice was made at random or if it was based on some deep spiritual insight. We’re measuring outcomes, not the rationale.

For a binary choice where you expect distribution to be relatively similar you can do it with less than 400 while having 95% confidence and 5% margin of error. That’s just statistics and probability.

That’s more than enough for a statistically significant sample.