If Civilization II taught me one thing, it's that ongoing payments are an absolute scam... Unless you're planning to declare war anyway.

I don't want AI in my browser even if I can turn it off for the same reason I don't want my refrigerator door booby-trapped with an explosive even if I can turn it off.

Bugs happen. Configuration changes happen. User error happens. Software is complex, and I shouldn't need an intimate knowledge of every goddamn app I run to be sure it's not siphoning all my data off to god-knows-where. I use hundreds of programs on a daily basis. It is completely untenable to carefully configure every single one, stay abreast of constant updates and changes, and spend 76 full working days reading every TOS I am subject to. And of course, all their policies and defaults are subject to change without notice, so nothing I learn today will necessarily apply tomorrow anyway.

I want to be confident that my web browser is not — either by design, due to a misconfiguration, or due to a bug — sending my data to OpenAI. I do not want a booby-trapped browser, even if I can turn off the booby-traps. I do not want my fridge to explode, so I don't buy fridges with built-in explosives. Seems pretty simple to me.

I also want to be confident in the same for others. If I deploy a browser to 100 employees' machines, or even just my mom's, a little opt-out checkbox under Settings will not give me any peace of mind.

On the one hand, I'm not even running 4K yet, and it is vanishingly unlikely that I will own a >4K display within the lifetime of my PS5, so this makes no difference to me.

On the other hand, I would like to see blatant false advertising punished every time it happens. "Nobody really cares" isn't much of an excuse when they clearly thought people cared enough to put it prominently on the box. Being able to play high-end video 10 years down the line is a legitimate selling point for a gaming console that doubles as media box.

Nobody tell her about daemons.

Sounds like an excellent class. Probably should be a requirement rather than an elective tbh.

Buying anything on Amazon hardly seems viable anymore. There's so much counterfeit crap there, and a million low-effort rebrandings of the same stuff you can get on AliExpress for cheaper.

Shop local when you can, and at least shop not-Amazon for the rest.

For context, original lyrics:

Don't wanna be an American idiot
Don't want a nation under the new media
And can you hear the sound of hysteria?
The subliminal mind fuck America

Welcome to a new kind of tension
All across the alienation
Where everything isn't meant to be okay
Television dreams of tomorrow
We're not the ones who're meant to follow
For that's enough to argue

Well maybe I'm the faggot America
I'm not a part of a redneck agenda
Now everybody do the propaganda
And sing along to the age of paranoia

Welcome to a new kind of tension
All across the alienation
Where everything isn't meant to be okay
Television dreams of tomorrow
We're not the ones who're meant to follow
For that's enough to argue

Don't want to be an American idiot
One nation controlled by the media
Information age of hysteria
It's calling out to idiot America

Welcome to a new kind of tension
All across the alienation
Where everything isn't meant to be okay
Television dreams of tomorrow
We're not the ones who're meant to follow
For that's enough to argue

Super tame.

In the New Year's show, they changed "a redneck agenda" to "the MAGA agenda". Okay, little bit more explicitly partisan, but basically the same thing.

Yes, this is still necessary.

It wouldn't make sense to put the onus to block every bad instance onto every single user.

Consider the extreme use case, which is obviously CSAM. I rely on my instance admins to handle that for me. If I had to painstakingly block every instance that has poor moderation (or worse), I'd simply stop using Lemmy. The "all" feed would be utterly unusable.

Also, admins need control over what's in their own database, potentially for legal reasons.

They've stated that they are using Mac minis as relays. They claim that they do not store messages or credentials, but I don't see how that's possible if it relies on a Mac or iOS relay server that they control.

Misleading title. They're not "available for purchase". There's a kickstarter.

Not once in the entire article do they measure energy in a unit suitable for measuring energy.

Measuring batteries in km is misleading and nonsensical. Batteries do not have a distance range. Cars have a distance range, based on many factors, only one of which is battery capacity.

Similarly, please stop measuring light output in watts that an imaginary incandescent bulb from 30 years ago might theoretically have used to produce that amount of light.

The best way to make money in the gold rush was selling shovels.

Same idea here. Nvidia is making bank.