And this is why I will never own a vehicle manufactured after 2006.

I have just too little control with newer vehicles, be it having to auth with the mothership with every repair I do at home just to get it to start up, or even failing to start up in the first place when the mothership could not be contacted.

I start off with Win10Privacy (which also cleans 11) and then follow up with Win11Debloat. The two work pretty well.

And Microsoft is stuffing AI straight into Windows.

Betchya dollars to fines that this will happen a lot more frequently as normal users begin to try to use Copilot.

That’s what I am saving up for, actually. The numbers of surplussed high-end compute just in my sparsely populated region could probably let me open my own datacentre.

Am I unreasonably disappointed to not find “Correct Horse Battery Staple” - or some variation thereof - in that list?

OpenBSD does not have a docker engine. Can this be installed without docker?

Just don’t take away passwords + TOTP 2FA for those of us who are actually using it correctly.

The FBI is probably going nuts here because someone inadvertently archived the Epstein files and everyone at HQ is panicking. They need to purge it for the Internet before someone discovers that archived content, and so they’re using CP as an excuse.

everyone can see the AI BS right out in the open

To me it is four things in particular:

1. How AI use erodes skills in the subject AI is being used to assist in. This is a 100% occurrence, and has been demonstrated across all industries from software developers to radiologists. Most experience a 10-20% erosion in their skill set within the first 12 months of AI use, but others in the study groups have seen up to a 40% erosion in their skill sets.
2. How AI use shuts down critical thinking, and makes users more stupid. This is a 100% occurrence, and has been clearly demonstrated by MRI scans of the prefrontal cortex while users are actively using AI.
3. How AI use makes the user slower. This is the only user point that is not 100%, as only less than 2% of the most senior and skilled users show a slight increase in work completed… after more than 12 months of using AI. Projections have been made on the other 98%, and over 90% of them will never work faster with AI than without it, regardless of training or experience.
4. The gratuitous hallucinations, which are only increasing in scope and severity with every AI generation. It arises entirely from the constraints the AI are rewarded with - providing no answer is weighted just as negatively as a wrong answer - and anywhere from 60-80% of all responses are hallucinatory or incorrect in some fashion, depending on the current model.

In prior generations, any industry with such performance would be laughed clear out of the boardroom.

But because capitalism is desperately seeking a solution to what they perceive as a problem - how to obtain labour without having to pay said labour - AI is being adopted hand-over-fist.

After all, the underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.

Both platforms have problems, and some of those problems are big ones, but Google’s actions with the Play Store makes Apple’s shenanigans look like that of a choir boy or Boy Scout:

https://www.howtogeek.com/how-google-tracks-and-scans-everything-on-your-android-device/

I have no clue how this doesn’t creep everyone right TF out.

And saying “I have nothing to hide” is the answer of cultivated ignorance:

https://amnesty.ca/features/wrong-response-mass-surveillance/

This looks small enough to be installed within the wheel hub itself. Imagine a car with four motors, one inside each wheel. The entire floor pan could just be one thin battery, and everything above it could be passenger and storage space.

Treat the cause,

Right. Like obtaining a controlling interest in Apple is just so easy to achieve. Now, where did I leave my random trillions?…

On iOS you can install a system-wide DNS configuration profile for AdGuard without having to install any app.

It doesn’t deal with ads served up from the exact same API/domain as the content, but any source of ads that is drawn from a different domain can be blocked and usually is blocked.

About the only apps I still see ads in are YouTube, Pinterest, and Facebook. All apps that use third-party advertising feeds have those ads blocked.

Damn, that’s promotional material that SanDisk would probably not want to have.

At this point, I wouldn’t blame any company that immediately ceased expansions in America and started to consider moving existing production facilities to adjacent countries, like Canada.

Aside from the Rotary Un-Phone, there are pretty much no dumb phones anymore. Those that market themselves as dumb are just reskinned full-fat platforms.

Even almost all flip phones are smart phones with a dumb skin, as they run either Android or KaiOS.

The main reason why I would switch is for device security - a true dumb phone OS that operates purely out of the ROM and has no ability to install anything that could survive a reboot.

And for something that primitive, it would be a flip phone on par with the Motorola StarTac. Simple black-on-green screen, low-res display, with a calendar and address book as the only non-phone, non-SMS functionality.

I kept reading about people having trouble during the restore process.

It is Duplicati, and IMHO restores work best if they aren’t restores-in-place. As in, dump the restores in a central location then drag-and-drop the data into place. Most of the issues I have heard of involve restoring data and settings back to where it originally was backed up from, and restoring directly back to those places - other than fully user-controlled directories, such as Documents or Photos - seems to be problematic.

Other than that, I have been using it for nearly a decade and have done a number of restores - after total drive deaths, so not just accidentally deleted files - to great success.

The downside is that tweaking backups from within the hidden C:\Users\[username]\AppData\ directory involves many days of whack-a-mole to exclude untouchable normally-in-use files so you don’t get scads of errors in the backup process. Plus, there are a fair number of entries in there that don’t really need backing up. But once you get that to settle down, it’s largely smooth it’s-set-so-forget-it sailing.

Sure, it takes a bit of effort. But if you replace your routers with ones that have open-source firmware or actual workstations acting as gateway routers and running business-class open-source software, you can create a personal VPN between everyone involved that shows only one exit point to world+dog.

The trick is with ensuring that all YouTube stuff gets properly and comprehensively funnelled through this exit node - VPNs can easily leak data if not configured properly, and sometimes do so despite good configs - and implementing this even on other devices that require individual VPN connectivity (roaming, like phones).

Plus, having a mobile device’s VPN auto-recognize when it’s connected to a known good network, and have it automatically disable itself in favour of the VPN on that network, is not something that’s easy to do.

Finally, doing so without a high-quality, high-speed ISP plan can easily lead to an unusably slow VPN. The “mothership” exit node, in particular, would have to be gigabit or better - and symmetrical as well, so fibre and not cable - because it has both the node and connections to other homes and devices. If everyone started suckling the YouTube teat at the same time, things would likely slow down pretty fast on anything significantly less than a symmetrical gigabit connection.

Abandon your monetarist goldbug worldview, the gold decoupling and subsequent floating of the international exchange rates are downstream of the actual policy decision that have emiserated the population.

I never said they were directly related, I just wanted to point out that they both occurred in the same year, in 1971.

This needs to be exactly reversed, the poorer you are, the easier it should be to acquire but the more you have the harder it gets. Up until a point where it becomes nearly impossible to go beyond the “capital horizon” some kind of equilibrium state where wealth can lo longer be acquired faster than you lose it.

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

Absolutely.

The 80s were already the second decade of the decline after the gold standard was revoked in 1971 and wages became decoupled from productivity. Everything was on a slowly accelerating slide downhill from there, although it took until the 90s for the first people to truly notice things were going sideways.

You want a real economic golden era? Try the 50s and the 60s, where a single wage earner could work a low-end service-level job (selling shoes, for example), and make enough to own a detached SFH, a car in the garage, support a SAH spouse and several children, go on modest vacations every year with at least one more ambitious one every few years, and still have enough left over to save generously for retirement.