I know a guy who spends 100x that on brownshirts.

And their hair is amazing.

Fortunately the HDCP association hasn't had much luck suing Aliexpress or any of the vendors there. Not that I have any use for one, but I kind of want to by a $10 HDCP stripper just on general principle.

I brought all of my gear in a work backpack long before I moved to macs,

It's all on site. There's an office and a workshop. Dongles, which belong in the workshop just sort of wander around all over the place, get put away in the wrong place and so on and so forth. The people with macs, thin PCs with no ethernet ports and broken USB ports are always on the hunt for dongles.

I'm talking about the generic adapters. Things like the USB-serial and USB-can adapters tend to be semi-permanently wired into the respective serial or CAN or serial ports (especially CAN since it's daisy chained the annoying way).

They're not expensive and someone should buy enough to saturate every work surface.

Twitter did a much better job with the bots. It did have a tough time because you can't algorithmically police right wing extremism without having it go after American Republican politicians. So right we extremism had to be manually policed. In other words racism and Nazis and whatnot. Musk solution to that problem was to just let the racists and the Nazis take over.

Now ordinarily that would be the company would rapidly go out of business because of lost users. But musk has been pumping money into it, largely with the help of the Saudi royal family. Essentially turning it into a propaganda arm of American billionaires and the Saudi elites. At least if you are consuming content on the platform besides a handful very specific people posting to it.

The real problem is that computers are just too good at figuring out relationships. That's why you can't kick Nazis off your platform using algorithms. A computer will very quickly figure out that the dog whistles the Republicans or whatever your local equivalent is are saying are dog whistles referring to racist or Nazi stuff and it'll go after those dog whistles because the computer knows that when a republican talks about welfare Queens it's no different than a Nazi talking about rounding up black people and gays. The computer knows the dog whistle and you can't program an effective algorithm that doesn't figure it out right quick.

Ok? That's my point, did you not read who I was responding to?.

Are we all willing to say Congresspeople have the right to say all of those things and censure for any of these cases is ridiculous?

Files were sealed because investigation was ongoing during Biden's term, Maxwell was sentenced in 2022.

Biden was also like a right proper President and was appropriately hands off with the DOJ. Obviously today respecting 2 centuries of norms is a bit woke.

I'm not saying that they can't do it, it's that they can't legally do it.

No. And if you watch a cabinet meeting, and it's not hard to see why it's an apt comparison. But feel free to replace "Dear Leader" with "Trump", if it makes you feel neuter, and finish reading the comment.

Let's not lose perspective here - we're talking about entertainment companies. These aren't airlines, ISPs, or grocery stores, it's boob tube fodder.

If you can't afford it, you don't have to subscribe. When I was a kid, we didn't have premium cable TV channels because my folks thought it wasn't worth the money. We still went to the movies occasionally and rented tapes from the local rental joint (before they all became Blockbuster Video).

There's absolutely no reason that the government should be involving itself in entertainment industry mergers. It's as absolutely non-essential as non-essential businesses can get. The sun will still rise tomorrow if you can't afford to watch Game of Thrones, or whatever the current crap is that HBO is putting out these days. And... there's always piracy.

I don't think it's really about any of this. This smells to me like a pump and dump scheme. Get investors thinking this idea is hot shit because it's based on a well-established brand, and then make off with the money before anyone realizes the world didn't really need yet another microblogging service.

That Dear Leader is a vile human being with generally unpopular policies being implemented in arbitrary, capricious, haphazard, and sometimes illegal ways? And, outside of right-wing echo chambers, is being covered in a way that reflects that? Maybe, just maybe, he's being covered in a negative way because an ever growing percentage of the population views him and his administration negatively?

What country do you live in and ill point out the people who are "forced" to keep society functioning and we can argue if we are "entitled" to it.

And another thing. Fuckin Benny Johnson, a private media figure, gets a death threat and then he appears at a press conference with fucking Attorney General of the United States

The fucking Vice President of the United States hosted Charlie Kirk's podcast for like weeks.

Unreal.

That is completely false in 2025. There definitely is bad engagement these days. There's a reason they pulled the advert rather than let it run its course. I don't think anyone here reading this has a sudden urge to go get a BigMac. Simply having a name doesn't make marketing in any way affective or positive.