Before flash was even practical, computers kept BIOS on true ROM and used a small persistent storage commonly called CMOS for configuration. It could be a pain because the button battery that maintained it could die.

These days, you could use a small flash for configuration and a larger one with write disabled in hardware for the boot code.

On the other hand, by far the greatest threat to your laptop is someone wanting to steal it outright and sell it off. They're not going to bother with anything on it, just blow it away with a bootleg copy of Windows and call it a day.

The people looking to profit from information on your laptop will do it from half a world away while you are using it.

This can be used to regain access to laptop you won that has been hijacked by DRM you don't want. Since it requires physical possession of the laptop, it doesn't pose much risk to the end user.

I just disable secure boot. If the device leaves my control long enough for someone to do something with it, it has to be treated as potentially compromised with or without secure boot. Why create an additional recovery roadblock for myself? Security is a funny thing if you think about it carefully enough.

Always lock your car so when someone steals your $5 flashlight they also break your $500 window. Always install security lights so criminals can see what they're doing when they break in.

So the faster we help them develop, the slower the world population climbs.

Let's face it, many evangelical Christians have voted for an administration that would instantly deport Jesus to El Salvador if he appeared today.

The upshot of my comment is that OEMs do have an easy option to not chain their devices to their cloud. They WANT to chain the devices, but then don't want to maintain the server and cry about the cost of their own self-imposed obligation as an excuse to brick features.

It's a scam.

ESP32 isn't all that new, and has never been expensive. Most of the OEMs doing rug pulls these days had the option easily available at design time.

You can put a web server on an inexpensive ESP32 these days. That server can be a lot simpler than the one in the cloud since instead of having to maintain many accounts, it only needs to handle 1.

On fire, fire sale, what's the difference?

At Radio Shack, you've got Questions, We've got cellphones.

Agreed. They did a lot better with retired engineers and college kids majoring in EE.

Cats will do that:-)

I can see why consumers might generally prefer an all-in-one solution *IF* it won't be enshitified. Alas, since it WILL be, I prefer a device that can't phone home at all in order to make enshittification impossible. It's unfortunate that the otherwise cleaner solution is screwed up by bad manufacturers.

If the TV was appropriately cheaper for not having the smarts, the $30 might not seem like much. It's not exactly complicated to plug the chromecast into an HDMI input. The chromecast remote will be what you need most of the time since the chromecast itself can turn the TV on, select the correct input, etc and the remote also has an IR transmitter to handle the volume function.

Admittedly, assembling the Pi is a step up in knowledge many wouldn't manage.

Many people do manage to use a chromecast just fine.

It would be better to somehow ban enshittification, but even defining it legally would be a hard problem, much less getting the legislation past the gauntlet of industry lobbyists.

Sooner or later, we'll run out of consultants. People eventually retire or quit the industry in disgust and the new crop of vibe coders certainly aren't going to fill those roles.

That matches my (limited) experience. Just for giggles, I let copilot (on Github) have a crack at a function in some of my code. Its suggested improvement made some sense in a vacuum, but in context it read more like someone who feels they must 'contribute' something and that's all they could find. It didn't seem to understand that the function would always be called in the context of a transaction and raising an exception will roll it back.

There is a difference. If you learned Pascal as the wave of the future, you could always do FORTRAN or with a little re-training, C (pointers always left Pascal programmers a bit befuddled at first). If you bet on Java, you could always migrate to C or Python. Some of the IDEs do leave people a bit brain dead, but not so much they can't make the jump to a simple text editor and command line compiler. Even BASIC was OK though you'd have to un-learn a few bad habits.

But if you learn 'vibe coding', you are dead in the water without the AI. No amount of typing "Make a game like Wolfenstein 3D but in a shopping mall with perfume ladies that take half of your health points.." into the compiler will get you anywhere at all.