I think the only Premium TVs left are the business TVs that give you meaningful mechanisms to not have intrusive "Smart" features.

Is there a meaningful difference between a Sony TV that harvests data and won't let you opt-out of "smart" features, and a Wal-mart TV that harvests data and won't let you opt-out of "smart" features?

I guess I am blessed to not be an audiophile and not have flawless supervision :)

FWIW, I have:
- a 20 yo 720p dumb 42" plasma
- a 20 yo 1080P dumb 50" plasma
- a 1yo 4k Samsung 65" TheFrame TV

That last one was a splurge I wanted because the "Art Mode" is just too beautiful, and at the time, Samsung really had the only coherent offering. (I guess there are now "off brand" ArtTV attempts from HiSense and others.. i have no experience with them.)

On the ArtTV, we watch youtube or DVDs or XBox on it a little of the time, and all that stuff looks fine to me on the 65" Samsung. But the TV is otherwise displaying pretty artwork almost all of the time, and whatever Samsung has done with the screen, dimming control, bezel, etc, really does work and really is lovely. And you don't need a service or an app to get the experience - just stick a USB full of public domain masterpieces into the TV.

Even so, the Samsung ecosystem is pretty annoying. I can have it show my images in ArtMode, but i cannot have the "real" experience you'd get with a subscription - with Art XML metadata and stuff (artist, date, etc). We don't always remember what a piece is or who painted it when it comes up..

Anyway, AFAIK, the only way to get TVs that aren't enshittified spyware is a business SKU, right?

In my house, we use Steam to play "windows-only" games on:
- Devuan with XFCE
- Devuan with Cinnamon
- Arch with hyprland
- bone stock Ubuntu 24
- ubuntu 25 laptop w/ second GPU

From my POV, there's not much need to port games to Linux. With the heroic efforts of Valve, most Windows games now just work. Win32, DX, D3D, and whatever else windows game devs have been using seems to have become the defacto reference gaming API on Linux.

Steam makes it work on every linux distro we've tried.

In writing this, it occurs to me: The F/OSS ecosystem does a very good job of re-implementing someone else's API/products (WINE, Proton, LibreOffice, etc)

The F/OSS ecosystem does a comparatively poor job at independently developing its own technology and then standardizing/universalizing those choices. E.g. the transition from X11 to Wayland; the systemd "situation(s)", desktop environments... gui greeters, audio muxers...

I think Valve has done the right thing. They made existing games work on Steam; they made Steam work on most linux distros.

Making everyone use a reference linux platform seems to be a total non-starter.

We already have a reference gaming platform: Windows 7 thru 10. And what we learned in 2025 is that Steam on nearly _any_ Linux often implements that windows reference gaming platform better than Windows 11 does.

MS is all in on ARM⦠Theyâ(TM)ve released an ARM64 native Office and Edge. Windows 11 has an x64 emulator in ARM with wicked performance to cover the gaps in the app space. The latest Surface offers the same Surface branded laptop with ARM chips (unlike the Pro X which stood out). Theyâ(TM)ve also brought ARM into Azure.

Worlds first what? https://azure.microsoft.com/en...

Forget about whether or not this is or isn't spying. Even if you take their claims at face value, this balloon would represent airspace incursion by an out-of-control unmanned aircraft. And airspace incursions are something the US military should handle, efficiently and promptly, as a matter of routine. This shouldn't be a giant diplomatic incident or require some great policy analysis to decide to take it down. The message should be plain and simple such as:

NORAD almost certainly knew about this balloon heading towards our airspace probably 5 days ago (late Monday or early Tuesday) when it was still many hundreds of miles away from the west coast, which means that authorization to shoot it down would have been requested at virtually the same time. There should have been plenty of time (hours) to take care of this safely and efficiently before it actually entered US territory, but my guess is that the authorization to shoot it down didn't come until much too late... possibly as late as Wednesday, after it had already crossed into inhabited US territory. Hence the reluctance to shoot it down, and hence the uproar.

One of the best parts about the FCC Broadband Map in my opinion was the idea that it was essentially "crowd-sourced" in that users could file challenges to the data and fix mistakes. But I was surprised to discover recently that there are huge limitations on the challenge process.

A month ago, I was interested in purchasing a property and one of my criteria was having fiber service available. The FCC Broadband Map showed fiber being available there, but before placing an offer, I called the broadband provider to confirm. The representative on the phone apologized and said that no service was available at that address, nor did the system show it becoming available soon. I mentioned that the info at the FCC Broadband Map was incorrect for this address and needed to be corrected, but she did not know what to do about that, but she would "make a note about it" and pass it along. I happened to check the map again about 30 days later, but it was still listed incorrectly. I decided to be helpful and file a challenge myself directly via the FCC website.

Unfortunately, before clicking on "submit" you are required to certify that you are either a current resident at the address or are the legal owner/manager of the property. No one else is permitted to file a challenge, based on the current website language. That's a significant hindrance in this case, because the current owner of the property obviously has no incentive to update the map to make the property look worse to prospective buyers, and obviously the provider here can't be bothered to fix it either. If interested 3rd parties are not allowed to file challenges on behalf of others when they have evidence, then the entire challenge process is sadly flawed and strongly designed to favor the status quo.

In fact, based on the OP, it sounds like this challenge which came from a competing ISP was actually against the FCC's own challenge policy, and I'm pleasantly surprised it went anywhere without simply being tossed/ignored.

I'd love if my switch could do 4k, I've got a Sony 4k projector and a large acoustically transparent screen. Our Xbox One X looks amazing, the PS3 still looks great, but the Switch feels quite dated. Targeting 4k for the easier output means we should be able to get a true/sustained 1080p output, a massive improvement. E.g. Breath of the Wild was only pushing 900p when plugged in and would chug in certain points, I'd love to revisit it at 1080p and a sustained 30FPS (if 60FPS isn't possible).

From the source's source:

> One metric ton of remdesivir is sufficient API to manufacture 900,000 courses of treatment, without allowance for any losses during formulation.

They don't account for losses, and estimates are around 12% of inputs make it to outputs: https://www.acsh.org/news/2020...

What about partial/full pre-processing of web sites or parts thereof to optimize client-side access for different platforms or scenarios?

Under the intense field the protons are going to oscillate back and forth under the optical electric field - note, the electrons will do this even more, as they are ~ 1/2000 as massive. With a beam, you only interact once, here the protons may interact for the lifetime of the pulse - which is very short. The question is the fusion yield vs the energy needed to drive the field. Muon catalyzed fusion worked very well - but the cost to create the muons was too high.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

> for nicotine, there is no "good" range, and it is far more addictive.

Are you sure about that? From what I've read, there's a potentiating effect of the nicotine caused by MAOIs in tobacco. Further, I have a very hard time finding studies about the health effects of nicotine that isn't from tobacco (smoked, chewed, or otherwise ingested). The health effects of nicotine sans tobacco seem akin to those of caffeine.

I ran across some music I was looking for behind a "warning, dangerous and offensive" material warning a few weeks ago. I was looking for a Ukrainian nationalist song - my translation is 'Kalina in the Valley' from one of the historical Ukrainian nationalist groups. Yes, the song was sung by a group that collaborated with the Germans in WW2. And singing or humming it during the Soviet era would get you a one-way ticked to Siberia. Doing so now in Russia would result in the same fate. There may be a broad brush here. Simply banning material does not address the issues.

The bill only has three sponsors. It's scheduled for a public hearing on January 31st and isn't scheduled for an executive session. Bills have to be voted out of committee no later than February 2nd to survive the legislative session. This bill isn't going anywhere beyond the public hearing.

I have been expecting this for a while. The real question I have had is how they would implement the feedback weights. You can do it with switches and a bank or resistors, but a memristor as a feedback element would be much more efficient - and should be far denser.