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.

You're making a rather large assumption there. I, for one, highly doubt that you could just "download an app to their phone and screw up the local cell tower". In fact, as an end user, I wouldn't even want this.

What the FSF is proposing (and hopefully eventually succeeding) is making some open firmware. Just because the firmware code is open doesn't mean every app (even if granted root access) in userspace will have unfettered access to everything the hardware radio could potentially do. There should be safeguards put in place to make sure the radio is well behaved. This is similar to backend code. You don't give the frontend admin-level access to the DB; you give it an API of things it's allowed to do.

Software defined radios already exist in various form factors and powers. I saw one in a walkie-talkie form factor a year or so ago with a range listed in miles and it could operate in cell bands. Point is, such things already exist in the mass market, and they're pretty dang cheap.

> The difference is that a human artist can't then turn around and take commissions to sell paintings of other people's IP, right? You can't just learn to draw Moana and then sell Moana TShits online - that's infringement. But Midjourney will take your money for access to their models and serve you up infringing images.

There's a disconnect between those two periods. Yes, an art student can't just start selling Moana merch. However, I don't see where Midjourney is doing that. In fact, their ToC states that you own all rights to the images you create. You are paying for the hardware resources to make freaky fingered people, not for the actual image.

They made over $48 billion dollars of profit *last quarter*. I think they can afford to pay as many people as they'd like.

> quasi monopoly

Is this like "Jumbo Shrimp"? They're certainly a big player, but not the only one. I don't really see how being successful means we have to dislike a company. Now, if they engage in practices that make things worse for consumers, we can deride that. And I'm sure they do, but I'd honestly be surprised if its anything nonstandard. That is- anything that Epic, GOG, Amazon, Google, etc also do.

> really aren't very good with returns

Can you please explain this? I have never had a problem with getting a return, and I don't think it's a coincidence that Epic's return policy is almost word for word the same. GOG's supposedly has a month-long return window, but they're also the only ones I've ever had an issue returning a game to. That's purely anecdotal though. I'm old enough that being able to return any PC software (especially games) is huge, and to my knowledge, you still can't returned an open game to a brick and mortar store.

There isn't really any proof that Waymo vehicles are driverless, only that the driver isn't in the vehicle. If you compare a dozen dubiously driverless vehicles to a million collecting data every moment and already doing a pretty good job at autonomy, which do you think will succeed?

The fact that the driver is not in the vehicle does not mean that there is no driver.

I believe that this was figured out in the amateur observer community before NASA confirmed it. I saw it go by in my twitter feed. Not sure I can find it now...

Linear Energy Transfer

It's not radioactive. When high-energy particles strike it, they break apart into lower-energy particles that are more harmful. So, you need enough shielding to catch the particles that break apart in the top layer of your shielding.

While radiation mostly results in transient errors, it can also cause latch-ups that blow a gate off of the die. For rad-hard equipment in space this is mitigated by silicon-on-insulator fabrication, so that you can't have a latch-up between the substrate and a silicon feature.

We could have REAL ZOMBIES! YEAH!

:-)

I hear you. Going to be an interesting future, if we live.