genAI is killing the open Internet. Killing it.

Burn in not a problem?

I've had a Samsung plasma TV (50"!) since 2012 and love it but it's gotten to the point there are permanent blotches of discoloured pixels on the screen. Not enough to be a major problem, it's normally only visible if what's being shown is supposed to be a large light colored area. But it's increasingly noticeable, and no amount of running supposed anti-burn-in stuff is getting rid of it at the moment.

Next TV will presumably be a smart TV. Other than "Not LG" I have no idea what it'll be, but I suspect the real "secure this device" thing will involve using it as a dumb TV - ie not connecting it to the Internet, no matter how much it begs, and just using HDMI inputs.

I have come across brand new still-manufactured dumb TVs in the wild, but they're typically low quality: Insignia was making them, at least two years ago, I was able to get one for my in-laws who are far too old to deal with "smart" TVs. (Something that really bothers me about current trends - after a certain age, modern "replacements" for tried and tested tech becomes unusable for people be it smartphones that require decent motor skills and good eyesight, or smart TVs that require a certain mind set and, well, good eyesight because you have to read a lot of shit on the TV. Welcome to late stage capitalism where everyone over 65 can just DIAF I suppose from the point of view of marketing companies.) Anyway, the Insignia was a classic dumb TV, just input selection and channel selection, as things have been since the 1990s, but the picture quality was f---ing awful. There were laptop LCDs in the late 1990s that had better contrast and refresh rates.

I'll give credit to the genAI people in one respect: they can market like nobody else. They've invented an entire soap opera about what AI is supposedly doing and people still fall for it.

Yeah, and Trump is promising to wrap up the war immediately after the upcoming elections.

I've always been a big fan of space exploration, but for a country that can't afford its lifestyle a moon base doesn't sound very important priority.

(Or maybe I should have said "isn't willing to pay for" its lifestyle.)

> Comcast has received decades of subscription fees, and if they didn't allocate part of their budget to infrastructure, they have only themselves to blame.

It's a bogus argument but you're missing what they're saying and responding to something else. They're saying it's irrational for a competitor (competitors don't have the infrastructure yet) to sell for $30 a month when it costs $1,500 to install that infrastructure. They're not saying it would be irrational for them to charge it, indeed, they could probably do so.

The problem of course is that it's not irrational, it's Total cost of wiring up an area/# subscribers = $1,500. And some subscribers will pay $30, some $50, some $100, some way more because that same fiber is being used to provide legacy cable and telephone services to a particular class of customer, namely old farts, like half of Slashdot.

Yeah I said it. You're old farts.

Anyway, the point is it very much makes sense to use different price points to get as many customers as possible because that $1,500 isn't going to go away just because someone doesn't subscribe. If the only way to get the last few residents in that area is to charge them $10 a month, it makes sense to provide a tier for them too, as long as others aren't attracted to the same deal.

For the same reason, Verizon and T-Mobile are currently offering "back up" services for about $20-25 on their 5G fixed wireless network. Why? Because every penny that comes in justifies upgrading those towers.

Comcast - or rather their CEO, I'm sure their experienced employees were head desking at the comment - just doesn't get tiered pricing and somehow doesn't understand that a massive proportion of infrastructure costs are fixed and do not change based upon subscriber count.

My cranky post was about a Samsung. I didn't mention the brand because I assumed their all that way.

I bought my first-ever "smart" TV this year, and the interface is horrible. The hardware is fine, but everything else is designed for people pushing stuff, rather than for a user.

When I had Comcast in the Bay Area, it randomly dropped one day because they installed the line to the house at a height that a semi driving through the neighborhood likely clipped the line. I was attempting to diagnose the issue from within the house, until I discovered the severed cable laying in the middle of the street.

I've done the same thing, I get it!

Also sounds (alas, all too commonly) that people don't know what "fascism" is, or what "left" vs "right" wing means, like the idiot GP.

Quick piece of advice, click the "parent" link if you want to know what someone is replying to.

I thought the Yandex attacks had shut down all the russian bots.

Then FISA could give Putin a peace prize!

A better question is what does it say to your thought process that you deny something is a problem because one or two people, but not the people who are actually qualified to talk on the issue and are saying it's a problem, are claiming the world is going to end in a year?

And why don't you apply that across the board. The same people who deny global warming seem also to be overly happy to denounce any attempt to have the government improve conditions for people on the basis that it's "socialism", despite most (usually all) European democracies having all the benefits that are being asked for, yet not a single one is a dictatorship. Clearly there are nutcases on that side, but nonetheless the "Oh AGW people are alarmists" people still somehow believe that the moment the US has a functional healthcare system available to all the government will turn into sOvIeT rUsSiA.

The scientists have, so far, made predictions that, if anything, have been too conservative and in reality GW has progressed far faster than the median prediction. Those are then facts. No other claims matter.

The UN is the one entity on Earth that provides an organizational framework for all of the world's governments. It has no powers to speak of, but it is a central meeting point. Nobody's expecting it to "guard goats", they're just expecting it to provide a forum.