I did the same. Roku is extremely chatty. It's easily the most chatty device in our home (thousands of connections per device outbound to their telemetry per day). It didn't take much time to block everything and then gradually figuring out which was absolutely needed for the level of functionality I wanted. Everything else gets dropped on the floor. Roku gets "desperate" and demon dials home base when you block connectivity to the data harvesters. Luckily only the small raspberry pi needs to be involved to squelch the noise.

raspberry pi 4 + argon case with M.2 SSD + ubuntu/debian + pihole

The whole thing took maybe 45 to setup and then another 45-60 mins of trial and error to shutdown the unwanted connections. Every device in our home uses it for DNS resolution so all the "smart devices" can be squelched from one place. It works very well for me. YMMV

An air campaign with very little risk to the attacking forces could leave Iran's infrastructure and oil production almost completely destroyed in a matter of days. They'll still not have nukes and won't have any capacity to recover any semblance of a normal life for their citizens for many years to come and they'll have no means to rebuild other than continuing to sell oil to the Chinese at a discount, assuming they could meaningfully re-hydrate their extraction capabilities. Even if China showered them with cash it would take many years to recover. Any attempt to return to mischief would be met with additional force. Slicing through Chinese and Russian sourced air defence systems didn't appear to be much of an impediment.

...continues to be its own reward.

I don't miss it at all.

Surely, the kernel could benefit from a concerted effort to pare down support for devices that are 30+ years past their prime and focus more on chasing bugs?

If Ford would manufacture an EV that people actually want, they'd sell more of them. They are perceived as a market laggard for EVs for a reason and their bread and butter is still the pick-up truck and SUV markets.

Ford's stock price has bounced around between a few dollars and just over $10 for much of the past 20 years. Their systemic problems extend well past their current EV market share.

Our younger kids have had school issued chromebooks since they were in kindergarten. They seem to mostly be used for roblox, mindcraft, and surfing "school safe" youtube. On the rare occasion that I see actual "school work" happening, it's more like a game than actual education. So we've redirected most of their after school time to team sports and playing outside. The world seems all stocked up on overweight children that are glued to games and screens. I'll make sure they know how to use computers, tablets, etc, but it's not going to be their constant companion or a viable alternative to actual social interaction and exercise.

You'll know we've reached that stage when there is armed conflict over control of Lake Baikal.

If you think you can escape transactional money grabs and lock-in by moving from VMWare to Big Blue as a hypervisor platform, you're kidding yourself. It doesn't matter if it's Z/OS or Openshift...it'll be a similar experience to getting gouged by Broadcom.

To a new drug to treat male pattern baldness. It's all about monetization of new drugs. Curing 50 people a year for deafness isn't profitable enough for big pharma.

Facebook is a blight on our collective culture and is merely a tool to monetize data that ought to be private.

I found that kids will just sit there and mindlessly watch inane video shorts on youtube for hours. Youtube is blackholed on my home network. Thank you pihole.

How would you tell the difference?

No idea. I haven't been to a theater in years. Not only has it gotten crazy expensive, but there just hasn't been anything worth seeing. How many retreads, sequels, prequels, and hours of nonstop explosions does someone need?

A few years ago, I invested in a nice home theater system and haven't looked back. Occasionally I stream something that the media says is "good" and have been consistently disappointed with the dreck being excreted by the movie industry.

No thanks.

The smoking man always seems to be just one step ahead....

Nutanix's hyper-converged solution is based on Supermicro gear, though they are more recently able to support things like Dell Powerflex as well.