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.

That's the great thing (for AWS)... they get to charge the crawlers AND the web site owners. And also sell infra for "AI" training, hosting, etc

Affinity's stuff is awesome, and I whole-heartedly suggest it for anyone using Windows or macOS. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on Linux, even under WINE.

The Bayesian spam analysis we've been using for decades would be called "AI" now. Then regular expression pattern matching used in ad blockers would probably also be called "AI".

The current AI hype bubble is LLMs; the actually useful "AI" bits have been chugging along doing useful things for ages, without burning down the planet.

So if you didn't understand enough SQL to write the query, how do you know what you got from Copilot is correct? How do you write tests for it? How do you modify it? How do you document it?

Current GenAI coding assistants seem intended to replace entry-level developer positions. Which means nobody will be working entry-level developer positions, so nobody will be learning how to be a more senior developer.

There is literally no amount of money the AI companies can charge to pay for the costs of the GPUs/CPUs/RAM/storage they've used. The only (short-term) winners here will be the cloud companies renting them resources... they'll have to jump onto the next fad ASAP once this bubble bursts.

You're assuming those failures weren't the desired outcomes. They were planned like that; the people responsible made tons of money at the expense of the employees of those companies, and their customers.

At my previous job, I used to get "vulnerability reports" about our corporate website having http on port 80 open. Of course we did, and of course it just redirected to https.

These wasted a minute of my time, but I could see it wasting lots of time depending on the amount of knowledge and process involved in the people getting the email.

Here in Canada, we have the CRTC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Radio-television_and_Telecommunications_Commission), the poster-child for regulatory capture. Our ISPs don't even have to pretend.

That's hilarious, nobody learns C in computer science.

NewEgg at least has a toggle to keep the "Marketplace" garbage/scams out of your results. I'm sure they're working hard to make their search as terrible as Amazon's, but for now it seems to work still.

Is this worse, or better, than the brain damage caused by repeated COVID infections?

This feature of COVID has even made it to pop sci like Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican...

I wonder how long they could go with no additional revenue if they canned the C-suite entirely and used that money for something useful.

You might notice that the MBAs are in charge now, at least at the big cloud providers (Amazon, Google, Microsoft). For an MBA, if you don't have constant, double-digit growth, you're a failed business. Numbers must go up, every quarter. The only customer they're obsessed with is the shareholder.

Cloud costs are just going to keep increasing. You're locked in, what are you going to do, go to a competitor who's also co-incidentally (wink wink) raising their prices constantly as well?

See also streaming services, cellular services, and Internet providers, at least the ones I'm subject to in Canada.

If I could stand constantly selling myself, I'd run a consultancy for setting up "on-premises cloud" (ie, servers) for small and medium businesses. Ah well.