It is true that US Border Customs / Homeland Security can search you and your devices when re-entering the country. Also, within 100 miles of the border checkpoints vehicles can be stopped and searched without a warrant nor even probable cause. This is all under national security and not your citizenship rights.

Wiping your phone prior to entering the country could raise suspicions and is the equivalent to document / evidence destruction.

The only reason I even tried out the Arc browser was due to the lack of UX chrome and tiling window working scenarios. The insane thing? The Browser Company never ported it to Linux. Just macOS initially then Windows. Something about a 3rd party proprietary bit of code preventing it or The Browser Company trying to protect some internal code they wrote. Either way, no port to Linux. Then they abandoned Arc in favor of Dia an A.I. first browser. I don't care about A.I. I care about using a browser that lacks any sort of UX chrome interface. No menu, no toolbars, etc. Just a hiding sidebar of vertical tabs. Lots of key bindings as well.

If I want A.I. I am just going to run an agent harness...

To believe that humanity is even capable of altering the planetary climate is quite kooky to begin. All the numbers are based on guesses in a computer model. Classic computing problem of garbage in and garbage out. Half the freaking global sensors are placed right next to heat sources from the sun beating down on pavement to an air conditioner exhaust being pointed directly at one of these sensors. There were multiple ice ages and humanity survived. Technically, we are still exiting the last ice age and yes, the ice is retreating. But it doesn't mean we are doomed. Not by a long shot. The Earth has been far hotter in its long history, and it will be cooler at times as well.

Imagine replacing the firmware in an LG spyware TV? Turn off all the tracking and surveillance features.

The banking and financial services industry is loaded with enormous technical debt. BOA is not the only one running 20+ year old software and for decades, the rule of thumb was "If it ain't broke don't fix it". Now they have legacy systems full of security vulnerabilities that they MUST patch and it's a crisis because they were behind the upgrade ball for many years. Hence the need to scramble and throw massive resources at the problem. Had they been more vigilant in keeping up with technology they wouldn't be in panic mode right now.

BOA was just recently fined $1.2 Billion by the US Treasury Department for committing acts of money laundering. Which is remarkable as banking / financial institutions are heavily regulated and EVERY EMPLOYEE knows the laws and regulations due to mandatory training. To commit such a blatant act of defiance is why the fines are so enormous.

This is a stop gap measure not a solution. The real solution is the start building nuclear power plants using the latest technology which is a thousand times safer and more efficient. New reactors can run a variety of fuels including the processing of fissionable waste from the old reactors. They can be built far smaller and fit inside a shipping container. They can also be made smaller still and dropped into a lead lined deep shaft in the earth. When the fuel is spent you fill in the hole with more lead and concrete and drill a new hole. New reactor designs will never meltdown like the old designs.

The UK has a fascinating design where an isotope pellet is fired into another isotype target which causes a short-term fusion reaction which heats a substrate such as lithium which liquifies and passes through a heat exchanger to turn water into high pressure steam. Every few seconds you fire another pellet at the target. The moment you stop firing the reaction stops, the lithium solidifies and the reactor is shut down. You just start firing again to bring it back online. The tech is cheap and can definitely be scaled from small to enormous. Many benefits.

Data centers are already talking about commercial nuclear power using new reactor designs. In the meantime, we need to keep pursuing multiple avenues to reach productive fusion reactors. If we can get it working and produce far more energy than it takes to maintain the reaction and keep it contained it will be limitless clean power source.

1. GNU coreutils is ancient as is sudo. There's bound to be a metric ton of legacy code in there for all sorts of bizarre edge cases encountered across many platforms and systems over decades. Duplicating all the C code into RUST is a nightmare and the evidence is found in the delays with the uutils being deployed.
2. This is not about security it's about hijacking the GNU General Public License.

I was going to upgrade an LTS server to this new release but now I am seriously considering making a different Linux distribution choice. Ditching Ubuntu LXD in favor of Incus as well. Yes, I know you can install GNU coreutils to override the rust-coreutils (uutils) and even GNU sudo but I want no part of Rust replacements until they have had several years behind them.

I might just go with Fedora or NixOS without Flakes. Yes, I know Fedora is providing rust-coreutils but it is still optional and not the default like it is with Ubuntu. With NixOS it is declarative, so I get to define what I want regardless. Another option is GUIX but sadly, their package list means I would have to package things myself in GNU Guile Scheme way too often. LISP is fun but I don't want to do that on a server.

The current situation is that the hype is off the charts. The investments are completely incomprehensible, being driven by FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and intense greed. Any other industry, saner minds would prevail. But for some reason Silicon Valley holds a charismatic demigod like influence over their investors. Nobody knows when the bubble is going to burst but it for sure is coming in the future. It will be a spectacular financial crash of epic proportions far worse than the US housing market snafu. Like back then, few will spot the warning signs and make a killing by shorting stocks. Nobody is paying attention to the risks currently being taken just as in 2008.

OpenAI is leveraged to the teeth by a tangled web of deals with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc. Scaling across many data centers with more being built. The cost of tokens is highly subsidized. Memory and storage manufacturers have abandoned retail in order to earn a cool trillion selling to these data centers. The electric grid is not capable of providing an ever increasing amount of power. There is talk of small commercial nuclear reactors but the regulatory requirements would be insane. There is concern over water and environmental pollution. The rising cost of electricity. They sell the data center to the states claiming they are creating jobs. Once the DC is built, what a couple dozen workers could manage the whole thing as most everything it's doing is remote. You just have hands and feet onsite. The jobs for construction would be temporary.

At some point the investors are going to expect an ROI and then the money is going to start drying up. With the thin margins upon which most all A.I. companies are riding things are going to implode. OpenAI may be the first and most spectacular financial failure in the history of the world.

Recently the Chinese did it a second time. First time was Deepseek. Now they have new models that again outperform US models. The Chinese models are open source. They are under severe constraints because they don't have endless top tier Nvidia GPUs so they have no choice but to increase efficiency. We landed men on the moon using extremely primitive computers. Even today's smartwatches would appear to be like a super computer in comparison. Open source would allow for far greater efficiencies. Anthropic's Claude Code CLI is using web based frontend developer React + Yoga to render the command line interface at 60 fps. It's absolutely insane and awful engineering. Their interface was flickering for a very long time. Never being fixed until they added a flag to stop the flicker. But they just added even more insane code on top of the previous badly engineered code. Then their code was leaked by their own A.I. pushing it out to GitHub wide open to everyone. Analysis of that code revealed a god awful mess. It's embarrassing really... Not only is the code from Anthropic & OpenAI closed source but they are actively forcing users to get locked into their LLMs by not allowing for API access without charging an arm and a leg to do so. i.e. charging by the token while subsidizing token usage within their own client software.

We need to stop these con artists before they destroy the worlds economies. Sam Altman may be the most dangerous man alive.The code must be freed and openly shared. You never know when some retired software engineer will make a breakthrough in code. It's happened before. Sun / Oracle had 32bit code to run Linux native binaries on Solaris and they killed it because it was too difficult to convert it to 64bit. Along came some random unicorn developer who made it work and shared his findings. In short order it was adopted by OpenSolaris. Closed source is too slow to evolve we need maximum eyeballs working on it if A.I. is truly to succeed.

A.I. is currently faking it till it makes it. There is no guarantee it will ever reach AGI or super intelligence. Even the scientists don't understand precisely how it is even doing what it is doing. But the hype machine keeps on churning. Sure, A.I. is constantly evolving and getting better and better rapidly. Will it ever live up to the hype? Nobody really knows. They just keep lighting money on fire hoping it makes it. A.I. is a significantly powerful tool but its nowhere near the hype around it.

It's all about keeping the hype machine going. Sure A.I. is improving at a very rapid pace. But it is still not anywhere near to the level of the hype. A.I. is a useful tool but all these A.I. companies are operating at enormous losses. None of them have turned a profit. Many consumers of A.I. are finding out the hard way that A.I. token consumption is more expensive than human staffers. They are also finding out that even a 28% failure rate is way too high. SalesForce, Amazon, Microsoft, and now Ford have backpedaled. Soon the investors are going to want a return on investment. Soon the token cost is going to need to be increased. Soon we will be running out of electricity and consumer electronics are starting to feel the pinch of inflated RAM / Storage pricing after Micron decided to exit the consumer market so they could make over a Trillion selling to A.I. data centers. Apple just raised their prices, others will soon follow. Electric prices are going way up and some places are talking about austere measures to conserve electricity. Those states need to jack up the price for the data centers so they can invest in increasing power production.

There are major advancements in semiconductors that will greatly increase efficiency thus reducing electricity costs tremendously. The problem is it costs trillions and takes a decade or more to retool FABs to use the new designs. There are also nuclear reactor designs that are much smaller and a thousand times safer than what was built originally. But the general public fears nuclear. These new designs make it impossible for a meltdown to occur, etc. Data centers are already pursuing nuclear power if they get past the regulatory red tape.

The problem is A.I. is moving faster than the supporting infrastructure can be built. We need to move faster to keep up. There may be a tipping point and the bubble may burst. It won't kill A.i. but the hype will disappear if the bubble bursts as investors see their money is being burned with no return on investment.

The only thing I ever used a FireStick for was to connect to my media server with an App Store approved app when I traveled and used hotels.Worst case scenario, I could jack in the FireStick to HDMI and connect the power cable to a USB port. It beats using a tablet or a phone to watch content on a small screen. The more modern tech savvy hotels you can just stream via AirPlay or Chromecast to the TV from a smartphone.

The side-loaded pirate streaming apps are what the newbs use who don't know any better.

Sadly, server storage is expensive again...

When applying for a position at a corporation, if you are suddenly thrust into an A.I. driven job interview process. ABORT IMMEDIATELY AND COMPLAIN LOUDLY AND PROFUSELY. Nothing quite so insulting as a corporation hiring but refusing to perform basic human interaction to find an appropriate candidate.

I just bought my first hybrid, the 2025 Toyota Camry XLE. I couldn't be happier! It accelerates faster than my Audi A4 and it more than doubles my miles per gallon. I receive 530 miles per 13 gallons of 87 octane fuel range. I can refill in 3 minutes and keep going like any normal internal combustion engine. Toyota makes the best EVs and everything they learned from the Prius is making it's way across their entire fleet. Lexus as well.

The problem with EVs is the charge network. Only Tesla does it right.I personally do not like Teslas. They look and feel like a plastic shell slapped on an EV skateboard. The interior feels cheap and boring. The time to charge is not something I would ever want to experience on a long road trip.

I am sure the Chinese will build out an infrastructure for EV charging. But they are not known for quality control and safety. So many dangerous Chinese products across the board. Poisoned cats & dogs because they cheated by chemically treating the dog food so it would appear to have more protein than it really had. Lead paint in toys for babies and toddlers. Infant baby formula sickened thousands and unalived many. Cooking oil extracted from street gutters and packaged and sold. Plastic rice, fake eggs, counterfeit pharmaceuticals and endless defective electronics.

I wouldn't trust a Chinese EV at all. I certainly wouldn't park one in a garage attached to your house. This is all Belt & Road Initiative where the CCP helps poor nations but what they are really doing is strip mining their natural resources and sending it back to China. When the CCP is finished they will just leave and those poor people will be left with a toxic mess and deadly products everywhere. Honestly, the Chinese CCP have zero respect for human life. A worker is injured in one of their factories and can no longer do the job. Well bye. That's it. They replace them. Pratt & Whitney sent my father and some other over there in the 90's looking to outsource some parts. They were stunned by the numbers of workers missing an eye, fingers, limbs, various disfigurements such as burn scars. They are worked very hard for very little pay and then they are abandoned when they are no longer productive. There are almost zero safety controls in these factories.

Browsers with privacy features are not breaking websites. It is the website developers coding JavaScript to prevent you from blocking ads by blocking your access to their content. It does not stop A.I. and a paywall won't either. I bet the A.I. companies all have hundreds of paid subscriptions and they mask their identity with fake user profiles. Yes they are paying the subscriptions. But then A.I. doesn't even need to render a page, it reads the code and accesses the raw content then reformats it in an outline summary of the meat without all the junk.

The general public thinks A.I. is real. They are running long chat sessions and going to down rabbit holes when A.I. starts hallucinating. It has really hurt people with mental health issues and the mentally impaired but also the ignorant. I do not think children should be using A.I. without adult supervision.

I want to use A.I. but I am finding it making many mistakes and it's just easier to DIY. Most of the time it's just running web queries and compiling a summary of the key bits of detail. Only sometimes is it useful. There is a lot of bad incorrect information online. Garbage-In / Garbage-Out. A.I. will write code and when you test it, it fails then it's back and forth and maybe you get it working or maybe not. I usually get frustrated with the bot, seek primary source information and figure it out. Sometimes it saves me time and effort and other times it wastes my time. I've seen it make guesses which is why I think it fails.

A.I. is a B.S. Engine and it is faking it till it makes it. Chatbots are not where it is at. I would like a highly focused agent tuned to the task at hand and it needs to be an expert. It needs to be easier to build an agent and train it.