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.

Blech.

While I can appreciate the motivation, it is always best to stick to widely recognized standards as far as programming languages go.

I've used TaxAct for years, out of familiarity more than anything, but find its user interface about as appealing as a dog's breakfast.

Yep. As a grizzled greying-hair, I'm not super worried about myself. I have the experience and knowledge to continue to do things AI simply can't, and probably won't before I retire. For that, I'll continue to command pretty good pay at a phase in my life when my kids are moving out and my expenses are going down. Bully for me.

Automation always shoots for low-hanging fruit. When that's factory assembly line workers, it's not such a big deal (it is for the workers, obviously, but I'm talking systemically) because those types of work don't usually have a significant career ladder, and after you automate, you don't need much of that role at all anyway.

When it's chopping off the bottom rungs of longer career ladders, it ultimately creates real supply chain issues for talent at the high end.

This guy isn't trolling. I remember 25 years ago being told exactly this by a professor at a Big 12 university.

The colleges are flat out TELLING YOU TO YOUR FACE that they aren't going to teach you what you think you're going there for, and you're going there anyway and signing away tremendous amounts of money for the privilege.

Meantime, technical/community colleges often DO try to fill that niche, and far more cheaply, but they're looked down upon as a "lesser education" -- and it's true. It IS a lesser education. They're 2-year degrees, and you can often pay for them in cash. You don't get anywhere near as much "general education" (i.e. the stuff that most people AREN'T going to Uni for anyway), and most of them are every bit as far behind the state of the art as most universities are (i.e. the tech education is BS anyway).

So there's a choice between spending an absolute ASS TON of money on a university that doesn't want to teach you vocational stuff, a technical school that's far cheaper but still doesn't really teach you anything modern and gives you a degree no one respects, or just teaching yourself. In tech, honestly, just teaching yourself is the way to go. You'll learn the programming in a few years on your own, and you won't be in debt for the next 20 years. Whatever couple rungs of the ladder you are docked are easily recovered in your first few years of experience anyway, and then almost no one gives a shit about your degree anyway.

Gawd. I felt that.

Though for me it's not that people are moving up faster, it's that companies can't keep focus on anything long enough to see even a medium-term play pay out. If it's not short-term tactical bullshit, then it's taking too long and we need to cancel it. You can spend all your time fixing all the previous short-term tactical shit instead. And anyway, I know we took up all your time on horseshit and told you not to work on it, but why isn't that medium term project delivered yet?

Meanwhile, the people who ARE moving up are the people who "solution" with unsolicited clever-sounding bullshit in meetings, and over-simplify everything that /someone else/ has to do.

This isn't why I became a programmer. There's no craft left in it anymore.

The last time this comet came around was the Stone Age. To give an idea of how old the planet is, this comet has had time to visit Earth over 90,000 times!

I don't know if it was actually orbiting at all that far back, but that's the time scale. This uses the Wikipedia quoted age of Earth at 4.543Bn years.

The cooling inlet for a nuclear plant is barely big enough for a scuba diver to enter. It could probably be smaller, but they make it that big so a scuba diver can regularly go in there to clear it of fouling by biological organisms (mussels, seaweed, etc). What they're proposing here is on an entirely different scale. The marine industry spends billions on anti-fouling paint, and it still requires regular scraping (every few weeks to months) and repainting (every few years). It's a massive endeavor. I suspect the best solution is not going to be propeller-like turbines, but something more like a flapping tail. It will be less efficient but will continue to function even if heavily encrusted, allowing you to stretch out maintenance intervals to where they're economically feasible (it costs probably one or two orders of magnitude more to send a diver down to clean things than to send a maintenance worker to a wind turbine).

Diesels are already more efficient than EVs in most of the world (where electricity is predominantly generated from fossil fuels). Diesel cars can already hit 40% efficiency, trucks 50%, and ships 60% efficiency. Electricity generated from fossil fuels is about 40% efficient (coal) to 60% (gas). Call it 50%. Power lines have about 5% transmission loss, battery charging losses are about 15%, battery discharging losses about 15%, and electric motor efficiency about 90%. For an overall EV efficiency of (50%)*(95%)*(85%)*(85%)*(90%) = 31%.

That's actually pretty close to the efficiency of the gas engines used in cars. Years ago I backed out the efficiency of a Nissan Versa using the Nissan Leaf as an energy consumption equivalent (since they share the same chassis and thus aerodynamics), and it came out right around 30%. Those new 6-speed, 8-speed, 10-speed transmissions and CVTs help a lot. It's why I've been saying for over a decade now that the priority needs to be converting our power generation to renewables and nuclear, and shutting down fossil fuel power plants. If you don't do that first, switching from a gas vehicle to an EV may make you feel better, but doesn't really reduce carbon emissions. (The energy cost advantage of an EV isn't because of efficiency; it's because coal and natural gas are an order of magnitude cheaper per Joule than gasoline and diesel. MPGe does not take generation, transmission, nor charging efficiency into account. It can't because those will all be different depending on your local power plant's efficiency, your distance from the power plant, and type of charger you use. So you can't really compare MPGe to MPG.)

The USB-C spec includes something called alternate mode. That's where the four wires carrying high-speed data (mirrored so 8 wires total) plus 4 lower speed data wires in a USB-C cable can be repurposed to carry signals other than USB. Common alternate modes include HDMI, Displayport, and Thunderbolt (PCIe signals).

Lightning only uses 4 wires for data (not mirrored). It would be completely trivial for Apple to create a Lightning alternate mode, and have all iOS devices switch to USB-C connectors. They could've done it a decade ago when the USB-C spec was first being laid out (Apple is a member of the USB-IF, and in fact it holds one of the seven board member seats). The only thing preventing Lighting over USB-C is their own obstinance and greed (selling overpriced Lightning cables).

I've had trouble with Zoom the several times I've tried it. Sometimes it worked ok for a little while, but then the camera would get laggy, or the sound would get choppy, or it would crash, or it wouldn't be able to find the camera, or some other weird misbehavior. Granted, it's been a while since I've tried it, because I hate having problems during meetings, so maybe they've worked some of this out. Also, I've now got pipewire instead of pulse, so maybe that'll make a difference. The point is that it just works on my Mac, and I don't have to think about it. I've already thought about it more in this post than I have the entire time I've used it on my Mac. Maybe I'll try it again for some low-risk meetings and see how it goes.

When I say "office" tasks, that's just "generally office stuff required by my company." Nowadays, a lot of that is web-based, but for a long time, I had a lot of mucking about with VPNs, or they required an antivirus to be installed to connect, or we used some software that wasn't available for linux, or a dozen other little things that just made Mac a lesser hassle. Now with Google Docs and Office 365, a lot of the required apps, like Outlook, are web-based, and perfectly accessible from Linux, but it's still nice to have the app installed in some cases. Linux has Teams packaged up on Electron, but I don't think any of the other apps are similarly available.

Point is, you have to choose your battles and pick your tools. I've found that the types of problems that I don't want to have are exactly the ones the Mac does absolutely flawlessly and without a second consideration. 0 brain cells dedicated. That said, I much prefer Linux for my development activities for the exact same reason. I tend to have to screw with things a bit on Mac to get them working, where on Linux they just work most of the time. So I do the tasks on the platforms that make them no-brainers. I've got enough problems.

I've been using Linux since the late 90s. It's amazing, and it's been my bread and butter my entire career. That said, I also really like Apple's stuff for some really pragmatic reasons.

* Macs are the closest "mainstream" thing to Linux. For the first half of my career, I wrote most of my Linux-targeted code in Windows because my companies wouldn't even consider anything else for corporate desktops. Talk about frustrating!! Over time, they became convinced (begrudgingly at first) to allow Macs, which at least is unixy enough to make life a lot easier. Non-tech people just like 'em more, cuz they're pretty and easier to use. Once they had the foot in the door, lots of people wanted them, and they became pretty standard.

* While my main developer workstation is a kickass Linux workstation, I do still keep a kickass Mac on my desk as well. I find that it just does some things better: Media, "office" tasks, Zoom, proprietary software that doesn't support Linux, and development tasks for projects where the usual workflow/scripts assume you're on a Mac. When I'm not using it, it makes a nice jukebox. :)

* The hardware lasts *forever*. When it starts getting long in the tooth for MacOS, you install Linux on it. I'm still using 2012 Mac Minis running Ubuntu as a Kubernetes cluster. My 2015 Macbook Pro runs Linux Mint like a champ after a simple battery replacement several years ago. Seriously, I almost never throw the stuff out. So what do I do? I buy high-spec'ed hardware when I get it, and spend the money on it, because I know I can reasonably expect to still be using it in ten years. I upgrade my high-touch machines every 3-5 years, and the existing machines go to family members or my server cluster for a second life.

I know MS has changed their stripes somewhat over the last decade, but as an old timer who saw their antics under Ballmer and Gates, I still struggle with considering Windows or its ecosystem for anything at all. It might be better in some ways, but old habits and prejudices die hard, I guess, so, for me, it's not even in the running.

I tend to work for startups and SMBs, most of which do not have the attitudes and drives many people here seem to assume. They don't have these fabled real estate portfolios, and they tend to be pretty light on management. They've almost all not only embraced work from home for current staff, but they've been hiring remote-only workers in states (and countries!) where they have no presence at all.

The place I work now is a truly distributed company with tech workers spread across the world, and very few people going to offices. We have offices in a couple major cities, and some people who live in those cities do go there if they choose, but they sit at their desk on Zoom for most of their meetings anyway, talking to their team mates all over the planet.

This distributed nature was often the case in the huge companies I've worked at too. Seemed like most of our meetings were video conferences anyway, with people sitting in other offices.

Working from home is just an extension of the way most companies were already operating in an increasingly globalized and distributed environment. It's not some new thing, it's just the next step.