What kills me is how Repubs constantly use "BUT CHINA!!1!" as their go-to boogeyman for everything from technology and AI to the economy and trade, and yet they conveniently ignore their massive buildup of renewables and nuclear. One of the few instances where the divergence between the US and China actually matters and they pretend it doesn't exist.

Imagine if the party in power actually cared about the energy future of the US. We could be setting ourselves up for the next 50 years of growth by electrifying everything and upgrading the national grid to support it. Instead we're DIRLL BBY DIRLLing, building new pipelines, and putting up as many methane power plants as possible. Stupid old fucks.

The real friends are the terrorists we made along the way.

Hey, I saw this movie!

Didn't end well for the guy with the plutonium.

Oh, I don't know. An EV version of the Reliant Robin might be just what the world needs right now.

Bullshit weasel words. "Cleaner" does not mean "clean".

A shit sandwich, now with 50% less shit! is still a shit sandwich.

The US has never been a completely anarchistic hellhole - we've always had laws (aka regulations). Gambling, for example, was very tightly regulated for hundreds of years and only recently has been opened wide (with all the expected problems).

If you're desperate for capital-F Freedom, I hear Somalia is pretty lawless. You can go set up a compound and fiefdom there.

Hah, good to know. I almost wrote "F350" because they're the most egregious "luxury commercial trucks", but 150s are so much more common I went with that instead. Luckily they have plenty of carrying capacity for all that regret.

Oh, I know. It's a very thin lining.

Pickups and SUVs are already subsidized out the ass by getting to skirt emissions and safety laws due to being "light truck commercial vehicles". This bullshit fantasy has persisted for decades even as they've become far and away the highest selling commuter and passenger vehicles in the US.

Maybe if people had to start paying the real price of these gas guzzling murder machines they'd be more interested in a reasonable EV or hybrid sedan or minivan. The only silver lining of Trump's demented Iran war is diesel hitting $6 per gallon and the sound of all those F150 tears.

I've been hoping to see an in-browser AI that does realtime ad-blocking, privacy protection, and readability adjustments.

Extensions like uBlock are amazing and I have all the respect for the people who build it and maintain the definition lists, but it's always an arms race. Something capable of doing it dynamically and on-the-fly could be pretty powerful.

Is an LLM capable of this? Probably not reliably or quickly (especially a self-hosted one like what's shipped with Firefox today), but maybe it can iterate on it and come up with rules and definitions that are faster to evaluate for future requests.

I had VERY SPECIFIC requirements and I wanted the extended warranty. I would have paid 2x at a dealer. I know what I was doing.

I bought a used 2020 XC90 from CarMax last week. I did everything online from shipping it from Texas to Minnesota to financing the extended warranty. I walked in the door, gave them a cashier's check, and drove away within 10 minutes.

That's how it should be.

The EFF is probably the most important advocacy organization that educates and acts on behalf of normal people's digital rights, freedoms, and privacy. The legal actions they take in support of these are meaningful. Now that the CFPB has been dismantled and the FCC and FTC had their teeth and spines removed, groups like EFF are the only thing we have in the US pushing back against millions of dollars of corporate lobbying money.

I'm not sure what you're talking about regarding RMS. Aside from the open letter they published after he was re-elected to the FSF board, which is fine to disagree with (I do), I don't think EFF did anything to him. Plenty of people pointed angry fingers at him in 2019 but AFAIK his resignation from the FSF was his own decision.

Absolutely not the case. The Neo is essentially Apple's first attempt at a budget laptop, and the market segment they're targeting is entirely different.

Case in point: My dad has been a Windows user for 20+ years and has always decried Apple as "decent hardware that's overpriced and running a lobotomized operating system." However he hates Windows 11 more and decided to replace his aging Windows laptop with a Neo last week. So far he's been impressed, though is still dealing with a learning curve. I guarantee you he isn't alone.

I think the Neo is Apple's attempt at getting into a new segment of lower-priced computers AND taking advantage of Microslop dropping the ball hard when it comes to Windows 11 shit quality and bullshit hardware requirements.

Perhaps somewhat ironically, I suspect the market really being cannibalized is potential new Linux users who go with a New instead of installing Linux on a cheap Windows laptop.

Delete your account if you want to, but please don't delete posts and comments. I sympathize wanting to stick it to Reddit and not giving them free content to whore out to AI companies for training, but for the millions of normal people who might get value from comments it's really frustrating.

There are tools to mass-edit all your reddit comments and it's incredibly frustrating to see when people do it. I've thought I finally found the answer to some question or technical problem or whatever in a reddit thread, only to then see the original post replaced with something like "This comment was removed because Reddit made me angry. Lorem ipsum dolar sit amet shit." Perhaps unfair but it makes me hate that person's selfishness much more than make me dislike Reddit.