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.

The community college I'm attending a class in online uses Proctorio. The rules say that we shouldn't wear headphones during the tests because we could be getting answers through the headset.

I'm taking a foreign language class, and part of the tests involves listening to spoken words. I don't own computer speakers, so how am I supposed to follow that rule? I'd have to buy speakers for just Proctorio.

You can always make your own custom Secure Boot key database and sign whatever you want.

It's even easier on millions of Dell and Alienware computers that used the test key as their production Platform Key. You can just use the leaked private key to modify the keys without being easily detectable.

Knowingly.

Microkernel architectures still always involve doing a full context switch when moving between processes. All the registers need to be reloaded, importantly including the entire page table. The page table flush is particularly painful.

There's always "powershell.exe -command ..." to get PowerShell to download an .exe from a web server and run it.

"PC" meant "primary cassette", the main paper tray of HP printers of the time. Other paper trays connected would say other things there when out of paper. "Letter" is the paper size.

They really should use quantum-resistant algorithms alongside a traditional algorithm for now so that you have to crack both. Quantum algorithms are very new compared to our old favorites. One of the NIST finalists for quantum-resistant crypto was cracked using classical computing near the end of the standardization process, highlighting the danger of relying on these alone.

Wake me when I can factor 1024-bit RSA keys. The Nintendo DSi and I have unfinished business.

I'm a pessimist, so I'm guessing--with no evidence--that we will find out that keeping N qubits coherent requires energy exponential in N, meaning that quantum computers are mostly useless.

...and it hasn't bothered me much.

Capcom's Zelda games--Minish Cap and the two Oracles--did mix up the formula a bit though.

Could the midday solar power glut be used to spin up flywheels, then be used with generators to provide the late afternoon air conditioning power?

The ARM64 version of Windows 11 has emulators for both x86-32 and x86-64 applications, and it works for most programs.

Getting a player's game process to execute arbitrary code is "hacking the two players' computers directly", so their statement is BS.

It's pretty easy to compress:

Integral from -1 to 1 of (1/sqrt(1 - x^2)) dx.