this is the kind of crazy genocidal maniacs guillottines were invented for

yeah, the National Socialist type...

that sounds like Starship Troopers

I can understand all that, but it still doesn't say why acting deserves special treatment.

Coders enjoy coding. AI has taken a chunk out of that, and people treat it as beneficial. It's taken a lot of translators out of the picture. They enjoy what they do. It's taken a slice out of countless jobs that people enjoy doing, and there's been a bit of a murmur about job losses.

Then we get to acting, with a famous actor being deep faked into a movie with the consent of his estate, and everyone is up in arms because actor and celebrity.

The sad bit is yes, this obsoletes many aspects of human engagement, just as the industrial revolution rendered a lot of manual work. It will continue to do it. The question is how we as a species adapt to it, and utilise it to our benefit.

It's not just a child. It's a child plus a network of organised crime that specialises in tooling for illicit compromise, which said child has access to, plus contacts with compromise experience to learn from. This changes things significantly.

Cybersecurity is a hellishly expensive thing if done to the degree that's found in financials and the like (where a bad compromise could have serious international ramifications).
Most places don't have the budget to hire enough of the right staff to protect against a dedicated attacker with up to date compromise tools. It only takes one flaw for things to start going very wrong indeed.

It's a case of "Taking security as seriously as you can afford to" as an operational expense, and keep insurance up to date for if you're ever compromised.

So, can I plug my Apple TV into it and never need to worry about that third party watching me or getting popover ads crap?

labor laws prevent companies from enslaving the workers... oh damn, we can't have that !

One other aspect of this is modern production regarding mixing and mastering. Music is pushed so far to the edge that drums are basically cut off at the high end and the whole thing sounds mushy.

My wife, who knows nothing about any of this beyond enjoying music, asked me one evening while we were listening to "Fat Bottomed Girls" why the drums sound so good compared to other music that we listen to. It's noticeable.

the stupidity is baffling

Yep, there's a very good reason that engineers poke and prod at things for years before marking something as safe for a life critical area.

Brian is right.

the goal is to locate and snatch mossad / CIA operatives that are attempting to raise mayhem in the country.

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.