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 programming guide for the Amiga cautioned not to use the upper 8 bits of an address for ANYTHING, because, although the MC68000 only bonded out the lower address bits, it was still a 32-bit processor and future versions might bring out all the address lines. The never-to-be-forgiven (for this among other things) clowns at Microsoft ignored the directive and used to upper address bits in their BASIC, which promptly broke everything when the 68020 (all lines bonded out) came out.

Unless someone shows some intelligence and reverts that disaster-in-the-making, we will be stuck with incompatibilities and restrictions for however long Linux/X86 lasts.

That's just "the cost of doing business. Jail terms gor the C-suite might work, though.

The phone (Samsung) I got when T-Mobile finally shut down the old Sprint towers has a voice assistant. It is set to "off", but we all know that is not a guaranteed behavior. I have no Google, Samsung, Amazon, ... account on the phone, so it is possible that the phone number tracking is providing minimal data to them, but I do not have any expectation that the mic is still not on, listening and forwarding somewhere/somehow. I imagine that the TLAs and LEOs wouldn't be happy if I bought Stingray and used it to figure out exactly what my phone is doing.

My Applephile friends tell me that it is not possible to run one of their phones without a working Apple ID. Is there any known way to truly disable Siri?

I had more fun playing with the game than playing it. I would spend time to map all of the triggers, then set up a massive a force as I could muster before setting them off.

No one has anything better, regardless of the specific syntax.

Initializing a specific piece of hardware requires going through all of the steps, in the correct order. If one of those steps fails, it is mandatory to clean up after yourself. The cleanest way to do that is to have all of the possible failures go to one bit of code that unwinds the initialization, step by step. Deciding which initialization steps need to be unwound can be accomplished by leaving breadcrumbs as steps succeed, or by putting multiple "goto" labels in for handling each failure case. Both work. In general, I prefer the breadcrumbs, but the real trick is to write the unwind code as you write the initialization code

When one of the thousands of white Honda Civics, or similarly common cars, is involved in a hit-and-run, there will be no way to identify it. Same thing for all getaway cars for other criminal actions.

I wonder how much the legislators/governor cost to pass this insane idea into law.

The web is not the internet, which worked pretty well in the days before, and early days after, the world wide web. I really miss those days.

Since the web has been "democratized", it has become a cess pit of scammers and scamees. Most scamees are some combination of simple ignorance, plain old stupidity, and mindless greed. For the foremost, education could help if there was some network of educators. You can't fix stupid. The greedy deserve whatever happens to them.

By politicians, of course, I mean corporate masters.

Even with wind and solar, California has nowhere near enough electric generating or storage capacity to run all of the personal and business uses. Last week (and probably later this week) we've had concrete examples of this.

The current time-of-use rate plan bills much more from 4 through 9 PM. If I take an electric pickup, car, or motorcycle to/from work, unless the business has free/subsidized charging, I have two choices: charge promptly when I get home (in case I need to vehicle for something) or wait until the rates drop at night. Before the noise starts, those of us who do not live in single-family homes do not have the option of roof-top solar, and I have yet to find an adequate battery system to do the time-shifting.

Now the clowns in Sacramento are planning to prohibit new natural gas heating. Instead, we will get to use electricity, which will be generated by natural gas power plants operated by corporate, not consumer, interests.

The oxygen was already there, just bound to some carbon. Making oxygen would require some form of transmutation, either some amount of fusion. fission, or, at least, some radioactive decay (IIRC, there's an isotope of nitrogen that decays to a stable isotope of oxygen).

Every time I see one of those oxygen concentrator ads that claims you can "make your own oxygen", I mentally cringe.

Although there is a usable amount of oxygen at Earth, having the tech to make it via fusion should also yield useful power since it's on the lighter side of iron.

It should be a hard requirement, right now, that any publicly-funded research results are stored in the Library of Congress, and that every citizen/resident alien (humans, not saucer people) is granted free, unlimited access. That would also include free use of any patents.

If we paid for it, we should be allowed to use it.

This is why, to the best of my ability, I'm not buying any car/truck made after 2008. An ECU is all the electronics I need in one. Some sort of sound-only entertainment device may be nice, but that's my limit. I have no desire to deal with a bunch of crap that is unrepairable and guaranteed to fail, that requires any sort of update, and is spyware for the manufacturers.

Probably more Android installs than desktops. Are there similar vulnerabilities? If so, when does Android get the fixes?