So it's not like the editors have anything important to be posting about right? Everything is just so calm and dull but you've got to expect this. It's just one slow news day after another and has been since the beginning of 2025.

There's nothing ironic about it they got what they paid for. People forget that Trump was a Russian stooge for ages. The reason he wasn't bankrupted during his most incompetent business deals is because he was laundering money for the Russian mafia.

Never mind the fact that Russia and the Israeli government both have massive amounts of dirt on Trump thanks to his long-term friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. You would have to be incredibly naive not to know that the Russian government has evidence of trump raping kids. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure that out. We learn from the Epstein files that the Russians provided a lot of girls to Jeffrey Epstein and we have eight credible women accusing Trump of raping them when they were children details of which have been corroborated by several journalists.

The problem is you can lay out all the evidence and proof of that but nobody is going to believe you because it's too fucking insane to think that we elected a pedophile who is under the control of a hostile foreign Nation to be president of the United states. I don't think the human brain is capable of grasping the enormity of that.

You get the same problem with things like the Iran Contra affair or how Ronald Reagan arranged for Americans to be held hostage so that he could win his election. It's just something that you don't want to believe is true no matter how true it is because you don't want to face a world that fucked up.

The rank and filed that those radicals need to stage an actual revolution aren't. Just like when 9/11 happened in America I can tell you right now that every single regular Iranian person is going to rally around the government and the military. Doesn't matter how terrible the government and the military are when your country is attacked you rally round them.

On top of that Trump has done numerous stupid things guaranteed to undermine any opposition of the Iranian regime. Go look up YouTuber Belle of the Ranch. She does a good job talking about it and how incredibly inept the Trump administration has been. Like criminally inept.

There are no upsides and no good outcomes from this. This is downhill for everybody. Which is to be expected from a man who bankrupted casinos.

So that Russia could have more access to our politicians and voters. It worked Trump's president again. But it does mean that we are substantially more vulnerable to other attacks. Especially when a senile old man can easily be tricked into starting a war that even Bush Jr wasn't dumb enough to start...

As for Iran yeah, we attacked them without any reason to do so. We already had a perfectly good deal to stop them from building nukes. But it came from a black man so it had to go.

And now it looks like all told this little adventure is going to cost us about a trillion dollars. That's another trillion dollars of debt and inflation. Almost as if electing a well-known rapist and pedophile with a long history of bankrupting businesses including casinos was a bad idea...

Funny thing is I don't see anyone defending El presidente in public anymore. Trolls will yell TDS at me but they never actually defend his actions anymore. Not outside of their safe spaces.

And despite $4 a gallon gas and a huge wave of inflation about to hit in a few months that we all know is coming, Trump still somehow has a 36 to 40% approval rate depending on the poll. I don't even know what you do about that it's fucking insane.

A sizable percentage of likely Democrat voters are worried that a woman would get bullied in international negotiations by male world leaders. This is of course a silly thing to think but they think it.

To counteract that women who run for president, and this goes for both Kamala and Hillary as well as the various women who ran in the primary, all have to do a bunch of saber rattling to show how tough they are to those voters.

The problem is that saber rattling inevitably backfires and a bunch of young men see it and get spooked that the woman in question is going to drag us into a war with a draft.

There's an old saying about war, don't give your opponents problems give them dilemmas. What I described above is a dilemma. There's no actual right answer or good solution. If you skip the saber rattling you lose the voters who think you aren't going to be able to negotiate and if you do the saber rattling you lose the voters who think you're going to draft them off to die in the Middle East.

The Republican party has a lot of these kind of dilemmas and they can usually solve them with overwhelming propaganda and dog whistles because they have a much larger media apparatus and a lot more money. Those aren't options for the Democratic party.

Because of all this under the current system it's basically impossible for a woman to become president. I think if they completely eliminated voter suppression then they could win but that's going to be a multi-generational effort.

This is what Jasmine Crockett meant when she said the Democrats are going to nominate the safest white boy they can find. They aren't in a position where they can risk running a woman again. We've got 20 or 30 years of civil rights organization and voting rights organization before that can happen...

It might be a hallucination, or it might be a real problem. And there are other possibilities. (E.g. earlier it was suggested that MS noticed a bad bug *somehow* and the government didn't want the bug to be fixed.)

If you want to be fair, it's been headed that way ever since the 1860's. And prior to that the individual states were headed that way.

People in power like to make their jobs easier.

Microsoft issues the secure boot keys that are used by all Linux distributions.

If they can just arbitrarily yank someone's keys like this, apparently without explanation or appeal, then what does that mean for those Linux keys? Are they subject to withdrawal for no reason as well?

Incorrect. Microsoft signs the boot shim. This lets you use Secure Boot with the default Microsoft keys you use to boot Windows. So any PC, with Secure Boot enabled, can boot Linux. The keys built into every PC are Microsoft's, and even if you hard reset the machine, they will revert to those Microsoft keys.

You are encouraged though if you run Linux, to create your own keys, and install them on your PC. Doing so would require you to re-sign the Microsoft bootloader but you are free to use your own keys. The only reason Microsoft signed the shim is because some OEMs do not make it easy to install a third-party key to secure-boot a non-Windows OS. So the Microsoft signed shim means if it can boot Windows, it can boot Linux.

And I say shim because that's the actual component signed - major Linux distributions re-distributed the signed binary. But it's bootloader independent - you can use the signed shim to boot your own version of GRUB or other bootloader and continue the secure boot chain if desired. (If you use something like Ubuntu, you're likely to encounter this if you try to compile your own kernel or module where you then h ave to add a key to the shim so the kernel can run your new module.

Microsoft can stop signing new shims, but that has nothing to do with Secure Boot. It's just a way so everything that can boot Windows can boot other OSes even if the OEMs lock down the computer.

Big companies often use their own keys for secure boot.

"Security by obscurity" doesn't work by itself. It's a necessary component of every security policy, however. You can't just pick one. (It's called "defense in depth", but that's not really a good metaphor.)

Then again, Apple's treatment of the Vision Pro perplexes me, so who knows what Apple is doing there...

I think Apple is trying to figure it out too, so they're just letting it be a developer's playground as in "Here's some cool hardware, now do something with it".

It's a device looking for a purpose, and Apple is just trying to see where that goes. I'm sure most of what we do with smartphones today wasn't what Jobs envisioned back for the original iPhone, so the Vision Pro is similar. Maybe hoping to see if an interesting use case pops out.

The pilots carry a transponder. If you make it down to the ground alive, you hide, turn on the transponder and wait for a rescue.

There was an article about the Boeing device that is just this.

It uses spread-spectrum wideband technology in fast burst mode so you can communicate. It's encrypted, digital and the fast burst means every transmission lasts well under 1ms which means by the time you detect it, it's too late to triangulate the position. (Think of the annoying beeping prank toys you can get)

Wideband technology means even if you pick something up, the location is spread out, and is a much weaker signal as it barely disturbs the noise floor.

It's also a 2 way communicator so you can send messages to it and they can reply back, and basically handheld. You strap it on, turn it on and it transmits your position in those bursts.

Of course, the biggest farce is about the second pilot being reported in the news. Which is a farce because if you know anything about the F-15E, you know it's a 2 man aircraft. So you know if you shot one down, there are two people you have to account for. It's not just public information, it's basically well known information. The fact that one was rescued means obviously there's one more to look for.

To put it in perspective, by then you could get IBM PC clones for under $1,000.

Not in 1984. Clones were cheaper, but the $1000 PC era didn't arrive until the 90s. The cheapest IBM PC was around $2000, but you were looking at like 128K of RAM and NO floppy drive. (The original IBM PC had a tape interface so you could use ... audio cassettes. While not unusual since every other computer had tape interfaces, basically nothing used it other than CBASIC - cassette BASIC which was a ROM BIOS option). That configuration was rapidly dropped and prices rose because you really needed 256K of RAM and 2 floppy drives.

Though one loading MS-DOS from cassette tape might have been an interesting alt-universe thing.

Among the 8-bits, the Commodore 64 was probably the cheapest around $500-600 (and another $400 for the disk drive, or $200 for the tape drive, I think).

Computers weren't something in many homes in 1984 - if you had one, it was likely an 8-bit one. PCs didn't really land in the home until later on when clones started coming down at half the price of IBM, But that was still several thousand dollars. An IBM with hard drive, single floppy and 640K was north of $5000, so a clone would likely be between $3000+ for a similar configuration.

The thing is, the MacBook Neo was done so Apple could experiment - to comply with upcoming EU laws, use up some chips they had sitting around and other things. They didn't expect the sales they got because honestly, if you survey the sub-$600 laptop market on PCs, it's rather dismal. Apple somehow packaged together something with a stunning screen, metal case and decent battery life. The CPU and RAM were middling, but for light tasks decent enough. But the display is bright and vibrant and outclasses anything you can find, the case is sold and not creaky plastic, and the battery life isn't abhorrent. It's also not a thick beast and retains the Apple aesthetic. And no stickers.

Honestly, it's something of a competitor to the iPad itself. Apple sticking a touchscreen on it and you pretty much can't justify an iPad anymore.

Current base price for a Mac Mini is $599. So, there's that.

If that's a barrier to entry, it's one that is shared by 90% of the (non-laptop) PC market, and it never seemed to bother PC users. It's not like Apple won't happily sell you a keyboard, mouse, and monitor along with your Mac Mini, if that's what you want to do.

Comparable to, say, a 787 airliner, whose environmental damage we tolerate without thought or comment simply because we're already used to it.

Consider the alternative, then. Anthropic does nothing, and sooner or later OpenAI or some other less responsible company delivers an AI with similar capabilities, but just throws it out to the public without much thought about the consequences. Both the black hats and the white hats start using it, of course, but the black hats have a field day compromising anything and everything before the white hats have a chance to find, fix, and distribute all the necessary patches to defend against all the newfound exploits. Not a great situation to be in, but probably unavoidable at this point unless the white hats are given a head start.