They are now. But they used to be a solid brand that you could get at Costco. I think back in the 90s they even sold computer monitors.
Thanks for the box recommendation. Does a Mi Box work with local media (on a NAS)? I switched from Roku (tired of the ads and constantly added apps) to Apple, which solved those annoyances, but it doesn't play media off the local network.
The last Vizio I bought wouldn't let you past the screen-covering EULA without signing in or creating an account. Which is why it went back to the store and it's the last Vizio will ever buy. It also lacked a sleep button on the remote... and required 8 button presses EACH time you wanted to use the sleep feature.
Years ago, they were my favorite brand of TV, worth paying a bit extra for. Never again. I'm so tired of the enshittification.
With the price of RAM shooting through the roof, I've noticed quite a few of the new low and mid-range Windows laptops are now shipping with 8gb of ram as well.
Purging code barely in use is generally a good security practice
The problem is the common practice of confusing, "I don't use it" with "Nobody uses it" or "Nobody should use it". Breaking things that many people use is also bad practice.
As someone who always waits for the "xx.3" versions (and often skips the even ones), I do too.
I've been using Linux since the 90s and when I was younger, I loved tweaking and getting the newest stuff. But these days I want it to "just work"(tm) and not have the UI and features not change a lot.
Out team of ~8 (pentestesting & VA) were unanimous about Copilot being crap and Claude being the top dog. So some higher ups OK'd a Claude Teams package for work. To bypass the CorpSec tards, we use it from our lab environment that has its own unmonitored link and IP range.
Anthropic/Claude is just so far ahead of OpenAI/ChatGPT and MS/Copilot it's not funny.
Maybe that was a bad idea in the face of rapidly growing demand.
What possible value is coming from this besides corporate welfare.
They're not even practicing getting into orbit around the moon, which would be needed for a landing. This is just a government sponsored joy ride.
Pizza Hut has degraded its food quality so badly that its barely edible.
I grew up in the 80s and remember Pizza Hut being a kind of nice place to take your family out or even go on a date (for a college kid). It was a sit-down restaurant with nice table service, good food, decent ambiance, and even a pretty good salad bar!
The last Pizza Hut I ate at was crap and it's now a tax prep office.
It will be especially fun when they start lowering credit scores because you "fail to submit to AI credit management".
As a "my first computer was a C64" kind of geek, the last thing I want is more useless plastic e-waste to clutter my house that will eventually end up in a landfill.
Gift ideas for a geek of my generation? A donation to the EFF in my name, or maybe a used copy of a book like Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg. An old copy of a BYTE, Compute!, or Creative Computing might trigger some nice nostalgia. Maybe even a coffee cup with vi or emacs commands, but even that's pushing it because who doesn't already have more than plenty of coffee cups?
The problem of LLMs is that they do not make a difference between data to be processed and instructions how to process the data.
Sadly, in a conceptual sense, this is hardly a new problem. Sending the data in the same channel as the commands of the public telephone system is what allowed phreaking to be so successful. For example, putting money into a payphone triggered an audio signal that was sent down the line saying you had paid. It was trivial to replicate that sound into the headset, tricking the system into thinking you had paid for the call.
"Roman Polanski makes his own blood. He's smart -- that's why his movies work." -- A brilliant director at "Frank's Place"
