Elon, Sam, Mark, Peter, et al... You are cordially invited to go fsck yourselves.

The magnitude of destruction you have wrought upon this industry, upon our livelihoods, and upon society as a whole, cannot be calculated, much less excused. You have stolen the corpus of human ingenuity and creativity from its creators without recompense, and now are trying to sell a provably shittier version of it back to us at a markup.

And, let's be honest, this is what you wanted to build -- a barely capable servant who will do your bidding, whatever it is, immediately, without question or compunction. It's extremely telling about your moral compasses that you studiously sat on your hands when your customers were creating graphic sexual imagery of celebrities over their vociferous objections; or impressionable young people (who needed help, not encouragement) were being driven to suicide by your chatbots; but "torturing" a memory block of neural net constants is somehow the bridge too far?

I repeat: Go fsck yourselves.

I have a wildcard cert from LetsEncrypt, which I install on all the services on my home LAN. However, because it's a wildcard, LetsEncrypt insists that I prove domain ownership by updating some DNS TXT records. My DNS provider doesn't support automated updates to TXT records. So ACME won't work, so I have to do that bit by hand.

Next, I have to distribute the cert to a handful of local services, including pfSense, TrueNAS, Postfix, the Unifi Controller (extra annoying, because Java), Forgejo, and probably a couple others I've forgotten about. None of that is automated, either. It hasn't been so painful that I've bothered to write scripts for the process, so I get to do a little SSH dance every three months.

"Deploy your own!" Couple of issues there: 1) Everyone treats self-signed certs as suspicious, so they're inappropriate for Postfix TLS; 2) Every time I've tried that, Firefox and/or Chrome complain about some obscure feature not being what they expect. The latest headache had to do with OCSP stapling, which has to be turned on -- oh, whoops, now it has to be turned off... Bleah. LetsEncrypt certs Just Work, so I haven't revisited building my own CA.

The "preceding year" bit doesn't seem to get much respect either, because it takes longer than that to separate the wheat from the chaff.

The problem comes with hardware which doesn't have a way (or, at least, a user-friendly way) to update its locale data. I recall having problems a decade or so ago with discrepancies between two computers because one of them hadn't been updated with the then-very-recent changes to Chilean law about summer time and the other one had.

But maybe an authoritarian dictatorship isn't a great example. Then turn your eyes to France and Spain.

On a point of order... Spain was in GMT until an authoritarian dictator decided that being in the same timezone as Nazi Germany would be convenient. France changed when it was occupied by Nazi Germany. Where you arguably get away with the examples is that there is a question as to why they haven't changed back.

There are use cases you're not covering. Last month I needed a photo of my sister-in-law's ID card to prove that I'd correctly transcribed her address (bureaucrats don't always understand that other countries do things like addresses differently) when applying for a document to make it easier for her to visit. If she'd had to be there in person we'd have had a circular dependency.

Maybe you use different OSes to me, but I expect whoami to be deterministic rather than stochastic.

More generally, there's a strong negative correlation between reliable contraceptive methods being available and birth rate. There's also a strong positive correlation between infant mortality and birth rate. Comparing the situation today with Victorian Britain as though the only thing which had changed is the working time directive overlooks those two significant differences (and surely many other relevant ones).

This "new" site is part of a larger effort by that slob to kneecap or compromise US government Web sites, and steal your personal data.

I first read about the effort here: https://thedreydossier.substac...

Yesterday, she took a look under the hood of America.gov, and yes, it's as bad as everything else the DOGE vandals have been doing: https://thedreydossier.substac...

Up until this point, government Web sites were designed, built, and maintained by the agencies responsible for that government service. For example, if you wanted to apply for or renew your passport, you would go to state.gov, which is run by the US Department of State, which is responsible for processing applications for and issuing passports. No other department has lawful jurisdiction over passports.

From the point of view of the law, that's still true. But the slob, without anyone's permission, kluged together passports.gov. This site was built and is run by the White House's "National Design Studio," completely outside the law and without any independent oversight. The State Department was not consulted and has nothing to do with it. Further, the site is filled with third-party trackers, analytics, and some custom code that copies every page you view, including form contents, to an unknown third party.

Oh, and the guy leading the National Design Studio and in charge of building these fake sites? He's Joe Gebbia -- cofounder of Airbnb. Read both articles for more details.

In short, you should treat America.gov as a malware site and stay well away from it. Under no circumstances should you feed it any of your personal information.

It's now the Department of Just ICE, but they haven't got round to updating the letterheads.

My Spanish bank this year forced me to install their app for verification because they discontinued the receipt of an SMS for the second factor. I am not amused: SMS works, but seemingly every other time I launch the app to verify an online credit card payment it insists on updating before it will let me do anything, and meanwhile there's a Verified By Visa timer ticking down.

what's the point?

The point is to be able to use your hardware in the manner you deem appropriate, and to ensure it is not doing sneaky shit behind your back.

If, instead of a Playstation, we were talking about rooting LG televisions to run custom Linux builds stripped of pervasive privacy-violating code and "apps," I suspect your opinion might be rather different. (And no, when the entire industry has turned to the Dark Side, voting with your wallet doesn't work.)

...Modern ejector seats cause spinal injuries from which full recovery is "unusual". Smashing the spines of pilots might not be the most effective way to boost morale.

$22,000 per hour. The F35 will be nearer $42,000 per hour. These are under-estimates, as they do not include price hikes, crashes that close businesses, crashing into businesses, crashing into heavily-populated sports centres, etc.