That's why I said "I suspect" meaning it *might* be. I just shared what I have observed.

The type of attacks I am talking about are similar to this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

You posted a link referencing a spear-phishing attack which has very little to do with where the email account was hosted and the entity providing the email service.

Given that Slashdot posted and article about something quite obvious. I am wondering if you are competing with Slashdot editors for the official captain obvious title. /s

All people I know who got their email hacked were on outlook. None on gmail nor any other provider. I am really curious about if he was on outlook or not. I suspect some hacked outlook email accounts have nothing to do with the user being negligent and has to do with microsoft cloud being full of security holes.

I keep on blocking full /16 microsoft cloud networks from accessing my services while I only block single IPs from amazon and google cloud and get orders of magnitude less bad request from them then Microsoft. This leads me to suspect some vm instances running on microsoft cloud were hacked directly because of security holes in microsoft cloud itself, not because the owners of the vm instances were negligent.

Sadly while your logic sounds spot on, the reality is, that TV still does ACR (basically hashing each screen sometimes multiple times a second) and builds one hell of an accurate profile of everything you watch. Even if the source is HDMI. And it's still sold.

Food for thought, that HDMI cable to your dedicated device, it likely supports networking, so the TV has a path to the internet even if you don't connect an ethernet cable directly to it, or add in your wifi creds.

Assuming it's remotely true (and there's good reason for thinking it isn't), it still means the FBI director was negligent in their choice of personal email provider, that the email provider had incompetent security, and that the government's failure to either have an Internet Czar (the post exists) or to enforce high standards on Internet services are a threat to the security of the nation (since we already know malware can cross airgaps through negligence, the DoD has been hit that way a few times). The FBI director could have copied unknown quantities of malware onto government machines through lax standards, any of which could have delivered classified information over the Internet (we know this because it has also happened to the DoD).

In short, the existence of the hack is a minor concern relative to every single implication that hack has.

f the child mentioned didn't give you consent to share details about them, don't.

I thought it was generally accepted that children under the age of 18yrs could not give legal "consent" to anything....?

Until the age of 18, for the most part legally, can't parents speak for and act for their children....?

There's no reason a smart TV MUST have an account with the manufacturer or seller unless they want to enshittify it.

You may want to have accounts with various streaming services or perhaps you just want it to stream video you have on a NAS.

What are the use cases for local AI models that actually require running on macOS? Surely a commodity x86 system is more appropriate?

Is there even the software support for LLMs on macOS?

Actually yes there is...

I'm still learning about this myself, but, from what I understand the M series of chips that Apple has come out with, with it having a CPU, GPU, and shared unified memory....it makes them uniquely capable of running local models on them...decently large models depending on how much you fork over for RAM. These M chips also have a special end unit for "intelligence processing" I think they call it.

The M5 chips just coming out look to be very good at this and it is speculated the M5 Ultra will be a high performance work horse.

Apple may have missed the mark for running AI, but the appear to have hit a home run on the hardware aspect of it.

I've seen demos on YouTube of someone hooking up like 4-5 Mac Studios that were maxed out M3 ultras I think and they were running extremely LARGE LLMs locally and getting cloud level numbers on them.

Of course these were like $10K each boxes.....but the level of model they were running would have cost my MANY more times trying to match them with NVIDIA GPU cards.....

i believe there are OSX friendly tools like ollama that make downloading, and running LLMs quite easy....and of course there's the latest sensation...OpenClaw, that folks are buying up Mac Minis for....to have multiple agents running using models of your. Choice (commercial clound or local) of models and giving them persistent memory, and ability to do a lot of things for you...depending on how comfortable you are with giving said agents long leashes and capabilities....

Do look a bit on YouTube on these topics....it's actually quite interesting.

These M chips are already giving the home user the capability to use models almost as large and on the cutting edge as the big companies.....more than enough for most users.

Right now, there's nothing x86 that can really match them...at least not for the money.

Look for a gaming monitor with no WiFi option

Do they make these in 65" or larger?

If not, that's not really useful....no one wants to have everyone in the family and/or guests huddled around a 25" monitor in the corner of the living room you know....

;)

Everyone's (rightfully) bitching about this, and I agree, but none of that solves the problem.

What's the alternative? Give me a TV brand that gives you, ideally, a dumb TV, but alternatively a decent smart TV that is easy to work with.

Responsiveness is an important, and often overlooked, characteristic. It's important.

Brand/model recommendations; go!

t depends on if they send you a tax notice or not. There was an outfit in Ohio that I used to purchase a lot of electronics from. One year I got a note from them listing my purchases, and that I would have to pay taxes on. That was a pain in the ass.

I think they got "caught", or had new accountants or something. But yes - if you can avoid the sales tax, it's a significant discount.

Interesting, I've never received any such notices....but most of my stuff is one off buys...not repeated purchases from a single site...

Believe it or not, I STILL find it pays to compare Amazon to maybe smaller retailers....for shipping vs tax!!!

I find a lot of sellers out there that still do not charge sales tax and some times...that makes it cheaper than Amazon...

Prime has LONG been a good deal for me.....but here recently with them adding commercials to Prime videos/movies....I'm starting to step back and re-evaluate....

if there was ever a moment for a robot to flip out and kill people, this was the one

Addiction is neurological, not chemical. Addiction is the consequence of the rewards centre of the brain becoming dependent on stimulation and that can be from anything.

Do try to make an effort.