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.

They don't delete data, they just cut off your access to it.

How about just spinning a wheel on satellites? I know it's used for stabilization but why not movement also?

Steve Jobs

You can run skylights through a fiber optic cable and shine natural light anywhere now.

Pretty sure they had an agreement in place on that since Xerox didn't think it was a product they could sell. They actually invested $1M in Apple at the time to develop the products better.

There's no shortage of managers who still believe in man months. To them, less time at work means less work gets done. That's it.

I've never understood this perspective because how would drugs and mind-altering substances work? What about brain injuries that significantly change someone's personality? How does it account for how awful memory is and how it can't be trusted? Sure people have 3rd person perspective memories since they're summaries that are rebuilt on demand and differ over time. People can't even remember exactly what was said in an argument seconds ago. There's also studies showing how near-death experiences can be induced by low oxygen levels in the brain, and how in children they see people who are still alive since that's everybody they know. Also tests of people supposedly leaving their bodies fail to correctly see items placed above their head when they start to "see themself" outside their body. It is much better explained by proprioception and a faulty sense of "self" as related to the body. There are several illnesses stemming from proprioception not being exactly where it should be such as a feeling of living outside the body, having someone behind them all the time or constantly failing field sobriety tests.

My random guess is they're thinking of QNX which was famous at the time for running nuclear plants and other high reliability situations for years without reboots and being able to upgrade modules in place. The kernel had very few calls which would make it easier to vet.

The AI coprocessor or whatever they want to call them on the new chips are pretty interesting. They're seeing a lot of use for image and voice processing. I'm sure there's still a lot of novel uses to come but largely agree with your point.

Sociopaths drink it black. There's been studies........... I'll now assume that everyone drinking it black is secretly a sociopath. Just don't tell THEM that.

In the Candace Owens / Cardi B feud fake screenshotted tweets attributed to Candace were shared repeatedly by fans of Harry Styles and Cardi B. https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch... This article also details how to investigate possibly faked tweets.

This quote has a deeper meaning that unfortunately applies to art and not patents. The full quote is:

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

Well actually there's an older version of it that goes

Immature artists copy, great artists steal.

This is probably what Steve was paraphrasing, which was based on an earlier saying

A good composer does not imitate; he steals

The basic meaning is that an artist should not simply copy the works of others but instead like Microsoft, embrace and extend the style. A great developer isn't going to spend all their time copying and pasting code off Stackoverflow, they'll understand a concept well enough to make it their own and apply or modify as needed.

Total earth-wide diplomatic immunity. She can do anything but eat. Well ok I guess she can eat mushrooms.