Indeed, I’m not justifying surveillance in either country. Just reflecting on how it’s been portrayed and is progressing here in the USA

He just lived in the society he advocated for. He literally believed a shooting now and then was worth the right for everyone to have guns.

You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It’s drivel. But I am, I, I — I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.

Those are his own words from 2023.

Just because it happened to him doesn’t mean it wasn’t what he wanted. For all we know, he died blissfully knowing he received a God-given bullet.

I think it’s much simpler than that. I think he just wants to make money and sees an opportunity to enrich himself. These people don’t have a sense of morality, only a “fuck you, got mine” basic American individualism

The irony is I remember growing up with numerous stories about how expression is locked down in China and everything there is surveilled and if you speak poorly against the government you’ll get arrested etc. And thank goodness we are free in America to express ourselves even if it’s against the government because, my gosh, I might not like what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it!

And as if with no sense of irony and not even a remote bit of critique, all those stories about surveillance in China (true or not, I don’t know) were actually true, are currently true, or are becoming true here in the USA. And in many cases they’re just sold as commodities back to us e.g. ring doorbell cameras.

And a final thought: the USA used to be able to justify many of its foreign interferences on a sort of moral high ground, including freedom of expression and all that. That mask was slipping but now with Trump2 seems to have just fallen off. The pretense has given away to crass might makes right international relations. I consider the USA becoming a hyper surveilled state to be part of this story.

The secondary use here is when you get asked in performance evaluation time how much you’re incorporating AI into your workflow. And you’d better not say “none” so you keep generating these nonsense documents and throwing them away so it appears like you’re using AI

Their primary use case in the office that I’ve seen is asking someone a question and having them send a LLM response where they clearly didn’t read what you asked and the response they sent you does not answer the original question. It’s so cool!

All this boohooing about his family. His wife chose to marry him because he’s a reactionary racist transphobic piece of shit. Meaning she herself is one. The only people I feel bad for are the young kids

A redundant comment already made by someone else: to consider the power draw of the computer if you leave it on 24/7

One thing to keep in mind is the IP address might not reflect the actual user’s location.

deleted by creator

I’m picking up what you’re putting down

Of course they know. They are knowingly making an addictive product that simulates an agreeable partner to your every whim and wish. OpenAi has a valuation of several hundred billion dollars, which they achieved in breakneck speeds. What’s a few bodies on the way to the top? What’s a few traumatized Kenyans being paid $1.50/hr to mark streams of NSFL content to help train their system?

Every possible hazard is unimportant to them if it interferes with making money. The only reason someone being encouraged to commit suicide by their product is a problem is it’s bad press. And in this case a lawsuit, which they will work hard to get thrown out. The computer isn’t liable, so how can they possibly be? Anyway here’s ChatGPT 5 and my god it’s so scary that Sam Altman will tweet about it with a picture of the Death Star to make his point.

The contempt these people have for all the rest of us is legendary.

Reminds me of all those stupid “cyberpunk 1994, office nights 1998” ai slop playlists on YouTube. They all have a common theme: they don’t represent or even remotely sound like the kind of music from the year they claim to take you back to. and the tracks, if one can call them that, are the same repetitive, thoughtless rhythms. If you go to YouTube to find some background music to listen to, these kinds of uploads dominate the search results today. And it’s all D-tier shit.

For me the experience is not flawless, but it’s not problematic either. For instance, I have never encountered random flickering just because a wrong program was open. In your case if you’re using Nvidia as a GPU and are using Wayland as a display compositor that might explain some of your problems like Vivaldi flickering, where it might not be an issue in an Xorg session.

And the fact that you have to be potentially aware of these things is one of the annoying aspects of using Linux.

IME the nicest part of Bazzite is not having to manage it. To that end, it works on my Steam Deck. But that’s nothing to do with stability, as you say. In its own ways it’s more annoying to use than a regular distro.

Clearly people are finding use for it, but I personally find those annoying aspects needless speedbumps in my own usage. Except for, again, on my Steam Deck.

It’s not just who’s on there. It’s also how the platforms promote content into your feed. When I was on Facebook in 2008 the friend feed was just that. Just people I mutually knew IRL posting. Facebook hadn’t yet figured out how to really monetize it. Advertisers were not as on it. SEO wasn’t really a thing yet.

Fast-forward 5-6 years and it really grew into an all-encompassing thing. Yeah, more people were on it, but so were the marketable opportunities. So were the suggested posts. So were all the news organizations, the grifters, the advertisers… and Facebook’s role in all of that is to promote the most outrageous and engaging content to you to keep you on the site longer than ever before. They have it down to a science.

UBlock on iphone works well and is free but is limited to safari, does not appear to even work with safari used as an in-app browser

This is the most annoying part about “content blockers” on iOS. Works fine in this one narrow context. Otherwise you need DNS filtering. I use PiHole, and I have it set up to VPN back home when I’m away to keep myself covered.

my one weird trick for using fandom.com is to disable javascript for that domain.

Well there are a lot of positives… anyway I just mentioned it as a point of reference. If you know Magit, you know it’s good.

Have fun!