This device is now mandated to watch TV or browse the internet in Germany:

If Mozilla wanted to achieve its stated goals, it would stay clear the hell away from AI, and it would move out of the US.

the people running the show are *also* bumbling fucking morons.

The morons in and around the White House aren’t the ones running the show. They’re puppets, and the puppetmasters are the Heritage Foundation. And THEY are anything but morons.

descent into a kind of fusion of tech and fascism

This isn’t new.

One of the defining traits of fascism is that the private sector is in cahoots with the government. In fact, that’s the root of the words fascism: fasces in Latin means bundle - the bundling of state and private interests.

Corporations have no principles and no morals: whatever will make them more money, they’ll ro-ro with. When it takes colluding with an authoritatian regime, they have no problems getting onboard.

The danger today compared to IBM helping the Nazis is of course that today’s computers are vastly more powerful than mechanical tabulators. This is going to turbocharge the dystopia orders of magnitudes.

And finally, people have been lulled into a false sense of security and convinced to give away a lot more personal information than they should’ve for the past 25 years - the “I have nothing to hide, why do I need privacy?” fallacy. Now they’re going to find out why they should have been careful. I almost want to say “I told you so” every day, having been called a paranoid crackpot for the past 25 years, but it’s so sad and so too late that it isn’t even anything to gloat about…

search “Hentai Alien Tentacle Porn” for you

This is suspiciously specific 🙂

Even if it was open source (it isn’t, because no model is really open source ultimately) and even if it let you review what it says it’s gonna do, AI is known for pulling all kinds of shit and lie about it.

Would you really trust your system to something that can do this? I wouldn’t…

I look forward to not installing it.

I was expecting it to be vulgarly gilded. The orange utan is letting himself go.

that and fucking ads galore

And trackers.

And Javascript that give you the time in the page, as if you didn’t have a clock on your desktop.
And Javascript that give you a fake chat window to talk to a shitty AI nobody wants in the bottom-right corner.
And Javascript to annoy you with GDPR shit everybody absent-mindedly clicks away anyway.
And Javascript to inform you that the site uses cookies, as if it mattered since it won’t work without cookies.
And Javascript that nags you for a subscription or stops you scrolling to force you to create an account.
…

And of course, all that is done by loading megabytes and megabytes of shit recursively from a kajillion nested addresses because web “developers” couldn’t code tight code if their lives depended on it. All they do is import pre-chewed shit that acts as trojans for big data players to plant more trackers and more ads in your browser, just to serve up barf people by and large don’t give a shit about.

No: the waiting time is more like 9 months and fully-loaded, you’re looking at north of €1,800 :)

The point of MNT machines isn’t value for money, but openness and sovereignty over what you own. They’re not for everybody, but my kids are out of the house, the house is paid for and so I have the means to put my money where my convictions are.

But no matter: the point was that Linux ARM laptops really are nothing new.

“Pave the way for ARM64 laptops?”

I have an ARM64 laptop as my daily driver right here on my desk and it’s happily running Debian 13. The road is quite paved already.

Funny, from my standpoint, more functional JavaScript almost always feels like service degradation - as in, the more I block, the better and the faster the website runs.

I run CalyxOS on my Fairphone4 and have zero issues.

Same old broken record as with previous Fairphones.

Their holier-than-thou attitude towards security backed them into the corner of being virtually unable to run GrapheneOS on any platform other than Google’s own Pixel phones, and now Google is pulling the rug from under them.

The GrapheneOS people were tedious when Micay was there, and they haven’t really changed.

Ouch. But who hasn’t?

I haven’t. Committing keys in git repos is beyond sloppy. Whoever does it needs to be fired immediately.

The best thing that could happen to the UK is that most internet sites just didn’t bother and stopped serving the UK. Kind of like how some US sites decline to serve up pages to European visitors because they couldn’t be bothered to be GDPR-compliant.

Unlike Europe though, the UK isn’t big enough to matter all that much. So if a large enough number of sites stopped catering to UK visitors, the authorities would quickly backpedal.

The problem is, they’re a bunch of talentless clowns with nefarious intents and access to your sensitive data.

That’s not true: electric buses are a great success in Europe. They qualify as ride-hailing and as electric vehicles 🙂

What’s not doing well is the antisocial ride-hailing electric transportation model that requires one huge vehicle per person so that person doesn’t have to sit next to someone else.

It’s different this time around.

The previous attempts were about freeing themselves from an abusive unprincipled data-hungry big data monopoly,

This attempt is about freeing themselves from an abusive unprincipled data-hungry big data monopoly operating in a fascist country and in cahoots with the regime.

I reckon it’s serious this time.

poettering is an absolute good guy here

Agreed. But he’s also an abrasive know-it-all. A modicum of social skills and respect goes a long way towards making others accept your pet projects.

pulesaudio protocol is used within pipewire and it works just fine.

I wasn’t talking about the protocol, I was talking about the implementation: PulseAudio is a crashy, unstable POS. I can’t count the number of hours this turd made me waste, until PipeWire came along.