The galaxy brain move is buying an old dumb tv for a pittance and use it for watching Jellyfin/Plex/stream from a browser with uBlock Origin/DNS filtering – all running on some relative’s “obsolete” smart toaster from last year that they happily gift you because “the new version’s bagel mode IS LIT – pun intended – but it needs the 128 gb DDR7 ram of the new model, can barely toast on the old one any more”.
Thanks for the link, hadn’t heard about that project, the list of target features looks very promising
But they all suck, or rather the Internet kinda sucks these days. Google very much included in the sucking.
In Google Search’s prime DDG was still terrible and not a viable competitor even with the privacy advantage. Now both services are almost comparable, so it’s kind of a no-brainer to ditch Google.
Yeah, search has degraded along with the Internet, you almost need an LLM now to filter out all the garbage hits. For a while, adding “reddit” to your search term was an OK high level filter to remove blogspam and e-commerce sites, but interacting with reddit is so annoying now that it’s barely an option and many of the quality reddit posters have moved on while the state and corporate astroturfers are running the show. Never mind that the “reddit filter” also removed results from much better sources, like specialist forums.
Then again, people with nefarious purposes are usually highly motivated.
What does Mozilla doubling down on AI and becoming less appealing to core users mean for Firefox forks going forward? How independent of Mozilla are the biggest ones in practice?
I agree, but the high global integration has also been a winning hand for Europe in the last few decades. There will be some pain and odd bed fellows.
The problem is that it isn’t clear what kinds of exposure private credit and other actors in the shadow banking space hold, because they generally operate on a model of financial obfuscation to get around banking regulation (i.e. being actual banks). What is known is that they are deeply intertwined with financing the AI bubble, even if all their exposure is through debt instruments, crypto schemes or insurance contracts (that probably is not the full scope though), they will be hit hard when their “borrowers” can’t pay back.
It’s the difference between a nice gesture and giving away his life’s work to take a stand. It’s still a nice gesture, but I doubt he will financially notice the lost streaming royalties from his fanbase on Greenland. Boycotting Amazon is probably the bigger thing here.
And possibly the most parts of shadow banking, i.e the alt accounts of major financial institutions.
Fun times ahead!
If you’re rich, you look good
That’s not news
I don’t know how it works in Australia, but a plus to subsidizing solar installation on roofs is that the home owner still has to co-invest for a considerable part, so you kinda get a leveraged build out, as opposed to the government directly building installations. But the balance between private and public good should be weighed carefully all the same.
In Sweden, people – wealthy home owners – have gotten a lot of public financial assistance for mounting solar panels that would either way have paid for themselves in a matter of years, lowering electrical bills and raising house prices for the owners.
Overall that is a good thing, the pros of increased solar adoption outweigh the glaring inequity, but all the same it’s hard to feel that it’s a part of the general fuckery of governments competing on who can pamper the upper middle class the most. Sweden also subsidizes mortgage interest and has essentially abolished (hard-capped at a low.level) the property tax on private homes. And Sweden has in recent years given financial relief to households based on their electrical consumption, I.e. very little (or nothing if electric is added to the rent) to renters and most of the money going to people with big houses and year-round heated pools.
The discussion on equity needs to enter the debate on things like incentives for solar panels on private homes or grants for energy saving insulation. These are good things, but the money can’t just stack up on top of other political favors to the wealthy. Less useful subsidies need to go. They need to replace other benefits.
Tl;dr surveillance equipment working perfectly, used for dystopian surveillance. Major shocker.
In the context of parenting there are certainly better things you can do to prevent “shennanigans” other than subjecting them to surveillance. Like you know… raising them?
Terrifying with a generation of peole grown up under total control and expected to be perfectly obedient. They will be shitty adults. But hey, at least they won’t have memories of that time they snuck out at night to watch the stars.
Oh, I agree fully about the focus on phasing out fossil fuels. My impression was that the article argued that it was a temporary method and therefore less valuable than other methods of capturing and storing carbon in terms of offsetting/a carbon credit system.
Subscriptions are thieves of intentionality
But what about the climate mitigation (e.g. preventing soil erosion) or potential ecological impact (e.g. habitat restoration). Is it really trivial to compare that to the climate use?
I don’t claim to have comprehensive knowledge on any parts of the equation or how they stack up to each other, I’m just saying that if you have an economical policy that incentivices one measure over the other – which at the of the day is what we’re talking about – it seems sensible to base it on the sum of the measures’ value. If we, for instance, want to disincentivice afforestation that should not strictly be made on the basis of how much carbon it can offset compared to other options.
But maybe that is just my general scepticism towards the promises of future CCS technology talking.
Yeah, as ridiculous as the record labels are – their reaction is exactly what one would expect after such a high profile move.