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

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.

Which one? Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Gummo or Zeppo?

Yeah but they have to set it up. It’s not sold to them ready to exploit - and crucially, Spez doesn’t get to make any money off my back.

My instance doesn’t sell what I write to train AI.

Of course, the AI sumbitches probably scrape Lemmy for content too like they scrape everything for content. But at least Lemmy doesn’t give them my content on a platter, nicely packaged up and ready to exploit and monetize. They have to do the scraping.

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.

Oh yeah well spotted 🙂 I’ll fix that for sure

• Are you a felon?
• Are you a sex offender?
• Have you been close friend with a notorious pedophile?
• Have you organized an insurrection to steal the elections?
• Are you a fascist?
• Does anybody say of you that you’re a fascist?

If the canditate failed any of the above, I’d pass.

But of course, it’s not like it was possible to know any of these things before 2024 (random date chosen for no particular reason…)

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy