Whom do you consider to be more evil? Trump or JinPing? National states don’t exist anymore. There are two kings, they only lack the title.

Pihole. Doesn’t solve everything, but I’m currently blocking ads from just over a half million domains.

They didn’t have the framework knowledge before to automate the thing. It’s exactly where I was before AI. I knew that I could work more efficiently, but spending months learning Python was a lot slower than the 45 minutes, every other week I save by having a script do something for me. I don’t save enough budget to actually afford the time and effort to find a programmer, tell them what I need and then pay them to write it for me. Took 20 minutes worth of tweaking with the free tier of Claude and it was done to a “good enough” standard to save the time.

Because money. It cost tax dollars to roll a truck to these sites every time a switch needs to be thrown. I heard that an air raid siren went off not too long ago because some kids figured out that they were controlled by DMTF tones on an unencrypted radio frequency.

The little advertisers aren’t the scary ones. It’s Meta, Alphabet and Amazon that are scary and absolutely do fingerprint in this way. That said, the scale of these systems really does roll right past the individual user, unless someone really cares about YOU, but unless you’re doing something wrong, they don’t really give a shit. CSAM, illicit substances, amd more could probably be pretty easily rooted out by these systems, but that wouldn’t make-line-go-up so it doesn’t happen.

We ALL hope so.

There’s NO WAY I could have got Proxmox running my HomeAssistant with voice pipeline, plus PiHole, plus Tailscale & RustDesk all running on my NUC without Gemini. The number of copy-pasted commands is frankly staggering. I’m learning Linux, but the number of things I’ve been able to do is staggering compared to where I’d be on my own.

About 90% of Society. If you told my mom she was going to have to plug in a device and use another button on her remote (input) she’d look at you like you were asking her to replace a CPU on a computer. Can I do that? Yeah, I can but it’s delicate work fraught with danger.

Yep. Do they really expect me to figure out which of the half million ad-sites my pihole is blocking so I can read the article?

I’ll take all your spare 256 or 512 gig ECC sticks. Heck. I’ll even pay for shipping.

Copper by weight is cheap as hell. RAM & NVME drives are a WAY better ROI. It wouldn’t even be worth carrying the whole server.

For the VAST majority of people, a computer is just a tool and as long as they can send some email and surf the web, they don’t really care about them. Most 8 year old computers are generally cast enough to handle these tasks so they’re just not updating. A lot of those who care , did so with the EOL announcement of Win10 so there are other factors at play as well as insane costs.

Works vastly better on the plastic cartons than the old (and still current) paper cartons. I remember mom carefully inspecting eggs.

I absolutely lament the enshitification of youtube. It used to be easy to find a video on how to fix nearly anything, but that’s bad for the algorithm, because then you turn the screen off and go about fixing the thing, as opposed to watching more videos :(

Sometimes it’s worth putting it back together just to practice. I remember my dad giving me an old radio and a screwdriver just to keep me busy as a very young kid. After I had it all apart, he asked if I could put it back together. Kept me out of his hair for a while longer and gave me confidence that maybe I too could put things back together.

1. I have kids and having them subjected to ads is a burden on them AND on me. I don’t get begged for the latest toys, or have to watch the latest ad for whatever cream will solve my latest rash…
2. I don’t mind supporting channels that I watch. I also pay for PBS as I want to support that type of programming.
3. I spend enough time supporting all the IT needs and maintaining my existing household’s IT infrastructure for players for all of the content that I download for my spouse and kids that isn’t available on YT or PBS.

These cameras tend to be in fairly heavy traffic areas which makes guns a poor option.

I went and looked back at Fark when abandoning ship at Reddit, but the feed is still super slow and the user base is minuscule even by Fediverse standards.

I haven’t read the article, and am not a thermo-engineer, but the problem is probably one of too low of a heat for too long. To make lower you generally have to boil water into superheated steam and then can use it to turn a turbine where it loses some heat and we can extract that difference as energy. The hottest parts of the chip are probably still cooler than the steam condensing on the output of a standard steam generator.

So, look AI sucks, but busywork like this might do ok at “a quick guide to python”.