Haha. I remember the pics going around at the time and never really read the story. I always thought it might be someone just trolling/gaslighting people from the inside. Or malicious compliance or whatever.

These tax scofflaws are Giga-Karens.

My kids got an Oculus a while ago. IIRC, it’s basically unusable w/o a Meta account.

Every time I see some story about VR, I wonder about those goggles having the unfixable battery in them that is going to fail in about 18-24 months (mentioned prominently in Buy Now documentary).

Are older people going to have to buy a new set every 2 years?

Not too long ago.

But when you set up things like AdGuard at home, you’ll quickly see that most people are probably not nearly paranoid enough. I work in IT, and even others in IT that should in theory know better think I’m being too paranoid to use various protections when using the 'net.

I don’t even have that many IoT devices in my house or enshittified products like Alexa, etc…and something like 20+% of DNS queries are blocked in my house…

I have Samsung in my house and of course they were known for being the worst/earliest offender when it came to “smart TVs”, but they are hardly the only one. Certainly you can do a lot to block them, but I am quite sure most people never even bother.

Not doing so is a journalistic and moral failure of the highest order and I’m tired of pretending this is what “journalistic integrity” looks like.

Well, look at how terrible they were about vetting Donvict prior to/during his first run. Most Americans knew about Donvict from his stupid game show and the “liberal media” did nearly nothing at all to disabuse them of that notion.

And pretending that the racist nutbars that were screaming about how the “liberal media” didn’t properly “vet” Obama (meaning, how did the Blah guy even win??!!!) had some kind of valid complaint, meaning bothsidering racist dipshits and claiming that anyone showing concern about the mobbed-up, washed-up total failson were just being alarmists, etc.

They’ve been terrible at how to deal with Donvict and his mobbed up apparatchiks for at least a decade now.

So they basically closed the consumer protections bureau, but are now trying to extort companies for this?

Even if many Republican politicians suddenly cannot even remember hearing this name “Trump” and pretend they “didn’t like the tweeting”, they’ll still be for all the worst policies of the Republican party.

Same goes for the Republican voters - even if they are given lifeboats to distance themselves with some new incarnation of the teabagger astroturf campaign, they’ll still all just be as awful and terrible and employing vibes instead of critical thinking.

Now if only the opposition can do their part to sweep up as many voters as possible - even former Taco supporters that you can peel off - without the constant purity tests and so on. Right now, the Democrats should be more popular than they have been in a very long time, but are managing to completely fuck that up anyway.

LOL, of course he is. This is the administration that is clutching their pearls over this guy being called a “Maryland man” in the already way-too-overly-compliant corporate media.

They want to control the language everyone uses, including over things like this, all the way down to individuals. And this whole thing has embarrassed the shit out of them, and they cannot (yet) control all language and messaging around this, so they are trying to be as cruel as possible to him.

So, recording illegal shit done by an administration headed up by a convict is “terrorism” now.

So much freedom.

It’s weird - this admin set out to “own the libs” and by that, they mean, annoy normal people.

When normal people refuse to engage with them, the RW trolls then clutch their pearls and feign outrage.

I don’t even know who is paying for most of it, to be honest. I know some people that buy an LLM subscription. I know companies will pay for per-seat licenses to things like Copilot.

But I see LLM use in Duckduckgo. I see it jammed into every product we are already paying for at work - MS stuff, Slack, hell, I lost track of all the places where some AI bubble has popped up saying how X product has added AI to help me summarize things. But who is really paying extra for any of that?

And don’t get me started on how I can download and run various models via Ollama or the like on even older GPU(s) and get decent performance for a lot of problems, all without handing over a CC# to someone, along with all my data for them to mine.

Old money vs new money. You can read about that more in books like The Great Gatsby.

If you read The Rich and the Super-rich, he talks quite a bit about how they make use of foundations to keep money out of the hands of the public.

The book is pretty old now, but I doubt the game has changed all that much.

I doubt it’s any coincidence that all these new money players - Zuckerberg, Musk, Ellison, and Gates all have foundations…all of that money would likely be better managed by public initiatives (assuming we don’t have insane administration like we do right now, of course), but due to their personal arrogance and the secret mission of PRESERVING wealth, they form these foundations.

And quite a few people think that these guys are really the best people (due to Worthington’s Law) to oversee and direct money at various problems to be solved - call me skeptical, even in the case of Gates, who may actually be sincere in some things and have the aptitude for it.

Who is paying for xAI anything?

Came here to say this.

Just let them leave if they really wanna. But where are they going to go, really?

The billionaire and centimilliionaire class should be getting on the ground and kiss the ground in thankfulness for what this country - and specifically, certain states - have done for them.

These ungrateful pieces of shit cannot ever have enough though, apparently.

Your mom goes to college!

Same. This is the same admin that had people claiming they were going to rewrite decades of code in “months”.

I’m sure some dumbass told them AI was up to the task.

LOL, I think I called this weeks ago, not that it took very much foresight to assume massive, easily-avoidable fuck-ups from the admin that thought someone like “Big Balls” was going to be able to figure out decades of COBOL code…

I think that’s how it works now, and has even prior to gay marriage being the law of the land, but the religious busybodies think their particular religion should somehow have a say in what is a government institution (and merely because of cultural inertia, I guess? xtians seem to think they own the very concept of marriage, which is…hilariously provincial, but that’s what xtians seem to excel at).