It’s all made up anyway!

(I thought the nose shadow was a weird mustache.)

Maybe she saw his their profile and realized she wasn’t interested after all.

Of course they knew. It’s a Facebook joke. Why would the Macomb Daily News call itself MaCumb?

That’s the dream. After years I finally got serious about learning/implementing VLANs and have begun to isolate everything out/properly firewall them. Most of the smart home stuff is already Z-Wave/Zigbee, but the few devices that aren’t are mostly already migrated onto a dedicated IOT network, as is the hubs, where only devices that have business talking to each other can even see one another.

I have yet to play with tailscale, but it’s on the list.

I like smart home stuff. I hate my privacy being invaded. It’s a very thin line to walk.

A company recently released a product that promises to be Matter compatible. By the time the product arrived, they edited their product description to say it worked with Matter if you bought their always online hub, created an account, let their hub talk to the internet, and then installed their internet-connected plugin to Home Assistant. (So it’s not that HA talks to these devices, or that it talks to their hub. It logs into the company’s servers to get the current state of the device.)

I wrote a review outlining this. An AI bot sent me a message offering me additional products from this company. (Ha!) And included the line “We strictly adhere to data protection regulations” … in the U.S?

Laughably misleading.

I had the creepiest conversation with a cop a few months ago.
My neighborhood is seemingly getting rougher by the day. I do have a video doorbell, but it’s not one of the major U.S. brands.

Anyway, it was trash day. Garbage had been collected. I had noticed several police cars around, but didn’t see any police. I went to collect my bins, and one of them popped out of nowhere to chat at me.

He was light on details, but needed to track the comings and goings of a parking lot across the street from my house. Didn’t need super clear images, just said he needed timestamps for a timeline. Said my camera angle was ‘perfect’.
And it is! I get so many alerts that I disabled it unless motion is detected within the area of my yard. (Which was not helpful to them.)

But he was explaining this to me, and said that he needed me to send them the video (before I told him that it was unlikely I had video, and then confirmed that I did not with him). A moment later, he did a quick scan of my various neighbors houses, and said (to himself) “Okay, that’s a Ring, that won’t be a problem.”

A problem?!? Just casually warrentlessly seizing footage from people’s homes is not a problem?

For those curious, the system I currently have is by Eufy and I cannot recommend the brand. Anker as a brand has been great (Eufy’s parent company), but I find the Eufy app to be riddled with spam, the offered features to be mediocre, and generally, customer service to be poor. They even had an amazon review removed once. (I called their app a piece of crap, and they hit it with a community standards warning to get it removed.)

I read your comment, then went to make a joke response to someone else about placing a vacuum chamber inside the case to reduce its buoyancy.
This set off a several minute long internet hunt where I learned about Archimedes Principle, which you clearly describe. It turns out the only vacuum here is the one in my head.

To wit: If placed inside the case, my empty head would reduce the buoyancy, but only by its own weight.
A Pyrrhic victory.

I’m in IT, but not that kind of IT.

Last week I afflicted myself with the Location Services are turned off bug by installing the 23H2 update to duplicate an issue a user in my work area was having.

When I called desktop support, we could not replicate the issue after he remoted in.
He closed the Remote Desktop connection, and the issue reoccurred.
He remoted in. The popup vanished as soon as he connected. We couldn’t replicate the issue. He seemed dubious now. He disconnected. It occurred. I got a screenshot. He reconnected. We looked at the remote connection settings. Remote connections were set to override location. Disabled that. Issue presented. We both had a good laugh.

I sort of think it’s a multi-pronged thing.

I think one of Trump’s advisors floated it for the easy to grasp reasons -
Proximity to the trade lane that’s beginning to open up through the arctic as the polar ice melts, and access to Greenland’s rare earth minerals as a way to not be reliant on China for them.

I also suspect that should the Trump admin ever gain control of Greenland (I don’t believe they would), but they would turn it into a penal colony as they attempt to turn the U.S. into a white ethno-state.

There’s the ego factor. The rest of the world is telling the man-child Trump no, so he’s trying to see if he can get away with it. He’s a psychopath who likes to see if he can enforce his will on others. It’s not even about the actual gains of the action, but about overcoming the objections of others because he’s fragile and weak inside.

And finally - because if the U.S. looks like a credible threat to Europe, that means that Europe will have to invest in meeting that threat, even if the threat never materializes. Resources are finite and that harms Ukraine’s defense. No doubts from me that Trump is getting encouragement from his pal Putin to keep pushing for Greenland.

It is completely fucked, though. No ‘real’ U.S. citizen wants this, either.

I thought cats domesticated themselves

To be fair, I’m one of the 10,000, so it was novel to me!

Are you saying wheat domesticated early man?

I got my wife a Legion Go in May and immediately installed Bazzite on it. I think I had a few minor issues, but nothing like what this blog post is talking about. It was a shockingly easy process!

And yeah, it totally rules as a gaming machine. I’m honestly jealous and am waiting for generational improvements to happen in the space before I buy another handheld. (Or possibly, I’ll buy the Steam Frame instead.)

In another comment, someone mentioned that it’s not just repayment of interest that profits credit card companies.
Even if you pay all debts monthly before interest can compound, the CC companies still charge processing fees to merchants on a per-transaction basis (which merchants either pass directly to consumers or indirectly through higher prices). They still get their cut, even if you don’t see it on a line item.

Recently I had house work done. The contractor offered to charge me 5% less if I paid with cash or check instead of credit card.

When asked a question.

Interesting idea! I’ve CC’d 2 additional people for their thoughts and linked to a reference page on the intranet that no one will read.

Everyone nods at one another until their heads fall off. No one does any work or makes any decisions.

I was going to ask “What’s your point?” but then I realized that this post isn’t even anti-AI.

The text of this post highlights anticompetitive business practices that have nothing to do with OpenAI’s business model.
Straight up - they can’t even use the silicon wafers.

This is just market manipulation to harm their competition and possibly engage in stock market fuckery. (Micron, which stands to make billions, is largely owned by U.S. based wealth management companies.)

OpenAI and its business partners stand atop a massive bubble that they are desperate to not have pop. I’m horrified, but kind of impressed at the maneuver.

You’re throwing stones in the wrong direction.

The other half are worse: people shouting nonsense at each other.

Not even whimsical nonsense, just nonsense about the maximally efficient way to exchange your labor and/or morality for the idea of financial security.

OnlyFans has steadfastly maintained that it is not explicitly a pornographic site. I imagine if a ruling went out that every tipped interaction on the site was considered pornography, they would step in on behalf of the content creators to try to whittle that down to case-by-case rulings, for no other reason than PR alone.

Tipping into the silly now…

I can’t wait until someone issues a FOIA for the deliberations over whether certain things are pornographic or not.

… I thought that was a vibrator until I zoomed in.

Creepy resemblance.