Minimally.

One does not need to be exceptionally imaginative to think about what things could be done by a christofascist government with the vaguest cover of law. They’ve already tried to float taking guns from all transgender people due to a single shooting. We know that simply by being known to law enforcement that they will target you for harassment and create charges or “confidential criminal informant” testimony to justify destroying your property (see AfroMan) without any means for you to seek compensation or breaking into your home in the middle of the night and murdering you.

Not buy their products. Drag them on social media. Give interest to news stories about the product’s users, not the figurehead of one of the vendors, so the news media focuses on them rather than the distraction. Reach out to your politicians and your friends to discuss how product failures are the result of the company embracing AI and don’t forget to highlight the greed that brought us to this fascist economic system. Use, donate to, or even offer your skills to non-LLM FOSS alternatives. Spend your dollars on companies with scruples. Build your own home lab, give up on all technology, get really into self-sufficiency, and go live in the woods to escape the whole system.

I don’t know… something other than giving in. Literally anything other than that.

For all the focus on Scam Altman, we should probably be focusing on the companies that are so quick to abandon their workers on the promise of saving a few bucks.

Until I saw your comment, my (flippant) response to the person you replied was going to be “Because Congress hasn’t figured out how to use Polymarket.”

Which is a far less eloquent corollary to your comment.

Ah, fuck. I read an article earlier that painted it as an ask for help from Ecuador without the context of the leadership.

I thought “Okay, fair play. I feel weird about it, but I can’t be a geopolitical expert in all things, so I’ll try not to automatically assume it’s bad.”

But… needle solidly swayed.

Yup. Apparently the Clintons testified in front of Congress yesterday regarding the Epstein files. That’s not high on the list headlines today.

Very probable. I was also not the most economically sound back then. I was trying to save money on a $20 can opener!

Can openers is what did it for me.

In 2015 I needed a new manual can opener. The local big-box stores had two basic styles. A cheap, all metal one that was just stamped from a single sheet, and a more expensive one with better handles.
The more expensive one had previously rusted and began to look nasty within a few years.
Amazon had a bunch of different styles at less than the price point of the more expensive one.

I bought one. It was fine. I didn’t love the operation. It cut the whole top off from the side, rather than from the top in a downwards cut. The sharp edges were on the can rather than on the lid. It would catch the paper labels and sometimes wad them up into the can while you cut. Cans with no air space would leak when opened.

Anyway. Replaced it in 2019. Amazon still had a broad selection, but all except for obvious crap was as expensive as the local big box store’s expensive option. Wound up going to a smaller local(ish) bulk foods store and bought a cheapo restaurant one for less than Amazon’s/the big box store’s similar offerings. Minimal rusting to date.

As we saw with his first two impeachments, impeachment is not removal. So long as the cult of personality continues to support him, so too will the Republican Party.

The problem with Gavin Newsom is they could swap him with Billy Crudup doing a bit and I wouldn’t notice.

You don’t even have to reference an article from a year ands half ago.

He literally suggested last week that he would cancel the midterms.

I hear you, but I would imagine that Musk would retaliate by counter-suing the city and/or state, if for no other reason than spite. And would drag the whole thing out for at least as long as the AI infatuation lasts before abandoning the building for officials to deal with.

A single citizen with a drone and a bunch of glass bottles full of petrol dropped onto the generators, however, would shut down operations immediately.

Trump is clearly fucking incapacitated. He needs to be removed under the 25th amendment. But what I see is either an utter lack of strategy, or a strategy of letting the republicans hang themselves (and all U.S. legitimacy along with it) in favor of letting things get to point where a midterm sweep seems likely. Ineptitude or callous political math. Feels like a greasy handshake from someone you know just spent all day alone.

I actually rebalanced my 401k tonight and dumped all my bond holdings and most domestic stocks just an hour or so ago. (I did keep the index funds, though.)
Swapping most of the allocations over to foreign stocks (showing about 35% yearly returns, vs the still good 14% I was netting before). I also threw a small chunk into a gold commodity index fund, which is showing 150% growth in the last year. Risky, but what am I going to do? Live long enough to grow old? In this economy?

I used to have a TCL soundbar.

In addition to being extremely mediocre, it promised to integrate with my WiFi so that music could be airplayed through it. After adding it to my WiFi, it still broadcast the open ‘setup’ WiFi network.

If you joined the setup network, you could SSH into the soundbar as root without a password and dump the dhcp.conf file, which would give anyone access to my home WiFi network. Other TCL models also allowed for root via SSH, but used 12345678 as the password. A skilled hacker could just bot these via wardriving and turn them into network listeners.

It may have still broadcast the setup network because I blocked the device from accessing the internet. I only ever went poking around on it because I noticed that the setup network kept getting set to the same channels as my home network and it was causing interference. I eventually just factory reset the device so it had no information on it at all.
After the umpteenth time of not being found by my TV, a hard reset killed it. Just got stuck booting and never recovered.

Anyway - crap brand. Sad day for Sony TV fans.

I hope that if I’m ever in the papers for abandoning my morals, my oaths, and all dignity in egregiously stupid ways, that my wonton and clear law-breaking is characterized as defiance.

“Oh, no, your honor, I wasn’t breaking all those laws! I was defying them!”

Sithlord.jpg

I will make it illegal!

Misleading post. OP bought a teleporter.

I’ve long humored the idea of ballistic fried chicken.
Fired from a giant cannon, friction cooks it to perfection on its way to you. Sadly, the math and materials science just aren’t on my side. You’d need to be very precise to avoid overcooking, or accidentally pulping the chicken with too high of a muzzle velocity (because then you just have a soup gun). And like, you’d have to have some sort of sabot that disintegrates into edible spices.

Even if you could figure out delivery (and not wind up with it arriving embedded with smog or STARLINK satellites) there’s still the matter of receipt without destroying homes.

When I was younger my grandmother died of cancer. She wanted to pass at home and we lived with her.

For months she just declined, until she was bed-bound in the living room, having carers and family members feed her, clean her after she pooped on herself, sometimes randomly screaming in pain, having nightmares, and was largely incoherent. In the last week she didn’t have the strength to eat and her doctors told us to just stop feeding her. She had a death rattle that lasted for days and echoed through the house every time she breathed, until finally something just gave out.
It was not dignified. It was not peaceful. It was deeply traumatizing. I wish we could cut her suffering short somehow – for us as much as her.