America and the "if you're doing nothing wrong you have nothing to hide" / "police don't need body cameras" duality. You really cannot trust the typical person to be attempting cognition.

Are your two chips in Framework Desktops, or some other package? I'm interested in a unified memory setup and curious about the options.

Could humanity keep some things for personal enjoyment and enrichment? As a treat?

The introduction of the baggage fee means more travelers will carry their suitcases. Without that, they might not have the opportunity to grab their bags.

I’m sure they do. But you can see the results of the current administration here.

They are lying.

It's a problem how many people seemingly have broken lie detectors these days. I blame social media for this one: far too easy to find a truthy bubble that validates your beliefs.

They say much worse things about me! Donald Trump, the leader of the MAGA people, released a Christmas greeting calling me scum (https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1157772703684...) - I've never done that and would never do that to even my worst political opponents. I don't understand why people persist in drawing this false equivalence. Are you in a media bubble where you don't see the things Trump says and does?

We lost civilization to advertising IMO. It feels like the majority of all technology is built around monetizing clicks. Astrophysicists are working at Stitch Fix.

Hear hear. Ban all advertising. We could do it slow.

Start by banning all gambling and drug commercials. That's like 20% of all commercials right there. This is already normal in other countries.

Then ban all billboards. People hate them already.

Then the big one, ban targeted advertising. With personalized ads gone, all of the incentives that make data collection profitable are gone.

Of course there will still be bad actors that want data mining to continue. But right now you can't even read 95% of websites because they have popups that make you agree to data mining just to get in. I'll be searching for like, a recipe and they want my name, device IP, browser fingerprint, and anything else they can pinch.

I'm searching for a nice spinach salad recipe. I go to google

First it fires up an LLM, which will run a GPU in an AI data center that they probably cleared a forest to build.

I just made nvdia stronger. I just helped pump their AI "adoption" numbers. And I helped train an AI that will help layoff me and my friends.

As always I run the search again with "-noai" at the end. Now I'm searching twice for no reason. The results were better, and faster 10 years ago.

It gives me results and I click the first link. A video that I can't pause starts auto playing. This recipe isn't that good so I go back and find another. I need to click the back button 4 times.

I try another link. And get another pop up. I opt into data mining this time because uBo is having trouble with the full page transparent overlays. Now they have my data to sell to 3rd party intermediaries that will sell them to companies like palantir and cambridge analytica. Every search builds a little more of my "shadow profile".

Maybe I should have just gone to the library and taken a picture. All I wanted was a salad recipe and I've now helped train the system that made brexit possible. I've helped nvdia. I've helped the very AI datacenters that I hate. I've helped the data miners.

The experience of using a computer in 2025 is exhausting. Particularly search engines. They used to work so good. They used to be so fast.

You probably recall when Google first came out, using that over Yahoo browse by category was a sea change in terms of finding things. That was the peak. People were still hesitant to put their credit card info so the majority of the internet was just labors of love. It was like a library. Now it is like a casino.

It was. And yet... Sometimes I wish I still had a curated list of links by category to browse. Does anybody know of anybody who maintains something like that these days?

I think I somewhat agree with the author but I find the idea of a single account completely unappealing. My view on the benefits of federation is that you don't have a single entity gating your access. Having multiple accounts is a benefit.

Which users? I typically dislike TikTok and other shorts but the platforms seem to be wildly popular even despite my opinions.

I was soured on ARM SBCs by the Orange Pi 5, which does not have an option to ignore its SD card during boot. Something trivial on basically every x86 platform I had been taking for granted.

I recognize their username. I would say it is deliberate that they overlook seriously concerning events in a manner that is patronizing and disrespectful to the people they disagree with.