The difference, you have to remember, is that the worse stuff is all hurting the people they want him to hurt. But betraying his made in America promises hurts the people who voted for him. That’s when they suddenly start to care.

Sorry, I meant “that and made in the US”, but I get that that’s not what I said.

Thing is, there’s going to be a lot of public attention on that “Made in the USA” claim, given how central it is to Trump’s domestic and foreign policy.

Sure, the FCC can turn a blind eye, but all it takes is for one worker at the assembly plant to call up a journalist. And let’s face, and journalist worth their salt is going to be hanging around every bar near that place. Even trying to screen specifically for MAGA friendly workers won’t help them much when one of those workers feels betrayed by how much of Trump’s product is actually coming from China.

My point is, there’s no good way to keep this under wraps. If they don’t actually build this thing in the US, word is going to get around, and it’s going to be seen as a total repudiation of Trump’s entire tariff strategy.

Except that they’re claiming Android 15, USB-C and 12GB of RAM.

No existing device has that combination of features, plus a headphone jack.

This thing is a fantasy, plain and simple. Nothing about it is real.

Honestly, none that are all that great. I tried Kodi in various forms, LibreElec, OSMC, MythTV, Steam Big Picture, and KDE TV (or whatever its called), but you’re just never going to get a great experience with stuff like Netflix and YouTube on Linux.

In the end, I bought myself an Nvidia Shield, switched out the launcher for one without ads, installed Smart Tube Next for ad-free YouTube, and I couldn’t be happier with the results. I’ve got my apps for Nebula and Dropout. I’ve got Kodi and Jellyfin for my home library. It has barely any power consumption, it boots fast, it runs a huge variety of emulators, the included remote works great (plus there’s a remote app for your phone that controls the entire system), and the wife acceptance factor is exceptional.

I’m really big on self-hosting and building all my own stuff; I use lots of repurposed hardware salvaged from companies I and my friends work at and I try to avoid off the shelf products. But I’m genuinely kicking myself for not buying a Shield sooner. It really is the best TV solution for a self hoster.

I’ll do you one better. I’m upping the ads on mine by 1,000,000x.

It is vitally important to understand that throughout the “potato famine” Ireland was a major exporter of food to the rest of the UK.

Irish farmers were growing all kinds of crops. Grains, carrots, cabbage, lettuce, etc, etc. All of these were sold to pay for the oppressive rents that they were forced to pay to English landlords who had stolen all of their land.

The potatoes the Irish grew were for subsistence, because all of the rest of their crops went to market. Even when the potato crops failed, there was more than enough food for everyone in Ireland, if the English would simply suspend rent collection for a short while, until the crop failures had passed.

Many motions to do so were put before parliament. All of them were rejected.

The Irish famine was not caused by a disease. It was caused by the intentional cruelty of the English.

Yes, the underlying model is the same as Tailscale, Zerotier and Netmaker (also worth checking out, btw). Clients connect to a central host (which can be self-hosted) and use that to exchange information on addresses and open ports, then form direct connections to each other.

We’ve implemented netbird at my company, we’re pretty happy with it overall.

The main drawback is that it has no way of handling multiple different accounts on the same machine, and they don’t seem to have any plans for ever really solving that. As long as you can live with that, it’s a good solution.

Support is a mixed bag. Mostly just a slack server, kind of lacking in what I’d call enterprise level support. But development seems to be moving at a rapid pace, and they’re definitely in that “Small but eager” stage where everything happens quickly. I’ve reported bugs and had them fixed the same day.

Everything is open source. Backend, clients, the whole bag. So if they ever try to enshittify, you can just take your ball and leave.

Also, the security tools are really cool. Instead of writing out firewall rules by hand like Tailscale, they have a really nice, really simple GUI for setting up all your ACLs. I found it very intuitive.

Credit for actually using rhyming slang correctly.

I can’t count the number of times I see characters saying shit like “'Aving a bath” or “Gotta get back to the ol’ trouble and strife.” The whole fucking point is that you say the part that doesn’t rhyme, while using the whole phrase as a mnemonic for the thing that it rhymes with. It’s a code language designed for discussing crimes. It’s not meant to be easily intelligible. If you’re saying the rhyming part it becomes much too easy to work out.

The universal translator is powered entirely by plot and absurdity. Hence why everything Quark says comes out in English, but anything said in Klingon is left untranslated. As for slang, again a definite “maybe” based on what’s established in Darmok.

Basically, don’t think about it too hard, none of it makes sense.

I agree that that would be a real danger, yes.

The key detail is that, like with rear brake lights, they extinguish when the foot is removed from the brake pedal. So it’s not so much the presence of the brake light, but the presence of an inactive brake light that would, serve as a warning that a car is about to start moving. This would be very helpful to drivers on a road when other drivers are pulling out too early from a side road or driveway. That little bit of extra warning is, in many situations, enough for you to pump the brakes, hit the horn, or both.

Airsonic or Navidrome server, plus one of the various Subsonic apps. I like Substreamer or Dsub but there are plenty of other options.

Will everyone here please read the article and learn that they’re using a completely different definition of “populism” to the one you’re imagining, before you start commenting?

Still one of the greatest burns I have ever seen in my life.

Well put. We’re in agreement on all of this, and understanding why Trump is so obsessed with tariffs helps to explain why he is so thoroughly confused about what exactly his tariffs are supposed to achieve. They are, simultaneously, a means of raising government income, a means of repatriating manufacturing, and a means of forcing other countries into more favourable trade terms (any careful examination shows that each of these objectives instantly nullifies the other two; it literally cannot be the case that more than one of these is true). The reason he’s so confused is because he starts with the use of tariffs as his desired outcome and then post-hoc justifies it with whatever reason he’s been given most recently. He wants to force other people to the table, yes, but he also wants to bring manufacturing back, and he also wants to cut taxes and replace them with tariffs, because really he just wants tariffs to be a thing that he does, that succeeds by some definition. The actual definition of success is irrelevant.

A person raising their voice is doing more than a person who chooses to stay silent. Why would you direct your anger at the former rather than the latter?

This idea that anyone “not doing enough” needs to shut up and sit down is exactly the kind of toxic bullshit that fascists want you to consume. They want you to feel that everything has to either be some huge world changing gesture, or it’s just not worth it. Life isn’t like that. Real resistance isn’t about blowing up the Death Star, it’s about thousands, millions of tiny acts of defiance that build upon each other. Every time someone says “this is wrong” someone else is inspired to agree. Every time someone shows up to a protest, someone else is inspired to show up the next time. You don’t change regimes in a day, and you don’t build movements out of nothing. They accumulate, millions of tiny choices gathering together into a vast whole.

Resistance starts in the mind. Fascists want you to think the way you’re thinking, because if you can’t even get to the point of giving a shit about what they’re doing, you’ll never ever get to the point of actually doing something about it.

Refusing to comply really can be as simple as just choosing to call out their evil, every single time. It’s a starting point. It’s easy and trite to say that big trees grow from small acorns, but much harder to really understand what that means, to take into your heart the idea that every single word or act of defiance matters, that enough drops really do make an ocean.

I’m not asking you to plan a revolution. I’m just asking you to give a shit. Because the people telling you to stop giving a shit are the ones who want to do terrible things to your country, and they need your passivity in order to succeed.

TD Cowen (which is basically the US arm of one of the largest Canadian investment banks) did an extensive report on the state of AI investment. What they found was that despite all their big claims about the future of AI, Microsoft were quietly allowing letters of intent for billions of dollars worth of new compute capacity to expire. Basically, scrapping future plans for expansion, but in a way that’s not showy and doesn’t require any kind of big announcement. The equivalent of promising to be at the party and then just not showing up. Not long after this reporting came out, it got confirmed by Microsoft, and not long after it came out that Amazon was doing the same thing.

Ed Zitron has a really good write up on it; https://www.wheresyoured.at/power-cut/

Amazon isn’t the big surprise, they’ve always been the most cautious of the big players on the whole AI thing. Microsoft on the other hand are very much trying to play things both ways. They know AI is fucked, which is why they’re scaling back, but they’ve also invested a lot of money into their OpenAI partnership so now they have to justify that expenditure which means convincing investors that consumers absolutely love their AI products and are desparate for more.

As always, follow the money. Stuff like the three mile island thing is mostly just applying for permits and so on at this point. Relatively small investments. As soon as it comes to big money hitting the table, they’re pulling back. That’s how you know how they really feel.