The pre-smartphone years. Where we could just be bored, and let our boredom drive creative thought

Its chin all the way down, baby.

The fries are vegan in Australia ever since they stopped cooking them in beef tallow - around early 2000s iirc.

However, their own website says they offer no menu options certified as vegan or vegetarian, due to cross-contamination being something they don’t wish to deal with.

Understandable as additional prep areas would be quite expensive, but also it’s a pretty weak copout when they could go to the effort of labelling their vegan/vegetarian items (with the asterisked proviso that they may have cross-contam)… I suspect it’s really to allow them to change up menu item suppliers to cheaper alternatives whenever they like, because they also do not bother to label any menu items with allergen info - and that’s very standard across even small cafes nowadays. To find allegen info you have to dig through a PDF that they update every few months.

Well, it’s not really meant to be impressive. If you read that list and you’re like “he seems fine to me”, then let’s just agree we have very different opinions.

Its a CIA-style listening device that people pay for and proudly install and display in their home, gathering data on them, sharing it with Amazon and anyone they care to sell or make that data available to - including police.

Ostensibly all to provide short voice answers and actions they could do privately with their phone in seconds.

Nah, he has a long history since 2012 of being quite conservative and posting dumb takes on Twitter, then in 2016 he stopped pretending he was a libertarian and went full MAGA. Only gotten worse since.

I don’t celebrate his death, because I feel like he is pretty insignificant compared to the real government and social media monsters (Meta, Google, etc) currently shaping the world into a worse place. But I won’t miss him one bit.

Some context and examples : https://cartoonwiki.toonsmag.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Views

Prudism. That’s the take.

Rather read Oglaf any day than this pearl-clutching nonsense.

ICE agents are federal law enforcement officers, working under the DHS.

Anyone calling ICE agents ‘officers’ is stating fact.

“But he is right about diet”

They wrote unironically, about a man with a well-documented history of hosting a tapeworm that damaged parts of his brain, due to eating poorly sourced and poorly prepared pork.

Internet Copilot One X.

A Chromecast is not full of ads, but are they all just Google TV now? Is Google TV full of ads? I haven’t used one.

Could be an option to reset your TV, disconnect it from the Internet, and buy & use a Google TV device instead. The streaming devices seem to have far fewer ads and shit than TV manufacturers cram into their devices nowadays.

The hoops we have to jump through to minimise surveillance capitalism… I see elsewhere in the thread you’ve had to use a PiHole to block most of the TVs traffic.

I’m guessing hes copying the Arc de Triomphe simply because he hasn’t seen the Brandenburger Tor.

I wonder when he’s gonna approach Hugo Boss for new uniforms for the Secret Service.

Spotify streams all music at 160kbps OGG for free users by default, so that’s what this archive is dumped at - the original Spotify content, no transcode. The only difference is they re-encoded all the songs with a ‘popularity’ of zero at a lower bitrate, because that saved an enormous amount of data for all the AI crap pumped into Spotify that nobody listens to.

Side note - it would probably not be possible to do a dump as a paid used (as they would notice a user account is being abused, and ban it), but paid accounts go up to 320kbps OGG and some content is also available lossless (as FLAC).

Anyway, 99%+ of people can’t consistently tell the difference between a 160kbps OGG and lossless, because of limitations in either their equipment, training, ears, or a combination thereof. This has been blind tested many times and the audiophiles that ‘swear they can tell’ are always proven wrong, they then usually blame the equipment or test. There’s tests you can run yourself too, eg here: https://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html

Biden and Obama pardoned a bunch of people (thousands iirc) who were doing long federal sentences for weed possession.

But you know, it’s theatre to justify having the pardon power. The heartwarming story at the end of the daily newsreel of corruption and conflict.

The better solution there is to fucking reschedule it. Treating the burns while the fire still rages is stupid.

Get rid of pardons, their abuse is more damaging than their utility.

I’m sure the paper trail showing what the lobbyists were paid is the mere tip of the iceberg.

There’s no way in hell the founder of a cryptocurrency exchange didn’t give Trump a massive payday of crypto off the books to secure his pardon.

For sure. IKEA is a great place to start (or stay), as it’s a cheap ecosystem and their app/implementation doesnt require permanent internet access - functions fine during an internet outrage, and quite privacy-respecting.

HomeAssistant is not anywhere near as hard to set up as it used to be. If you have an old mini-PC retired from work sitting around there are HA images for PCs now, and it’s pretty simple to set up to use your IKEA hub (or whatever you have already), while adding a huge swath of optional features.

I agree it’s still not something your average Joe will set up, but the continual lowering of barriers will get more people into running a self-hosted local config is a great thing for privacy and expanding the hobby.

There’s an xkcd for everything, isn’t there.

Its not wrong, but the major attraction to Matter is it must allow devices to operate locally (not tying them to cloud services that die every internet outrage, or permanently when the service retires), and it’s an application-layer protocol. Meaning it can operate over WiFi, Ethernet, or Thread.

Many existing smart home hubs have been able to program support for Matter and simply send out an OTA update to add certified Matter support.

The real issue with smart home adoption has been proprietary formats all vying for dominance and fragmenting the market. I don’t think AI has changed much.

Matter (and Thread) are a huge change to the SmartHome landscape because they’re open protocols and have well-documented standards - and they’ve finally begun appearing in big manufacturer’s line-ups such as IKEA.

Once their availability spreads I suspect a lot more people will get into running their own local (eg HomeAssistant) smart home because they won’t have to do the ‘ok do I need z-wave or ZigBee or HomeKit or IFTTT or Hue or Tuya or… you know what, fuck this’. It’ll all be the same protocol and communications and config & debug will be much easier.

Youtu.be is YouTube’s default short URL when clicking the ‘share’ function on videos on mobile iirc. I’ve seen it thousands of times.