So, the elephant in the room is Chrome killing ad-blocking.

I think that Firefox (and Firefox forks, like Zen Browser) have low-enough marketshare that websites that depend on ad revenue may just kill support for Firefox if Firefox does permit ad blocking.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

As of February:

Chrome: 66.3%

Safari: 17.99%

Edge: 5.33%

Firefox: 2.62%

The software used to view the Web in 2025 is really mostly under the control of either Google or Apple.

I spent a while when choosing a laptop a while back trying to compare based on how many watt-hours the battery could provide, so I think that that’s a useful metric, but I don’t know how easy it’s going to be to mechanically dig that up for all the laptops out there.

The overall goal is to cut the agency’s budget by fifty percent. Shedd suggested using AI to analyze contracts for redundancies, root out fraud, and facilitate a reduction in the federal workforce by automating much of their work.

I am bullish on AI in the long run.

I am skeptical that given the state of affairs in 2025, you can reasonably automate half of the federal government, via AI or any other means.

I also don’t think that the way to do this is to lay off half of the federal workforce and then, after the fact, see what can be automated. If you look at the private sector automating things, it tends to hedge its bets. Take self-service point-of-sale kiosks. We didn’t just see companies simply lay off all cashiers. Instead, we saw them brought in as an option, then had the company look at what worked and what didn’t work – and some of those were really bad at first – and then increase the rate of deployment once it had confidence in the solution and a handle on the issues that came with them.

Armed with this new tool, which enables raw access to Bluetooth traffic, Targolic discovered hidden vendor-specific commands (Opcode 0x3F) in the ESP32 Bluetooth firmware that allow low-level control over Bluetooth functions.

In total, they found 29 undocumented commands, collectively characterized as a “backdoor,” that could be used for memory manipulation (read/write RAM and Flash), MAC address spoofing (device impersonation), and LMP/LLCP packet injection.

Espressif has not publicly documented these commands, so either they weren’t meant to be accessible, or they were left in by mistake.

I’d kind of like to know whether these can be used against an unpaired device or not. That’d seem to have a pretty dramatic impact on the scope of the vulnerability.

I’ve been telling myself since about 2016 that I would save up to go all in and build a solid gaming desktop.

Finally, I was at the point of “Fuck it, I’m tired of waiting. I’m buying a 5080, even if it costs as much as 2 PS5s.”

I assume that whatever you’re running right now isn’t terribly new if you’ve been thinking about upgrading for nine years.

The 5080 is a 16GB card. A quick skim on Amazon suggests that 16GB Nvidia cards are in short supply, but that you can get a 16GB AMD GPU without problems.

https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare/4982vs5721vs4917/Radeon-RX-7600-XT-vs-GeForce-RTX-5080-vs-Radeon-RX-7800-XT

They aren’t quite as fast on the Passmark benchmark as the 5080, but they also cost a lot less (even if the 5080 were available), and I assume that they’d be a lot faster than whatever you’re running now.

Could go with that (or something less-fancy) and then if you felt that you wanted to spend more for more performance, do so when GPUs become available.

I mean, people do use the Web UI.

I was reading some articles the other day, and the impression I have is that that’s really not true for at least Trump.

The Trump route was more:

• Conservatives in the US felt that media had a liberal bias. Whether it did or didn’t doesn’t matter for this discussion — that was the perception.

• Fox News offers a viewpoint appealing to conservatives. It becomes essentially the only mainstream conservative media outlet. Liberal viewers watch a variety of news media, but Fox News dominates among conservatives.

• Fox News — already somewhat opinion-based from the start — starts to veer off into conspiracy land. Because so many conservatives watch Fox News, this has a major impact.

There’s some back and forth here. It’s not that Fox just pushed ideas that were out there, but that they’re willing to show material based on what people will watch, and they gained more viewers than they lost if they ran bonkers stuff.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/08/media/fox-news-hoax-paperback-book/index.html

There wasn’t really any major center-right mainstream news source other than Fox News, so if Fox shifts into conspiracy-land, so does the conservative public.

I dunno. Maybe the answer is something like a news source somewhere between CNN and Fox News. Something that a conservative audience is comfortable watching, but doesn’t fly off the handle to the degree that Fox has. It maybe can’t capture an audience that’s as large, but it only needs enough to be viable.

I mean, there are center-right media sources like the Wall Street Journal, but those are kinda not aimed at mass audiences.

So, to expand on that, at least in US law (and I’d assume elsewhere), if you let people use your trademark for other products and don’t legally challenge it, the trademark can become genericized, which means that you lose the exclusive right to use it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark

I don’t know if that was the concern here, but generally, it’s true that there’s an obligation on trademark holders to actively defend their trademarks or lose them.

Hey everyone,

Unfortunately, I have to take down this project. The team at Playstack reached out to me in a very polite and professional manner, requesting its removal, and I fully respect their wishes.

So, during the Cold War, the US had some very direct interests in European security. The US did not want Moscow conquering Europe, then exploiting European capability and resources against the US.

That’s probably not any kind of a near-term risk in the post-Cold-War era. Even the people who are very concerned about Russia and feel that it could do very real harm in Europe don’t see Russia overrunning all of Europe in the near future. Too big for Russia’s mouth to take in one bite.

And Europe has a lot of potential, much larger economy than does Russia. I remember seeing a statistic somewhere that today, Russia is spending more on defense than all of Europe.

kagis

https://breakingdefense.com/2025/02/russia-overtakes-all-of-europe-on-defense-spending-in-key-metric-iiss-military-balance/

Russia overtakes all of Europe on defense spending in key metric: IISS military balance

The spending figures included in the think tank’s newly published Military Balance report also show that in real-terms, Russia’s military expenditure increased by over 40 percent in 2024.

But…Europe’s still got that much larger economy. So even if Europe is not ready and may not want to spend more on defense, it can if it has the political will to do so, and one can probably assume that Europe would, if push came to shove, spend more rather than simply watching as Russia slowly clomped across Europe.

But…I’m not sure that I’d say that the US doesn’t have some substantial interests in Atlanticism. For one, China is going to be trying to expand its influence and control in the world. China may not primarily be trying to expand its influence through hard power, even though it is certainly building out its military and power projection capabilities. It may aim to use economic and political pressures. Europe’s a more-important player there. It does have economic clout comparable to the US.

One of the points I’ve brought up before is that one of the critical capabilities feeding into both economic and probably military capabilities in the US-China situation is chipmaking. The US government paid to bring extreme ultraviolet lithography to the prototype phase…but then they dropped it. It was the Dutch who took it from there to a commercial state. The US is going to care a lot about China not having access to that technology, and the US continuing to have access to it.

When the US was pushing hard to get people not to use Huawei 5G infrastructure, they were promoting Sweden’s Ericsson or Finland’s Nokia. I don’t know how the situation has developed subsequent to that, but the reason they were doing so was because the US doesn’t have a domestic company that fills that role – we had the Senate talking about buying one of those two companies if Europe wasn’t willing to support them, because it was a strategic weakness the US had vis-a-vis China.

There are probably a bunch of others, but those are specific technologies that come to my mind.

Point is, there are capabilities that Europe has that the US does care about as regards China and wants onside. I think that it’s probably true that the US is inevitably going to focus more on China over time, and less on happenings in Europe’s neighborhood than in the past. But I’m skeptical that it’s in US interests to outright end Atlanticism. And one of the things that the US can bring to the table that does have value to Europe is a considerable amount of hard power.

Are Asia-Pacific allies next?

I would guess not. The Project 2025 stuff is full of material concerned about China. I don’t think that the US is backing out of the Pacific at all. I’d expect the opposite.

Honestly, the “Pivot to Asia” has been kind of getting talked about since…what, at least Obama? But then there’s always been something happening since then, most notably Russia hitting Ukraine. Some degree of realignment was inevitably going to happen, even if not as abruptly or impolitely as with Trump.

kagis

Looks like the phrase was associated with the Obama administration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_asia

U.S. President Barack Obama’s East Asia Strategy (2009–2017), also known as the Pivot to Asia, represented a significant shift in the foreign policy of the United States since the 2010s. It shifted the country’s focus away from the Middle Eastern and European sphere and allowed it to invest heavily and build relationships in East Asian and Southeast Asian countries, especially countries which are in close proximity to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) either economically, geographically or politically to counter its rise as a rival potential superpower.[1]

Additional focus was placed on the region with the Obama administration’s 2012 “Pivot to East Asia” regional strategy,[2] whose key areas of actions are: “strengthening bilateral security alliances; deepening our working relationships with emerging powers, including with China; engaging with regional multilateral institutions; expanding trade and investment; forging a broad-based military presence; and advancing democracy and human rights.”[3] A report by the Brookings Institution states that reactions to the strategy were mixed, as “different Asian states responded to American rebalancing in different ways.”[2]

Since 2017, the United States has readjusted its policy toward China through FOIP, replacing the concept of the “Pivot to Asia” or “Asia-Pacific” with the “Indo-Pacific strategy”.[4][5]

I wouldn’t be surprised if it was discussed under the Bush administration, though, even if it didn’t rise to the level of a formally-named thing.

Google and Apple and others already do that ad hoc, using signal strength from Bluetooth and WiFi beacons. Can contribute to that by just setting up a wireless access point or several near where you want more signal. Doesn’t even need to be Internet-connected.

Well, that’s a pleasant piece of news among a number of not-so-pleasant news items.

Reddit will now issue warnings to users who “upvote several pieces of content banned for violating our policies” within “a certain timeframe,” starting first with violent content, the company announced on Wednesday.

Hmm. What does this pertain to?

kagis

https://www.theverge.com/news/606904/reddit-rules-bans-violence-doxing-elon-musk-doge

Reddit has seen an increase in rule-breaking posts across “several communities,” and it has issued a temporary ban on one that featured users calling for violence against people who work for the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

That community, r/WhitePeopleTwitter, was given a 72-hour ban on Tuesday, as reported by Engadget. Screenshots shared on X show multiple examples of the threatening posts. Musk later reposted the screenshots, claiming that the users have “broken the law.”

In a note on the subreddit, Reddit says it was banned “due to a prevalence of violent content” and that “inciting and glorifying violence or doxing” violate Reddit’s rules. An unnamed Reddit admin said the ban was meant to be a “cooling-off period” for the community.

Reddit also gave a full ban to a subreddit called r/IsElonDeadYet for violating rules “against posting violent content.” The unnamed admin said Reddit is taking steps “to ensure all communities can provide a safe environment for healthy conversation” in a post on r/RedditSafety.

Ah.

Wick posted the code for a tool that automatically downloads DMs from Twitter accounts. The code specifies Twitter accounts, which existed only until the social platform rebranded to “X” in October 2023, suggesting the possibility that the tool could be used to search through the digital past of government employees looking for disagreeable opinions or references.

Another tool appeared to be designed for collecting sensitive data from government agency org charts. The tool contained fields for capturing the employee’s office, a 1-5 satisfaction rating, union status, and whether or not their position is statutorily mandated.

Well, that’s interesting. The guys who are determining who to lay off are apparently using union status as an input.

Is the Executive Branch taking someone’s union status into account in making a firing decision legal? I’m pretty sure that it’s not for private business.

https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/discriminating-against-employees-because-of-their-union

Discriminating against employees because of their union activities or sympathies (Section 8(a)(3))

It is unlawful to discourage (or encourage) union activities or sympathies “by discrimination in regard to hire or tenure of employment or any term or condition of employment.” For example, employers may not discharge, lay off, or discipline employees, or refuse to hire job applicants, because they are pro-union.

I believe that that also applies to government. That seems like it might be some pretty juicy meat for the public sector union lawyers to work with.

Ehhh. I mean, technically yes, but a proxy for search engine requests is probably functionally equivalent to the end user.

Also, if users don’t know that such a thing exists and goes looking for a “search engine”, they likely also want this.

One of my personal pet peeves is power stations — a big lithium-ion battery pack hooked up to a charge controller and inverter and USB power supply and with points to attach solar panels — being called a “solar generator”. It’s not a generator, doesn’t use mechanical energy. But…a lot of people who think “I need electricity in an outage” just go searching for “generator”. I don’t like the practice, but I think that the aim is less to deceive users and more to try to deal with the fact that they functionally act in much the same role and people might not otherwise think of them.

I am less sympathetic to vendors who do the same with calling evaporative coolers “air conditioners”. Those have some level of overlap in use, but are substantially different devices in price and capability.

Speaking as a consumer of news sources, it doesn’t really help me whether a news publication includes some kind of automated analysis, because I’m really concerned about bias originating from the news source, not the specific writer. Even if it actually works, the news publication is the one that selects the systems used to conduct that analysis. It’s maybe useful for the news publication in identifying bias from the writers working there, but they don’t need to publish that.

However, the idea of running some kind of text classifier to grade an article automatically on metrics like that from a party who isn’t the news source itself is maybe more interesting. Like, I can imagine having a coterie of bots that run here on the Threadiverse, run an automated classification of an article and post it on said article, for example, and then one could block bots that one isn’t interested in seeing.

I think that if one wants to change this, it probably involves some kind of regulation that affects how people shop, or at least a shift in social norms, so that some kind of metric of over-time cost is prominently featured next to the up-front price on goods.

We’ve seen shifts like that before.

There was a point in time where it was normal, in the United States, to haggle over the prices of goods. It really wasn’t all that long ago. Today, that virtually doesn’t exist at all, except for over a very few big-ticket items, like cars and houses.

The change started when some people…I think Quakers…decided to start selling their goods with a no-haggle policy. NPR Planet Money did an episode on it some time back…lemme see if I can go dig it up.

Yeah, here we are:

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/415287577

That wasn’t driven by regulation, but by consumer preference. Consumers (usually, outside maybe upscale restaurants) demand to see the up-front cost of something they buy before buying it. So it’s possible that if costs keep shifting from the up-front cost that we can readily see at the time of purchase into over-time costs that we cannot as readily see, we might see consumers just refuse to buy items from retailers that don’t also show some kind of a reasonable over-time cost also visible.

Or maybe the government could require some level of disclosure of over-time costs to be shown when selling an item, they way they standardized display of credit card interest rates.

I should qualify that – I don’t know for sure whether and which distros enable updates to run non-interactively. fwupd has the ability to do so and it’s billed as doing so on its github page, but that doesn’t mean that a distro has to actually take advantage of that. Could be that in a default configuration on a given distro, it only updates stuff next time you invoke it.

The only reason I’d guess that it might not run automatically is that some devices do not deal well with power loss during firmware updates, and I can imagine that a distro – which has no way of knowing when a user might start flipping power switches – might want more-conservative settings. Might be something like the last bit of distro installation, but they might not want to run during normal operation.

But yeah, I bet that Louis Rossman didn’t think of that either when he was talking about using USB connectivity to prevent firmware updates.

EDIT: I also vaguely remember reading something claiming that smart TVs from some manufacturer that are not connected to the Internet were using nearby smart TVs of the same brand and within WiFI range that can reach the Internet for Internet connectivity. Ordinarily, I’d say that that’s not generally an issue for most devices, but printers often do have wireless networking capability, so probably one more at least theoretical vector via which a printer might potentially reach the Internet. I have not read any claims of a printer doing this, though. I also don’t know whether-or-not those claims for the smart TVs were legitimate, but they are technically-possible to do, so…shrugs

If we reach a point where an AI can summarize a video to that degree and provide background summaries, I’d happily use it. I mean, I’d mark the origin, but nah, this is just me.