This device is now mandated to watch TV or browse the internet in Germany:

But these sham community engagement exercises piss me off

That’s Google for you: they’ve been doing self-serving open-source for decades.

For instance: they open-sourced Android. That helped Android become the dominant platform and Google capture the cellphone market. Since then, Google has been slowly moving their stuff away from the open-source AOSP and into their proprietary stack, introduced proprietary features that are almost compulsory for a practical, working Android system like Play Protect, and are actively killing deGoogled ROMs.

There’s only one thing to keep in mind with Google: if they do something, it’s not in your interest, and they know how to play long games. Anything they do will be used against you some day.

the people running the show are *also* bumbling fucking morons.

The morons in and around the White House aren’t the ones running the show. They’re puppets, and the puppetmasters are the Heritage Foundation. And THEY are anything but morons.

descent into a kind of fusion of tech and fascism

This isn’t new.

One of the defining traits of fascism is that the private sector is in cahoots with the government. In fact, that’s the root of the words fascism: fasces in Latin means bundle - the bundling of state and private interests.

Corporations have no principles and no morals: whatever will make them more money, they’ll ro-ro with. When it takes colluding with an authoritatian regime, they have no problems getting onboard.

The danger today compared to IBM helping the Nazis is of course that today’s computers are vastly more powerful than mechanical tabulators. This is going to turbocharge the dystopia orders of magnitudes.

And finally, people have been lulled into a false sense of security and convinced to give away a lot more personal information than they should’ve for the past 25 years - the “I have nothing to hide, why do I need privacy?” fallacy. Now they’re going to find out why they should have been careful. I almost want to say “I told you so” every day, having been called a paranoid crackpot for the past 25 years, but it’s so sad and so too late that it isn’t even anything to gloat about…

Removed by mod

I myself was made aware quite recently of just how fucking fascist the UK has become. I shouldn’t’ve been surprised, seeing as though any idiotic thing coming out of the US is parroted without fail in the UK 6 months later. So it stood to reason that the UK would become just as fascist as the US. But just how violently fascist really took me by surprise.

search “Hentai Alien Tentacle Porn” for you

This is suspiciously specific 🙂

Even if it was open source (it isn’t, because no model is really open source ultimately) and even if it let you review what it says it’s gonna do, AI is known for pulling all kinds of shit and lie about it.

Would you really trust your system to something that can do this? I wouldn’t…

I look forward to not installing it.

You can commit treason more than once.

Yeah… Fuck you.

Which one? Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Gummo or Zeppo?

Yeah but they have to set it up. It’s not sold to them ready to exploit - and crucially, Spez doesn’t get to make any money off my back.

My instance doesn’t sell what I write to train AI.

Of course, the AI sumbitches probably scrape Lemmy for content too like they scrape everything for content. But at least Lemmy doesn’t give them my content on a platter, nicely packaged up and ready to exploit and monetize. They have to do the scraping.

It’s Microsoft. Assume surveillance.

No: the waiting time is more like 9 months and fully-loaded, you’re looking at north of €1,800 :)

The point of MNT machines isn’t value for money, but openness and sovereignty over what you own. They’re not for everybody, but my kids are out of the house, the house is paid for and so I have the means to put my money where my convictions are.

But no matter: the point was that Linux ARM laptops really are nothing new.

I’m fascism-intolerant. Different disease, but one I’m proud to suffer from.

Well, Proton can move wherever they want and be as good as they what, I’ll never be a customer again because of what their fuckhead CEO Andy Yen said.

I don’t care that he’s backpedaled, I don’t care that Andy Yen isn’t Proton-the-company, and I’m even willing to accept it was a very unfortunate duh moment on his part. Here the thing: I don’t have many ways as a nobody to get back at Trump, but one way is to not give any of my money to anybody who enabled him, even by mistake.

So Proton is on my shitlist forever thanks to Yen.

A good 10 years. I’ve had zero issues, with my account or my family members’.

“Pave the way for ARM64 laptops?”

I have an ARM64 laptop as my daily driver right here on my desk and it’s happily running Debian 13. The road is quite paved already.