It keeps our AI overlords out of reach of mobs with torches and pitchforks.

Seriously, we’ve already got Flock, Palantir, Boston Dynamics, and fascism – we’re like one step away from killbots mowing dissidents down in the street.

Plot twist: it’s actually a whole SoC packaged to look like a single transistor, with the pins being for +V, ground, and a 1-Wire data bus.

I don’t know that such a thing exists, but these days I bet it could.

It’s funny how few people realize that etymology.

This is no different than people choosing to stay in a relationship with an abusing partner.

I say that about Windows users who jump through hoops to try to disable the spying and they get mad at me, LOL.

Found Adam Ragusea’s Lemmy account.

Except that, as this shit shows, it clearly isn’t. You can pay AND you still get exploited anyway!

The ONLY choice that will protect you in the long run is capital-F Free Software, with zero tolerance for proprietary shit whether zero-price or paid. That’s not even some sort of leftist ideological position at this point; that’s just a statement of fact.

That calls for an escalation to small claims court.

Yet another reason why antitrust law is important. The same entity shouldn’t be able to shut off your email because you had a dispute over an entirely separate product.

Recompiling the kernel is a privilege, not an obligation!

People will play this like “Fucking hey! I aced that bike segment first time!” all proud of their gaming skills when the reality is you did absolutely nothing, my brother.

I wonder if actually trying makes it more difficult. Does it actually let you crash into stuff and miss jumps, or does it just override your mistakes even harder?

Last I checked (which, admittedly, was a few years ago) I literally couldn’t find any security cameras that weren’t compromised in some way. The only options are basically:

• Consumer models tied to “cloud” services
• Generic Chinese ONVIF cameras that probably phone home to who knows where unless you firewall them off from the Internet
• ONVIF cameras that might have a slightly better reputation than the previous category but are only sold through security system installers, not normal retail channels
• Analog (not IP) cameras that you hook up via coaxial cable
• Building your own goddamn camera from scratch with a Raspberry Pi or something

It’s ridiculous!

For TVs, there used to be the option of Sceptre dumb TVs, but even those have disappeared from the market in the last year or so.

I’ve been looking for a smartwatch/fitness tracker (and a bike computer, which is kind of a similar category) and the pickings seem very slim there, too. There’s the Pebble and the PineTime, which are open but maybe lack some of the sensors one might want in a fitness tracker, and there’s stuff that’s intended to be proprietary but supported by Gadgetbridge (e.g. iGPSPORT bike computers) . There might be others, but I don’t know about them.

It’s fuckin’ bleak, y’all. I’m at the point where I’m seriously considering building almost all my own tech out of Raspberry Pis and/or ESP32s because that’s easier than searching for needles in the infinite haystack of surveillance capitalist slop!

The Slate EV also doesn’t actually exist yet.

Depends if it’s a bowtie or long tie.

What do you mean, “wait for?” We’re already in one!

I look forward to having Grace Hopper chips remanufactured onto ATX boards in half a decade or so, but it’s still cold comfort that we can’t have affordable hardware today.

I just saw a video yesterday on hacking old bitcoin mining GPUs to unlock their RAM and PCI bandwidth and whatnot for general-purpose use. Desperation is the mother of invention, after all.

The problem isn’t that it can’t be done, it’s that the manufacturing cost vs. labor cost in the US stops it from making economic sense. They do repair and reuse electronics in places like China (that’s where those modified GPUs with extra RAM and cheap desktop motherboards with old Xeon CPUs on them you find on EBay and Aliexpress come from, for example), but that’s because the technicians doing the work get paid a lot less than skilled people would be willing to accept here.

I’ve tried to use ZeroTier because Tailscale still has centralized servers for starting the connection, but had trouble getting it to work. Maybe I should stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

My stuff is only accessible from my LAN (because I haven’t figured out how to set up a tunnel or reverse proxy yet).

But why won’t any other country do it either? Or are these ads only displaying to US IP addresses?