These bans, first of all I’m certain they became an urgent issue to pass only after social media in the NATO aligned world turned sour on Israel, nothing gets passed so fast with near universal support unless it has to do with pushing the imperialism agenda without calling it imperialism. Geopolitics and surveillance are some of the only topics with near unified positions in the major political parties of a country

Besides that, whatever supposed think of the children faux concern get espoused, I bet on these failing because it doesn’t solve root causes of insecurity nor does it address anyone that is legally an adult. Worries about cost of living, this solution is to try and block kids from knowing too much about that. Scared of war and getting drafted or lose the appeal of of volunteering to join because of social media, ban social media. In the vein of that, kids aren’t patriotic and don’t support historical allies like they used, maybe they don’t look at their countries history including recent history with pride like previous generations, already deciding they don’t want to have children by the time their legal adults - solution is ban social media. The solution is just marketing control rather than improving living standards

That never wanting to address adults things. People settle into their beliefs once they have to start taking responsibility for themselves. So new legal adult through their 20s. Really that period might as well be the age of adult children since we’re in school so long now and take so long now to hit adult milestones like owning a home so it seems like people these days chase youth/escapism well into their 30s. This whole period of life is rife for radicalization and developing of antisocial behaviors but we only ever want to talk about the children with solutions that won’t fix their fundamental issues of financial, health, transportation, whatever insecurities of an adult they will inevitably face. I’ve been hearing all about focusing on children since they’re still developing while adults are lost causes for decades now. It’s becoming clear to me that no one wants to tackle problems of adulthood even though we live in countries with aging populations with less and less children enough that we’re now seeing student populations shrinking causing school closures and district mergers

If they didn’t screw up locals power and water prices, they wouldn’t have so much popular blowback. Noise complaints have been a thing about crappy data centers for a long time. Two, employment is just a short surge to build and fit them out. Data centers aren’t employing people long term like non-automated manufacturing hubs. You’re not getting a hundreds of thousands member strong data center workers of America union to champion new builds. I haven’t come across a city where damn near everyone I meet works in relation to a data center. At least not yet. I do find that for damn near every sort of manufacturing/warehouse giant employers

Newtypes are the future. Those whose souls aren’t weighed down by earths gravity will chart humanity a path that saves earth from the gluttonous earthnoids

On the higher end of action cameras, it’s GoPro, DJI, and Insta360 that are very good. They are better than the budget brands. Problem being the budget brands are still pretty good. It follows phones. Before small camera sensors sucked. By like 2015 it reached a point of good enough for the vast majority of people. Good enough 1080p for YouTube. Then 4k came along and the same thing happened where camera sensors at the budget level became good enough for the vast majority of people. So it doesn’t matter if you find people in video communities all trying to get people to buy the $300+ GoPro or DJI action cam or else they’ll regret it, plenty of people will try the ~$100 ones and find them very good for their use case

DJI at least has an evolving drone business. GoPro exists as an experience enhanced brand where the experience enhanced is being undercut by other competitors and on the premium end, DJI sells more stuff and people have a habit of buying stuff from brands they already have. So if you have any thoughts of shooting video with a drone, for an action cam you’ll probably buy DJI. Just want to strap a camera to your helmet or whatever, any of the plethora of ~$100 action cameras will do. GoPro’s lane has shrunken. It has premium competitors while not being competitive for the entry level

Back when it was only Roku boxes, I don’t recall any ads at all on the home screen. Then when I got a TV with Roku built in, I recall it also being zero ads. That was like 10 years for the Roku TV where it still had no ads on the homescreen of the RokuOS. Then they added that big right banner ad. It was that for a number of years and then they added a row at the top advertising some streaming apps. Then they started this beta program for the new layout and they jacked up the size of the content advertisement space and pushing your stuff further down where your cursor focus defaults at when starting the TV/Roku. The expanding presense of advertisement icons have been pretty rapid.

Roku used to be have no advertisements. Then they started trying to be a digital storefront for movies/tv and that was just a button on the side list menu. Then they started adding advertisements more and more

Altman can try to hype up how everyones going to subscribe to them someday all the while their subscriber base is being eaten up by competitors.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-projects-chatgpt-plus-subscriptions-to-drop-by-80-from-44-million-in-2025-to-9-million-in-2026-made-up-using-cheaper-subscriptions-somehow/

Local stuff. I still believe the small parameter, ~1B free local, ones will suffice for the vast majority of how people use LLMs and there’s still going to be a few years of improvements there until investments dry up. Eventually I bet more and more phone companies will include one of these small ones out the box. Pretty much like a nice search engine that works offline like if you’re out on a major hike. Cloud stuff, there’ll be stuff like Proton’s Lumo where they’re taking free open weight stuff and piecing them together for users.

OpenAI’s thing is they’ll make up for falling subscribers with advertising. So pretty much we’re advancing fast in the search engine race of the 90s/early aughts. We’ll at least have Gemini. ChatGPT maybe ends up crashes in value someday and bought up by Microsoft or some other company. Deepseek, Qwen, Kimi. Claude like ChatGPT maybe survices or crashes and gets adsorbed by another company. Proton continue to exist as the company making AI products out of free stuff. Eventually the pace of improvements moves at a crawl and it’s pointless to be paying for the best paywalled stuff. Just use the free stuff like how everyone mostly uses free search engines

It’ll be packaged up in plasma 6.7, I think mid June. Then it’ll be easy for distros to make it available. I want to try it but I don’t want to change distro or build it myself. When 6.7 rolls out, I got my computer plugged into my TV with CachyOS handheld edition. Right when Plasma 6.7 is available in the Arch repos, I’m installing it

My understanding is that they pushed it to some people as a beta and eventually they would roll out the update to everyone even if they opted out of the beta. I opted out to go back to the not as bad homescreen and blocked it from the Internet in my router settings

Centimeter by centimeter getting people towards signal and matrix chats

I’ve defaulted to ddg for like 2 years now. Solid. Good enough. Really what happened is that SEO optomization websites even before the AI craze made Google search so awful that ddg became just as good if not better for me than google

If they get out some solid linux drivers, I’d buy one. Same thing for me when it comes to anything risc-v. I’m buying out of interest in a new alternative

Assuming you meant drm free books

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/p/drm-free

Not every book on kobo is drm free from what I remember so keep an eye on that

It’s like how the US can block mergers between companies that aren’t based in the US. Companies want to operate in these markets. If a major regulator says no, they have two options. Remove themselves from the market the regulator that denies them regulates or spin off into multiple companies if that’s actually possible operationally for the multiple companies to exist. Somalia regulators can block an acquisition in their country but that wouldn’t change much for the company as Somalia has a small market and little international influencer. If China or the US or the EU say no, a company that wants to operate internationally will lose a huge market and will now have a way more difficult time doing business from other companies that operate multinationally

2020 plain clothes federal agents kidnapping people to makeshift prisons and the none of that really being addressed should have been an ey opening for people to view their greatest threat being the government they live under. Same with the Snowden leaks and rather than that becoming illegal, much of of progressively becoming legal going forward. Maybe some even made retroactively legal

I keep thinking maybe things will good by 2030 and remember that’s 4 years away. Game devs please target the Steam Deck and Switch 2 as the baseline. Mid range and high end is just too premium for most people. Even entry level enthusiast gaming hardware is too expensive because of memory and storage. Steam Deck and Switch 2 are good low power draw integrated graphics level. That’s not terrible for pricing

Yup. For all the making fun of chinesium (socially acceptable racism often when people talk about chinese products. Very clear when one scoffs at a taiwanese product as being trash because chinese but then walks it back when they learn it’s of taiwanese origin), in my life I’ve seen chinese phones, audio products, and cars go from scoffed at to being well regarded in enthusiast communities.

I saw it in other hobbies of mine. Not long ago people only talked about Japanese and German chef knives - Chinese knives must be trash. Then eventually people started to try out Chinese knives that weren’t just grocery store bargain stuff. Now progressively people are trying knives from Vietnam. Turns out people have been making knives in these countries for thousands of years. Not as bad but maybe worse is when a person I knew told me they were at first surprised to learn movies were made around the world rather than just being in hollywood, english language. Went from American and European made video game peripherals dominating to more and more chinese competitors like 8bitdo, aula, whatever.

In my lifetime, earlier if it said made in South Korea of made in Taiwan, the assumption was poor quality. Hyundai was scoffed at until like the mid 2010s in my experience. I’m told Japanese products were scoffed at as poor quality until like the end of the 70s and then you had major strikes and violence against Asian American people in the rust belt as anti-Japanese sentiment primarily in regards to competition for autoworkers and steel. Now Japanese made is fully regarded as high quality and the desire to compete in quality+value+parts+serviceability doesn’t seem to be of much interest to US or European automakers (that parts availability and serviceability is major)

I imagine it the same as decades back with Korean and Taiwanese made goods, you get you pay for. If you start on the premise that a $200 Chinese product should be as good or better than like a $500 American product, that’s a nonsense expectation to have. People will go from a $1200 iPhone and use a $200 Ulephone and determine that $800 phone from a company with a Chinese sounding name, name of their CEO, are trash unless it turns out that that Chinese sounding name company is headquartered in Taiwan or Singapore

We’re in a mature software stage for these art software applications. Easier to catch up than create new features that people make essential to their workflow. Today it’s commercial alternatives that have closed the gap well enough. Someday in the future open source stuff will. It’s inevitable

He was probably always like this to a degree. Thing to keep in mind is that political alignments when it comes to voting blocs aren’t all or nothing. Even if historically Chapelle has voted democratic, that doesn’t mean he cared for everything equally or at all and this applies very much to black people and racial minorities in the US and western European countries and leftist parties as those parties are seen as less racist parties so you really don’t have as much leeway to vote for other issues when your safety and basic rights as a minority group are more of a concern over stuff like economic/immigration/healthcare/sexuality/gender/etc policies. Like Chapelle will dependably care for politics that are pro-black Americans but any other race, I’m skeptical he actually cares and very likely doesn’t care for matters of gender and sexuality. In regards outside of social black american policies, he may very well be firmly conservative. It just wasn’t good for his brand earlier in his career

Similar vein would be like the past decade of popular rappers being way more embracing of the republican party than in the past. Like Snoop Dogg, Lil Wayne, Nicki Minaj. Like do Beyonce and Jay-Z really care about the working class or other races. Jay Z was a crack dealer and in the Epstein papers and Beyonce has consistently made use of sweatshop labor and been ruthless with her touring employees. Social progressives in regards to the what they identify with, conservative in regards to their money and possibly other identities.

Racism is still a problem but this isn’t the 70s. It’s not that surprising considering how mainstream homophobia a lot of rap used to be up to the early 2010s. So as multiculturalism continues to become more and more normal, I have expected for a long time for left/right voting splits by race to trend towards 50/50. In the past openly conservative actors/musicians/comedians/entertainers/etc were a lot more common. I’m guessing the civil rights movements going mainstream is what changed that. Then as the civil rights movements that had huge swaths of people could identify with starting passing some good enough threshold, demographic based civil rights becomes more niche and parties have to experiment with messaging and being a conservative entertainer/artist stops being career suicide

I think there should be some healthy skepticism for actors and their actual political alignments. It’s been practically required for public relations for entertainers to be seen as leftist but at the studio executive and I expect at the funding source producer level, there’s always been a high percentage of conservative representation. And publicly rich leftist, I’ve never seen them as eager to fund leftist political causes like publicly rich conservatives. Well known advocate for victims of sexual abuse, Ashton Kutcher, was quick to defend his close friend and serial rapist from that 70s Show. Stories of him and Wilmer Valderrama make them both sound predatory towards young women/girls.

Like their shouldn’t be any genetic reason why white people should be more conservative across the board of polices. The same really for LGBTQ people being progressive which is why I’m never surprised about the existence of conservative people of LGBTQ backgrounds. People always mention how western European politics are so much more leftist than American but to me that only really applies to the social safety net but that doesn’t apply to overall policy in regards to capitalism, immigration, foreign policy/imperialism-racism outside of their own borders. As non-white populations in European countries increase, to me it looks like race politics and racism have become more and more reflective of the US. I have doubts the social safety nets in Europe would have ever been passed if at the times their populations were as racially diverse as the US was in the 50s-80s

Dave Chappelle the older he’s gotten, the more he’s punched down. It’s not like he wasn’t doing that when he was younger, he just got worse and worse over time. Then he tried to be one of the good ol’ boys and just wasn’t rich or influential enough to fit in and now he wants to pretend he isn’t a crappy person deep down. It’s a bit hard to make it far in entertainment if you aren’t pretty self-centered and opportunistic. He just unmasked to the crowd that weren’t his audience and now he wants back in with the younger crowd again

I remember a study that had Duolingo as the most egregious data collector by far on people’s phone