I’d be fine with hissy fits if they were about something real.

Plus, is this sending my data to HP to be processed remotely as a cloud service, or is this AI stuff being run locally? I don’t especially want to have the contents of my print jobs being sent to HP.

There are some open-source systems for media PCs.

Kodi seems to me to be popular, though I don’t use a media PC myself.

You’ll need to have the technical knowledge to install it yourself.

I’m not really gung-ho about mandatory approaches either, like with licensing, but for an optional approach:

• I have to be able to assess a device and its drawbacks with a reasonable amount of knowledge and time spent researching it.

• There has to be at least one option on the market that does what I want.

For cars, at least, we’re really getting to the point where it’s not practical to get a new car without a cell data link that phones home.

And trying to stay atop of the privacy issues for all classes of device out there can’t be a full-time job, or it’s not reasonable to expect people to make informed purchasing decisions. Like, I should just be able to say that I don’t want a device that broadcasts any persistent unique IDs in plaintext over a radio, not have to research whether the current crop of smart automobile tire pressure valves has a protocol that exposes that information or not…

I’d like to avoid Europe’s prescription-heavy regulatory route, but the way things are now in the US isn’t my ideal either.

It’s also harder to find them in larger sizes any more, even for the few for which sell them at all, so if you want a larger one, you may not have much by way of options.

https://assetbasedlife.com/dumb-tvs-are-a-dying-breed/

This lists Insignia, which is a Best Buy store brand.

This has a couple, at least as of last year:

https://www.tomsguide.com/features/dumb-tvs-heres-why-you-cant-find-them-anymore

Your best bet of grabbing one is to head over to Best Buy and look out for the Insignia brand of TVs. There you can find a 43-inch dumb TV for around $169 or a 32-inch model for $69 . (Links to Best Buy.)

On Amazon, you can simply search for dumb TV and you should be able to find a few options from manufacturers like Westinghouse, RCA or Sceptre. (Links to Amazon.)

It’s also possible to buy a used TV, but obviously, as with getting used cars to avoid monitoring stuff in newer cars, the pool of those will only be around for so long, and you can’t take advantage of any technological advances subsequent to them.

One issue that has come up recently in discussions on here is that it’s hard to get dumb TVs or computer monitors in large format in 2024.

Not impossible, but surprisingly difficult. I went looking for a large computer monitor for some user who wanted a large one. I eventually found an older one on Amazon still for sale, but it’s not that easy to get large computer monitors, which I think is part of what drives people to use smart TVs as computer monitors.

You can get projectors, but that’s not what everyone’s after.

Thing is, it’s getting pretty cheap to build radios into devices, and companies are doing that and bridging them to whatever Internet connectivity they can reach, not just your own. You don’t necessarily have to personally plug something into an Ethernet socket to make a device Internet-connected.

From back when Amazon Sidewalk was rolling out:

https://www.statuscake.com/blog/what-is-amazon-mesh/

This time, however, the big news is Amazon mesh, a network to connect users and their devices. The tech giants have called this project Amazon Sidewalk+ with the idea first being made public back in 2019 where they announced they wanted to extend and expand the connectivity of their customers.

Why did Amazon do this?

According to Amazon, the main reason was to provide a better service for their customers whilst using their devices. Although there has been some backlash by those in the safety and security space, the idea seems to be very safe and simple.

How will Amazon mesh work?

The Sidewalk project will create a network mesh between all the connected devices so it can increase the connection field around the devices. It will be able to do this by using Low-energy Bluetooth and 900MHz radio signals to pass data with the connected compatible devices. By doing this, the network can extend the reach of the signal and thus it will be able to cover a larger area to allow devices to connect.

Here is an example of how this will work: imagine if you have a compatible device at the end of your garden such as a light which you normally can’t control with your phone. With the extended network, that light could connect to a neighbour’s device and by doing this it will be connected to the network, and you will have the ability to then use your phone to control the light.

There has been some concern regarding how much data the network will use for those who agree to be part of it and Amazon have estimated that the data usage could be around 400-500mbps a month. For most people, this is such a small amount that it won’t even be noticeable.

How can the mesh network be used?

Another use for this mesh is for users around the network to connect and possibly use the mesh to perform other tasks such as a Ring doorbell (Amazon-owned) to be installed in the part of the house where the usual Wi-Fi signal doesn’t reach. This provides customers with a great alternative to the far more expensive Wi-Fi extender mesh products on the market.

As is normal in situations like this, many users are concerned about the security of this project. According to what Amazon has released regarding how it will work so far, there will not be any security concerns as the connections will not identify which device was connected meaning that if your Ring doorbell extends the network to a nearby device, the system will not mention that this device was connected to that particular Ring doorbell. However, people need to be aware that Amazon itself can collect this data and the way the users interact with the network.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/01/amazon-us-customers-given-one-week-to-opt-out-of-mass-wireless-sharing

The feature works by creating a low-bandwidth network using smart home devices such as Amazon Echoes and Ring security cameras. At its simplest, it means that a new Echo can set itself up using a neighbour’s wifi, or a security camera can continue to send motion alerts even if its connection to the internet is disrupted, by piggybacking on the connection of another camera across the street.

But the company’s plans have caused alarm among observers. Ashkan Soltani, a former chief technology officer of the US Federal Trade Commission, told the tech site Ars Technica: “In addition to capturing everyone’s shopping habits (from amazon.com) and their internet activity (as AWS is one of the most dominant web hosting services) … now they are also effectively becoming a global ISP with a flick of a switch, all without even having to lay a single foot of fiber”. The feature may also break the terms and conditions of users’ internet connections, which do not allow such resharing, warned Lydia Leong, an analyst at Gartner.

Users can disable Sidewalk in the settings section of the Alexa or Ring apps, but have until 8 June to do so. After that, if they have taken no action, the network will be turned on and their devices will become “Sidewalk Bridges”.

Amazon is not the first company to look to create such a network. Apple has taken a similar approach with the company’s range of AirTag item trackers, which can connect to the internet through any compatible iPhone they come into contact with, not simply their owner’s. And BT, through a long-term partnership with Fon, ran a service from 2007 until 2020 that allowed broadband customers to share spare bandwidth in a public wifi network.

When you have companies creating their own radio networks, they can use someone else’s Internet connection to move data.

For expensive devices, like cars, it also makes economic sense to have a dedicated cell modem and service phoning data home. But it’s not the only route.

Point is, you don’t have a monopoly over granting your devices Internet access any more.

I’d rather pay for pretty much all products up-front with money at purchase time rather than pay with my data.

Not gonna tell other people what to do, but for myself, whether it’s my car or television or search engine or whatever, I’d rather just pay the bill rather than having the manufacturer or service provider go data-mining my data to figure out how they can make money from it.

I think that YouTube is a great service. YouTube Premium, though, is ad-free. What I want isn’t no-ad stuff, but no-log policies. And there aren’t a lot of manufacturers selling privacy. And it’s hard to compare services and products based on that.

I’ll go one more step. I don’t want to go read through privacy policies and figure out what the latest clever loophole is. We had to deal with that kind of legal stuff back prior to standardization around a few open-source licenses, and it sucked.

And I don’t want to deal with privacy policies that change and maybe don’t do what I want.

What I want to do is look for a privacy certification, and let the certification agency deal with that.

They might be able to make some kind of test that could reliably identify damage.

I mean, I’m skeptical, but it’s not impossible.

I remember streaming internet radio (somafm) and trying out different skins on my windows xp laptop back in the early 2000’s and just feeling like the cyberpunk future had arrived.

SomaFM is still around.

It looks like Qmmp can use WinAMP skins.

Apparently archive.org has a library of WinAMP skins.

Milkdrop was my gateway drug.

That was reimplemented as projectM, and there’s apparently a Qmmp plugin.

The billionaire this week posted his hoped-for change that “the block function will block that account from engaging with, but not block seeing, a public post”.

If I understand the change aright, that’s an excellent move in my book.

What it sounds like Twitter is doing now is how Reddit used to work. When you ignore a user, you won’t see their responses, but other users can.

Then Reddit changed it to “blocked user cannot respond”, which people on Reddit promptly started abusing to, in heated arguments, make a comment and then promptly block the other person, so that it looked like they weren’t responding. You wound up with people commenting all over a thread with stuff like “this user blocked me, but here’s my response to this other comment”. Was one of the several major moves that Reddit made that I think were in error and made me less happy with the site.

Lemmy works the same way Reddit originally did as well; that’s how I’d want social media to generally work.

EDIT: It might also be that this is only a partial move in that direction, so that a block prevents a user from responding but not seeing a post. If so, that’d be an improvement, I think, but not as far as I’d like things to change.

Follow-up to OP: If you do want that kind of large battery in a smartphone, you can get it. There are a few Chinese manufacturers that make “ruggedized” smartphones. For whatever reason, maybe because people want to be able to operate away from power, this class of device tends to have both a tough shell and large batteries; it was one of the few places I could find phones that had really huge batteries.

Doogee is one such manufacturer: here’s one with a 10800 mAh battery – I really wish that we’d use Wh ratings rather than mAh, but whatever – and another from the same manufacturer with a 22,000 mAh battery. These are also quite large.

For the former phone:

395 g

Or 0.87 lbs.

For the latter phone:

The weight is 543g or nearly 1.2 lbs

But that gives some idea of the kind of the size tradeoff that you might need.

https://9to5mac.com/2023/11/21/iphone-battery-mah-capacity-list/

iPhone 7 Plus battery mAh capacity?

2900 mAh – 11.10 watt-hour

Generally-speaking, you can’t improve a whole lot on capacity from a manufacturer’s battery in the same space.

You definitely can’t more-than-triple capacity.

On the other hand, there are a lot of sketchy people selling batteries with incorrect capacity claims out there.

I am all for large batteries, but doing so requires device manufacturers doing larger cases with space for larger batteries, not just dropping a replacement battery into the same space.

How can someone have four simultaneous citizenships?

Most countries let you have multiple citizenships. Unless a country restricts you from doing so, you can have as many as you want.

I couldn’t find it when I glanced at their site earlier, but the Germany-based Tuxedo Computers, according to this Reddit post, does have or is supposed have a Swiss French layout option:

https://old.reddit.com/r/tuxedocomputers/comments/13voqru/swiss_french_keyboard_layout/

Hey there!

We will add CH-FR as option without extra cost to the configurator soon.

If you’re in a hurry please order with “custom layout” and point to this thread at the order comments box. We will refund the extra costs afterwards.

Hope that helps!

Someone else already mentioned them.

I have looked at Tuxedo before; they sell laptops specifically targeting the Linux market, so I expect that they’d have good compatibility, and they’re in Europe. I was interested mostly in that they were one of the very few vendors out there who made laptops with large batteries and Radeon-based GPUs (more-Linux-friendly). They’re a little pricey, but not, in my book, unreasonably so relative to the hardware that I was looking at.

That being said, I have never personally owned one of their laptops, so I cannot personally speak as to the experience, just that it’s a vendor that I’ve looked at.

If I were going to personally go get a laptop that runs Linux right now for myself, I’d probably be considering one of:

• Framework. Here in the US, pricey, good repairability, good expandability, Linux-out-of-box (I’m not gonna use their out-of-box install, but it means that they’ve checked the hardware for decent compatibility). I doubt that these guys offer a Swiss French layout, though, so that’d probably kill it for you. They aren’t a huge company, and have been talking about taking on projects other than laptops, and I’d be a little concerned about them maybe going out of business or something.

• Tuxedo. Germany-based, somewhat-pricey, large batteries, Linux-out-of-box. Radeon GPU hardware (if you want an off-CPU GPU). I couldn’t find a Swiss French option, but that Reddit post says that they have it.

• Lenovo Thinkpad. China-based, not-as-expensive. Used to be a pricey IBM line. Notable for having a model with three physical trackpad buttons, a rare feature in 2024 and a major selling point for me. I like physical buttons and they’re rare now, and Linux benefits from having three rather than having to chord two or something. May not matter if you’re fine with virtual buttons. Strong history of Linux users using the thing. I’m much-less impressed with their current hardware than I once was, but it’s also cheaper than it once was, so…<shrugs> Reasonably good historically about expandability and case-opening; last one I needed Philips-head screws and a spudger tool, though no security bits. Physically durable, at least. Large-enough that I bet that you can get a Swiss French layout. Muted black business aesthetic without a lot of LEDs and shiny stuff, which I prefer. Batteries aren’t as large as they once were, but battery life is still good (though the T14 I’m typing this on has less-than-impressive screen brightness).

• Dell XPS. Often listed as being comparable to Thinkpad, business-class laptops. Haven’t owned one.

Qualcomm wants to buy Intel

https://lemmy.today/post/16573058

Sorry, there’s no way Qualcomm is buying Intel

I guess that’s covering all the bases.

That’s a thought.

considers

I still think that the limiting factor there is more one of speech synth than writing dialog. Like, “arrow to the knee” is Skyrim, right?

kagis

Yeah. And those were voiced.

Similarly, you had Fallout: New Vegas with stuff like “patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter”.

I bet that it’s not too expensive to write a lot of human-written dialog, but that hiring a bunch of voice actors to act out minor lines – especially if a given character has only a few lines – it is probably the more-expensive bit. Like, I think that a human dialog writer could probably affordably put together enough dialog that a player wouldn’t really exhaust it, but that you’d want to make any synthesis of the lines not have a lot of extra cost.

I think that the technology just isn’t there for most generated dialog.

What we’re doing today is taking a training corpus and then directly, without higher-level processing, producing more text like it, given a prompt.

What limitations exist here?

• Written and spoken language are not the same, and a lot of training data is from written language. In English, written sentences are longer than spoken ones. People use some different words and grammatical structures. Try reading a play or transcribing what someone says, and it kind of drives the point home. That’s not an unsolvable problem, but it’s a good argument that gluing something like ChatGPT to a speech synthesizer is a long way from where you want to be.

• You need a training corpus similar to the way a given character would speak. Maybe if you want “a generic American”, you’re okay. And there’s legitimate uses for that in games, certainly. But what if you want to have Celechir, high-elven guard in the kingdom of Arandie? How do you build up a list of things that Celechir would talk about? How much germane training data is there out there?

• There is no strong association between text and game world state, which is normally desirable. Let’s say that I’m creating a character in Fallout 4. How am I going to get them to talk about the world around them? I can encode some world state and state about that character in a prompt, but that’s sharply-bounded using existing mechanisms – I can provide maybe a couple of hundred prompt terms, which is not a lot to try to describe the world and relevant characters and all that. I’d guess that any such generation mechanism is going to require some level of pre-processing as to world state that doesn’t exist today.

I am all for using generative AI to do speech synth. I’ve been impressed with output there. We may not be quite to the point of good, emotive speech yet, but we’re good-enough for a lot of uses, and it lets one do things that cannot be done with pre-recorded, static samples from a voice actor, like dynamically-generated text.

But for writing dialog via generative AI? I’m a lot more hesitant there in the near future, given what I’ve seen so far.

Now, I am sure that you can make video games in certain limited genres that do leverage what’s there. But I think that it’s far enough from a drop-in replacement for hand-written text that it’s not a great option. Maybe you can make a so-so sexy chatbot or something like that that’s isolated from a broader video game world. Maybe you can create characters that speak in fairly-constrained ways. But I don’t think that we can just create NPCs on par with human-written-dialog characters via gluing ChatGPT to them and providing a handful of human-language directives about how the character should act, the way we could for a human writer, which I think is what some people are dreaming of. Further down the line, maybe, but I think that it’s still a fair way from where we are in 2024.

Ng drove his vehicle from a VR interface:

Ng himself, or at least, Ng’s avatar, is a small, very dapper Vietnamese man in his fifties, hair plastered to his head, wearing military-style khakis. At the time Y.T. comes into his office, he is leaning forward in his chair, getting his shoulders rubbed by a geisha.

But it is a very strange thing to do, for one reason: The geisha is just a picture on Ng’s goggles, and on Y.T.'s. And you can’t get a massage from a picture. So why bother?

Ng sits back down and the geisha goes right back to it. Ng’s desk is a nice French antique with a row of small television monitors along the back edge, facing toward him. He spends most of his time watching the monitors, even when he is talking.

Y.T. gets up and walks around behind his desk to look.

Each of the little TV monitors is showing a different view out his van: windshield, left window, right window, rearview. Another one has an electronic map showing his position: inbound on the San Bernardino, not far away.

“The van is under voice command,” he explains. “I removed the steering-wheel-and-pedal interface because I found verbal commands more convenient. This is why I will sometimes make unfamiliar sounds with my voice – I am controlling the vehicle’s systems.”

Recognizing his van is easy enough. It is enormous. It is eight feet high and wider than it is high, which would have made it a wide load in the old days when they had laws. The construction is boxy and angular. it has been welded together out of the type of flat, dimpled steel plate usually used to make manhole lids and stair treads. The tires are huge, like tractor tires with a more subtle tread, and there are six of them: two axles in back and one in front. The engine is so big that, like an evil spaceship in a movie, Y.T. feels its rumbling in her ribs before she can see it; it is kicking out diesel exhaust through a pair of squat vertical red smokestacks that project from the roof, toward the rear. The windshield is a perfectly flat rectangle of glass about three by eight feet, smoked so black that Y.T. can’t make out an outline of anything inside. The snout of the van is festooned with every type of high-powered light known to science, like this guy hit a New South Africa franchise on a Saturday night and stole every light off every roll bar, and a grille has been constructed across the front, welded together out of rails torn out of an abandoned railroad somewhere. The grille alone probably weighs more than a small car.

“I tried prostheses for a while – some of them are very good. But nothing is as good as a motorized wheelchair. And then I got to thinking, why do motorized wheelchairs always have to be tiny pathetic things that strain to go up a little teeny ramp? So I bought this – it is an airport firetruck from Germany – and converted it into my new motorized wheelchair.”

“America is wonderful because you can get anything on a drive-through basis. Oil change, liquor, banking, car wash, funerals, anything you want – drive through! So this vehicle is much better than a tiny pathetic wheelchair. It is an extension of my body.”

“When the geisha rubs your back?”

Ng mumbles something and his pouch begins to throb and undulate around his body. “She is a daemon, of course. As for the massage, my body is suspended in an electrocontractive gel that massages me when I need it. I also have a Swedish girl and an African woman, but those daemons are not as well rendered.”

“And the mint julep?”

“Through a feeding tube. Nonalcoholic, ha ha.”

That might be a bit of a jump past where we are today technologically, since he’s got a tactile-feedback rig for VR and the car driving under voice control. But, yeah, it’d be a pretty capable vehicle.