Invading Venezuela is not even remotely the same thing as invading a fellow NATO country, and most Americans know it. If Trump tries to invade, he'll trigger a domestic crisis. i.e. Will congress block it? Will the military obey orders? How severe will the protests be?
If Trump quells all that and his invasion goes ahead, he'll trigger an international crisis too. Does NATO simply implode, or do the EU and other former-NATO countries form an anti-U.S. alliance? What kind of insurgency forms in Greenland? Does what's left of the old world order turn against the U.S. with economic sanctions? Does China take advantage of the moment to finally invade Taiwan? How loudly will Putin be laughing during all this?
We can only hope Trump is merely trying to distract people from the Epstein files with a bluff.
Regarding an 'invasion' of Greenland, it would actually be done in a day, and I highly doubt an effective insurgency would form. The US already has military control over the territory, and the population is way too low and concentrated to offer opposition.
This is implicit in the reaction of the EU: If the US takes over Greenland, Europe will close down all American bases in Europe.
This is what makes this particular foreign policy so incredibly stupid: The US already gets everything it needs from Denmark/Greenland. The US is considering throwing away European allies to have their flag be bigger on a world map.
Yes, it could be done quickly. There are only several population centres of any note, often separated by hundreds of miles/km but Nuuk would be the main target.
If Trump does something it will be the same as with Venezuela. This invalidates most of your pointed questions against it happening.
These questions would at most be raised after it already happened, and after watching a few political influencer like Zack who routinely gets 50k+ viewers I suspect your trust in "most Americans know the difference" to be exaggerated, sadly.
This scenario also strongly reminds me of an old fable from the Middle ages, where the king reassures the peasant that the noble will be punished if he kills the peasant... But what meaning does such a punishment have for the peasant who'd be dead?
So yeah, there will be political fallout once Trump's invades it's ally Denmark, at it will invalidate NATO entirely. But does that matter to the annexed people? They'll still have lost their sovereignty to be exploited by American mega corporations.
Take a second look at Venezuela. Congress passed an act limiting Trump's ability to operate in the country. The U.S. is currently not occupying or controlling the country. They have not effected regime change. The former VP has taken over and may take some pro-U.S. actions due to threats of being kidnapped but, with Maduro gone, she could be replaced at any moment. Meanwhile, U.S. oil execs are balking at doing anything in Venezuela and all Trump can do to keep Venezuela on the front page (instead of the Epstein files) is continue pirating oil tankers.
Venezuela could realistically come out of this with their sovereignty intact and no significant U.S. takeover of their oil industry materializing. If anything, the lesson we should learn here is that Trump is so inept that, should he try to take over Greenland, he may trigger all the negative consequences of doing so without actually accomplishing much of anything. Someone living in Nuuk, far from any American military base, might be forgiven for not noticing when they wake up in an American territory. A couple of leaders might get a promotion and the cheques may start coming from Washington rather than Copenhagen, but the Americans may have no interest in governing Greenlanders and American mining companies may refuse to get bogged down in another one of Trump's swamps.
What may happen to Venezuela is not the point. The point is how little control American people have on this Administration (which BTW last week started effectively giving immunity to ICE agents who kill Americans)
Don't give your "smart" TV internet access. It's that simple.
Samsung's chicanery taught me this, but other manufacturers are no better. Those TV apps may seem nice, but they can be run on hardware you have more control over. I'd recommend only buying "dumb" TV's, but they've become increasingly rare and expensive. Less costs more!
Soon we'll have a popup before every individual show on Netflix asking us if we accept the cookies before we watch, all in the name of consumer protection
Cookie pops are malicious compliance to regulations that legitimately protect consumers. You’ve cherry picked one bad side effect to throw out all the ways the EU is way ahead of anyone else in protecting consumers, most of which you don’t even notice because it’s hard to notice harm that did not happen.
Just shows how much you are worth as a product to them, and how little competition is in the cell market, that all these devices can get lifetime cell connections while we are paying, how much a month? Actually, lawsuits about privacy for devices like this should quote how much the infrastructure costs are to support their tech. The network, services, people, etc are all a good estimate of actual value, in dollars, they are deriving from selling you as a product.
We use a crap ton of calls/sms/data over the same period, expect decent QoS on well performing bands, and have a TON more customer management and onboarding overheard over the same 5-10 year period. Meanwhile devices with embedded telemetry might get a plan as low as 500 MB total over 10 years and have hundreds of thousands in a single sale with no customer support overheard, SIM reactivation on new phones, etc.
Are you getting as good a deal? No, probably not, but trying to compare them to the cellular service you pay for is problematic in many ways. You too can get a $14 10 year prepaid plan from 1NCE for your Pi to send sensor telemetry from on occasion if that's what you want instead of "normal" cell service.
I wouldn't mind companies having to disclose everything and anything about the telemetry they collect though. Just putting the dollar figure on it is unlikely to shock anyone as it is low for you to do the same thing too.
Follow the example of how buying a Linux PC works. Look at popular brands where there are vibrant online communities of people neutralizing the surveillance / control bits - pulling out the 5G modems and whatnot. It's possible manufacturers will eventually arrive at using all-in-one integrated chipset where you can't just disconnect a daughterboard or scratch the appropriate traces to a radio chip, but we're so far from that.
Bad news: we're actually closer than you'd think to that, considering how many cellular modems on their own are full blown SOC stacks and how far we've gotten into the eSIM camp.
Cell modems are their own SOCs, but are their application processors being used to implement the main functionality of the TV?
Maybe they are, with Android UIs and whatnot? I actually don't have any "smart" TVs (main TV is a 43 inch monitor driven directly by Kodi), so I'm still picturing the car model where there is a separate component that does WAN communications, and the software developers made the system tolerant of it being disconnected (for development ease and also resiliency to failures). But maybe my model is horribly wrong for TVs.
> Don't give your "smart" TV internet access. It's that simple.
For the tech users yes, simple. But for the non-technical user it's not.
The ISP given router don't normally provide the options for such. Nor would my mother, father, brother, sister even know about the slightest about networking, isolating networks.
My parents got a Samsung TV. At Christmas, I turned off all the data collection features (and some abysmal AI face filter that was ruining the latest Knives Out film). It very annoyingly started prompting to reenable them regularly.
TV-free here for about 6 years. I'd recommend it. It takes some getting used to, but after acclimating, the presence of TVs has become annoying. I'm not sure why I'd want to lose myself for an hour or two to it when there's more fulfilling things in the world.
I can see where you're coming from with your "more fulfilling things" statement, but I disagree. After all, TV's don't spew noise they spew stories. I'm not gonna argue that all TV is fulfilling, but engaging with stories is one of the the things which separates us from animals and to me is one of the more fulfilling things in life.
This is an area I'm keeping an eye on - currently this 55" Gigabyte one is about as good as it gets, but it feels like it's straddling the line between monitor and TV, as it runs Android and supports CEC and eARC.
Appliance manufacturers are starting to lock features behind an app/connectivity. Bosch and I believe LG are putting certain wash cycles app only. The in app only functionality will just get more intrusive until morale improves.
The grandparent mentioned "world wide mesh network internet". Is Amazon Sidewalk world wide? The link you posted only mentioned it launched in the United States in 2021. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/everything-you-need... shows a coverage map with large areas unserviced.
they can give the tv powers to autoconnect to public/open networks and can partner with companies like Comcast to get more access points. It's best not to buy a smart TV
Everyone says this but is there even a single example of any TV manufacturer including a cellular chip or partnering with an ISP for this kind of access?
Yeah sure eventually the "don't give your TV network access" might stop working but it works today and for the foreseeable future. You're more likely to get a TV that refuses to operate without a network.
American cable operators set up a separately managed and isolated SSID and DOCSIS service flow to provide Hotspot2.0 access for their cellular subscribers (among other things). XfinityMobile/SpectrumMobile SSIDs are everywhere now out of the box being hosted off of ISP-issued hardware.
That’s where we have to circle back to the parent comment - a smart TV operator could 100% go buddy-buddy up with Xfinity/Spectrum/Cox/et al. and get Hotspot2.0 certs at the factory level to go hop onto whatever cable operators they want to target.
Xfinity cable modem / router combos will create public Xfinity networks by default for many years now. Absolutely is something Xfinity could be selling access to for other corporations.
"We're very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device—in fact everything that we're announcing has an NPU in it—but what we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI," Terwilliger says bluntly. "In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome."
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What we're seeing here is that "AI" lacks appeal as a marketing buzzword. This probably shouldn't be surprising. It's a term that's been in the public consciousness for a very long time thanks to fiction, but more frequently with negative connotations. To most, AI is Skynet, not the thing that helps you write a cover letter.
If a buzzword carries no weight, then drop it. People don't care if a computer has a NPU for AI any more than they care if a microwave has a low-loss waveguide. They just care that it will do the things they want it to do. For typical users, AI is just another algorithm under the hood and out of mind.
What Dell is doing is focusing on what their computers can do for people rather than the latest "under the hood" thing that lets them do it. This is probably going to work out well for them.
I actually do care, on a narrow point. I have no use for an NPU and if I see that a machine includes one, I immediately think that machine is overpriced for my needs.
True. But if a company is specifically calling out that their machine has an NPU, I assume they're also adding an surcharge for it above what they would charge if they didn't mention it. I'm not claiming that this is a rational stance, only that I take "NPU" as a signal for "overpriced".
Historically, raster graphics won out because they used less resources. Perhaps that's changed. If so, it would make sense for various OS's to start working on native support. Irix did it in the 90's. It can be done now.
Yeah but I would argue that they just used cheaper ressources since historically has been cheaper than compute.
It's not clear if compute can be cheaper than storage still today.
On one hand you can afford to use less storage but you have to use GPU power everytime to draw graphics, if the chip can support the compute requirement you can save on storage, but you pay with higher power draw at every interraction.
On the other hand you can just put more storage, chip assest that are rendered for the device they'll be used on and be ok.
Outside of crisis like now, storage should be cheaper in the long term I think. I doubt there is that much benefit in having assets being able to resize to any arbitrary resolution. The definition used in phones isn't that far away than what is used in laptops, monitors and now even TVs.
Something to think about is that icons/assets often need to change shape slightly as they become smaller or bigger for optical reasons. So even if you manage a fully vector scaled UI, you might still need to have difference depending on DPI to reading distance ratio. Rasterized assests might still be the real answer for a very long time.
Considering how bad is the iOS 26 release on performance, because of its dynamically computed interface, I'm not sure it's worth pursuing vector UIs, it doesn't make a lot of sense to make a more powerfull chip just to draw prettier or more "pure" interfaces...
we've been able to "preserve vector data" with pdf and svg image resources on ios for a long while now... compile-time rasterization is the default though...
What would LLM's make of normal human conversations if they had access to everything you say (Just wait!)? Think back to the last time you hung out with a group of friends, either in person or online. How much of what was said would an AI bin into positive, negative, or neutral categories?
Rather a lot of what is said in any given social circle has to do with complaining. It's very common for people to point out something that is viewed as bad by everyone. Then the group commiserates and bonds over that. Even though an AI might consider such complaints negative, there might be a positive effect on people feeling heard and supported by a like-minded group.
For this reason, I'd take OP's results with a modicum of salt. Human interaction doesn't have to be all rainbows and unicorns to have a positive psychological impact. As with in-person interactions, I suspect a significant portion of what OP's LLM's described as negative might just be humans bonding through complaint among peers.
"10. In a large company, countless variables are outside your control - organizational changes, management decisions, market shifts, product pivots. Dwelling on these creates anxiety without agency.
The engineers who stay sane and effective zero in on their sphere of influence. You can’t control whether a reorg happens. You can control the quality of your work, how you respond, and what you learn. When faced with uncertainty, break problems into pieces and identify the specific actions available to you.
This isn’t passive acceptance but it is strategic focus. Energy spent on what you can’t change is energy stolen from what you can."
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Point 10 makes it sound like the culture at Google is to stay within your own bailiwick and not step on other people's toes. If management sets a course that is hostile to users and their interests, the "sane and effective" engineers stay in their own lane. In terms of a company providing services to users, is that really being effective?
User interests frequently cross multiple bailiwicks and bash heads with management direction. If the Google mindset is that engineers who listen to users are "weird" or not "sane"/"effective", that certainly explains a lot.
A wrong, followed by another wrong, followed by another wrong, followed by another wrong, followed by yet another wrong...
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"Flood the zone" is a political strategy in which a political figure aims to gain media attention, disorient opponents and distract the public from undesirable reports by rapidly forwarding large volumes of newsworthy information to the media. The strategy has been attributed to U.S. president Donald Trump's former chief political strategist Steve Bannon."
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Pay attention to the context of this moment. The timing of this invasion is no coincidence.
"The last time the United States formally declared war, using specific terminology, on any nation was in 1942, when war was declared against Axis-aligned Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, because President Franklin Roosevelt thought it was improper to engage in hostilities against a country without a formal declaration of war. Since then, every American president has used military force without a declaration of war.[1]"
Korea was not a war. Vietnam was not a war. Iraq I and II were not wars. Afghanistan was not a war. The "War on Terror" was not a war. You could be forgiven for thinking this invasion of a sovereign foreign country is a war, but it's not a war according to any law that is likely to be enforced within the USA.
Power accumulates in places it shouldn't be permitted unless the people occasionally claw it back and redistribute it. Unfortunately, Americans failed to claw back the power to declare war from the POTUS almost a century ago. Trump's reasons for declaring not-war (cough Wag the dog. cough Epstein. cough) are more unprecedented than his methods in this particular case.
"The Wizard and the Prophet" by Charles C Mann sets up an interesting duality that I think more people should be aware of.
Mann describes "Prophets" as people who see a problem and then try to prod people to change their behaviour in order to avoid it. e.g. Thomas Malthus observed that exponential population growth had humanity on track to experience severe famine, conflict, etc. that would violently and savagely bring our numbers back within the carrying capacity of the Earth. Multiple people have made predictions about when humanity would reach the brink at numerous points in the years since Malthus, but were always wrong about when the Malthusian trap would finally spring...
...because of "Wizards". Wizards are people who set about solving problems with tech. Advances like the use of fertilizer, first bat guano and then the Haber-Bosch process, followed by scientific crop breeding have effectively raised the carrying capacity of the Earth so much that, despite our exponentially ballooning numbers, there are far more calories per person available now than in Malthus' day.
Prophets are valuable for their ability to observe and raise awareness about problems. The Earth does have an ultimate carrying capacity too, which we should keep in mind even if we don't know what it is. However, the track record undeniably favours the Wizards. They get things done. Prophets hate this, because it makes it look like they were wrong. They weren't wrong. They were just too focused on an approach to the problem that rarely works.
The modern environmentalist movement is dominated by prophets. So much so, that wizards are often portrayed as the enemy. History has shown that this is wrong-headed. We should value prophets for what they do, but ignore them when they tell us not to fund the wizards.
Meta now has an extensive track record of doing unethical things because they're slightly more profitable. This case is relatively minor compared to what they did in Myanmar[1]. Meta has some very smart people working for them but, unfortunately, Meta's management prefers to set them to the task of creatively evading responsibility rather than actually addressing problems.
Governments seem to be a step behind when it comes to protecting their citizens from unethical social media corporations. As in this case, any sensible regulations that are imposed will be circumvented in the most dishonest ways possible. Regulations often aren't imposed at all due to pressure from the U.S. government, whom Meta has considerable influence over. Could international cooperation to regulate social media solve some of these issues?
Twitter also seems to have considerable influence over the US Government. So much so that the US has imposed sanctions on a few people in the EU for suggesting that maybe Twitter should moderate hate speech.
If Trump quells all that and his invasion goes ahead, he'll trigger an international crisis too. Does NATO simply implode, or do the EU and other former-NATO countries form an anti-U.S. alliance? What kind of insurgency forms in Greenland? Does what's left of the old world order turn against the U.S. with economic sanctions? Does China take advantage of the moment to finally invade Taiwan? How loudly will Putin be laughing during all this?
We can only hope Trump is merely trying to distract people from the Epstein files with a bluff.
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