I already switched to Immich. It’s pretty good at finding pictures, it doesn’t require a subscription, and it isn’t Google.

Starcraft is from before ubiquitous home internet. You could use your modem to directly dial your friend without an ISP. There’s no way it requires online activation.

Is that what his head looks like under his hair?

Is Bitcoin really a good idea? bitcoin.com says you shouldn’t worry because it would cost “hundreds of millions to over a billion dollars” to run a 51% attack on the Bitcoin network for an hour. The US government spends this kind of money on wars, and likely has the means to reduce that cost by forcing offline or compromising a large portion of the trustworthy Bitcoin network. This alone wouldn’t allow money to be seized, but it could be used to destroy the crypto market, making that money effectively worthless. You wouldn’t normally need to worry about an attack of this scale, but the it’s not beneath this government and there are a few AI companies that could use a government bailout in exchange for temporarily converting all their GPUs to Bitcoin miners.

Does World War III involve different countries attacking and defending crypto currencies?

My old phone was constantly recommending that I send YouTube videos with spy query parameters to the e-mail address of a dead relative instead of Untracker. It’s like they designed the system to push users towards doing what they want users to do instead of helping users do what users want to do.

I have to use a Mac and I can confidently say that the experience of using a Mac has not gotten better every year. It just doesn’t get worse as quickly as Windows. It may be true that Apple Silicon has gotten better every year, but so has AMD.

47 years of extortion, corruption, and death

Oops. 47 is actually the number of the US president with the most extortion, corruption, and death.

What does licensing have to do with it?

Microsoft is a huge liability. They’ve forced companies and home PC users to be needlessly dependent on their cloud services to be able to do just about anything. They own the hugely popular GitHub and NPM developer platforms, and indirectly control other developer platforms through GitHub integrations. They’re one of the major cloud service providers. They have a system that forces home and small business PCs all over the world to execute arbitrary code. They’ve been replacing their developers with incompetent AI systems. A major Apple or Google attack has the potential to break nearly all mobile devices, but a major Microsoft attack could cripple businesses everywhere.

Facebook and Palantir on the other hand could just disappear off the internet and we’d be better off.

This is just the average Atlassian or Slack experience coming to GitHub. You’re just trying to do your job and the platform is constantly trying to push you to use services of advertisers.

Give it a few months and your phone will helpfully install it for you.

Would the MacBook Pro or rpi4 with a second Ethernet nic running a firewall before the routers also fix the issue of not getting security updates?

No. For most routers, this provides no additional protection to the router. Your router should not be accepting connections from the WAN side that would be blocked by the firewall, but consumer routers almost always initiate connections to the WAN side, indistinguishable from normal client traffic to your firewall, and accept connections from the LAN side, invisible to your firewall. If the firewall blocks all incoming requests, it would create problems for UPNP, effectively giving you CGNAT, even if the firewall does not perform address translation.

At least for some laptops, you cannot just remove the battery. If the battery is removed, the performance may be throttled. This is true of very old MacBooks.

Of course I understand the EO perfectly.

runs on the web

The description says it runs in a browser, and it looks like this code does OCR in a browser, but it relies on sending your data to third-party services like Claude to do proofreading. It’s based on a different version that runs entirely in a browser: NDLOCR-Lite Web.

Why 7 days? It should be illegal for them to have the data in the first place, especially in the EU where they have better ways of doing age verification. There are situations where the law says that you need to verify somebody’s identity, and age checking should not be one of them.

Was there ever a chance that the self defense force would be deployed to help the US attack Iran?

Soon the whole US will be rolling “clean” coal.

In the US, most IPSs have remote access to your modem as well, even if you purchased it yourself from a store unaffiliated with your ISP.

If there was another 9/11, Trump wouldn’t be able to decide whether it was bad because America was attacked or good because he doesn’t like New York City.