“That is what we believe in. That’s a capitalist society, a market. The other one is socialism. Socialism does not work. You go around and dictating and overseeing every single price, no. If there’s collusion on pricing, I’ll go after them and tear them to shreds, but nothing beats a free market.”

One thing I keep noticing about right-wing thinking is that it tends to be very coarse-grained, black and white, with no subtlety or shades of grey. It’s either all or nothing. But reality is never all or nothing, it’s always shades of grey, ambiguous and complex. Look at how conservatives talk about any topic - vaccines or immigration or science funding or transgender health care or climate change - and you’ll find this tendency for unrealistic all-or-nothing crudeness.

It may not be that he doesn’t understand. It may be that he’s not working for us.

How about cutting off USAID and thereby causing the deaths of about 10 million people by 2030, or accelerating the pace of climate change beyond what anyone thought possible, and thereby killing life all over the planet? Those are also big achievements.

Or all the ones at the top, since if you go far enough there’s probably something living or formerly living in each square.

Or all of them because if you can see them it’s a sign you’re alive.

Or just switch off the computer and walk away because you’re starting to take joke Captcha memes way too seriously and you’ve had enough internet. Sorry. Time for a break.

Microsoft and Apple. The internet will only allow OSs from large American corporations.

I’d like to see the rest of the world say “fuck it” and carry on as before, leaving the Americans to censor themselves. But governments around the world are suddenly rushing to implement very similar terrible laws. It smells very coordinated.

Would this bill ban the use of all operating systems released before it became law? That seems unlikely.

So then how about OSs released before it became law, with patches released afterwards? That also seems unlikely.

So then how about my computer’s current OS, which is a heavily patched version of a little hobby OS called Linux, originally released in 1991?

Journalists might do better to report when Microsoft release a patch that isn’t full of catastrophic bugs.

Your Rollercoaster Tycoon example is a bit odd, since coding a whole game in assembly indicates deep understanding of what you’re doing, whereas the problem with vibe coding is that it requires only the shallowest understanding. Unless I’m misunderstanding and that was your point.

There may be a maintainability issue with both, but for a different reason in each case.

Seemingly just because the title has “PHP dev” in it. It’s not entirely fair.

I guess bullshit is easier to make than shoes.

Overregulation and underregulation are both problematic, so it’s not an easy thing to get right. But sometimes you get the impression a regulation is all agenda and very little thought (e.g. this one in California, and the FCC’s recent banning of foreign-made home routers).

The only criterion is: are billionaires into it, or does it threaten them?

The FCC ruling prohibits the sale of new models of consumer router. It doesn’t forbid the continuing use of existing routers or, if I understand it right, the continued sale of models that were already on sale. So you can continue to use existing models as WAPs or routers. But when the tech and the security moves on the FCC wants the USA to be left behind.

Yes, OPNsense is excellent if you have a spare computer to run it. Then you can repurpose your consumer router as a WiFi access point. I still feel safer flashing the old WiFi router with open firmware before using it even as a WAP.

If it’s a desktop PC you can buy a PCIe card with multiple Ethernet ports pretty cheap, especially if you buy used.

Time to flash the old Netgear router with some open source firmware.

Netgear likely agreed to some backdoor shit

If that’s how you win Trump’s favor, count me out forever.

It’s not clear what makes Netgear’s currently foreign-made routers safer than, say, an Amazon Eero 7 or a Google Nest WiFi Pro.

This is all evidence that it’s not really about safety. It’s a clumsy attempt to strongarm tech companies into setting up factories in the USA. It may also be an attempt to create an environment in which it’s easier to install US government backdoors on every home router.

I suspect it just indicates the excessive power of corporate lobbyists.

US doctors defend Trump, “This is how we all dress now”