In theory a smart fridge could be useful.

If it automatically scanned everything you put inside, it could tell you what ingredients you had if you were planning a recipe. If you were at the store you could know what to buy. It could warn you before something reached its expiry date, or remind you what leftovers were still uneaten. Depending on how much you trusted it, it could learn what you always buy, and add them to your shopping list when you were running low, or even actually order them.

In theory this could reduce food spoilage and wastage, and could save you money in the long term. It requires trust though. Samsung is obviously mistreating users by showing them ads. But, it could be much worse. The fridge could order food that the user didn’t need, or if it ordered food Samsung could strike a deal with one company and always prefer their brands even when there were cheaper options. And, of course, Samsung could sell your buying habits to Google and Meta who would use it to more effectively target you with ads. Or, Samsung could cut a deal with insurance companies to tell them which users had unhealthy eating habits so the insurance company could deny coverage or hike rates.

The big issue here is section 1201 of the DMCA. If that didn’t exist, someone could open up a business installing a new, custom, privacy-centric OS on people’s fridges. But, with section 1201 in place, that’s illegal and you could be thrown in jail for performing that service. Even outside the US laws like that exist because the US insisted on them on condition that otherwise the US would force those countries to pay high tariffs. Of course, now the US is jacking up tariffs regardless. I have no idea why no country has yet repealed their equivalent of section 1201. Whichever country does it first will have a huge advantage.

I don’t want to have to completely redo my whole email stack.

Web services, and then various components of an email system.

I’m using automated renewals.

But, that just means there’s a new cert file on disk. Now I have to convince a half a dozen different apps to properly reload that changed cert. That means fighting with Systemd. So Systemd has won the first few skirmishes, and I haven’t had the time or energy to counterattack. Now instead of having to manually poke at it 4x per year, it’s going to be closer to once a month. Ugh.

The front page of the web site is excellent. It describes what it does, and it does its feature set in quick, simple terms.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to a website for some open-source software and had no idea what it was or how it was trying to do it. They often dive deep into the 300 different ways of installing it, tell you what the current version is and what features it has over the last version, but often they just assume you know the basics.

Thanks. In theory if I do change my mind and run Steam on my HTPC, it should work even if I don’t use Bazzite. But, for now, I’m going to aim for keyboard control and Kodi.

It seems better now than it was a few months ago. Back then it actually locked up my machine if I triggered the bug. Now it just temporarily slows things down.

But, I haven’t gambled on running a few apps that would regularly trigger it just in case. What’s funny is that modern Steam games are no problem, but it’s running emulated games using Emulation Station that causes problems. Games from 2024, no problem. Games from 1984? Hey, that’s pushing it.

On the HTPC you’re running Bazzite? Do you play games on that machine?

I’m planning on setting up a HTPC, but I won’t use it for gaming. I was thinking of setting it up to run Sway because I think I’ll mostly be using Kodi which has good keyboard support, so why not try to do everything in a keyboard-friendly way.

Yeah, you should be using flatpak wherever possible. I currently have only gnome-tweaks and zsh as layered packages. Everything else is a flatpak, brew or lives in a distrobox.

Same here also on a 1080, but with the closed-source drivers. There’s some issue they’ve had for at least the 6ish months I’ve been using it where with my dual screen setup sometimes hangs. Apparently it’s a known bug and they haven’t fixed it. It hits me about once every couple of weeks these days. Other than that it has run every game I’ve tried as well as Windows.

Now imagine if there was some way a government could take a percentage of that and put it towards improving society as a whole.

Yes, some form of “giving pledge” where the amount was standardized and there was no option to back out. Radical thinking here.

You expect those 250k lines to be comprehensible? In my experience they’ll be an utter clusterfuck.

Even worse is if they’re completely plausible, but there’s a very subtle logic bug in there that is super hard to spot because of just how plausible everything is.

Even if the original developers weren’t rock stars, the codebase was feature-complete in the 80s or earlier and they’ve spent the decades since then eliminating nearly every single bug.

The real issue is that it’s expensive to add new features compared to a modern codebase , and it’s very difficult to find COBOL programmers in 2025.

Eventually a bank is going to take the gamble and rewrite everything in a modern language, and designed with modern tech in mind. But, it’s going to be a huge gamble. And, I can guarantee you, they’re not going to be vibe-coding it.

“Doogie Howser here hasn’t even had a day of med school, but thanks to AI he’s writing 5000 drug prescriptions per day!”

“We literally found this homeless man on the street ranting about lizard people, and now thanks to AI he’s the the biggest stud at the hedge fund, making hundreds of multi-billion dollar trades every day!”

“Betty here failed out of high school and can’t even pronounce ‘nuclear’ properly, but thanks to AI she wrote the entire atomic power plant safety manual in a day.”

“Would you believe that Fred is still in a coma? Yeah, doctors say he’s ‘in a persistent vegetative state’ and ‘never going to recover after that i-beam crushed his head’, and ‘what you people are doing is both cruel and insane’. But, we hooked DeepSeek up to his respirator and heart monitor and connected some black and red wires together and he’s back to working as an air traffic controller!”

Hour to hour and day to day that’s probably true. But, nVidia is actually an example of a company where their leadership made some smart decisions decades ago by understanding their market extremely well and correctly predicting what was going to be happening in the industry 5-10 years down the line. For example, he went all in on CUDA almost a decade before the AI went mainstream, and because of that decision, nVidia is the biggest company in the world today.

I would bet that if a major decision came up and you had to decide whether or not to go all in on X, you couldn’t actually do his job.

It’s also proof that there wouldn’t be major negatives from a wealth tax. These guys love working, it’s not about the money, they all say it. So, let them keep working, but give their earnings to people who need it.

Also, having no work-life balance is different if you own a significant fraction of the company vs. if you’re on salary.

Like, if Jensen Huang spends 12 hours over the weekend working on something for nVidia and increases the share price by 0.01% (with a $4.165 trillion market cap, this means it goes up $416 million), his personal net worth will go up by $14.7m. Not bad for a little weekend work.

Let’s assume that someone who is on salary is on something absurd like $1m per year and gets a 500% bonus for working overtime. Their 12 hours of weekend work is going to net them $28k. That’s certainly nice, but it’s about 1/500th of what Huang gets. And, your average engineer probably doesn’t get overtime at all, and if they did it would be closer to $3k not $30k.

If someone who owns a business wants to have a bad work-life balance, that’s one thing. But, it should never be expected of anybody who’s just on salary.

Most technology adoption follows an S curve

For successful technologies. Sometimes technologies just don’t catch on, like 3d TVs, or VR or Segways. Then the curve is more up then back down to zero.

But yeah, this time might be different. Linux has more or less reached feature parity with Windows. Games run just as well or better under Linux, with only a little bit of fiddling. That alone might not be enough, but having that happen when Windows 10 is reaching end of life, and Microsoft wants you to buy new expensive hardware for the privilege of moving to Windows 11, and just as they’re adding all kinds of new ads and AI bullshit into Windows.

Personally, I’m already on Linux, so my main reason for hoping it gets more momentum is so that device manufacturers make sure their drivers work well in Linux. Full driver support and full software support for devices is the main thing that’s still a bit of a pain.

Yeah, even an established creator is going to have a hard time moving their audience.

If YouTube weren’t a near monopoly it would be different. Then other companies would be competing for creators.

Making it worse is section 1201 of the DMCA. It makes it a crime to circumvent access controls. In the past, Facebook was able to grow by providing tools to interface with MySpace. People didn’t have to abandon their MySpace friends, they could communicate with them through Facebook, and Facebook could ensure that messages sent on its platform arrived to people still on MySpace. But, if you tried that today Facebook has access controls in place that make that a crime. The same applies to YouTube. Nobody can build a seamless “migrate away from YouTube” experience because YouTube will use the DMCA to block them.

The governments of the world need to bring back antitrust with teeth and force interoperability.

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