Yes, but then how would Big Bro save the children and stop the terrorists? :-) Seriously, though, asking parents to parent today is highly offensive. Just got modded "troll" for suggesting that on another similar story.

or the high tech screen breaks at the worst possible time, or spies on you, or ruins the depth perception (image never changes from any angle), or is too low resolution, or has inferior contrast, or the 1cm lens on the outside of the car gets dirt on it. "Modern cars" are made for modern idiots with little in the way of critical thinking skills, much less driving skills. I'm sure it looks "cool" at the dealership, though.

Exactly.

Furthermore, why would someone want to run a modern Linux distro on old hardware (or new hardware for that matter) ? That's just going to result in having all the suck of a modern Linux distro. Install *BSD, hand-wave off the silly Linux politics and keep truckin'. Linux is a corporate operating system now controlled by business interests, bean counters, and communist-esque ideologues. It's never interested me much in the first place.

Wrong. There is definitely a healthy retro scene and many people that love older hardware. Vintage computing festivals/meetings total 50,000–150,000 unique attendees per year worldwide at dedicated retro computing/computer conventions. So, those figures alone gainsay your "derp zero" thesis.

Now, I personally don't *want* to run Linux on any of my retro hardware. Linux is full of suck these days with System==D, Wayland, etc... Why would I want to continue futzing with the same OS Pottering and pals are busy ruining. Linux has always been full of annoying personalities and ideas that way. I'll run BSD happily on my older hardware and have a blast, never touch System==D, and just laugh off the Linux downfall into a corporate bitch-OS.

I'd agree that some enterprising 15 y.o.'s might be able to come up with both the cash and a way to connect to social media. There are several other ways you didn't mention like getting a hold of an old laptop and just doing it from a browser, using friends' computers, etc... However, the problem with all those things is that they require the time and space to spend using social media.

Part of the problem here is the enormous amount of time, focus, and energy kids dump into these environments. They don't do that in a vacuum. If you are actually parenting your kid, you're going to notice rather quickly. If you fail to intervene then the failure is on you. You should definitely be going through your kids belongings and tracking their activities as closely as needed to insure they aren't putting in the time. After all, it's not like they are going to use social media for 15 minutes at their buddies' house and ruin themselves. The damage is the result of years of neglect and lack of oversight/parenting.

... but you had nothing to say that would fish you out of this hole you're digging? That checks out.

Excellent. Well, allow me to retort. I'd say you're a weak willed bitch who cannot stand up to an obnoxious, whiny,15 year old bully you raised. Don't pawn your lack of fortitude off as some kind of universal constant of parenting nobody understands. Others seem to have no problem at all with saying "NO". So, you really have no excuse, do you?

Want to build a high tech car with a solar roof that's low to the ground? Sounds like a reasonable compromise. However, it's just one more thing to break and have to haul back to the dealer for a costly repair. A physical rear-view mirror is a simple solution and appeals to the KISS principle. It might not be as effective at night or for specific situations (low slung cars without rear glass), but it comes with other drawbacks besides adding fragility to your car. For one thing, it's one more camera for Big Brother to use to spy on you and monitor your activities. The more compute capabilities cars have the more governments and their proxies will misuse them and mandate others to misuse them. Another issue is that a rear view camera is easily obscured by external dirt whereas an internal rear view mirror is less vulnerable. I'm not sure why "Polestar" is doing this since they make ugly, square, second-rate EVs that are either sedans or hideous "crossovers". I think it's one more thing to dazzle car-igmos and soccer moms at the dealership, but seems to be ill-advised in the long run comparatively.

My experience matches yours. Grok is the least worst of them and is still pretty heavily weighted toward whatever opinion you'd hear from a Ivy League college educated mainstream journalist. I mean that is what they are trained on, so it makes sense. However, they obviously have a different dial for tolerance somewhere between "22 year old lesbian" and "Parag Agrawal". The slider should be there and labeled "How left do you want your far left leftism?"

You express some interesting ideas about the chilling effect, too. I know for sure people have a lot of unspoken and unexpressed hate. So, I doubt that not being able to talk to an LLM about it will cause any measurable impact on the existence of hate or non-conformist ideas. However, we also seem to be in early innings of this AI/LLM game. Maybe that will change. Overall, it's the classic case of safety versus freedom. About half the folks I meet these days are downright scared of freedom and will willingly and unabashedly advocate for censorship and authoritarian control. That's how much fear is in them.

Claude always comes up with the most mainstream conformist response to anything. It's absolutely intolerable. I can't even interact with it much on technical topics. It'll push any trendy thing journalists love and techs hate. It's super paternal. The question here is what is the tolerance for LLMs treating (unfortunate) disturbed people normally and seriously ? If someone uses the information to hurt themselves or others, is the LLM to blame? I'd say there isn't any difference between an LLM and a search engine if a crazy guy searches for "What is the police response time at my local kindergarten?" What you do with information matters more than where you got it from.

Ostensibly your teenager still lives at home. They don't have the cash to buy their own phone. So, the parents bought them the phone. They also pay for the cellular carrier. I personally know kids that get grounded from their phones and have them taken away by the parents for months at a time. There is no end to parental controls built right into the OS! I find your assertion pathetic and ridiculous. If you cannot control your fucking children then stop having them or at least stop whining that you have no control.

I love Norway. Less industrialization and a small population in a beautiful location helps a lot. Norwegians are generally nice/kind folks in my considerable experience as a foreigner there. However, it's not that rosy. The weather is shit in most areas most of the year. People are always desperate to go on vacation where the sun is shining. They have shitty choices for food (if you like savory or fast food especially) because they cannot handle any spicy food at all. Everything is nasty, bland, and too expensive. It's boring as fuck, too. They don't have a lot of options for fun besides "discotecken" and drink-yourself-cross-eyed. Don't try to get anything done on Sunday, either: everything is closed. It's goddamn gorgeous in the Summertime, but maaaan it's bleak in December.

Also, as I mentioned elsewhere, if you are unlucky enough to express your opinions about migrants online and you're one of the 1000 or so folks they arrest every year for hate speech, you also might not be too enthused. Still... beats the UK or Germany's level of censorship and viewpoint suppression.

Correct.

**Norway's "hate speech" laws are a textbook European censorship regime dressed up as compassion.** Under the Norwegian Penal Code (especially section 185), it's a crime to "threaten or insult" someone or a group based on ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, etc... if it's "likely to be seen as a serious violation." Penalties can include fines or up to 3 years in prison. "Insult" is deliberately vague courts decide what counts as "hate." As the Chuch Lady would say "How conveeeeeeeenient!!"

This is **state-enforced thought control**. Norway (and most of Europe) abandoned the clear American standard (no viewpoint discrimination, only narrow incitement to imminent lawless action (Brandenburg v. Ohio)). Instead, they let bureaucrats and judges punish "wrongthink" that might hurt feelings or "undermine social cohesion."

It's selectively enforced, chills dissent on immigration, Islam, gender ideology, or COVID policies, and treats citizens like children who can't handle robust debate. True tolerance means protecting offensive speech; Norway's model is soft totalitarianism with snowflakes as the excuse. Classic Old World statism vs. the First Amendment's radical presumption: speak freely, or shut up and tolerate it. Thousands have already been prosecuted with Section 185 (over 1000 a year in a fairly small country). Yet ask a search engine or LLM and it'll crow about how great the journalist protections are there. Yeah.... unless you say something they don't like.

They make phones with pretty fullsome parental controls. Yet they want the government to play the heavy, I guess. I mean most parents would get more mileage from an AirTag in their kid's shoe. After all the research showing you that your kid's smartphone is turning them into a lazy narcissistic retard and that phones ruin school performance, people still cannot find the gumption to tell their little yard ape "No." ? Holy shit. Norwegians are big on doing what the rest of society wants and going with the flow, but standing up for individual rights or free speech, not so much. Despite glowing praise from idiot journalists about how great their free press is, they have hate speech laws (censorship) and around 1000 folks a year are arrested simply for expressing things like doubts or dislike for migrants.

If you aren't free to express yourself there then it's no big surprise Big Brother will tell you how to raise your kids, too.

That was before we had an "LLM C Compiler" that was bullshit and didn't have an assembler or linker (Anthropic). That was before we had the Mighty "Mythos" that found three whole bugs (supposedly) and threatened a flood of more of them.... that never came. See, thing is, I get curious when people make these claims and tend to try to repeat any really impressive tasks, like when I tried Anthropic's C compiler that turns out cannot link, optimize, assemble, or do anything really well without some other (non-AI already existing) tools.

Sorry Lucy, play football by yourself.

It does just sit there, but it most certainly can do things after the OS is loaded, too (very much depends on what OS we are talking about). BIOS stays in ROM/shadow RAM. The BIOS code is in ROM (typically mapped at the top of the 1MB address space, like F0000h–FFFFFh) and often shadowed into RAM for faster access. The Interrupt Vector Table (IVT) at the bottom of memory (00000h–003FFh) points to BIOS handlers. These don't get wiped out when the OS boots. Furthermore, we have things like INT 13h, disk operations (read/write sectors, status, etc.). This includes the original CHS functions and INT 13h extensions (EDD for LBA, larger disks). These were commonly used by bootloaders, DOS, real-mode programs, and even some protected-mode code via switches or VM86 mode.Other examples include INT 10h (video), INT 16h (keyboard), etc. All of these were/are available after booting and many OSes use them.