30 years ago it was Beanie Babies.

I recall seeing infomercials selling "investing guides" for which dolls you should horde.

Hint: if the value of something hinges on the fact that the factory only goes so fast, you might not want to bet the retirement on them not spinning up another factory.

Astute investors will note that Dude Bro's strategy was based on the notion that bitcoin would keep appreciating.

So if everything kept getting better forever, he would be right.

But so would everyone in an index fund. With far better performance when line go down.

if you go in to it thinking it is, or worse, wanting it to be, you will be very disappointed.

University sells you a bundle of services:

- Prefab peer collection - you get to pick friends/lovers/hopefully a partner from a pool of your supposed peers.

- Training to act like an adult while still adulting with training wheels.

- Somewhat related, but having time and space to explore who you want to be.

- Certification that you're capable of some professional acts that you will probably not use, but will get you in the door for some other job.

- And yes, if you want to learn, you can do that too, but many people don't. This is mainly training in how to pursue your own goals while paying lip service to someone else's. (Don't diminish the value of this - this is how most people spend most of their lives.)

Do these people really think they're hiding Directive 4 from us?

We are only a year out from the murder of a health-insurance executive, so the police are more on edge than usual.

Then we need to threaten such things much more often, so that the cops will eventually get used to it, and relax. ;-)

Debian never tried to kill me through my computer. I'd appreciate it if my car manufacturer made their car as safe as my computer.

Fuck it, I just want a Debian car. Then I won't need to extract bloody vengeance from beyond the grave, as my zombie revenant tracks down the CEO of Subaru, and the rotting flesh of my hands tightens around his throat as payment for the time a popup distracted me.

So you forgot when Netflix was funding the Biden fascism machine?

Honestly, yeah, I do. When was this, and what was the pro-fascist action?

We need a right-winger billionaire to balance Soros

You've got plenty. Publicly known support from home-grown billionaires (this omits foreign actors like MBS giving billions to his family, donations to 501c3s, "partnerships", his shitcoin bribe pipeline, and any quiet bribes be haven't heard about yet):

- Richard Kurtz
- Steve Wynn
- Bernard Marcus
- Elon Musk
- Cameron Winklevoss
- Tyler Winklevoss
- Miriam Adelson
- Jimmy John Liautaud
- Geoffrey Palmer
- Don Ahern
- Roger Penske
- Robert Johnson
- Timothy Dunn
- Elizabeth Uihlein
- Richard Uihlein
- Phil Ruffin
- Linda McMahon
- Diane Hendricks
- George Bishop
- J. Joe Ricketts
- Douglas Leone
- Andrew Beal
- Larry Ellison
- Kenny Troutt
- Kelcy Warren
- Jeff Sprecher
- Kelly Loeffler
- Antonio Gracias

Some people are busting out "definitions" of "End to End Encryption" but people were already using that as in informal descriptive term long before your formalized technical jargon was made up. Nobody should be surprised if there are mismatches. Have faith in our faithlessness.

I personally view the term as an attempt to call semi-bullshit on SMTP and IMAP over SSL/TLS. In the "old" (though not very old) days, if you sent a plaintext email (no PGP!), some people would say "oh, it's encrypted anyway, because the connection is encrypted between your workstation and the SMTP server, the connection from there to some SMTP relay is encrypted, the connection from there to the final SMTP server is encrypted, and the recipient's connection to the IMAP server is encrypted."

To which plenty of people, like me, complained "But it's still plaintext at every stop where it's stored along the way! You should use PGP, because then, regardless of the connection security, or lack of security on all the connections, it is encrypted end to end. Never trust the network, baby!"

Keep in mind that even when I say that, this is without any regard for key security! When I say E2E encrypted, it is implied that the key exchange may have been done poorly/incorrectly, mainly because few people really get to be sure they're not being MitMed when they use PGP. You can exchange keys correctly, but it's enough of a PITA that, in the wild, you rarely get to. You usually just look up their key on some keyserver and hope for the best. Ahem. And I say "usually" as if even that happens often. [eyeroll]

Indeed, every time I hear about some new secure messaging app/protocol, the first thing I wonder is "how do they do key exchange?" and I'm generally mistrusting of it, by default. And sometimes, I'm unpleasantly unsurprised, err I mean, cynically confirmed.

But anyway, if my E2E definition matches yours, great! And if it doesn't, well, that's ok and it's why we descend into the dorky details, so that we can be sure we're both talking about the same thing.

Netflix is, eh, what it is. But at least it isn't owned by the fine minds that brought you Oracle licensing behavior and is fully on-board with the Project Fascist America.

> Meanwhile, H.264 has dedicated hardware decoders in world+dog devices, including ancient ones.

Ancient ones, yes, but most devices sold in the past five years have AV1 *decode* support.

Hardware with AV1 *encode* is still pretty rare but a fair number of up-market chips from the past few years have it.

What we mostly care about here is the $20 amtel or mediatek devices sold today, and those are fine.

Netflix can support the older devices with H.264 as long as it makes more sense to pay the patent license fees than to drop support for old devices.

It won't be long before there are no devices that the manufacturer still supports that can't decode AV1 in hardware. Not that most end-users even know their device went EOL and now a potential liability.

Given that Netflix has native apps on most of these systems it should be straightforward to serve the non-patented stream to any device that can play it well.

> They don't do backups at those outfits?

We really need Federal government backups to be centralized at the National Archives.

Both so one expert team can make sure it's done right, instead of hundreds of teams with questionable experience and track records attempting to do it right.

And /also/ so when one agency goes, "whoopise, I guess we deleted the evidence of our crimes!" there is recourse.

Right now, the prosecutor just goes, "shucks, I guess we don't have a case then. Better fire some leaf-node IT contractor."

Microsoft famously tried to lean on Apple to kill it.

Anyone who has a temper-tantrum like this over getting fired shouldn't have been allowed near systems in the first place.

Anyone working in IT who isn't at least aware of the layers of surveillance at any reasonable sized shop is terrible at their job.

And simply as a matter of competence, anyone who does something like this without a plan ("Muneeb Akhter also allegedly asked an artificial intelligence tool for instructions on clearing system logs after deleting a database") is a fucking moron.

The claim is they used CF-ABS with a transition temperature of 105C, but that pretty clearly seems to not have been the case.

The douchebag putz looks almost healthy there.

Steve Lehto has a good video about this.

In Michigan the Lemon Law applies to problems that 'reduce the value to the consumer'.

Some people are attempting to return their cars over these popup ads. IIRC it was GM that was much more aggressive but I might have that detail wrong.