"Your worst sin is that you've destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing." --Dostoevsky // βοΈ1 Timothy 1:17βοΈ
Ecclesia Militans
Joined February 2009
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Secularism promised progress but here we are having to go all the way to the Supreme Court to argue that being a women isn't merely a feeling, nor should we allow the amputation & mutilation of physically healthy children by anyone.
On Wednesday, a massively important case is going before the Supreme Court to decide whether states can protect children from gender ideology. Top-flight lawyer Erin Hawley explains the stakes at @WNGdotorg.
wng.org/opinions/a-states-riβ¦
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Happy 10-year anniversary to this absolute banger
Exactly right. I know some places have codified the right to tinker with your own property but that will need to become more widespread.
The real test begins when folks start to reverse engineer their personal vehicle software. Fun times lol.
Reverse Engineer Anything and removing malware/spyware from your own devices sits so close to the cyber guardrails that phrasing or word choice can mean the difference between a refusal and smooth sailing. The rumors that Claude was nerfed started on reddit, and in those threads many comments point out that Claude will still do it if you rephrase it. OpenAI is treating the similar refusals with codex as accidental decision-boundary issues and says they're getting fixed. I expect Anthropic will do the same. It's pointless and counterproductive to try to restrict this. Let people do what they want with their own property. They'll do it anyway with less restrictive models, and fighting it just means losing subscriptions and a resentful public.
Libs never beating the "America Last" rap.
New Gallup poll asks "which values the country most needs today?"
Out of a list of 12 values, Republicans put "patriotism" #1, for Dems it ranks dead last - by a lot.
Dems say "equality" is most needed, Republicans rank it 11th out of 12.
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Just saying
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Pretty much.
As of the past few weeks, debt markets have almost entirely shut off access to money for any company that doesnβt have substantial revenue independent of AI data centers.
SpaceX closed $40B of debt for GPUs, but weβre investment grade and have Starlink & launch revenue.
That means the 200+ neoclouds are going to see guppy-level death and consolidation. Some will make it through, but not many.
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As someone with a portfolio of energized land assets here is what I am seeing:
1. Neoclouds are disorganized and poorly capitalized. Some are definitely better than others however.
2. Hyperscalers are intractable, bureaucratic organizations that take 3 months to do an NDA and want 18mo escrow periods. We built our portfolio by competing against these terms because of our speed and simplicity. The more future assets orgs like ours win, the bigger the problem for the hyperscalers downstream (see 3).
3. There are delays in the existing pipeline that will catch people off guard in 2027. Hyperacalers will (obviously) react by focusing on their own internal compute needs over any third party. If the third party is a model company, they will tell them to go through their model router where they will also take a non-trivial vig. Them telling Ant they have no compute for them (rumored in Antβs S-1) if true is a huge tell that this is already happening.
All of this is to say that it does look like there will be a lot of partially stranded compute and compute sitting in inventory in 2027 than is currently forecasted. This is bought and paid for but effectively underearning (below total cost of capital) or collecting dust. We see this as true for everyone - model companies, hyperscalers, neoclouds except ONE (you can guess which one).
This dislocation will benefit two kinds of orgs: the non-bureaucratic big scalers who can build industrial scale quickly and the nimble, well capitalized players feeding them.
2027 will be a turbulent year because it will clear out a bunch of wrong/bad bets. It will also be a consolidation year for a few.
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Lots of people forgetting that giant corps essentially shut off the Internet for any customer they felt was insufficiently condemnatory of the Jan 6 riots
They hadn't even broken any written rule. They just didn't like them so no Internet for them. Starlink's policy is way more clear and fair.
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My thoughts on responding to Data Republican's discoveries.
The Coming Insurrection instapundit.substack.com/p/tβ¦
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If you've ever wondered why smart TVs are so cheap, this is why.
@log4j rooted his Samsung and found an always-on hot mic, automatic content recognition, geolocation, network mapping, ad targeting and user profiling, shared with Samsung's "400 partners".
A lot of it can be blocked in <15 min, wrote a basic guide below.
What your TV is doing
The main culprit is ACR (automatic content recognition). Your TV screenshots what's on screen, fingerprints it, and sends it home to build your ad profile. Samsung does it every 500ms, LG every 10ms [1].
What is insane: it happens on connected devices too.
Plug in your laptop, your console, your work machine, and your TV can fingerprint that via HDMI [1].
He also found that if your Samsung doesn't have a mic, it'll look for one from a connected soundbar or bluetooth device.
xitter.cf/log4j/status/211376224β¦
It's on by default, and you likely agreed to it on the setup screen you clicked through in 10 seconds.
Step 1: Turn off ACR
Samsung: Terms & Privacy β Viewing Information Services
LG: Live Plus
Vizio: Viewing Data
Roku: "Use info from TV inputs"
Sony/Google TV: Samba Interactive TV
Menus vary by model, but those are the names to look for. While you're in there, opt out of interest-based ads, reset your advertising ID, decline every optional privacy agreement, turn off voice recognition, and delete apps you never open.
Step 2: Give smart devices their own network
Put the TV, cameras, speakers and vacuum on your router's guest/IoT network. The logic is simple: these devices rarely get patched. If one gets compromised (getting drastically more frequent with AI), it shouldn't be able to see your other devices or home network.
Step 3: Block trackers for the whole house with DNS-level filtering
NextDNS (cloud-based) is easy and has a solid free plan. Pi-hole is a little bit more work if you prefer self hosting. For simplicity we'll focus on the former.
1. Sign up at nextdns.io (free tier is plenty)
2. Privacy tab: add a blocklist (OISD is a good bet) and turn on Native Tracking Protection for Samsung, LG, Roku, Amazon (see attached image)
3. Setup tab: copy your endpoint
4. Paste it into your router's DNS settings as DNS-over-HTTPS/TLS (or use the IPs + "Link IP" if your router only does plain DNS)
5. Bonus: block outbound port 53 except to your router. Some devices hardcode their own DNS to get around you
Then open the NextDNS logs and watch how often your TV phones home. It's eye-opening. If an app or update breaks, find the domain in the logs and allowlist it.
Why they do this
TV prices are down 97% since 2000 [2]. Most of that is better manufacturing and brutal competition. But once margins on the hardware hit zero, the cost moved to you.
In Q3 2024, Vizio lost $6.7M selling TVs and made $115.8M in gross profit from ads and viewing data [3]. They've said on earnings calls that they keep TV prices low to grow the audience they sell to advertisers. Walmart bought them in 2024.
This isn't a conspiracy theory either. Vizio paid $2.2M to the FTC in 2017 for tracking 11 million TVs without consent. Last December, Texas sued Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense and TCL over ACR. Samsung and LG have since agreed to stop collecting that data without explicit consent [4].
TL;DR
1. ACR off
2. Ads + voice off
3. Smart devices on their own network
4. NextDNS filtering on the router
Sources:
[1] ACR study: arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203
[2] Cost of US consumer goods: aei.org/economics/chart-of-tβ¦
[3] Vizio Q3 2024: sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/β¦
[4] Texas v. Samsung: texasattorneygeneral.gov/newβ¦
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We finally have an explanation for βFacebook is listening to me through my phoneβ. Theyβd never do that (and itβs not really possible).
Turns out literally everyone else was β and then selling that to ad data brokers.
WTF, $3000 Samsung TV has an always-on mic, automatic content recognition, geo tracking, network mapping, and ships your data to Samsung + 400 partners.
Bro Rooted a brand-new 2025 Samsung TV after noticing absurdly targeted ads.
Firmware was locked down, so zero-days it was.
Got a root shell.
then found: always-on voice service, ACR, geo, full telemetry pipeline, and four separate DRM systems.
This isnβt a bug, Itβs the product bro.
This is an argument for reinstating colonialism.
Elon Musk must be reading @instapundit.
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It's subtle, but with a trained eye, you can detect a slight difference between the way that The New York Times Editorial Board is treating the accusations against Ilhan Nur Said Elmi (aka Ilhan Omar) and the way they treated the accusations against Donald Trump.
