And of course there are scammers on all sides - not just legitimately bad stores trying to whitewash their online presence, but also entire scammer rackets that extort legitimately good stores by flooding them with BS reviews [2].

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-shady-companies-remove-ba...

[2] https://9now.nine.com.au/a-current-affair/inside-the-extorti...

The thing is, up until the advent of the internet it basically didn't matter - although in some cases, e.g. the German left-wing terror group "RAF", rich people did end up getting v&, in some cases killed. But that was a rarity.

But now with the possibilities of modern technology? Being able to be active on the Internet without hiding behind a pseudonym is a rare privilege. Wrong political opinion? Some nutjob from the opposite side can and will send anything from "pizza pranks" to outright SWAT to your home (or your parents, or ex-wife, or anyone they can identify as being associated with you). And if you got money? Stalkers, thieves, robbers, scammers, you will get targeted.

Well... they wouldn't be the first ones to black out the Internet either. And I'm not just talking about threats specific to oneself here because that is a much different threat model, but the effects of being collateral damage as well. Say, your country's leader says something that makes the US President cry - who's to say he doesn't order SpaceX to disable Starlink for your country? Or that Russia decides to invade yet another country and disables internet satellites [1]?

And it doesn't have to be politically related either, say that a natural disaster in your area takes out everything smarter than a toaster for days if not weeks [2].

> If your BIOS or bootloader is compromised then so is your OS.

well, that's the point of the TPM design and Secure Boot: that is not true any more. The OS can verify everything being executed prior to its startup back to a trusted root. You'd need 0-day exploits - while these are available including unpatchable hardware issues (iOS checkm8 [3]), they are incredibly rare and expensive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viasat_hack

[2] https://www.telekom.com/de/blog/netz/artikel/lost-place-und-...

[3] https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Checkm8_Exploit

Not to complexity, but to abstraction. The more something is abstracted away, the more fungible "developers" become, to the eventual tune of Claude Code.

No one cares that trying to debug a modern application is as hellish as its performance, the KPI that executives go for is employment budget.

Sounds nice on paper, has issues in practice:

1. no internet (e.g. something like Iran)? Your device is effectively bricked.

2. heavily monitored internet (e.g. China, USA)? It's probably easy enough for the government to snoop your connection metadata and seize the physical server.

3. no security at all against hardware implants / base firmware modification. Secure Boot can cryptographically prove to the OS that your BIOS, your ACPI tables and your bootloader didn't get manipulated.

[1] https://shop.certum.eu/open-source-code-signing.html

[2] https://comodosslstore.com/code-signing/comodo-individual-co...

The problem isn't just in the OS side of the stack. Disk firmwares - especially SSDs - love to lie to the layers above [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46239726

Well... multiple things here.

If you're in, say, finance, you can't just go and move to some flyover state and work remotely. You need to be around NYC (US), LON (UK) or FRA (EU).

If you work some service job, say you work retail, okay. But... imagine what happens to NYC when all the people doing the menial work keeping the city alive (have to) move away? Whoops, now everyone is going to drown in trash and feces!

It is vitally important for any city to have enough adequate housing for all levels of income, otherwise it falls apart.

The problem is, in the end it leads to a society where you NEED a smartphone to enjoy basic human existence - and yes, access to cultural and sports events is a fundamental part of being a human.

That in turn almost always means: your smartphone must be either Apple or a blessed Google device. And that in turn means: no rooting (because most apps employ anti-root SDKs these days), no cheap AOSP phones, no AOSP forks like Graphene OS. And that is, frankly, dystopian when your existence as a human being depends on one of two far too rich American mega corporations. Oh and it needs to be a recent model too, because app developers just love to go the easy route and only support recent devices on recent OS versions.

And that's before we get into account bans (which particularly Google is infamous for), international sanctions like the one against the ICC justices, or pervasive 24/7 surveillance by advertising SDKs or operating systems themselves.

[1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/afuv_2005/anlage_1.html

[2] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D...

In the multi-tile array it apparently still only needs one Pi [1] as the FPGAs do the heavy lifting.

[1] https://moonrf.com/updates/

Meanwhile... the RPi alone will probably make up 299 dollars of that price tag [1].

It is not a good time to design hardware that needs RAM. Arrest and imprison Sam Altman.

[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/dram-pricing-is-killi...

Part of that is because most of the world's power grids are extremely dumb. There's no visibility anywhere, certainly not in real time - if you're lucky, there is some sort of alert monitor for overtemperature in local transformers, but no voltage/current monitoring on an individual consumer level and no current monitoring on both sides of a transformer.

Imagine a small pole transformer plus secondary-side distribution lines rated and fused for 100 kVA. Enough for a few farms. Now farm A and B each install an 80 kVAp solar panel set - and farm C, D and E consume 50 kVA each. Without the decentralized solar, the pole transformer fuse would have been triggered - but now, there's 150 kVA of consumption going on, fed by the 160 kVA solar panels, on a distribution line only supporting 100 kVA, that's now acting as a fuse. An immediate risk of damage, if not outright fire.

That is why large scale solar/wind or large consumers all need permits, plannings and sometimes dedicated lines and transformers.

The only other way to run a system without creating tons of new infra but still able to catch such dangerous situations is a detailed (!) network map on the utility side plus realtime monitoring of the transformer and all five farms input/output currents.

I'd like some sort of shared blocklist support for YouTube and Instagram. I'm sick and tired of content thieves and AI slop farms.

Because third party drivers usually are utter dogshit. That's how Apple managed to get double the battery life time even in the Intel era over comparable Windows based offerings.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis#2025