Exactly.

If you are describing hitler’s role in WW2? Yes, he was The German Fuhrer.

I would say that, honestly, I prefer the second version as it is more accurate to what he was. But any time you change something you have to ask “what does it mean that we are changing things?”

And since musk is, at best, someone who wishes he was as cool as the losers on LUE back in the day? This is very much not being done with a journalistic style guide in mind.

The ISS (and most engines) also kind of need to be field/garage maintainable. Having to transport a maneuvering thruster back to JPL every few years is obviously a no go.

But also? O-rings (and many kinds of press fits and gaskets) ARE more “single use” than not. That… almost never happens.

Its similar to those wax rings for toilets. Anyone who has ever had to remove/replace a toilet will tell you: Get the actual wax rings because ANY kind of leakage is just hell. But… anyone who has ever actually had to install/replace a toilet will tell you to spend like 5x as much (so… 20 bucks instead of 4) for one of those rubber+wax rings. Technically that is ALSO single use/attempt only but… you actually get a few tries before you need to replace it and find a new helper. You’re going to regret it in 5-10 years when you realize the seal wasn’t great and that smell that wouldn’t go away is a slow leak of piss and shit gas but… it took you five minutes instead of fifty as you kept having to lift the toilet back up to replace the ring.

I feels like all these is really non-issue for dailly user, you’re not gonna open the stuff up every week, most likely you’re gonna need to do it once in a year or two to change some part. If you have any skill repairing stuff, cleaning it up is just a matter of having a toothbrush and some toothpick to clean up the gunk before doing the work, and you will already own a set of driver.

My issue is that it just doesn’t make any sense from an engineering perspective.

Yes, the vast majority of owners will never open their watches up. Hell, they will buy a new smartwatch LONG before they would need to. Like most “right to repair” style topics, we are really talking a very small subset of power users and repair shops.

But what does this get you over the industry/artisan standard? You need one less tool… except now you need a toothpick/brush to properly clean those screw heads. Arguably you always needed one since you SHOULD be deep cleaning your watch before any maintenance, but you technically don’t need one to remove a backplate. And while you probably COULD unscrew without cleaning, you are drastically increasing the likelihood of deforming the screw head and/or outright stripping it.

At best it is a sidegrade. But just look at some of the more… reddit-y responses to this. It is marketing influenced design. People think “screws? I can fix that!” and want to Believe in it.

And, generally speaking, I REALLY dislike stuff like this because it inevitably leads to “enshittification” where things get worse for everyone.

I love my Casio for exercising and hiking and the like.

Casios are, by and large, disposable items. They are not meant to be serviced. They are meant to be replaced. And there are countless stories of Casio putting a LOT of threadlock on those screws for that reason. For some you can get aroudn that to swap a battery or replace a lug but the “preferred” method is to send it to Casio and, if it is under warranty, they basically just send you a new one instead.

And the higher end Casios have twisting backplates that ARE meant to be repaired/maintained have the same twisting backplates as the rest.

Go look at how watches are actually disassembled.

You basically need something to twist it off (magnet, friction, a dedicated tool, or honestly just two properly sized prybars) and then you are set.

This is just yet another case of a tech company “disrupting” because they can’t be bothered to look at what the actual state of the art is and realize there is no point.

Those gonna get jam packed FULL of dead skin and gunk within days.

Watches, generally speaking, have a twist off back plate for that exact reason. And smart watches tend to add glue because it is more reliable than rubber gaskets for water resistance (and because it means you need to contact Apple for replacement parts…).

Its similar to the issue with screws in general. EVERYONE hates flat head screws. People who don’t know that they come in different sizes hates phillips. Everyone LOVES torx…

Until you have something that is exposed to dirt and debris on the regular. And suddenly you are digging the gunk out of those fancy heads by hand while they are still installed. Versus a quick scraping and using the god awful flathead.

A lot of people don’t understand how AI training and AI inference work, they are two completely separate processes.

Yes, they are. Not sure why you are bringing that up.

For those wondering what the actual difference is (possibly because they don’t seem to know):

At a high level, training is when you ingest data to create a model based on characteristics of that data. Inference is when you then apply a model to (preferably new) data. So think of training as “teaching” a model what a cat is, and inference as having that model scan through images for cats.

And a huge part of making a good model is providing good data. That is, generally speaking, done by labeling things ahead of time. Back in the day it was paying people to take an amazon survey where they said “hot dog or no hot dog”. These days… it is “anti-bot” technology that gets that for free (think about WHY every single website cares what is a fire hydrant or a bicycle…)

But that is ALSO just simple metrics like “Did the user use what we suggested”. Instead of saying “not hot dog” it is “good reply” or “no reply” or “still read email” or “ignored email” and so forth.

And once you know what your pain points are with TOTALLY anonymized user data, you can then “reproduce” said user data to add to your training set. Which is the kind of bullshit facebook, allegedly, has done for years where they’ll GLADLY delete your data if you request it… but not that picture of you at the McDonald’s down the street because that belongs to Ronjon Buck who worked there one summer. But they’ll gladly anonymize your user data so the picture of you actually just corresponds to “User 25156161616” that happens to be the sibling of your sister and so forth…

in fact a lot of research is being done right now trying to make it possible to do both because it would be really handy to be able to do them together and it can’t really be done like that yet.

That is literally just a feedback loop and is core to pretty much any “agentic” network/graph.

Go ahead and do so, they will have separate sections specifically about the use of data for training. Data privacy is regulated by a lot of laws, even in the United States, and corporate users are extremely picky about that sort of stuff.

There also tend to be laws about opting in and forced EULA agreements. It is almost like the megacorps have acknowledged that they’ll just do whatever and MAYBE pay a fee after they have made so much more money already.

Understand that basically ANYTHING that “uses AI” is using you for training data.

At its simplest, it is the old fashioned A/B testing where you are used as part of a reinforcement/labeling pipeline. Sometimes it gets considerably more bullshit as your very queries and what would make you make them are used to “give you a better experience” and so forth.

And if you read any of the EULAs (for the stuff that google opted users into…) you’ll see verbiage along those lines.

Of course, the reality is that google is going to train off our data regardless. But that is why it is a good idea to decouple your life from google as much as possible. It takes a long ass time but… no better time than today.

As it stands? Cloudflare is still incredibly effective at protecting customers from those DDOS attacks. Which, depending on your hosting solution, can mean very noticeable monetary savings because YOUR hardware/connection didn’t spike. And, regardless, can mean noticeable monetary savings as your engineers didn’t need to recover a crashed system because your setup was just sitting there idle.

That said: If you truly need high availability? You need to do what downdetector did and have alternatives ready in the event that Cloudflare falls over. Same as with your ISP… which should be ISPs plural.

Agentic AI is just a buzzword for letting AI do things without human supervision

No, it isn’t.

As per IBM https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/agentic-ai

Agentic AI is an artificial intelligence system that can accomplish a specific goal with limited supervision. It consists of AI agents—machine learning models that mimic human decision-making to solve problems in real time. In a multiagent system, each agent performs a specific subtask required to reach the goal and their efforts are coordinated through AI orchestration.

The key part being the last sentence.

Its the idea of moving away from a monolithic (for simplicity’s sake) LLM into one where each “AI” serves a specific purpose. So imagine a case where you have one “AI” to parse your input text and two or three other “AI” to run different models based upon what use case your request falls into. The result is MUCH smaller models (that can often be colocated on the same physical GPU or even CPU) that are specialized rather than an Everything model that can search the internet, fail at doing math, and tell you you look super sexy in that minecraft hat.

And… anyone who has ever done any software development (web or otherwise) can tell you: That is just (micro)services. Especially when so many of the “agents” aren’t actually LLMs and are just bare metal code or databases or what have you. Just like how any Senior engineer worth their salt can point out that isn’t fundamentally different than calling a package/library instead of rolling your own solution for every component.

The idea of supervision remains the same. Some orgs care about it. Others don’t. Just like some orgs care about making maintainable code and others don’t. And one of the bigger buzz words these days is “human in the loop” to specifically provide supervision/training data.

But yes, it is very much a buzzword.

From everything we have heard… I would be shocked if it wasn’t pretty damned close.

Gamers Nexus touched on the pricing info they were given. Go watch the video to confirm but off the top of my head:

• The Steam Machine will be priced competitively with an entry level computer
• The Steam Frame will be below the price of an Index

So what that translates to is

• The Steam Machine will likely be in the 800-1500 USD range
• The Steam Frame will be up to 1000 USD

Which… sounds about right. The Steam Frame is going to use a comparatively cheap Snapdragon processor but it still needs all the HMD tech. The Facebook Quest 3 is around 500 USD and considering economy of scale… that is probably the price floor for the Steam Frame.

And the Steam Machine? That is rocking a proper Zen 4 with 16 gigs of DDR5 and 8 gigs of DDR6. Considering how expensive RAM already is and how that probably ain’t going down until late 2026 at the earliest… And it is worth noting that people lost their shit over the ROG XBOX ALLY X S 45 WHATEVER being 1k but… spec wise that lines up with similar laptops. The display is a decent chunk of that, which the Steam Machine won’t have, but… yeah.

Computers is expensive. Especially in a Post Liberation Day world. It will be a miracle if the base console price (because you can bet the PS6 is gonna do the same stupid bullshit MS did with the Series S…) is below 900 USD with the “real” price being well over 1k. And the Steam Machine is going to be priced along those lines because Valve (presumably) doesn’t have a bunch of warehouses full of parts from five years ago.

The good news is that if you already have a gaming PC, and don’t need the Valve branding, you can get a pretty solid AMD NUC for 300-600 USD that will run Bazzite perfectly and play a lot of your games locally with the rest streaming over Moonlight or Steam Link. GMKtec pretty much have this market on lock and I personally love my K11 (overkill but also really nice to not have to walk upstairs to wake my desktop for every single game).

You’ll have the same nonsense with HDMI 2.1 as the Steam Machine will (so VRR) and AMD but there are workarounds for that (basically you flash a displayport dongle to be REAL sketchy). And you’ll be able to take advantage of most of the software improvements Valve are pushing for SteamVR, SteamOS, and Steam Link that are going to be coming rapidly for the launch. MUCH less oomph but… people who are expecting proper 4k experiences out of a Steam Machine are lying to themselves.

You would need REALLY massive hands to touch those when your thumbs are resting on the analog sticks or the face buttons.

Not sure what drugs you are on but… gimme some.

But yeah. I am glad that the world is trying to minimize dependence on MS. Nextcloud… is very much not it. It is bloated and plugins break constantly and it is shockingly horrible for everything except file sync.

This is the Author’s Guild asking for internet providers to be able to block people without a court order.

Uhm…

Authors Guild Asks Supreme Court

That’s the question at the heart of Cox Communications v. Sony, a case the Authors Guild—joined by Sisters in Crime, Romance Writers of America, the Songwriters Guild of America, Novelists Inc., the Dramatists Guild of America, and the Society of Composers and Lyricists—weighed in on by filing an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court on October 22, 2025.

This is asking for the court to decide in their favor.

As for

They can already go after individual infringers and web sites that aid in piracy. Now they want to be able to order providers to cut off users without the bother of going to court over it.

ISPs have been doing that for decades. That is where data caps came from with the ISPs tending to throttle the hell out of you if you downloaded too much in a single month or they thought you were running a website without paying for business internet. Back in the day, you just had to call and ask why your internet was so slow (for the fifth time that year…) and they would un-cap, but that eventually turned into an official system where they charge an arm and a leg for going over 1 TB or whatever nonsense.

ISPs are already doing whatever they want without court orders. They just do so in a way that lets them profit off the pirates (if there isn’t enough competition to prevent them from doing so).

I’ll also just add on: We very much do not want the ruling to be that ISPs have to document everything you do and collect evidence so that the rights holders can sue you. It will end very very badly. Because that won’t be the current model where if you get caught you get a letter and stop.

The local government is not banning repeat speeders from using the roads though.

Uhm… they do. Fuck up badly enough and your license is taken away. Does that stop people from driving? Of course not. But the penalties for getting caught go up really fast (if you aren’t a cishet white “good old boy”).

And while it is more associated with NIMBYism than safety, there are a few neighborhoods around the country where “no through traffic” is enforced very heavily. Usually there is no actual fine, but you get a rentacop who will make your life hell for the 30 minutes they spend “running your plates” and so forth.

That should remain the decision of the courts.

Uhm… what do you think this is?

I mean… why do you think new speed bumps and traffic signals get added to neighborhoods? Same with adjusted speed limits.

That IS the engineers (well, the local government that employs them) being held accountable for dangerous roads.

For this? I have very serious concerns for all the obvious reasons. But ISPs 100% know what we are doing. Like… there is a reason that comcast et al basically have like a 1 gig upload on a 100 gig down connection. Same with bandwidth caps… which “worked” up until everyone was teleconferencing from home and watching 4k netflix.

And… considering comcast et al love to sell bundles for “unlimited bandwidth” or “symmetrical upload”… they are very much profiting off of piracy.

A lot of that is also a function of displays.

Everyone and their mother want ridiculously bright displays with high contrast because we are all afraid of (I will never feel comfortable typing this without an awkward preamble) crushed blacks and so forth. Most people have no fricking clue what a “nit” is but you are more likely to know how many of those a display has than the actual resolution because that is what is put in the copy sent to reviewers.

And when your display puts out brighter light than the bare light bulb in the room… suddenly a white background is REALLY brutal and everyone jokes about getting flashbanged.

The “speculative” part being massive.

Depending on what brand phone you buy, you either think apple copied the Star Trek communicator or Star Trek copied apple. But the reality is that the communicator was really just a logical extension of the telephone (also so are cell phones but…). And it played such a major role since the 60s were really when people began moving really far away from their families for work or Life and audiences could relate to relying on their phones to keep in touch. And then it is just a logical extension of what happens if you are always in touch… and then what happens when you aren’t?

In a lot of ways? It is less that the techbros see the torture nexus and want to make their own and more that the torture nexus represents a logical progression of society and technology that we will reach if ethics and “common sense” fails and… welcome to the 21st century.

To elaborate:

A TC video usually serves two purposes. The first is to provide information that is interesting and sometimes even useful.

But the other is to detail the learning process and to glance down a few rabbit holes along the way.

And the Dishwasher Saga has the bonus of being both an incredibly snarky man proving the internet wrong AND being some of his most profitable videos.

One of his best videos that more or less explains this is when he did a “live” demo of… just using google to identify and repair a radio. It is deeply fun and rapidly turns into a discussion of why it is good to curate your own entertainment rather than relying totally on algorithms.

… How did you mispell the name of the service in the thread title?

Aside from that: I think so, but you need to make that decision for yourself. There are a few demos that various influencers have made (I was sold by the one by Remap Radio… Fuck Capitalism, Go Home, and Pay For Google?) but what sold me is:

1. I do a LOT of searching in any given month. I’ll use an LLM based “engine” for quick factoids (we’ll get back to that) but I really need the ability to search from my browser’s address bar or the steam browser without having to wade through all the bullshit.
2. I REALLY like that I can prioritize, deprioritize, and outright block sites. No need for a sketchy anti-fandom extension that tracks everything I do when I can just click the dots and say to never show me warframe.fandom ever again. Also it is useful for blocking the REALLY chuddy news sites and misinformation blogs
3. Speaking of Steam. I can just grab/assemble my login-less search string and use that with Steam so that all my in-game searches use kagi with my token rather than dealing with raw dogging google.
4. And as for that LLM? While I wouldn’t pay for it on its own, I do like the kagi assistant. Mostly because it shows me what search strings it is running/emulating and gives me citations. So when it tells me that smallpox tastes savory, I can see how it came to that conclusion and even check if that is contradicted by the website it linked to

I have a lot of concerns with the techbro libertarian attitude of the company itself and am not really huge with where my money goes (in terms of API calls) but… I have a lot more concerns with google shoving and obfuscating gemini more every single day.

Do I like that I am paying for what should be a basic fundamental element of the internet? Of course not. But also… kagi’s approach kinda feels like what searching always should have been since it lets me cut through the SEO bullshit so effectively. I doubt I would be paying for this if google et al hadn’t all decided it was better to emphasize advertisements and LLMs over all else but… I also could see myself doing so with the right demo?

No.

The “only thing going for” them is the ability to sign up with zero personal information. You can encrypt your emails with ANY service because it is you exchanging keys ahead of time and doing it locally before you even look up Job on usenet.

Do not trust a third party to encrypt your sensitive communications for you. Do not trust a third party to protect you. Instead, look at what the the third party actually offers you and figure out how you can take advantage of that.