No the Home Screen ads were added in an update 2.5ish years ago. I know this because that is when I decided to disconnect my Roku tv from the internet rather than see ads when I turn my tv on.
I had been a pretty big Roku fan before that point as I had worked with them back in ~2017 and knew how locked down and sewn up they kept customer data, and only shared it in a very anonymized way. Obviously the situation has degraded in the recent years, and caused me to brick the functionality of a very expensive device.
Seems like it’s impossible to have a smart tv now that actually respects privacy, so back to dumb tvs and connections to pcs?
I believe dumb TV’s are both more expensive and much harder to compare. I can’t find any dumb TV reviews on rtings.com for example.
People usually suggest commercial TV’s but its not clear how to determine which have comparable HDR gamut as consumer units. So it’s hard to figure out exactly what the premium is.
Is a $2,000 dumb/commercial TV equivalent to a $500 consumer TV or a $1600 one?
Some of that extra cost is for the extra reliability the commercial displays offer, in case anyone wondered. They're designed to be on 24/7 for extended periods.
I see double click coverage, Amazon coverage, and a tiny amount of Facebook, but missing a lot of large players in the adtech space. I don’t see Microsoft being explicitly called here.
Then from the large scale independent companies I see none of them on here? Shouldn’t you try Trade desk, Magnite, Applovin, Criteo, Xandr as well?
Then you would want to check vs data brokers as well; Experian, Equifax, Axciom, Epsilon, LexisNexus, Liveramp, and CoreLogic at minimum.
Every gallon of gas you use was produced far away, shipped halfway around the world for processing, and shipped back to you. Even if you are in the US, we basically don’t have the equipment to process our own gasoline from the crude we produce.
This means that millions and millions of machines have to be maintained, shipping lanes have to stay open, infrastructure has to stay profitable, distribution has to stay easy and cheap. The web is invisible to the end user, but it is massively complicated and expensive to upkeep.
Solar, once you have the panels you have to clean them every once in a while, and replace a failing panel every once in a while. But they produce for ~30 years after being made once.
So it’s funny to argue about environmental waste in this way. It’s an issue, but everything in a solar panel can basically be recycled and we are seeing the facilities start to come online as the first wave of PV panels starts dying off.
Multiple ways. One interesting one is huge sand batteries that are being heated up to massive temps, then having pipes run through there to collect the heat energy as hot water and doing the industrial processes that way.
Another way is using excess green energy to produce green hydrogen, which can be used as a fuel source in very high energy scenarios.
Past that, we recently have made electric arc furnaces and electric smelting furnaces for steel and aluminum, and several of these are fully solar powered.
It’s a shift to change the energy source for industrial production, but we have the technology and the ability. And the sun is free!
Yeahhhh I had to disconnect mine from the internet due to this (I don’t want a display ad on the menu screen when I turn on my TV like WTF, my TV just enshittified itself randomly with an update that added this a year or two ago). Which would be fine but you can’t change the TV menu tile layout if you are disconnected from the internet… Just incredible layers of design stupidity here.
I use pfblockerNG(like pi-hole but for pfsense) to block ads to my roku. And I set up pi-hole at family members houses to block ads and telemetry on theirs.
Both can be true. Standards can both have improved since the 1920s and income inequality can be equivalent or worse than the gilded age. This would be coherent with improvements mostly being funneled to the top, while some benefits accrue throughout the economy.
However the story is much more dynamic and interesting than that, with income inequality shrinking until the late 70s and early 80s, then expanding drastically until now, half a century later. That period of lower income inequality is mostly why things got better for the working class (but science and technology have marched on regardless).
This is a silly take. There is a line of "good enough" for most coding (most CRUD apps and APIs are nothing special), and once we are past that, nobody will care about having the "newest, best" model except extreme outliers. And this base "good enough" model will become an ultra cheap commodity as we already see with GLM, deepseek, etc.
As long as closed models are 6 months ahead I won't be switching from them to prev. 6 month SOTA open source models. Maybe its just a different calculation if you're in a job, but as an indiehacker I'll take any edge I can get
Ofc again, can be convinced to switch if there's however a clear speed difference, like 5x+ for a open source sota even if it was SOTA for 6 months ago
I have 2/3rd of an acre, but most of it is a 45 degree hill, so it's more like a full acre equivalent of flat ground (except drastically more of a pain). Pulling weeds up several hundred feet of steep hillside that grow back constantly is a punishment worthy of Sisyphus.
It hadn't been done for about 5 years when we moved in, so one of the neighbors spent 200 hours cleaning it up for us. Not joking, 200 hours of labor. Scotch Broom is a literal nightmare.
True. But on a large and very steep hillside - "2/3rd of an acre, but most of it is a 45 degree hill" - it can be extremely difficult to replace the plants holding onto the soil, without experiencing horrible erosion during the transition.
Yep. Depending on the property layout, and how close that slope is to the house, it might be something to contract out and have hardscaping and drainage done.
My last house didn't have anywhere near as much land, but there was a fairly steep hill on the back of the house. We ended up having part of the slope dug out and a "seat-height" retaining wall installed, with drainage installed as part of the build, and lots of low-maintenance plantings. Reduced the work from weekly mowing on a slope to occasional weeding and trimming. But, it wasn't cheap to do properly.
Weeds are pioneers, helping the soil, when nothing else can grow (or is allowed to). First of all why do you need to get rid of those weeds? Second of all, if you improve the soil and go through successive plantings of larger things, the weeds will be outcompeted.
Yes. And that wealthy individuals are avoiding taxes via things like buy -> borrow -> die, in which high stock valuations that increase but are not sold are not ever taxed, and roll over the taxation potential upon death to their current value. Thus by borrowing against them until death, the inheritor will inherit with a tax basis at the current value upon receipt and thus all taxes are avoided. In which case the tax would go from 0% to 20% (functionally a small amount may be sold to pay interest, so really assume 1% or 2% taxes default). The horror!
Buy borrow die as you describe still ends up with a 40% estate tax. Most uber wealthy want to avoid the estate tax so they utilize trusts, which cant die. Really the people who benefit the most from buy borrow die are those with 10-50 million. Not enough to pay serious estate tax because of the exemption. Above that everyone uses trusts which work differently. Not that the trusts dont have their own loopholes.
Indeed, the ultra-wealthy pay far less than 40% effective estate tax. Seems closer to 15% due to creative accounting, which is further reduced to 6.8% by charitable contributions:
> Specifically, for single decedents, estate taxes paid equal 6.8% of the value of Forbes wealth at death. The value of their gross estate is 39% of the Forbes estimate of their wealth. This large gap, already noted in earlier work (Raub et al., 2010), is likely to reflect the various techniques available to high-net-worth individuals to undervalue assets in the context of the estate tax. Taxable estate is then 45% of gross estate (due to deductions primarily gifts to charities) and on that base the tax rate is 39% (Balkir et al., 2025, Table 4 Panel B).
I had been a pretty big Roku fan before that point as I had worked with them back in ~2017 and knew how locked down and sewn up they kept customer data, and only shared it in a very anonymized way. Obviously the situation has degraded in the recent years, and caused me to brick the functionality of a very expensive device.
Seems like it’s impossible to have a smart tv now that actually respects privacy, so back to dumb tvs and connections to pcs?
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