I know you said to avoid the “just don’t connect it” advice, but I frankly think that’s your best bet without shelling out absurd amounts of money. I hate the concept of smart TVs, so like you I tried to find a reasonably priced dumb TV. Had zero luck. Instead, I bought a 55” Hisense TV (U8K) about 6 months ago, and have never once connected it to the internet. I think it’s technically a Google TV, but I wouldn’t know, since I just connect my devices to it, no internet necessary. It’s a gorgeous display with amazing picture quality. All the features are enabled, nothing was stuck behind an internet-wall. I don’t regret it.

I believe there are 3 kinds of musicians. Keep in mind I have no evidence for this, it’s just what I’ve experienced through a life of playing music and being around lots of musicians.

#1 is someone with natural ability, these are the people who seem to be able to pick up any instrument and intuitively understand how to make it sound like music. This is the rarest kind of musician.

#2 is someone with a little bit of #1’s natural ability, but like 70% of their skill comes from honing it through sustained, long-term practice. It’s hard, and can be incredibly frustrating, but also very rewarding. I’d say many if not most successful musicians fall into this category.

#3 is someone with none of #1’s natural ability, but a passionate desire to learn. With grueling long hours of practicing the basics, studying some theory, and intentional instruction, #3 is perfectly capable of playing an instrument beautifully, but it will be a lot more work for them than it would be for #’s 1 and 2.

It’s probably pretty similar to sports. Some people are naturals, but almost anyone can learn to be really good at them, it just takes a shitload of work.

No he has had a secret service detail ever since he was elected, he didn’t refuse their protection after losing the election and leaving office.

Current presidents are required by law to have secret service protection, former presidents are entitled to lifetime protection, but can choose to refuse it. He hasn’t refused it.

“We have published by mistake a modified version of this photo on the site,” the magazine wrote

Lol riiight, that’s believable. Why did you modify the photo in the first place? Someone had to actually do a couple minutes of work to remove the pin.

I wish people would just own their mistakes, not tell condescending and unbelievable lies about them. We’re not as stupid as they think we are.

Stories like this give me goosebumps. I’m so thrilled for her and her accomplishments. She sounds like an amazing person.

Then the goosebumps go away when I look at the downvotes and realize how many people, even here on Lemmy, have unfounded seething hatred for people they don’t know. She’s just trying to live her life, get over yourselves.

Oh it’s totally possible for them to be effective, they just very rarely are.

Whenever I fly, I put a lighter (I don’t smoke) and a full liquid hand sanitizer spritzer in random pockets in my carryon. I still separate my normal toiletries into the required quart-sized bag, but leave the liquid hand sanitizer and lighter in the bag as a kind of test. They have never once noticed or cared, and I travel a fair amount.

It’s all security theatre.

Blow some cannabis smoke in my face and point me in the direction of a comfortable chair. Now it’s a chill hangout session, not a boss fight. But you still win.

Completion reward: let’s share some pretzels

I thought we had laws to prevent companies from union-busting. Apparently Mercedes doesn’t give a shit and is happy to break the law to keep their workers poor and their profits ridiculous. This is infuriating.

“It is a daily barrage of text messages, emails, and there’s an app we have for work for every kind of announcement you can think of and we’re getting two to three notifications daily. Every day before the shift, we have to sit in the team room and watch anti-union videos,” said Webster. “It’s just been a constant barrage. Everybody is just sick and tired of it.”

My understanding is that the judge is chosen by lottery, out of a certain number of judges in the same district. Since that particular district in FL only has a few judges there was always a pretty solid chance that she could be chosen. It wasn’t a certainty, but definitely a good chance.

That’s why her actions are such a betrayal of the justice system. It shouldn’t matter which judge was randomly selected. To anyone with eyeballs, she has shown a distressing preference for the person who appointed her, and has shown over and over again that she doesn’t have the relevant experience to oversee a case of this magnitude. If she were a qualified and impartial judge, she would appreciate the fact that she appears to be completely biased, and recuse herself.

Even if tons of legal experts are wrong about her, which at this point seems pretty unlikely, her duty is to step aside and allow a judge who still has the public’s trust to oversee the case.

I do not trust this man to do anything in my best interest. He is a disingenuous and untrustworthy messenger, and if allowed to continue unchecked will end up the overlord of a new hyper-capitalist dystopian nightmare. I’m genuinely afraid of this guy and people like him.

I’ll remind folks that this is a man with such appalling hubris that he thinks he should be able to raise trillions of dollars to make his own fantasies come true.

I don’t know much about the case beyond some very lazy peripheral searching, but it strikes me that Proton’s compliance isn’t an issue, but the requests themselves are totally unjustifiable and based on malicious prosecutions to nab some separatists on ridiculous terrorism charges for their nonviolent action and protests.

This individual is suspected of being a member of the Mossos d’Esquadra (Catalonia’s police force) and of using their internal knowledge to assist the Democratic Tsunami movement.

The requests were made under the guise of anti-terrorism laws, despite the primary activities of the Democratic Tsunami involving protests and roadblocks, which raises questions about the proportionality and justification of such measures.

This is one of the more disturbing things I’ve read in a while, and there’s a genocide going on.

It strikes me that this guy and his followers simply never grew up, because they didn’t have to. Instead of being faced with everyday challenges like the rest of us, their money could insulate them from any degree of hardship or friction. When you live a life where literally everything can be solved with your money, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to never run out of it, there’s no motivation for you to empathize with or even understand other people’s points of view, and thus this scary techno-authoritarianism is born.

These are the people who will prevent us from making any socioeconomic progress. They actually want us all to wear colored shirts and be discriminated against based on our color. Their dystopian vision is genuinely the stuff of my nightmares.

I tried the alarm on the other side of the room thing and it consistently ruined my day. Put me in a frustrated and pissed off mood from the start. Now I just force myself to get out of bed immediately when the alarm goes off, no excuses and no snoozing allowed. It sucks, but I’m never late.

All bets are off on the weekend, alarms are only for a damn good reason.

This is totally right, because the majority of those ideals come from a place of genuine empathy. Being honest about personal experiences is the fastest way to jumpstart that empathy in those who are out of practice.

Yesss! I grew up with one of these and didn’t realize it was unconventional until I lived on my own and tried to find one in a store. Had to buy it online. I use it nearly every day.

There always needs to be a human making the calls. I never want the robots to make life and death decisions, and sentencing is just that. It definitely seems like they got this one wrong, but AI is not the answer.

The criminal justice system is completely fucked right now. There are multiple tiers of justice, and it is by no means blind. But large language models (we don’t have anything remotely like an AI that could do consistently what you want) are a warped and biased reflection of humanity, and would only intensify and perpetuate the systemic injustice.

I believe the death penalty is morally wrong in any and all circumstances. But if the state botches their murder attempt, they shouldn’t get a second try.

Disinformation, which comes from self-serving and agenda-driven swaths of the world’s population (meaning people, not AI), will be amplified by AI-powered tools. The tools themselves are not necessarily the problem (though of course they sometimes are), but if the datasets they steal (sorry, use) to train their models are filled with dis and misinformation, then obviously their outputs will be filled with the same. We should tackle the inputs first, and then the outputs will be less likely to misinform.

In order for the inputs to be better, we need a quality free press and faith in our public institutions. So most of the world is not in great shape when it comes to those…

We also need to be able to easily see inside the workings of the AI models so we can pinpoint exactly how the misinformation is being generated, so we can take steps to fix it. I understand this is currently a pretty challenging technical issue, but frankly I don’t think AI tools should ever be made public until they are fully transparent about their sourcing.

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Getting rid of your most talented interviewer right before the most important and scariest election in American history was such an amazingly shortsighted and asinine decision. And don’t tell me this had nothing to do with Gaza…

He is never afraid to express his personal morality on air, which is pretty rare. He believes combative journalism is integral to a functional democracy, regularly saying “journalists should be biased, biased towards democracy.” He’s often the only voice of reason amid a toxic cloud of both-sidesy bullshit. There are not two sides to every issue, sometimes there’s just the truth. And he’s not afraid to say it.

MSNBC didn’t deserve him. I hope he has a stack of amazing job offers, I’ve come to rely on his voice.