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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • The hardware requirements are quite steep, but I’ve got local AI running in my house. It’s mostly just there for when I want to screw around with it, but technically I could setup OpenClaw and point it to my AI server to use as its brain.

    I’m not stupid enough to do that on any real computer I use, but it might be cool to do on a VM where I can tightly control what it can see and have access to. Of course, that limits its usefulness, but security has a cost.

    At the same time, I can see the allure of a real digital assistant. I’m old enough to remember when professionals had personal assistants that not only helped them keep track of their work life, but also their personal life. Scheduling their personal life like doctors appointments or house repairs. Dealing with vendors to make sure stuff actually gets done, and making sure they are in the right place at the right time. That would be rad to have.







  • If you sign into a Microsoft account during setup, Microsoft automatically turns on bitlocker and sends the key off to Microsoft for safe keeping. You are right, there are other ways to handle bitlocker, but that’s way beyond most people, and I don’t think Microsoft even tells you this during setup. It’s honestly a lifesaver for when bitlocker breaks(and it does), but it comes at a cost. In the business world, this is seen as a huge benefit, as we aren’t trying to protect from the US government, mostly petty theft and maybe some corporate espionage.

    As is often the case, the real solution is Linux, but that, too, is far beyond most people until manufacturers start shipping Linux machines to big box stores and even then they’d probably not enable any encryption.










  • Individuals don’t pay their own taxes, their employers do. When you “pay your taxes” at the end of the year, you are just paying difference between what you should have paid and what you did pay. The exception being contract workers.

    And if you don’t pay your taxes, the government can just seize the money from your bank accounts. Of course, if everybody stopped paying, employers included, the federal government would have a hard time processing it all, but if it wasn’t a sudden massive stop, they would just start raiding people’s bank accounts, probably without due process.


  • There was also a pretty aggressive format war between BluRay and HDDVD that tempered demand for a little while. I bought a launch PS3 as well, in part because of BluRay.

    I also think it was a time where not everyone had an HD TV, nor did most people see a huge difference between DVD and BluRay, so there just wasn’t quite the demand compared to VHS vs DVD. Aside from the graphical stepup to DVD, it also didn’t need to be rewinded and didn’t take up nearly as much space. I think those two were big selling features, that the DVD to BluRay transition just didn’t have.