I spent a while when choosing a laptop a while back trying to compare based on how many watt-hours the battery could provide, so I think that that’s a useful metric, but I don’t know how easy it’s going to be to mechanically dig that up for all the laptops out there.

The overall goal is to cut the agency’s budget by fifty percent. Shedd suggested using AI to analyze contracts for redundancies, root out fraud, and facilitate a reduction in the federal workforce by automating much of their work.

I am bullish on AI in the long run.

I am skeptical that given the state of affairs in 2025, you can reasonably automate half of the federal government, via AI or any other means.

I also don’t think that the way to do this is to lay off half of the federal workforce and then, after the fact, see what can be automated. If you look at the private sector automating things, it tends to hedge its bets. Take self-service point-of-sale kiosks. We didn’t just see companies simply lay off all cashiers. Instead, we saw them brought in as an option, then had the company look at what worked and what didn’t work – and some of those were really bad at first – and then increase the rate of deployment once it had confidence in the solution and a handle on the issues that came with them.

Armed with this new tool, which enables raw access to Bluetooth traffic, Targolic discovered hidden vendor-specific commands (Opcode 0x3F) in the ESP32 Bluetooth firmware that allow low-level control over Bluetooth functions.

In total, they found 29 undocumented commands, collectively characterized as a “backdoor,” that could be used for memory manipulation (read/write RAM and Flash), MAC address spoofing (device impersonation), and LMP/LLCP packet injection.

Espressif has not publicly documented these commands, so either they weren’t meant to be accessible, or they were left in by mistake.

I’d kind of like to know whether these can be used against an unpaired device or not. That’d seem to have a pretty dramatic impact on the scope of the vulnerability.

I’ve been telling myself since about 2016 that I would save up to go all in and build a solid gaming desktop.

Finally, I was at the point of “Fuck it, I’m tired of waiting. I’m buying a 5080, even if it costs as much as 2 PS5s.”

I assume that whatever you’re running right now isn’t terribly new if you’ve been thinking about upgrading for nine years.

The 5080 is a 16GB card. A quick skim on Amazon suggests that 16GB Nvidia cards are in short supply, but that you can get a 16GB AMD GPU without problems.

https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare/4982vs5721vs4917/Radeon-RX-7600-XT-vs-GeForce-RTX-5080-vs-Radeon-RX-7800-XT

They aren’t quite as fast on the Passmark benchmark as the 5080, but they also cost a lot less (even if the 5080 were available), and I assume that they’d be a lot faster than whatever you’re running now.

Could go with that (or something less-fancy) and then if you felt that you wanted to spend more for more performance, do so when GPUs become available.

I mean, people do use the Web UI.

I was reading some articles the other day, and the impression I have is that that’s really not true for at least Trump.

The Trump route was more:

• Conservatives in the US felt that media had a liberal bias. Whether it did or didn’t doesn’t matter for this discussion — that was the perception.

• Fox News offers a viewpoint appealing to conservatives. It becomes essentially the only mainstream conservative media outlet. Liberal viewers watch a variety of news media, but Fox News dominates among conservatives.

• Fox News — already somewhat opinion-based from the start — starts to veer off into conspiracy land. Because so many conservatives watch Fox News, this has a major impact.

There’s some back and forth here. It’s not that Fox just pushed ideas that were out there, but that they’re willing to show material based on what people will watch, and they gained more viewers than they lost if they ran bonkers stuff.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/08/media/fox-news-hoax-paperback-book/index.html

There wasn’t really any major center-right mainstream news source other than Fox News, so if Fox shifts into conspiracy-land, so does the conservative public.

I dunno. Maybe the answer is something like a news source somewhere between CNN and Fox News. Something that a conservative audience is comfortable watching, but doesn’t fly off the handle to the degree that Fox has. It maybe can’t capture an audience that’s as large, but it only needs enough to be viable.

I mean, there are center-right media sources like the Wall Street Journal, but those are kinda not aimed at mass audiences.