The smart answer would be to figure out the expected payload of the devices and send a dummy one that tricks the TV into thinking its phoned home, I suspect.

Projectors are still valid, and often superior, alternatives to TVs.

They’re definitely more work to get right though

Welp... I bought recently a projector.

It wouldn't start in a dumb mode without first establishing internet connection and a Google account.

Projectors can never come even remotely close to the contrast of an OLED. That's an inherent limitation of requiring a reflective display surface and not something that can be fixed with better technology.

How is projector superior? More often than not, with the same amount of money spent, projector produces worse image quality, consumes more power, and don't last as long.

Interesting idea I never thought of, though for my purposes my room gets way too much natural light for a projector to be viable.

There are ambient light rejection (ALR) screens available now that make projectors viable even under bright lights. Problem is, the decent ones are quite pricey, sometimes costing almost as much as the projector themselves. You could easily buy two OLED TVs for the price of a decent short throw laser projector + ALR.

The other issue issue is that most, if not all, modern projectors are also "smart", so you may run into the same privacy issues as TVs...

Maybe the best option is to just buy a PC monitor and pair it up with decent speakers, the only issue being you can't get larger screens like TVs.

Yeah the projector doesn’t quite save on room aesthetics if I need whole screen setup, unless I spend even more to make it super hidden and seamless in the room.

I’ve just found that disabling network connectivity and going with an external streaming box is the best compromise of the moment.

On LG it’s important to never agree to the terms and conditions. I’m not sure if they still allow you to do that on new TV sets. It’s very disturbing to find out that the TV is queueing up data to send home even while offline.

The Apple TV streaming box seems to be the least privacy-invasive, mostly ad-free, mainstream easy to use option on the market, but it’s certainly not perfect in that regard.

blackout shades go a long way, but if you’ve got huge bay windows that’s probably too much.

If it’s close to good, and you need a little more brightness, there are newer screens that reflect much more light. more reflective = pricier, but there’s a decent value/sweet spot.

Huge floor to ceiling windows is exactly what I have. Of course I also don’t want to make my room pitch black just to watch TV.

It’s good to know that there are solutions designed for high-light situations, though.

I realize that this is a tangent but one of the more sad developments of recent developments as an advocate for open knowledge is how much of it is trapped on servers like discord that will never be indexed by any search engine.

There isn’t even an ability to turn on a feature to have discord chats indexed or anything. I realize it’s not only discord but it’s illustrative of what I perceive as an issue

It's no worse than how it used to be trapped in IRC greybeards and the solution, whatever it is, is presumably the same.

Shoutout to Kagi search for having a deny list feature. It’s really nice for this sort of thing.

Google used to have a deny/block list. But such lists are obviously very advertising unfriendly, since the companies paying for placement and running the most ads are most likely to be blocked.

They have one, it's just centralised and blocks the good sites.

I honestly love Kagi, it's like every single "it would be nice if Google gave me feature X instead of being greedy" in one place

Exactly. And SmallWeb is awesome too

Part of me wonders in a world with evergreen browsers if that long tail won’t simply shrink as time goes on.

I have yet to run into Java applets or Internet Explorer required situations in years. As far back as 2016 I’d occasionally find myself having to deal with both of these things. Still rare in 2016 but it was there.

Eventually I never saw it again.

That said, I’m not sure what gaps exist that I don’t perceive either, so I could be wrong and not know it

Companies attempt to manufacture demand all the time. It’s one of the core functions of marketing.

Liquid Death is a perfect example of manufactured demand.

I went to a (hot!) concert last weekend, and the only "water" available at the venue was liquid death.....for $8. Absolute robbery.

It was the plainest water imaginable.

It’s really another way of saying: it needs to meet GitHub’s current utility and functions today.

And one of them is ease of discovery. GitHub make’s it really easy to do that. Same with contribution.

As far as looks go? That’s more subjective.

But the discovery and contributions piece is easy to prove, just look at how much traction a project gets when it’s hosted there versus elsewhere. Even really large projects that has many contributors have moved there like WebKit

Right, I'm not saying "there are no differences between GitLab and GitHub". They have all the same core functionality, but obviously GitHub has a unique community with more OSS folks.

What I'm saying is, you could pick almost any popular Internet site, craft your requirements to describe it exactly, and write a blog post lamenting how there's no alternative.

It doesn't mean there's really no alternative (for you or anyone else) ... it just means you're announcing to the world that you are a big fan of that site, and you personally will never be happy with any other site no matter what.

> And one of them is ease of discovery. GitHub make’s it really easy to do that. Same with contribution.

At the end of the day, this seems to be the author's ultimate decision factor. None of the alternatives--open-source, self-hosted, or commercial--have the social gravitational pull GitHub does. Popularity begets popularity.

Wish they would decouple styling from everything else.

Have a default you can import? Absolutely, that makes sense

But styling by default they you have to make complicated overrides for? That’s the part that gets me

They aren’t. Political will is faulting but the military is holding back on Iran. There is no follow on ground invasion or clear carpet bombing of the entire country. These strikes are all suppose to be strategic. If the US military was waging a true all out war, Iran would be piles of rubble and glass

I am not supportive of war with Iran by a long shot but to see the US military and be like “oh it’s strained” is just not talking from a place of knowing. The politics is straining the military and rightly so, but capability wise it’s as good as ever

The military loves to say how they are pulling their punches. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. When things get real, the US will totally be there and unstoppable.

>If the US military was waging a true all out war, Iran would be piles of rubble and glass

Then the Gulf oil infrastructure would be gone in retaliation and the impacts to the global economy would be severe. Trump's popularity and legacy would be utterly destroyed.

Doesn’t negate capability which is what is being mentioned.

The USA wouldn't be able to invade and carpet bomb China and end the war before logistical strain started to show either.

There's no point talking about USA's theoretical capabilities to end a war quickly if they can't use those capabilities to end a war quickly. Yes, the USA is holding back on invasion, carpet bombing, total war and nukes. It doesn't matter to the Chinese assessment for the capability of sustained high intensity US military operations.

Oh it most definitely does matter, to think it doesn’t makes no sense. The Chinese may be building up their military capabilities but they still spend a fraction of what the US does every year.

They’re different leagues, and in a gloves off war being on the receiving end of the US military would be devastating.

I think if China makes a move it’s because they perceive US political will to defend Taiwan to be weak enough that there won’t be a real protracted fight or escalation.

Which I half wonder if that is why they aren’t more defensive about Iran. Bleed out the political will of the US populace on a war and it’s unlikely we’ll want to support another one anytime soon.

How well is this military doing against Iran right now? I think a few months ago a civilization was destroyed one night, right?