I mean, a camera is an easy thing to block, as long as you're aware of it, understand the implications, and have the desire to block it. Just obstruct the lens. Roll of black electrical tape, put a strip over it, done. Now, most people out there may not actually do so...
Only becomes an issue if other services that you actually want are tied to the camera, or if the TV refuses to operate without a usable picture of the viewer or something.
LG TVs will soon leverage an AI model built for showing advertisements that more closely align with viewers' personal beliefs and emotions. The company plans to incorporate a partner company’s AI tech into its TV software in order to interpret psychological factors impacting a viewer, such as personal interests, personality traits, and lifestyle choices. The aim is to show LG webOS users ads that will emotionally impact them.
“As viewers engage with content, ZenVision's understanding of a consumer grows deeper, and our... segmentation continually evolves to optimize predictions,” the ZenVision website says.
Going beyond ads, if you start training AIs on human preference based on mass-harvested emotional data, I imagine that you can optimize output quite considerably. Like, say I have facial recognition being converted to emotional response data, maybe something like smartwatch pulse data, some other stuff, and I go train an AI to try to produce a given emotional output in a viewer. I bet that they can do a pretty good job of that. Like, maybe how to piss people off at a target in political campaigns, build an AI that has a potent ability to emotionally-manipulate and flirt with humans, or ensure that interest doesn't waver in television content by determining at what points people have less interest.
‘within three weeks’
If so, it seems pretty unlikely to me that the people negotiating can be doing much in terms of modifying things from the pre-tariff situation, and Trump is likely to do what he did with NAFTA->USMCA
change very little, and then spend time giving the impression to supporters that he's drastically modified the trade environment (Fox News: "Trump has solved our trade problems that Biden permitted to happen with the best trade deal ever"). I mean, trying to complete any kind of meaningful free trade agreement tends to take far longer than that.
Table 1 Duration of US free trade agreement negotiations (in months)
US FTA partner From launch date to signing From launch date to implementation Jordan 4 18 Dominican Republic 6 37 Bahrain 7 30 Oman 10 45 Korea 13 69 Australia 14 22 Israel 15 29 Morocco 16 35 Costa Rica 18 71 El Salvador 18 37 Guatemala 18 40 Honduras 18 38 Mexico 18 31 Nicaragua 18 38 Canada 20 32 Peru 23 56 Singapore 29 37 Chile 30 36 Colombia 31 96 Panama 38 102 Average 18 45
On top of the fact that this would be off-the-charts short for a meaningful FTA in any case, neither of the two "shortening" conditions that were found exist here; it is not a US election year, and while the UK is nominally a monarchy, the monarch holds no power and Parliament is, no doubt, going to be involved in any substantial change in trading relationship.
Despite the small sample, two variables are significant in explaining the delay between launch and signing.
- A king. Having a monarch reduces the length of negotiation by about half. Only four agreements took less than a year, and three were with Bahrain, Jordan, and Oman. A king surely has more leeway to carry out reforms he deems reasonable. (The fourth was the Dominican Republic’s negotiation to join the Central American Free Trade Agreement or CAFTA, though it benefited from joining late, which may suggest that late entrants to an already negotiated TPP could also face shorter delays.)
- An election year. Agreements that are signed in a US presidential election year end up taking about 40 percent less time than agreements signed in other years. This makes sense: Negotiating presidents want to close agreements that they started, which will be part of their legacy. The urge to close is real: More than half of the US agreements were signed in election years and of course the TPP, if implemented, will add to that group.
In the UK's case, there was some prior discussion about a UK-USA FTA, so maybe they could bootstrap off that to reduce the negotiation time, but I have a hard time believing that even an administration-friendly, Republican-majority Congress is going to sign off on whatever the Trump administration negotiates in a major FTA without having some kind of input.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom%E2%80%93United_States_Free_Trade_Agreement
I've never really wanted to get a QLED monitor, so I haven't spent time looking at their VRR behavior; sorry. I imagine that there's material out there about it, though.
I have more problems telling Linux to not play audio through my dualsense controller
Open pavucontrol, go to the "Configuration" tab, and for that device profile, choose "Off".
You could also just select something else as default device in the "Output Devices" tab, but disabling the device will keep it entirely off the list of options, if you don't want it used.
I tend to do that with the HDMI outputs on my video cards as these days video cards can stream audio to televisions via HDMI and the like, and I never want to actually use my monitor as an audio output device; I have dedicated, discrete speakers.
I mean, he's a populist. He scores political points by blaming "the elite". That's kind of hard when you're the President, since you are the establishment, and especially when your party holds a trifecta, so he's got to find someone to show himself fighting, be it being in the news over court cases or whatever. Someone else has to be responsible for obstructing what you're doing.
During term one, he kept himself in the news by having legal fights over his "ban immigration from several majority-Muslim countries" thing.
He's got to always be visibly fighting something for that to work. If you aren't in a fight at any given moment, go push on something until you get pushback, and make sure that you stay in the news for it.
I can see flicker in some 60 Hz LED lighting in the corner of my eyes, using the rods in the irises of my eye, when I can't see it using the cones in the pupil. Stick the light in the middle of my vision, and the flicker vanishes. Drove me nuts with some inexpensive, high-power corncob LED light bulbs that didn't have an electronic ballast, just fed wall power directly to an array of LEDs.
Wikipedia says that the cones are more time-sensitive than the rods, which isn't what I'd expect if that were the case. But that's what I experience. Maybe it was the result of the thing getting a sine wave
which is what wall power would input to an LED
rather than a square wave, which is (roughly) what I'd expect a system controlling brightness of an LED using PWM to output. I don't know what else would be unusual about that situation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold
Different points in the visual system have very different critical flicker fusion rate (CFF) sensitivities; the overall threshold frequency for perception cannot exceed the slowest of these for a given modulation amplitude. Each cell type integrates signals differently. For example, rod photoreceptor cells, which are exquisitely sensitive and capable of single-photon detection, are very sluggish, with time constants in mammals of about 200 ms. Cones, in contrast, while having much lower intensity sensitivity, have much better time resolution than rods do. For both rod- and cone-mediated vision, the fusion frequency increases as a function of illumination intensity, until it reaches a plateau corresponding to the maximal time resolution for each type of vision. The maximal fusion frequency for rod-mediated vision reaches a plateau at about 15 hertz (Hz), whereas cones reach a plateau, observable only at very high illumination intensities, of about 60 Hz.[3][4]
Passing an open hand with fingers extended in front of the light tends to make any flicker more visible, as it makes the moving fingers "judder", as with a strobe light.
The flicker fusion threshold does not prevent indirect detection of a high frame rate, such as the phantom array effect or wagon-wheel effect, as human-visible side effects of a finite frame rate were still seen on an experimental 480 Hz display.[6]
Normally, Congress imposes tariffs, rather than the President.
Trump's authority to impose tariffs is entirely based on him making a very-questionably-legal use of an act granting him authority to act in emergency situations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Emergency_Economic_Powers_Act
The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), Title II of Pub. L. 95–223, 91 Stat. 1626, enacted October 28, 1977, is a United States federal law authorizing the president to regulate international commerce after declaring a national emergency in response to any unusual and extraordinary threat to the United States which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States.[1] The act was signed by President Jimmy Carter on December 28, 1977.[2]
I think that there is probably a pretty strong argument that LGBT policy in the UK does not rise to the level of an emergency posing an unusual or extraordinary threat to the United States.
California just filed a lawsuit arguing that Trump's use of the act is not legally justified:
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/04/16/governor-newsom-files-lawsuit-to-end-president-trumps-tariffs/
SACRAMENTO – Governor Gavin Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta today filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging President Trump’s use of emergency powers to enact broad-sweeping tariffs that hurt states, consumers, and businesses. The lawsuit argues that President Trump lacks the authority to unilaterally impose tariffs through the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, creating immediate and irreparable harm to California, the largest economy, manufacturing, and agriculture state in the nation.
I think that Trump demanding policy on LGBT in the UK as a condition to refrain from imposing tariffs probably only strengthens California's case.
I can understand not having a local brick-and-mortar store, but I'd have thought that anywhere in the world could have comics shipped to them.
It does matter, but there are drawbacks and advantages each way.
My current monitor is LCD. When I bought it, that was because OLED prices were significantly higher.
I like the look of the inky blacks on OLEDs. I really love using the things in the dark.
If you're using a portable device, OLED can save a fair bit of power if you tend to have darker pixels on the screen, since OLED power consumption varies more-significantly based on what's onscreen. I use dark mode interfaces, so I'm generally better-off from a pure power consumption standpoint with OLED.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_CRT,_LCD,_plasma,_and_OLED_displays
OLED displays use 40% of the power of an LCD displaying an image that is primarily black as they lack the need for a backlight,[35] while OLED can use more than three times as much power to display a mostly white image compared to an LCD.
OLEDs are more prone to burn-in than LCDs, but my understanding is that newer OLEDs have significantly improved on this. And it takes a long time for that to happen.
Aside from price, I'd mostly come down on the side of OLED. However, there is one significant issue that I was not aware of at the time I was picking a monitor that I think people should be aware of. As far as I can tell from what I've read, present-day OLED displays have controllers that don't deal well with VRR (variable refresh rate, like Freesync or Gsync). That is, if you're using VRR on your OLED monitor and the frame rate is shifting around, you will see some level of brightness fluctuation. For people who don't make use of VRR, that may not matter. I don't really care about VRR in video games, but I do care about it to get precise frame timings when watching movies, so I'd rather, all else held equal, have a monitor that doesn't have VRR issues, since I have VRR enabled. If I didn't care about that, I'd probably just turn VRR off and not worry about it.
EDIT:
https://www.displayninja.com/what-is-vrr-brightness-flickering/
Tennessee HB 879, also introduced in the State Senate as SB 818, attempts to stymie the oversaturation of out-of-state rideshare drivers, which has negatively impacted Tennessee drivers. While drivers in bordering states are allowed to accept rides in Tennessee, Tennessee drivers are not eligible to do the same, meaning they must contend with out-of-state competition while not being able to benefit from crossing state lines themselves. The bill would require rideshare drivers to have a “transportation network license” to accept rides within the state. In order to obtain that license, registrants would need a Tennessee state driver’s license.
I wonder if laws prohibiting drivers from other states from offering service in neighboring states could be challenged on Dormant Commerce Clause grounds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dormant_Commerce_Clause
The Dormant Commerce Clause, or Negative Commerce Clause, in American constitutional law, is a legal doctrine that courts in the United States have inferred from the Commerce Clause in Article I of the US Constitution.[1] The primary focus of the doctrine is barring state protectionism. The Dormant Commerce Clause is used to prohibit state legislation that discriminates against, or unduly burdens, interstate or international commerce. Courts first determine whether a state regulation discriminates on its face against interstate commerce or whether it has the purpose or effect of discriminating against interstate commerce. If the statute is discriminatory, the state has the burden to justify both the local benefits flowing from the statute and to show the state has no other means of advancing the legitimate local purpose.
Amusingly, it sounds kind of like there are some questions about Gorka's own immigration status. Under Afroyim v. Rusk, the government cannot strip an American citizen's citizenship:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroyim_v._Rusk
However, this is predicated upon the citizenship being having been validly-granted in the first place. If the citizenship is later discovered to have been granted dependent upon false representations being made to naturalization, the government can strip it as never having been validly granted in the first place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Gorka
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/11/26/john-kiriakou-sebastian-gorka-is-back/
https://www.durbin.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/senators-call-for-investigation-of-sebastian-gorka-after-reports-surface-of-ties-to-neo-nazi-group