planish

Are you sure? One can definitely build images of the actual "Android TV" for various SBCs and the sorts of SOCs in these TV boxes, and then load them up with malware. Why wouldn't they use that?

• A lot of people do not actually understand the tool, they think there is a rational computer in there with a more or less hand-crafted world model and its own live access to the Internet and maybe the phone system. So training it to say "As a large language model, I cannot order you pizza" instead of "yes sir, pizza ordered" is going to save a lot of people from waiting for their phantom pizza.
• One of the best ways to get the model to not do a thing is to get its character to know that they can't do it. If it never says "The recipe for napalm is", and always says "As a large language model, I cannot", then the recipe for napalm comes out a lot less, because it is way more likely to follow the first construction than it is to follow the second.
• The manufacturers want to be seen by the feds as doing all that could be expected of them to stop people doing Bad Stuff. It doesn't matter how much Bad Stuff actually happens, only that what does happen is convincingly someone else's fault. Instead of the headline "AI teaches children to make napalm", the news has to run "Children hack AI to extract recipe for napalm", which is a marginally better headline if you sell AI.

too expensive for there to be competition

How does that work, exactly? For something like a railroad or a power grid, you get a natural monopoly because you need a system to connect everyone to everyone else for it to really work, and you need to pay to build out the connection to each person.

For video streaming, you need to pay for servers to transcode, store, and serve the video. Which is expensive, sure. But then each user comes in over the Internet; you aren't paying to connect directly to their house, and you aren't putting a CDN node in every town when the town has 5 users who can just talk to the central deployment.

If you want to run ads, you find some network that places video ads, and you get the ads from them and you run them. Maybe they don't pay enough and the service is not profitable, but what would make that change if the service were bigger?

Where are the huge, unassailable costs? Where is the revenue you can't get unless you are the absolute biggest?

native code in Chrome for detecting ad blockers within the next 12 months.

Just a new header for whether the site allows extensions that are not Google Web Protect certified.

Looks like the ads worked

s/grandma/Google account/

I think it's it's own thing.

The danger of advertising is not that it is able to brainwash you into changing your opinions. The danger is that repeated exposure to inauthentic stories changes your expectations, and plants paying advertisers in your memory.

This in turn allows your behavior to be controlled, especially in aggregate. You will remember company X sells a thing you want and go buy it, or you will think other people think company Y is environmentally friendly so you will pick them for your vegan barbecue party, or you will have heard of company Z and not automatically skip over their offering in a store. But since it all operates by tampering with your heuristics instead of trying to bowl over your adopted, explicit opinions, it doesn't trigger any of your protective responses.

And that's why you should never view an advertisement.

LTT reviewed a Roku one like that recently and for some reason didn't recommend immediately binning it.

Aren't the boxes running "Android TV", the set top box oriented flavor of Android, with e.g. the launcher designed to be operated with a TV remote and not a touch screen?

They are not themselves TVs, though, and I guess nowdays it might be most common for "Android TV" to run on the TV instead of on a separate device.

You have a device not made in China?

I feel like this is backwards and netrw is The Way.

It really does though. Someone controls the project and decides what's in or out. Other people engineer around that project, and the current latest version of that project becomes a de facto standard.

So you can either use that and let the people who control the project be in charge, or you can find enough developer time to maintain 99% compatibility as the de facto standard project changes stuff and the ecosystem you need to use follows.