They make fake tattoo sleeves.

Yep. A lot of these tech companies that have run in the red for years are now being called on to produce a profit and pay the big backers.

I’m chaos grandpa in one and tax evader in a different one.

Apparently, SpaceX has special tactics to stoke his grandiose ego and trick him into giving them the freedom they need.

It’s a tale as old as bosses. Many of them have big egos and think that because they’re in charge that magically gives them expertise. So if you want to do something you either get them looking at something shiny or you make them think it’s their idea.

I had a boss like that ages ago. If I wanted to work on something out of the ordinary I would plant the idea, then a few weeks later I would remind him that he brought it up a while ago. I used the fact that he had a million things going on so he never really remembered who brought it up. I didn’t care that he got the credit because I got to work on cool things and expand my repertoire.

In Texas? Eddie Cruz sounds like a guy who drives an El Camino and has a cousin named Cooter. He’d have been the presidential nominee in '16.

“Did you hear about Eddie and Cooter? They running for the big house! Get in the pickup, we’re gonna go vote!”

That’s why way back in the day they had GIMPshop and why there’s PhotoGIMP now.

As a fat redneck, you’re mostly correct. You just forgot to add the word drunk in there somewhere.

Imma fry one up in about half an hour. I’m also gonna start drinking in just a minute. My fat drunk uncle who lost several of his fingers in a fireworks incident is smiling down on me from redneck heaven.

Brother is the only printer company I like. I’ve had a workhorse for ages and it is still going strong.

I’ve been using them for 20ish years and never had any more trouble than routine maintenance.

I need to start assuming anything I don’t understand is this.

I played Cyberpunk on Stadia. It was pretty good, no complaints from me. Stadia worked out really well in general for me.

I replaced it with a Steam Deck when it shut down. I used the money that Google refunded me and ended up not spending anything on it. I think BG3 was the first Steam purchase I made that didn’t come out of the refund.

I liked cloud gaming. I may dabble in it again someday but I don’t play often anyway and now I have a backlog so it’ll be a while.

Probably unpopular, but I really like Studio One. Reaper is more powerful, and I love it too, but there’s something about Studio One that just let me wrap my brain around it the first time I used it. For me, it’s great for quick and dirty production which is a lot of what I do and “just works” with my interface and mixing console.

Of course that’s not the case for everyone and a lot of folks want and need something with more to it.

It’s also age dependent at the lower levels. Over 35 or 40 and you’ll pay more than someone young. Or at least that’s how it used to be.

I don’t know what the going rate is but I assume that if you just want a throw you could probably get a mid tier prostitute almost once a week for that price.

If I can just tell her how awesome my penis is she’ll fall madly in love! Right now she has no idea!

I have a Tailscale subnet router set up locally and added the remote IPs to my router. Tailscale on every device was a crapshoot as to whether it would route locally or through the VPN.

I asked support and they said it should be on every device. Could be something else on my network forcing it to act like that but I don’t have enough give-a-shit in me to troubleshoot it.

It never made sense to me, but I wasn’t having a GREAT time until I was in my mid 30s. I had something like a 7 year party. Disposable income, before the worst of my aches set in, and just doing whatever I wanted as long as I made it in to work.

High school was Lord of the Flies.

I was specifically talking about what the original commenter said.

with proper support, privacy, customization options and no crap like ads

Dumb TVs are already a thing as mentioned elsewhere. Commercial Displays cost more but you can beat someone to death with them and they’ll still work.

I’m with you on hoping for more options. I’d hate for my next TV purchase (hopefully years from now) to be forced online under the guise of firmware updates to steal my viewing habits.

How many more times? If a regular TV costs $100 then they’re making $20k plus marketing data. The PrivaTV would need nearly a $7000 markup for the same return.

Obviously these are made up numbers for illustration. I think that for big manufacturers it’s not worth it for the return and amount of effort they would need to spend. Maybe a small manufacturer could do it. Maybe that would spur the big guys to buy them out and take it over once the hard work is done.

I think they know it, I just don’t think they care. It’s a niche market. On top of that, they’d have to convince the people in that market to trust them.

If they can get a 10-20% return on 10,000 Smart TVs, why waste the effort on properly developing and supporting 3 PrivaTVs (patent pending, exclusions apply, see your local drunk for details)?

I could be wrong, I just don’t think the market is large enough that they’d be willing to throw manpower at it.

Exactly my feelings. I understand, at a basic level, how both cars and computers work. I fix motorcycles as a hobby. I work in system reliability as a profession. I don’t have the inclination to tinker on cars or computers in my spare time. I want to turn it on, press the pedal, and vroom vroom off into the night.