Let me pay for that chai tea using cash from the ATM machine and my PIN number. Would you also like some naan bread with it?

You could close down all the AI data centres, all the crypto mining farms, all the private jets, and eliminate all the billionaires…and it would be a rounding error in global greenhouse emissions.

The vast majority of emissions come from the fact that 8 billion people exist and need food, transport, heating/cooling, and industries to support their lifestyles.

The focus should be on building towards renewable ways to support whatever we want to do. Purity tests around the worthiness of types of energy use is just a distraction.

I have an Ugoos am6b+, it’s a bit clunky with stuff like HDMI-CEC and the remote is cheap plastic trash. But it does its job at playing Dolby Vision REMUX files.

For everything else, I use an AppleTV 4K. It’s fast and reliable and the only box that doesn’t shove ads on the Home Screen.

AppleTV.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/12/the-ars-technica-guide-to-dumb-tvs/

Personally I use RAID5, with regular backups for documents and projects. Not too worried if my movies and tv library get lost…that takes up most of the space though.

Just buy an LG and use an external media device. LG TVs work perfectly fine with no network connection and you can set them to power on and go straight to the last used HDMI input.

I never see the built-in OS on my LG OLED.

My understanding is that Apple have implemented RCS, which funnily enough, does not even support encryption yet. Google had to roll their own proprietary add-on.

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/09/18/end-to-end-encryption-rcs-messages/

AppleTV is the media box to use if you hate ads and value your privacy. Its Home Screen is just a grid of apps. No ads. None. It’s also way faster (CPU speed) compared to the competition.

Replacing a smart TV OS with a device made by Google or Amazon defeats the purpose. You’re still going to get ads plastered all over your Home Screen. And they still lag and stutter unless you pay a premium price for an 5 year old Nvidia shield. Either use an AppleTV or build your own HTPC.

I haven seen my LG OLED’s smart OS for years.

My LG OLED TV can be configured to load directly into a HDMI input. I keep it disconnected from wifi at all times. I never see the smartTV OS. It’s probably the best option because OLED panels are the best current display technology.

I use an AppleTV as an external media box for all my needs. But the same would apply for an Android box or HTPC setup etc.

High of Sauron

They are: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/four-additional-states-join-justice-departments-suit-against-apple-monopolizing-smartphone

I’ve been in similar situations while renting. I ran ethernet cables along skirting boards and around doorframes and hid them inside adhesive cable raceways.

Apple lay out some details here: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

They control the cloud hardware. Information used for cloud requests is deleted as soon as the request is done. Everything end-to-end encrypted. Server builds are publicly available to inspect. And all of this is only used unless the on-device processing can’t handle a request.

If somebody wanted to actually create a private AI system, this is probably how they’d do it.

You can disagree with this or claim somehow that they are actually accessing and selling people’s data, but Apple are going out of their way to show (and cryptographically prove) how they’re not. It would also be incredible fraudulent and illegal for them to make these claims and not follow through.

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I have a 50 terabyte NAS for storing my movies and TV shows. And access it from any of the TVs in my house.

For music…I have a music streaming subscription for convenience, but also have some vinyl records for the small-ish number of albums I want to keep forever.

My high end PC from 3 years ago won’t run Windows 11 because of TPM bullshit.

What made me lose interest was bad writing. “Andor” is a great Star Wars TV series, and I’m looking forward to its second season, because it has…let’s see…good fucking writing!

At a certain point, a company’s primary product becomes its stock. Share buybacks, short term gains, etc become the strategy. The goal is no longer to create value for customers, but to create value for shareholders.

The realpolitik answer is that they’re the only country in the region with highly functioning western-style market economy. That is valuable to other functioning western style market economies. Its a system trying to help itself propagate.