I don’t think that the grid frequency is used for PC timekeeping. You have internal timekeeping circuits. AC power stops at the PSU, and I don’t think that there’s any cable over which a time protocol flows from the PSU to the motherboard.
[Pope Francis] went further in the 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, calling social media an “illusion of communication.”
There are probably a lot of criticisms one could make of this statement, but I think that a really good one is that the only reason I’m reading content from your papal encyclica is because it’s in an article that was submitted to a social media system.
The relentless pursuit of profit and growth ruins absolutely everything it touches. Capitalist rot.
The factor driving age verification has been laws passed by countries. It’s not private industry forcing it, but government. That comes from people complaining to their legislators that they are unhappy that their kids can see <random thing that they object to> online.
If you want a communist system, fine. But there are far too many users on here who, when faced with virtually anything they don’t like, immediately post a screed complaining about ownership of private industry, when it often has absolutely nothing to do with the actual issue at hand.
EDIT: I’d also add that there are actual solutions if you object to something like this. You can pass a law against biometric-based age validation, which I can certainly understand — that form could be prohibited. You could have some alternative form of age-based validation to be instituted to create a path of least resistance for services, like having government provide and fund a zero-knowledge service to confirm various facts to services like age. In countries which have constitutional law and a higher bar to modify it than lower law, you could pass a constitutional law against any form of age validation (“ageism has no place in our country”) to prevent legislators from easily passing things like age verification laws, which I personally don’t think will fly politically in most places, but it’s at least one theoretical option.
I would love to load up custom ROM though… What annoys me the most is lack of RTC battery, because the time resets whenever there’s a power outage.
They made an Internet-connected fridge and didn’t put an NTP client on it?
Ah, thanks! Well, that’s one lone ray of light.
I’m still grouchy about a sandwich place that I liked that recently changed ownership putting in kiosks that apparently do facial recognition, as once I walked up, they suggested items that I’d purchased last time. That started me looking, and I’ve been noticing that a lot of the ordering kiosks that places have been installing around where I am have cameras (though none have been actively making suggestions). I can only imagine that that gets hooked into the tracking and advertising system at some point too, though.
Between increasing use of facial recognition and ALPRs, it’s going to be increasingly difficult to avoid targeted ads. I don’t have a fix for that. I mean, it’s illegal to block use of ALPRs. A lot of places also have anti-masking laws, though I suspect that in practice, they aren’t enforced much, and someone could theoretically put something on their face. I don’t especially want to run around wearing stuff on my face, though.
kagis
It sounds like that was a joke from some years back.
Skyrim: Special Edition Announced For Samsung Smart Refrigerators And Alexa
If that headline has confused you then let’s be very clear, this is a joke by Bethesda…
They do have a screen and Internet connectivity, but I don’t think that ATMs are actually a great route (unless they force people to stop and wait to get their money, which I don’t think will fly and will cut into capacity). There isn’t much eyeball time on them. The reason a car or a refrigerator works is because you’re likely to be around it a lot.
I will say that the rise of gas pumps at gas stations that play back advertisements is pretty obnoxious, though.
To enhance our service and offer additional content to our users, advertisements will be displayed on the Cover Screen for the Weather, Color, and Daily Board themes.
I really hope that Steam games don’t head down this path over time. Internet-connected refrigerators I’m willing to avoid, but that’s not the only vector for this sort of thing.
EDIT: And as has been pointed out on here before, some Internet-connected cars are starting to have updates to show ads on their UIs pushed out. Any time you’ve already spent the money and are kind of locked in and the manufacturer has Internet connectivity to the device and can update the thing subsequent to purchase, you’re kind of in a bad position regarding leverage.
I’d be pretty comfortable saying that buying enough battery storage to power-shift a year of power is more expensive.
What I want to do is find out what the maximum size battery I would need in order to store all of summer’s electricity for use in winter.
I mean, I think that it’s probably not a good idea for this guy to try to go fully off-grid if he has access to the grid, but for the sake of discussion, if one were honestly wanting to try it and one is in the UK, I’d think that one is probably rather better off adding a wind turbine, since some of the time that the sun isn’t shining, the wind is blowing.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/322789/quarterly-wind-speed-average-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/
Wind speed averages in the United Kingdom are generally highest in the first and fourth quarters of each calendar year – the winter months.
The UK is one of the worst places in the world in terms of solar potential:
https://globalsolaratlas.info/
But it’s one of the best in terms of wind potential:
Well…
From an evolutionary standpoint, we’re basically the same collection of mostly-hairless primates that, 20,000 years ago, hadn’t yet figured out agriculture and were roaming the land in small groups of maybe 100 or so at most, living off it as best we could.
From that standpoint, I think that we’ve done pretty well with a brain that evolved to deal with a rather different environment and is having to navigate a terribly-confusing, rather different situation.
I mean, you see any other critters that have been outperforming us on improving their understanding of the world?
I recall reading that one application of sentiment analysis in voice recognition — like, determining what a speaker’s mood is — is that if someone gets upset on a call talking to a computer, the system will route them to a human.
Altman said in a statement accompanying the announcement, adding that the company is “building an age-prediction system to estimate age based on how people use ChatGPT.”
I suppose our theoretical teenager could get an account on, say, Grok and ask it to rephrase all of his prompts as if they were written by a 30-year-old and then send the output of that to ChatGPT. Let the models fight it out based on their profiles of what constitutes an adult.
As Miku has no physical presence, the relationship is purely platonic.
If someone isn’t already banging on that, I am pretty sure that they will be before long.
kagis
https://aimojo.io/ai-powered-female-sex-robots/
AI-Powered Female Sex Robots: Top 8 Models for 2025
Yeah.
Legend has it that every new technology is first used for something related to sex or pornography. That seems to be the way of humankind.
— Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, HTML, URLs, and HTTP
I have not done so in the traditional sense in quite some years. My experience was that it was an increasing headache due to crashing into a wide variety of anti-spam efforts. Get email past one and crash into another.
Depending upon your use case – using the “forward to a smarthost” feature in some mail server packages to forward to a mailserver run by a SMTP service provider with whom you have an account might work for you. Then it still looks to local software like you have a local mailserver.
If I were going to do a conventional, no-smarthost mailserver today, I think that I would probably start out by setting up a bunch of spam-filtering stuff — SpamAssassin, I dunno what-all gets used these days on a “regular” account — and then emailing stuff from my server and seeing what throws up red flags. That’d let me actually see the scoring and stuff that’s killing email. Once I had it as clean as I could get it, I’d get a variety of people I know on different mail servers and ask them to respond back to a test email, and see what made it out.
I’d also bet against the CMOS battery, if the pre-reboot logs were off by 10 days.
The CMOS battery is used to maintain the clock when the PC is powered off. But he has a discrepancy between current time and pre-reboot logs. He shouldn’t see that if the clock only got messed up during the power loss.
I’d think that the time was off by 10 days prior to power loss.
I don’t know why it’d be off by 10 days. I don’t know uptime of the system, but that seems like an implausible amount of drift for a PC RTC, from what I see online as lilely RTC drift.
It might be that somehow, the system was set up to use some other time source, and that was off.
It looks like chrony is using the Debian NTP pool at boot, though, and I donpt know why it’d change.
Can DHCP serve an NTP server, maybe?
kagis
This says that it can, and at least when the comment was written, 12 years ago, Linux used it.
https://superuser.com/questions/656695/which-clients-accept-dhcp-option-42-to-configure-their-ntp-servers
My Debian trixie system has the ISC DHCP client installed in 2025, so might still be a factor. Maybe a consumer broadband router on your network was configured to tell the Proxmox box to use it as a NTP server or something? I mean, bit of a long shot, but nothing else that would change the NTP time source immediately comes to mind, unless you changed NTP config and didn’t restart chrony, and the power loss did it.