Rip, I havent seen the latest season. That's funny though.

I bet you he played pranks on them with Trelane.

Apparently there is a holiday edition in the US that uses cane sugar. https://youtu.be/UC6bv6Ies3A

Maybe Q will rub off on Janeway a bit and make her less murderous.

i haven't seen academy yet, have they explained how the Jem'Hadar were able to breed? In DS9 they were grown synthetically by the Changelings afaik.

this is so cursed

Not sure if you mean hardcoded DNS IPs or hardcoded "phone home" IPs. Hardcoded DNS addresses in devices are annoying, the only way i've found to get around that is using destination nat rules (DNAT) which requires more than a consumer router typically. hardcoded phone home IPs would get blocked by your firewall. you're right that most firewalls are set up by default to implicitly allow outbound traffic. you set up a rule that explicitly denies all outbound traffic from the TV, then only allow port 443 (or whatever port your streaming service uses) on the specific IP/IPs that your service uses. Here's Netflix's published IP info for example.

edit also i'm fully aware it's fucking ridiculous that we as consumers have to go through this much rigamarole. you shouldnt have to be a literal network engineer to do something as simple as have an internet-connected tv that doesnt spy on you.

no it helps to block everything that isnt just netflix or whatever streaming service you use. you combine a DNS adblock along with blocking all the unused ports and it severely limits the communications. you could also add a vpn to add another layer of security. idk about jellyfin but most streaming services i know use https/443 to stream to your tv. so youre only allowing the specific service you want and only on a specific port. buncha great dns blocklists here https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists, and a smart tv specific one for pihole here https://github.com/Perflyst/PiHoleBlocklist/blob/master/SmartTV.txt

It's relatively easy to restrict a smart tv to TLS/HTTPS traffic only using your router and a dns adblocker.

Outer Wilds vibes

The problem of non-white people being in "their" country, I would guess. But I don't care to dig too deeply into the psyche of these monsters.

Linus and Luke from LTT were talking about this the other day, how you can spend like 20-30 grand on a sub-zero or some other fancy brand fridge, and it will last 50 years like appliances used to. But when you sell your house eventually it will add NO value, the buyer is just going to see "great, the house comes with a fridge like it's supposed to". So unless you plan to take the fridge with you from house to house and go through the trouble of replacing it with something normal when you do then the economics just don't work for most people anymore.