I think they kind of do the active Internet part now. I don’t watch television and haven’t touched a TV for a long time, but recently I had to help a neighbour set his new smart TV up. It was one of the big brands, I don’t remember if it was LG, Samsung or something else. The TV couldn’t go through initial set up without me installing some app on his phone. If there was an option to skip I couldn’t see where it was, I only assume that if it was possible it was intentionally made un-intuitive or hard to discover. And of course, if you want the TV to connect to the app you must connect it to Internet. Again, it may have been a failure on my part, but I wouldn’t be supprised if they intentionally forced the user to do it this way.

Samsung had something similar on their cheaper phones (the A series) where during the initial set up it asks you to login or create a Samsung account and you have to jump through a couple of hoops to skip it, as well as some other part where I don’t remember what the phone asked you to do, but the “Yes” option was blue, while the button to skip was intentionally colored the same or very similar shade of gray as an inactive button. So if the TV was Samsung I don’t doubt for a second that they will do some shady practice like that.

Most of the time you can kick a computer in anger without consequences and that’s enough for me. Can’t do it with my colleagues without at minimum having to talk with HR. And sometimes it even solves the issue (maybe helps with humans too, but can’t legally try it)

Some day someone with a high military rank, in one of the nuclear armed countries (probably the US), will ask an AI play a song from youtube. Then an hour later the world will be in ashes. That’s how the “Judgement day” is going to happen imo. Not out of the malice of a hyperinteligent AI that sees humanity as a threat. Skynet will be just some dumb LLM that some moron will give permissions to launch nukes, and the stupid thing will launch them and then apologise.

Yes, except if you are in my University, where professors are fossils and knowing OSI is required to pass the CN exam.

Thought I was the only one who noticed

Well, not half. Just a tiny amount, some would say that just 1% is enough.