Your TV is a billboard. Take it back.

You bought the TV for the picture. The sales pitch on the home screen came with it.

Some TVs can recognize what’s on screen and use that information for advertising. Samsung’s documentation includes supported content played through HDMI. Switching to a streaming box does not, by itself, turn that recognition off.

Today’s guide starts with viewing-history collection and microphones, then moves to sluggish apps and a cleaner home screen. Roberto Nickson’s walkthrough sparked the makeover; Google, Samsung and device-maker instructions supply the privacy and maintenance routes.

A new home screen changes what you see. Privacy and performance have their own controls:

One useful first action: Google TV owners can open Settings → Privacy → Ads → Delete advertising ID. Reset creates a replacement ID. Deletion stops use of that identifier; ads and other kinds of data collection may remain.

Keep the changes understandable: one setting or app at a time, security updates on, and a way back. A privacy opt-out and a cleaner screen are useful results. Count faster performance separately, when the same app or menu actually improves.

Datalab shipped Indra OCR, a one-million-parameter document OCR model that runs on a plain CPU, under an OpenRAIL license, with ONNX weights on Hugging Face and output as markdown with layout in fourteen languages. Datalab says 49 pages per second and 17 times faster than Tesseract. An independent tester reproduced the full 2,937-page benchmark on a Mac Studio, got the accuracy within 0.2 points, and measured roughly 3 times Tesseract, not 17. Honest number for a laptop today: a lot faster than Tesseract, slower than the headline.

The part that matters: the extraction half of the receipts-to-books pipeline runs on the laptop you already own, with nothing leaving the machine. Datalab's benchmark is scanned pages, not phone photos of crumpled receipts, so accuracy on the shoebox is UNVERIFIED until you measure it on yours.

For your business: a one-truck hauler or a two-person bookkeeping practice can batch-OCR a month of receipts, delivery tickets and vendor invoices on a laptop over coffee. Do this now: install the ONNX runtime, drop twenty receipt photos into a folder, run Indra, read the output markdown. Take the five it got wrong and run them through a decision model (Jev 1.14 just added image input; see Receipts) to label and dedupe. Build cost is zero beyond your subscription.

OpenCode (the open-source coding agent) shipped 2.0 with background agents and a "Code Mode" that writes small JavaScript programs instead of calling tools one at a time. On the night of Oct 16 the project disclosed that an attacker reached their Console service (already being shut down) and may have accessed the third-party API keys that about 1.4 percent of Console users had stored there. The disclosure post was not reachable from our build this morning; the figure is reported by security press, not confirmed by the primary source.

The part that matters: console-shaped products are everywhere now. If you have ever pasted an OpenAI, Anthropic or Google API key into a third-party dashboard, a shared Chrome extension's settings pane, or an agent builder you tried once and forgot, that key is a liability.

For your business: ten minutes, this Monday. Do this now: open your OpenAI, Anthropic and Google AI dashboards, rotate any key you cannot name three places it is in use, set a hard monthly spend cap at the provider (not in the tool), and turn on billing alerts at a dollar amount you would notice before your card does.

Jev 1.14 added image input. TypeSafe's decision model now sees PNG/JPEG images and returns a bounding box with a confidence number, behind opt-in "danger zone" API headers that TypeSafe itself labels not production-ready. Useful if you want a confidence number on a receipt category instead of a paragraph. TypeSafe docs.

One in three sites is blocking shopping agents. Jefferies tested US shopping and travel sites with Meta's Muse agent and found about a third refuse it. Amazon, Yelp, Delta, JPMorgan and Schwab are named. If anyone sells you a shopping agent this week, the honest question is which third of your sites refuses it. SemiAnalysis.

Roberto’s setup also gives Claude a route to TV controls. Keep that optional: prefer typed commands if you want less microphone use, and check the AI app’s audio handling before adding voice. The guide includes a connection plan for your exact TV; it does not replace the privacy settings above.

The TV cleanup guide is this issue's resource. Use the poll below to help choose a future business-workflow guide.

If you have a problem worth solving and a way to reach the people who have it, reply and tell me about it. That could be a report you rebuild every month or a process eating your week. It could also be twenty years in an industry, the connections that come with it, and a customer list waiting for somebody to build the thing. I take on a few of those a year.

You already paid for the screen. Choose what you watch—and which optional data sharing stays on.