You could do battery swaps for NEVs in a scheme where you didn't own a battery at all, and instead just subscribed to one. You could also do it for heavy diesel truck equivalents, as big diesels typically have the fuel tanks hanging on the outside of the frame where they're nice and accessible anyway. But it doesn't make any sense for the vehicles in between that, i.e. the bulk of them...

MATE is outdated (but good for resource constrained systems) and GNOME is dumbed down and hard to get good results from, you need a whole bunch of add-ins just to get where KDE is. KDE was very bad in the past, but it's really come quite a long way. GNOME was really quite good in the past, but it's really gone the wrong way. I'm not against having a simple mode but I don't want oversimplification to infest everything.

Well, that is the Big Lie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie) being pushes by law enforcement and Law&Order politicians, isn't it? Claiming harsher sentences, more surveillance and more police and police powers would actually improve safety. The reality is they do not.

If you let the police make your laws, then one day you will wake up in a police-state.

Seriously. If you do not actually look at what you buy before doing it, you will get shafted at least on part of your purchases. That insight is as old as humanity. I see some are still ignorant regarding that issue.

We will find out.

You're absolutely right, and it sucks that I fell for that trap.

In regard to long-haul trucking, I think there's some merit to the idea of having swappable batteries, since presumably the capacities are larger than in consumer vehicles. But since truckers are already spending stretches of time at rest stops, the benefit is incremental, as you noted.

Along those lines, there might be applications for taxi fleets--short range personal transit where the vehicles are all uniformly the same and operated out of a central hub. But again, if the capacity is big enough that a car could just be charged every night, why build these complicated stations?

Why are we even trying to secure stuff? With hiring processes this extremely broken we could just hand them everything directly.

The problem is most coders were not actually experts before AI. They will be even worse now.

AI also adds a ton of security vulnerabilities, cannot find most of them and makes attackers a lot more productive. The fireworks will be spectacular.

As some people are making very good profits with fixing vibe-"coding" crap now, that is entirely plausible.

To be honest, I care less and less. Blithering criminal idiots fucking everything up and the rest too dumb and incapable to stop them. There is nothing to learn there except that on average, people are completely clueless. I knew that one before.

Indeed. Trump hires only people that are mentally deficient and perform below his level. Well, what his level was a few years ago, by now he will be hard pressed to find anybody even less capable than he is.

Well, do not expect an idiot to be able to connect the dots, even when it is very easy...

You clearly are clueless. Trump and his mob are not anti-DEI, Trump and his mob are anti-Science. And you are not doing well with Science either, because that is veeeeeeery obvious from the observable facts.

One of the most important factors of dealing with climate change is predictions. Shutting down your own research capabilities just means getting less accurate, delayed and predictions not tailored for you. That is about as bad as it sounds.