I have a Honda with an obsolete "infotainment" system, but at least it has an Aux In next to a USB port that provides power, so I can plug in an $11 UGreen dongle and listen to whatever I feel like. If I cared there are some nice 7" 1080p screens for cheap in the Raspberry Pi space that could be shoehorned in and run at 12V. But I'd rather have no screen at all.

Funny thing is that UGreen pairs faster than any other bluetooth device I have and never doesn't work. For eleven bucks.

With the fickleness of Google and Apple there's no chance they'll even support the current CarPlay and Android Auto in 20 years. I like to keep my vehicles 15-30 years, depending on how well they handle rust.

Maybe Crutchfield will make bypass harnesses for these systems in ten years when absolutely nothing works but the screen and speakers are still useful.

We really should be looking for standards at that level, so the compute modules could be upgraded after the manufacturer abandons their platforms.

As Louis says, you shouldn't be a felon for disabling ads on your refrigerator that you never agreed to.

There is a history of what we would now call industrial engineering and human factors going back at least as far as the first written records that shows that working more than a reasonable number of hours per week for any length of time leads to colossal decreases in productivity and quality, not to mention safety. If you have to work 18 hour days for two or even three weeks to get the crop in, yeah, that will work, but trying to keep human beings on this kind of schedule for very long leads to failure, burnout, and health problems up to and including death.

Heliboard is its modern replacement that gets updates.

Install Obtanium.
Install Heliboard.
Install Futo voice typing.

Jettison the Google input stealers.

> Why? Absolutely no idea

This isn't surprising to anybody who's studied the psychology of political science.

Those who identify as 'conservative' value maintenance much higher than those who identify as 'progressive'. You're more likely to see them in their driveway changing their oil and measuring their tire tread depth. It's just different kinds of people with different time-preference mindsets.

Note that with a limited budget maintenance spending is money that cannot be spent on immediate benefits.

You need to allocate some of the benefits money to upgrading the IT systems so there's less to hand out. "How could you possibly cut their benefits?" is the kind of misplaced empathy that undercuts the system that they feel is valuable.

Of course there's usually a Federal bailout in the wings for people who don't plan ahead so the incentive systems are all completely misaligned for good governance. Since the Lockdowns we've seen the weaponization of the Dollar through sanctions and tariffs that have pushed world oil markets to the Yuan and cross-border settlements in sovereign currency exchanges, so the Dollar is in freefall compared to commodities which means those bailouts are going to end very soon.

As this reckoning becomes too real to ignore the populations will move strongly to vote for candidates who seem to understand the value of maintenance.

Yeah, and Healthcare is 20% of GDP.

According to Keynesian economists, if we were all much healthier the economy would be worse off.

I'm not sure how much more evidence you need that the entire economic school is a bunch of self-styled money-priests making excuses for government spending.

Keynes did some really good early work but then he got caught diddling kids and after that the King's spending was all the best thing anybody could do.

An early version of "trust the experts".

So the code was written by people who aren't familiar with the idea of "fail-safe"?

I might have gone to school for software engineering but I never equated it with building a bridge at 4000' over a canyon. Those are different things.

But none of my classmates would have thought about building a stack that fails into random or dangerous conditions. We always built from the ground up and verified states as new functionality was added with test evaluation of the possible error states.

And those classes were in C++89 without the advantages of proper exception handling like Java or Python provide.

I think if I were in the market for a $5000 IoT mattress I'd want to see something like a UL label on it. I guess the hardware guys put in a thermal switch so the heating elements shut off at 110*F? Thank goodness a runaway fire wasn't a failure mode.

I wouldn't personally ever spend that kind of money on something like that but if I were rich and disabled maybe there would be use cases.

I'm glad you looked up the real number as I usually see estimates of 65% of USians or something like that living in apartments (zero of which have chargers installed in the parking lot of course).

But what you are saying is that no progress can be made on the other 66% who can install a home charger until absolutely every possible case is covered, which is not out of touch but simply pro-Big Oil propaganda.

Here come the edge cases! Apartments! Towing a trailer from San Diego to Maine. Driving from Little Rock to Boise to return that tool you borrowed but being back in time for work at 0700. Nothing is decided until everything is decided.

Sure, whatever.

Auto industry analysts and enthusiasts alike have a hard time understanding how Stellantis is still in business, particularly now that they have screwed up the Jeep line in North America. I wouldn't take them as indicative of anything.

Beg to differ a bit: while GM made some missteps, particularly in handing the VOLTEC technology over to their PRC subsidiary and dropping it in North America, they took their time to develop a well-engineered and manufacturable EV platform for the next 10-15 years. The problem is their executive team is now living in fear of what a fascist regime could do to them if they don't toe the line and that has given the anti-progress faction at GM operations HQ the chance to counterattack and put anchors on EV marketing and sales. Really a shame and it will cost them dearly over the next 20 years [1].

[1] the anti-progress faction at GM will be well-retired to their backwoods Michigan cabins with their 2,847hp offroad pickup trucks by then

There's only one question in my mind: when the United States wakes up 10 years from now and realizes we have fallen 20 years behind in basic and applied science, EVs, public transportation, and re-creating our built environment to center humans instead of machines (ok, we're already 30 years behind on that last) WHO ARE WE GOING TO BLAME?!? SOMEONE DID THIS TO US - THEY MUST BE PUNISHED!!!

"Electric vehicles are one of those things that are a really good idea in theory but out in the real world they are just simply unworkable. "

EVs are like the apocryphal bumblebee: they don't work in theory, yet millions of people use them every day with no more serious inconvenience than ICE vehicles experience from time to time (e.g. the mythical 'range anxiety' = running out of gas on a back road).

I've had people give me long lectures about the un-usability of EVs while I have driven them across the city, errands, and back on purely electric power in my PHEV.

Doesn't the Nissan Leaf get about 60 miles?

I was looking at a cheap used one that was down to 45 miles, I think.

30 miles gets me to town and back so it would only last a few years at that rate.

They're talking about LineageOS. Think Graphene but it doesn't just run on Google hardware. Over a hundred devices and they just added mainline kernel and qemu support so it potentially runs on thousands of devices.

Sadly with less hardening. I wish Lineage would take some Graphene patches. The crazy thing is Lineage descended from Cyanogenmod which had many of these patches!

If I want an app to draw over other apps (e.g. accessibility apps) I need to grant that permission (AOSP distro). How do they bypass that?