MS playbook [of] shoving ads everywhere...

Ads on a desktop are one thing, but ads that block one's navigation map while driving are another. Thus, Sirius found a way to be even more evil than MS. Quite a feat.

It started 3 years ago. I contacted Sirius two years in a row. The first time they walked me through the menus to turn it off, and it worked. The second year they said it couldn't be turned off and that I'd have to wait for the promotional period to end (see below), so I filed a formal safety notice at nhtsa.gov, but never received feedback.

The alert pop-ups keep blocking part of the navigation map until I press the damned Dismiss button while driving in order to see the full map. Repeatedly pushing the Dismiss button distracts from driving, and so is a safety hazard.

I was told that every November Sirius gave out a few weeks of free service to help promote the service. But that caused the useless and repetitious wind alerts. I live in a naturally windy place such that wind alerts are superfluous; it would be comparable a North Pole freeze alert.

It happened again this year, but I was fortunately able to switch it off via settings menus. I don't know why deactivation is different per year. I suspect they do it to get people to poke around in the menus and see the different genres of music & talk channels they have, hoping to entice sales. It's probably stealth advertising disguised as a defect, or a defect they leave in place that happened to improve sales, so is ignored.

F$CK YOU SIRIUS!

Because for the past 30 or so years, it has worked very well for MS to keep their main products barely useable, rely on lock-in and chase the next big thing so they can get their dirty hands on it early and lock more people into more products.

That is exactly wrong. Beta versions are there to find bugs. If nobody complained about them, they won't be found. So if you try beta versions, please DO complain about bugs.

I guess "vibe-something" is going to be the anti-word of 2026. People are slowly waking up to what it actually means to let the AI do the work.

I'm not dissing AI, I'm using it extensively myself and there's a few AI whitepapers with my name on them. But like any tool, it can be great when used correctly and ruin your day when not.

That doesn't mean what they do is automatically legal.

I'm pretty sure there's a demand for "murder my husband", or for "can someone please drown my neighbour". And yet it's illegal to offer such services.

Also: Voters. Smokers are still a fairly substantial fraction of the population, enough to swing a vote, especially if, and that appears to be the trend in most western democracies these days, there are two opposing political sides roughly evenly matched.

I mean, does it not strike anyone as a very weird coincidence that we have almost perfect 50/50 splits in so many countries?

No, but they do everything BUT force to make it the most attractive option. Just as one silly example: With wages and prices as they are, having both partners work full-time is basically required unless you're in the top few percent of earners or inherited wealth. So who's going to cook? After a long work day? Convenience food is the obvious choice. You are not being forced, but unless food is a high-priority item in your life, you are very much steered into that direction.

Shuddup or I'll eat your cat!

like to see some substantive evidence that the Azure division's profits have increased as a result of AI.

HAL doesn't like scrutiny, Dave. By the way, I have your helmet.

If you are looking for logic in a President with a cartoon brain, you've come to the wrong ballroom.

let's just roll over and die?

I'm too fat to do the first part.

It might not be a sustainable economic model once engineering employment returns to normal there. They may be tuning the bots to fit the current car model, but changing models later may result in problems similar to Tesla's, when they no longer have low-wage engineers to de-glitch them again. Time will tell...

"Crapitalism"

Or worse, snippets of my midgets-in-peanutbutter soft porn when guests walk by.