Mazda's legacy button layouts plus the dial are really great. I have a 3rd Gen Mazda3 and it's nearly perfect. There is a touch screen but it's never used. The dial turns and also pushes for select, and there are some other buttons around it for getting back out of menus and a home button, and some shortcuts for various things. All within comfortable reach just between the gear selector and parking brake (real mechanical parking brake handle!) without having to raise your arm and glance away from the road to make sure you're finding a button. It's all done by feel.

On the steering wheel is volume, track skip (which works in Spotify for it's normal 15 second skip function forward or backward to skip through commercials) and cruise control. Also a phone answer and hang up button.

About the only complaint I have is the A/C fan speed is two buttons rather than a knob, but at least the temp adjust is a big fat knob. They gave up room for a fan knob in exchange for dual temperature knobs for passenger and driver.

The Gen 4 Mazdas are similar, with better Android Auto / Car Play integration and a nicer screen, and are still fairly new, a lot of low mileage cars still available through CarMax, etc.

If they are going to rely on voice commands I'm done. I don't talk to machines. If it's still usable via buttons, fine.

My wife has a Tesla and the UI experience is awful. Absolutely awful. The only good thing about it is the drivetrain. It's like owning a supercar in terms of acceleration. Other than that, I would consider Teslas to be actively driver-hostile. I avoid driving it as much as possible. I hope they will eventually be considered a quirky novelty relegated to the dustbin of history, while more traditional button interfaces make a comeback.

Regardless of whatever budget Congress sets, the majority party has already been clear that they have no intent to enforce it. If the president uses the NASA money for something else, or even just puts it into his own personal pocket, we can be confident that he won't be impeached, and if impeached, he won't be convicted.

The only thing that matters is the total budget. The president is free to spend that total however he wishes. This isn't the law as written, but it's the law defacto. If voters have a problem with that (do they?) they can choose a different party to be the majority.

First of all, the amount of money that gets back to the creator is vanishingly small compared to what's kept by the cartel. While you think you're supporting the creators when you pay your license, you're really just supporting a vast army of middlemen leaching the money out. I'll say that to the apologists in this thread.

Secondly, they'll hit you up for a license even if you're just playing over the air radio. A radio station that's already paid a license and is playing advertising to pay for it. They will blatantly double dip. This happened to me when I owned a cafe / art gallery a long time ago.

I'm all for supporting the aritsts, but the system as it exists is seriously broken.

JSON is an improvement over XML and easier to transmit than YAML.

So when Lindsey starts reading from her AmEx-approved script, callers are infuriated by what they perceive to be another machine.

If she's accurately executing the programmers' script, I'd say she is a machine. Somebody port Doom to her!

This is a fuckin' awesome idea, but there's an easy improvement over the red rectangle and block symbol. Seriously, dude, you gotta use the sign images from They Live (1988). You know you want to.

If people don't have a government-granted monopoly on their features, they'll have no incentive to have any features at all.

Patrick was not happy with the veto.

Abbott has called a special session for the purpose of writing a new bill. I suspect that Patrick will get a very slightly looser version of SB3 passed, which may itself get vetoed.

The number of times that my wife has had to submit a copy of her marriage certificate to confirm her original name even though we've been married for 11 years baffles me. It made some sense in the first year or two, but she still has to do it a couple of times a year for seemingly random things. I encouraged her to keep her original name when we were planning the wedding, but she insisted on the name change.

We never needed "AI" or LLMs to think we're nothing more than machines.

Last I heard, Apple sales haven't plummeted and thrown them into bankruptcy, so it sounds like they learned the lesson just fine: it's fine to show people ads. People might complain a little bit, but they won't stop buying. Cost is $0 and ad revenue is presumably more than $0.

If someone is stuck with your proprietary software and you aren't showing them ads, then you're leaving money on the table. What're they gonna do, fork it out?

He vetoed the bill.

https://www.texastribune.org/2...

He doesn't care. It wouldn't be going to his supporters for the most part, and some of the more vocal ones will criticize him for it.

Yeah, I'm hung up on that too. You can come up with some outrageously huge numbers for mass and angular velocity, but once I multiply them by zero distance... I'm missing something.

the outer edge of the mass exceeding the speed of light

That intuitively makes sense, but I thought part of the black hole cheat is that it doesn't have an edge. I thought they were literally singularities, with a circumference of zero. Apparently not the case?

How a thing with a circumference of zero could meaningfully "rotate" is beyond me, but I thought this (and many other suspected properties of rotating black holes) was supposed to be beyond my ignorant layman understanding!