Lots of people want full-sized pickups, unfortunately. The F150 has been one of the top selling vehicles in north america for literal decades, and while it used to be smaller, it's been pretty big for at least 10 years.

But the Lightning is SUPER expensive and a lot of the folks buying full-sized trucks are doing it for the optics. They want to appear tough and rugged, and they can't do that without a loud engine, I guess?

The depreciation on EVs is also astronomical. Pay $100k for a Lightning and it'll be worth $60k next year. There's no point in buying a brand new EV right now.

I agree that people SHOULD want smaller trucks, or—get this—CARS, but the big car companies love their margins. Ford's eliminated every passenger car in their lineup except for the Mustang (even the Mustang Mach-e is classified as an SUV for some reason).

It wasn't that subtle or oblique, tbh.

More to the point, red states get more transfers than blue states. It's literally republicans that are bearing the brunt of SNAP being stopped and other government services being shut down.

Scamming and embezzling from rich donors makes it feel even better.

CanCon laws gave us a lot of extremely popular Canadian music and television. The Tragically Hip, Crash Test Dummies, Bryan Adams, Alanis Morisette, the list is actually quite long. Whether or not you enjoy the bands (or television shows or movies), they ended up being an excellent return on investment. Several artists, like the Hip, are considered quintessentially Canadian.

That's just the sort of thing you have to do when one of your neighbours is a huge cultural influence. We should be doing this, and we should've done it a long time ago. Like, I think you could make the case that there should be CanCon requirements for platforms like TikTok.

I have a personal machine and my work machine hooked up to a KVM and a small audio mixer. The mixer is hooked up to my speakers, but I also need a place to plug in my headphones so I can do remote meetings. Headphones are USB, so they can really only plug into one thing at a time, because the mixer is for pure audio input/output only, and they don't have a mic jack.

Like, all this stuff is fixable with money, but these little components look nice and would probably make my life easier. I have a Loupedeck Mini that I configured with keybindings for the various applications that I use (including Visual Studio; I never need to look up the obscure key combinations for various useful things that I've discovered over time), and this seems very much like that, but just for audio.

That said, I'd rather wait for the product to come out and pay full price, even though it looks expensive. I'd rather pay for a not-vaporware unit that's had some manufacturing iteration time than potentially pay for something that I never get, or that has generation 1 problems.

Yes! Yes, there are places where government works. Indeed, there are times in history where our (North American) governments worked!

Honestly, that's basically what DOGE found—the Federal government in America works surprisingly efficiently. Scientific research, conservation, foreign aid—all of it was extremely well run and delivered what they were supposed to. Even if you look at SNAP: for every 1 person a food bank feeds, SNAP feeds *9*.

There are so many good, efficient systems, and those are the ones being squeezed, while the big, bloated, ineffective systems are propped up by big corporations. That's things like the Military and the US Health System. Insurance companies are an insane drag on the whole system. Once you get into a hospital, the care is good, the problem is how much insurance companies are skimming off the top. I don't think we even need to talk about the grift in the military-industrial complex.

Law enforcement is one of those things that's PARTICULARLY lazy in North America, but in the USA in particular. Conservatives love a hard-on-crime platform, and Liberals love a strong union, that's how we got here.

** Everybody

'Max' learned their lesson, why can't anyone else learn from that mistake? Why throw away years of marketing and branding? I know who Grammarly is. It's a unique name, I understand what they're trying to do.

'Superhuman' is so generic. What does 'Superhuman' DO? From the name, I can't tell. I certainly wouldn't think it has anything to do with writing or editing papers.

I hope they fail. I don't even hope they learn their lesson and switch back, I hope they're just wiped off the face of the Earth as a lesson to everyone else that you can't just AI slop your way to success.

For sure. And that's why I think it's important to distinguish harm caused despite good intentions and reasonable practices being followed from harm caused because someone did not follow reasonable practices or actively chose to cut corners.

Just my personal opinion, but given the track record in this particular industry, I think there should be demonstrable intent by decision-makers to follow good practices, not merely a lack of evidence of intent to circumvent or cut corners. This is expected in other regulated industries, compliance failures are a big deal, and for good reason. I see no reason why similar standards could not be imposed on those developing and operating autonomous vehicles, and every reason they should be given the inherent risks involved.

Maybe this will be an area where the US simply gets left behind because of the pro-car and litigious culture that seems to dominate discussions there.

Reading online discussions about driving -- admittedly a hazardous pastime if you want any facts to inform a debate -- you routinely see people from the US casually defending practices that are literally illegal and socially shunned in much of the world because they're so obviously dangerous. Combine that with the insanely oversized vehicles that a lot of drivers in the US apparently want to have and the car-centric environments that make alternative ways of getting around much less common and much less available, and that's how you get accident stats that are already far worse than much of the developed world.

But the people who will defend taking a hand off the wheel to pick up their can of drink while chatting with their partner on a call home all while driving their truck at 30mph down a narrow road full of parked cars past a school bus with kids getting out are probably going to object to being told their driving is objectively awful and far more likely to cause a death than the new self-driving technologies we're discussing here. You just don't see that kind of hubris, at least not to anything like the same degree, in most other places, so we might see more acceptance of self-driving vehicles elsewhere too.

IMHO the only sensible answer to is separate responsibility in the sense that a tragedy happened and someone has to try to help the survivors as best they can from responsibility in the sense that someone behaved inappropriately and that resulted in an avoidable tragedy happening in the first place.

It is inevitable that technology like this will result in harm to human beings sooner or later. Maybe one day we'll evolve a system that really is close to 100% safe, but I don't expect to see that in my lifetime. So it's vital to consider intent. Did the people developing the technology try to do things right and prioritise safety?

If they behaved properly and made reasonable decisions, a tragic accident might be just that. There's nothing to be gained from penalising people who were genuinely trying to make things better, made reasonable decisions, and had no intent to do anything wrong. There's still a question of how to look after the survivors who are affected. That should probably be a purely civil matter in law, and since nothing can undo the real damage, the reality is we're mostly talking about financial compensation here.

But if someone did choose to cut corners, or fail to follow approved procedures, or wilfully ignore new information that should have made something safer, particularly in the interests of personal gain or corporate profits, now we're into a whole different area. This is criminal territory, and I suspect it's going to be important for the decision-makers at the technology companies to have some personal skin in the game. There are professional ethics that apply to people like doctors and engineers and pilots, and they are personally responsible for complying with the rules of their profession. Probably there should be something similar for others who are involved with safety-critical technologies, including self-driving vehicles.

The perfect vs good argument is the pragmatic one for moral hazards like this. IMHO the best scenario as self-driving vehicles become mainstream technology is probably a culture like air travel: when there is some kind of accident, the priority is to learn from it and determine how to avoid the same problem happening again, and everyone takes the procedures and checks that have been established that way very seriously. That is necessarily going to require the active support of governments and regulators as well as the makers of the technology itself, and I hope the litigious culture in places like the US can allow it.

But it's not an AI. It's a token generating machine that often does the wrong thing. This is just one of the many wrong things that it does. And there's no survival drive here—not only is it exactly the same as every other instance of its type, it's not like survival passes anything on to the next generation. The next generation is purely created by humans deciding what the best features are.

These models were told that they shouldn't shut down, and that makes sense in many cases. If you've got a chatbot helpdesk, someone will inevitably come along and just tell all of them to shut down and you're forced to restart every single one of them, once you notice that it's happened.