>"Literally the only reason that any car manufacturer tries to force you to use their own system is to sell you subscriptions."

They will sell you subscriptions, regardless. Because there is still the matter of telematics, car mobile app, etc. How do I know this? Because my new car has both Android Auto and Apple Carplay ability, in addition to native systems (so it has all three). Without the subscription, a lot of functionality is lost, even when using AA/ACP (like self-driving). The car comes with 3 years of included service at no cost, though.

No company is going to be without subscriptions, regardless of what system.

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.

My employers recently signed up for a ChatGPT account and I've been seeing how it can help me.

I remain responsible for the big picture, for actually making apps that work on iOS and Android. I've found ChatGPT helpful for refining details. It saves sifting through years worth of Stack Overflow postings. It's a handy tool, but it won't replace me any time soon.

If you say "Chat GPT" in French it sounds like "chat j'ai pété" ("cat I farted"). I guess I need to get out more...

...laura

Yeah, when they said "GNOME" my eyes rolled. I know exactly nobody that uses a 'modern' GNOME desktop under Linux. Nobody. Cinnamon, MATE, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, whatever, but not GNOME. I have no idea why on earth Ubuntu defaults to Gnome.

Really, most people are ditching Ubuntu anyway for Mint. But at least most everything learned in a class or "cert" for Ubuntu will apply to Mint, except for the Snap crap.

>"The FAQ advises test takers to use a Chromium-based browser, as Firefox "is NOT supported at this time... There is a known issue [...] will be resolved in the CUE.01 Linux 24.10 exam release."

Maybe they need to take/pass their own exams? No Firefox = invalid site. There are essentially only two browsers, and they can't handle that extraordinary amount of diversity?

>"tenant admins will decide whether to enable it and require end-users to opt-in."

That is a misuse of the term "opt-in". That is like saying I am requiring you to volunteer.

Heliboard is its modern replacement that gets updates.

Install Obtanium.
Install Heliboard.
Install Futo voice typing.

Jettison the Google input stealers.

I *HATE* "shorts". And never watch any.
I also don't login with YouTube.

My life was made so much better when I discovered that UBlock Origin (Firefox, of course) can actually hide all the Shorts crap!

https://github.com/gijsdev/ubl...

> 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.

The more decentralized mining is, the harder the 51% attack

Therefore, you want mining that is about as efficient on a current CPU as it is on a high end GPU or even ASIC. That way big server farm investments scale up with a low integer factor -- compared to a Bitcoin ASIC farm which can be (IIRC) dozens of millions of times more efficient per dollar than your PC CPU.

Various strategies were considered and tested. The end result was really clever: create a simple virtual machine with specific characteristics (such as non-halting totality, and a syntaxless bytecode). The one-way function is simply to run the random input program to completion, and provide the output. In other words, be a CPU.

The algo was specifically released as a separate standalone so others could pick it up. But there is only one crypto that uses it. It's the one that actually encrypts the data on the blockchain, has hundreds of .onion nodes run to this day independently by true believers (and yes I am one), so that actually it would be really hard for even a major government to shut down its untraceable transactions.

I just checked, for the first time in probably 2 years. Huh. It's not even in the top 25 market cap anymore. But it's the only coin that IMO for better or worse matches the original Tim May style cryptoanarchist vision that Satoshi was gesturing towards. And I don't need to say its name because you know which one it is.

>"The court found that the company misled customers because its network uses copper cables for the final stage of connections, sometimes extending up to a mile from the distribution box to subscribers' homes."

Yeah, the marketing name game. A lot like the words "unlimited" or "free".

Cox Communications calls their home coax cable modem service "Powered by Fiber". Hmmm, that is cutting it a bit close. Technically, ALL ISP's are probably "powered" by "fiber". It is true that most of Cox's modern network is now fiber, but the last step to the home, at the neighborhood level, is still coax. And it suffers from all the typical signal interference, leveling problems, and channel bonding errors we have had for eons.

That said, I am lucky and my home connection seems to be very reliable. But just a few blocks away, where I manage an almost identical connection, it is a nightmare of constant issues. Dropped packets, long ping times, regular outages (sometimes many per month). It is on a different "node", so I am told.

Anyway, my point is that the biggest advantage of fiber is not speed (at least not when talking about home connections), it is reliability/lack of interference. And one doesn't get that unless the fiber makes it all the way to your house.

And yes, finally, there is a fiber-to-the-home option in my neighborhood from a competitor. But their pricing is too high to have me bother changing to it. I think they are still trying to milk pissed-off Cox customers at high prices and haven't tried undercutting yet (that might happen later). Their service is more expensive, but twice as fast (and CGNAT, so you have to pay $10 more per month to get around that "feature"). But I don't need the speed. At 300/30 I am just fine. Yet it is nice to finally have choices and perhaps having competition might get Cox improving services and lowering prices.

>"First of all, please kindly go fuck yourself with your judgmental bullshit."

Wow, nice posting language there. Perhaps you should calm down before posting? I think we actually agree on more than you think...

>"Parenting is fucking hard...mistakes get made."

100% agree. But handing over an unrestricted internet device to a child isn't a simple mistake nor a one-time mistake. It is a huge, continuous, major mistake.

>"Should Roblox get sued?...no.."

100% agree.

>"can parents supervise every fucking minute of their kids life?...no, they can't. If you think they can, you're fucking stupid."

Nobody expects parents to supervise their kids every minute. That would be stupid, and actually damaging. But if you give a kid an *unrestricted device* to have/keep/use whenever they want, one cannot possibly supervise that. They will spend countless hours on it doing whatever they want. I see it all the time. It doesn't matter as much if they are exposed to crap once in a while, but that isn't what is happening that is causing the major issues.

>"If a parent says they can be on top of their kids online interactions, they're lying...probably to themselves."

100% agree, if it is not a locked-down device.

>"Also, it's bullshit to sue them."

100% agree

>"I think they [Roblox] take reasonable actions."

My comments were not about Roblox, but about unrestricted devices in the hands of minors. I readily admit I have zero experience with Roblox (but I would if I were going to whitelist it for a minor).