You do have a point. I guess it really depends on just how much acceleration we are talking about, and how/when the power is delivered.

Usually, the actual limit of acceleration now is simply the ability to get the power to the ground. Vehicles will have only so much traction to launch and accelerate but so quickly. So there is that. And almost all modern vehicles also have vastly improved traction control and stability control systems, as well (and those are on by default, and that is something I could agree should reset to on with every start). So tire spin and loss of control is greatly diminished. Having decent acceleration is nowhere near as dangerous as it used to be. The main concern is just being aware that others around you might not expect you to be in X location that quickly.

As for Ludicrous: The primary reason Teslas would not have the Ludicrous Mode on all the time (or by default) is that it actually takes considerable time before it can activate (it has to prep for it by conditioning the battery), and when used, it only lasts for a short time, and it seriously destroys range (very seriously).

>"If an OS vendor really cared about what was in the best interest of the user they would never place the user in a situation where they face take it or leave it demands for privileges from app vendors."

^^^ THIS, 1000%

But the reason we don't get such fine-grained controls is that the ecosystem is designed to maximize simplicity and the ability of the OS and apps to spy, advertise, and control the user.

>"As long as there's a method, someone will write instructions that people will follow."

While this is true, additional warnings and hoops can and will dissuade a large number of users. Is the goal 100% perfection, or perhaps a 50% or 75% improvement?

One idea would be a mandatory waiting period. Say an hour. Where you have to check back in and complete the process later. That would give someone time to think about it and also help stop impulsive actions. Annoying, yes. But security is always annoying.

Anything that ships AI bundled with it won't ever make it onto my desktop."

This isn't "bundling AI", it is just offering an option to hook into your choice of AI engine, if you want to use it.

>"Do you think it would only be active if you used that dedicated AI tab? Of course not. It'd be running in the background at all times, analysis your harddrive under the pretext of being ready IF you needed all the information, but what it'll really be doing is selling even more of your personal data."

I seriously doubt Mozilla would do anything even remotely like that. We are not talking about Microsoft or Google. And it is not like it would be a secret. Mozilla discloses exactly what they do and everything in Firefox is open source.

If you don't want the feature, don't use it, or turn it off. The end. I do agree with other postings that it would be better as an extension. They can even bundle the extension.

>"It's no longer the Firefox that I knew in 2004"

I would hope not. If it were, it would lack a hell of a lot of useful improvements, including new standards, performance, etc.

>''it's just AI this and sponsored tab that. It's proof that open source can be enshittified."

Um, it is an optional browsing mode. You don't have to use it. You can probably even disable it so you don't see it. I am not a fan of all this AI stuff, and it doesn't bother me. Mozilla/Firefox isn't "going AI", it is just a mode that hooks into whatever cloud AI site you want it to use. No different than when they added the search stuff. You have full control what to use (or not use it at all).

Like it or not, sometimes things need to be added that many of us find useless. But for Firefox to stay relevant, they do need to keep up with some of the "trendy" stuff. Thankfully, something like this is not difficult to add and doesn't really use any resources.

You know that "sponsored" home page or tab stuff? A click on two settings and it they off, permanently. Settings> Home> New Windows and Tabs> Homepage> Blank Page and New Tabs> Blank Page. Or you can keep them on and customize what remains on them, including turning off "sponsored" anything.

>"The laws of physics prevent many people from driving a vehicle with a sub 5 second 0-60 time. It takes a lot of ponies to get a bro-dozer up to speed that quickly."

Ariya E4orce crossover. Certainly not exotic. 0-60 in 4.8 seconds.

And did you forget about motorcycles? A Kawaski Concours sport touring (again, nothing exotic, but flashed), 0-60 in 2.9 seconds. And that isn't even electric.

> Good idea

I don't think so at all. It would be a good idea to have a setting to limit power, AND the ability to choose if you want it to remember it or not. Maybe even a password or something option, if the owner wants to lock the setting. But what I buy is my vehicle, I want control.

> EV's accelerate much faster than most cars did in the past and the clues from engine noise aren't as obvious.

Yes, I know. Those are two of several reasons I bought an EV. Had it been neutered with some nanny-state crap, I would have sought out some other model/brand/type.

In the USA is it common to have self service tills at supermarkets that accept coins?

If it accepts cash, it should accept both coins and bills. Any change I manage to accumulate usually gets fed into the coin slot at a self-checkout before I swipe a card to provide the rest of the payment. It's better than handing it off to a Coinstar machine, as those skim off a percentage of what you feed them.

>"I agree with everything in your post except for that. My search engine is startpage.com, which acts as a proxy between me and Google so that it has no way of knowing who made which query."

I use both DDG and StartPage. StartPage is a non-Google search page, even though it returns Google results. So you do actually agree with everything :)

>"It's probably not legal, but M$ has always thought they were above the law."

They *are* essentially above the law. As evidenced by an entire history in which nothing is really ever done to slap down their monopolistic anti-competitive behavior.

Google isn't far behind.

>"I simply refuse to use an OS that leans so hard on trying to modify my behavior."

Me too. Which is one of many reasons all my machines run Linux.

And I refuse to use a browser that allows Google more control over the way the web works, works against open standards, and creates a seriously dangerous monoculture. Which is why all my machines use Firefox.

And I don't want Google having complete control over search either. Which is why all my searching is done with non-Google search pages.

>"Sounds nice, is unworkable in practice."

Oh, I think it is workable. But I don't think the Times team will get what they want that way. :)

>"How on earth can you "exhaustively" deidentify millions of chat logs that could contain literally any personal details"

Exactly. There is no way. Except....

Expose the logs to the Time's team, but with extreme control. Meaning the Times could have people go into a secure room of OpenAI, with no personal electronics of any kind allowed, and use a locked-down machine of OpenAI's to search and view logs and tag some of interest. The data never leaves OpenAI's machines. And OpenAI can look at the tagged ones and ensure they are suitably scrubbed before a copy of ONLY THOSE are transmitted to the Times or court.

I think Samsung might be the only one making great Android tablets. I have used several. The last two have been in the "S" line. Current one I use is Galaxy Tab S9. They are expensive, but freaking fantastic screen, great build, fast, lots of RAM, etc.

Even their lower-end models are nice. But the S has that kick-butt screen.

>"I run a very small boutique hosting service and traffic has more than doubled since AI, all attributable to them. OpenAI in particular just seems to come along and hit like 30-60K links per day, no robots.txt rate limiting, just a "gimme all your data" scraping posture. Amazon is by far the worst, "

Oh, there is far worse now. Last week my club website was hit by a full-on distributed bot-net scraping our wiki. Up to a dozen hits per second from 250,000 unique IP addresses all over the world (but mostly Singapore and Brazil addresses). All of them ignoring robots.txt. All of them pretending to be people/browsers. It crippled the old/small server, so I took the content down and the traffic continued for 5 MORE DAYS still requesting various links into the content, until it finally started tricking to 2 or so per minute.