I've just read the SeaWorld article and the proportion of the article related to controversies seems appropriate to me. I wouldn't expect the article on VW or Mercedes to include lengthy sections on Nazi collaboration either. These are important historical controversies but there is a lot more to say about these companies and main articles like these should have a reasonable word count. Extended topics on the details, including the controversies, generally get their own article.

Pressure on China recently has, in my opinion, been about the Ukraine war. We see the same playbook as India- tarrifs and screwing with visas and just today India says they will stop buying Russian oil. It's a costly move for India in the short term but they understand it's the right thing to do and prefer to play well with other countries. China is the last large-volume buyer of Russian oil left but they are too proud to be seen as folding to external pressure and their propaganda ministry has been following the Russian line on the topic. I doubt China will play ball with the West on this one, and some Chinese markets are already or will be closed to American farmers forever. It's also true that China aggressively steals every digital file they can find, friends or otherwise. They should be called out every time it happens, because it keeps happening.

I doubt AI is going to do much for divorce law. Divorces generally go relatively smoothly or are a battle. People in easy divorces are already using template forms from the internet. Difficult cases are the definition of a "people business", a chatbot is not going to be satisfying to people who want someone to fight for what they want.

^this!!

critical driveline software should be separate and autonomous from accessories. My ID.4 which I love but admittedly does not have the smoothest accessory software used to crash the heads-up display and with it the air conditioning system. So, while driving in summer rush hour hear I am performing a hard boot on the system swearing my but off.

Playing devils advocate we have a slew of users who want to be able to drive there car with there iphones.

Electric vehicles are silent in the car park, which is a hazard for pedestrians. There's a good argument that cars should make a sound in this situation, so people are aware a car is moving or about to move.

Apart fro that - yes, the lack of noise, vibration and harshness is a big advantage - and also a design problem, because without engine noise rattles and tyre noise become a bigger issue.

That cap is everyone who wants to buy a car, minus a small group of enthusiasts who mostly buy classic cars second hand anyway.

There are many who can't afford electric cars with the range that they need, but technology is quickly solving that issue as battery research and improving mass production reduces costs.

Agreed, the claim that it couldn't be backed up because the size was too large is totally bogus. We're talking about a single rack of equipment for a cheap option capable enough to do weekly snapshots. Less than a shipping container for a higher end system.

I completely agree but businesspeople should study and respect a skilful salesperson's methods, if only to be aware of sales tactics they shouldn't be flimflammed by. I'm not convinced that Jobs was a skilful salesperson but he definitely was the boss of a very successful company and that's pretty much the same thing to the people interested in such things.

Unlike IMAP, POP allows you to maintain a local copy of your mail, a copy that is isolated from the server.

For many reasons, people prefer that to IMAP or Exchange, which will delete mail from your local cache if it is removed from the server, and accessing that cache independent from the server is also a challenge.

Thankfully, this isn't Gmail dropping POP support for their users. We will still be able to get emails into Thunderbird or Outlook using POP. What is going away is configuring Gmail to use POP to pull emails from other accounts into the Gmail inbox.

Plus all the handhelds either out now or on the way. Competition on hardware is getting fierce. A nice steady revenue stream from subscriptions is a lot less hassle and risk.

"I know this dude who is good with computers..."

LLM-based AI can do some pretty impressive things. It *seems* to answer questions with remarkable accuracy, and it instantly produces code in response to often ridiculously vague input queries:

"Write me an app to track ant farms in Vietnam"

And what do you know? You get something that seems surprisingly useful!

Except that it's all an illusion.

I'm an experienced software developer (25 years now) and I focus on information lifecycle apps targeting workgroups and enterprise - organizations of 50+ people. As I write this, about 20,000 people are concurrently using an app I created.

Over the past year or so, I've been trying to deeply integrate AI into my workflow. It's there when I write code in VSCode, it's there when I write sysadmin/shell code, and it's there when I'm refactoring.

The more I use it, and the "better" it gets, the more frustrating I find it. It's only somewhat useful in the area that most coding projects fail: debugging.

No matter what it seems, LLM-based AI doesn't *understand* anything. It's just an ever-more-clever trickery based on word prediction. As such, it serves only as another abstraction that still must be understood and reviewed by a real person with actual understanding, or the result is untrustable, unstable, and insecure "vibe code" that is largely worthless outside of securing VC funding, which is the thing that AI perhaps does best: help unprepared people get VC funding.

You still need real people to get code you can live with, depend on, and grow with.

That can be true in some instances, but often it just means that there are steps which require significant time or needs the involvement of more people and obtaining their cooperation. "It's difficult" often just means that significant resources and time are needed, and is especially relevant for unbillable work. This often results in things not proceeding (an eventual "no") but that is not a foregone conclusion. Alternative phrases such as "this plan is unrealistic", "this sounds expensive and nobody will pay for it", "this needs approval from a high level and will take time and effort to convince 3 levels of managers", or "we have no capacity" are often the actual position, but politeness and succinctness distill this to "it is difficult". This is almost never the end of a conversation, just the initial indication of if something can or can not happen.

It depends on how it was designed, and the operating conditions. Steam catapults have their issues too- making freshwater from saltwater occasionally has hiccups and contaminants can enter the steam system, causing corrosion and erosion. The advantage of steam is that the catapults themselves are mechanically fairly simple, the steam source is external so the hardware embedded in the deck isn't too complex. Electric catapults have lots of electrical hardware at the point of use, including many coils of wire, any of which can suffer an insulation failure and presumably put the whole catapult out of action, or at least degraded in output. The expense is also an issue as linear motors are more expensive and each full-size US carrier has 4 of them.

That's not unusual for military aircraft.