Everyone who supports AI medical transcriptions says, "of course you still need to proof-read it," but we know there are a lot of physicians and psychologists not proof-reading the transcriptions because stuff like this is getting through. Do doctors not take ethics seriously? They're worried about lawsuits, but not worried about using an unproven technology that's notorious for confabulating?

You are correct, and this is part of a broader crisis of falling trust in institutions across the western world. We need science to be able to happen within an open scientific community that the rest of us can see into, but the media has an addiction to reporting on the findings that are weird outliers. But those weird outliers are the most likely to be incorrect, which feeds a cycle of mistrust. I would like to see science come up with a grading system of scientific certainty... where, say, the quantum mechanics model, which agrees extremely well with experimental results to as many digits as we can measure, is graded as a 9 out of 10 certainty, and the results in the squishier social sciences are down in the 2 or 3 range, and then climate science is only going to fall in the 4 out of 10 range at best. New surprising results should come in at a 0 or 1 initially. This would hopefully help the media better understand what they're reporting on.

You're clearly not talking about American cars. What's a 1-tonne Ford Escort? I did have a 1983 Dodge Ram D150 half-ton pickup truck with a Slant-6 and an A-833 manual transmission; that thing would get 25MPG and hold 75MPH all the way westbound across Michigan... of course, it took it a while to get to 75MPH, merging was just like driving a Peterbilt with a 53' trailer full of anvils. That exact same engine and a comparable transmission were available for the Dodge Trucks line from 1960 to 1987 and was renowned for durability and reliability.

The key point is that Americans typically don't want them. To this day, in Canada, gasoline is cheaper than water. I'm not sure if that's a statement about gas prices or a slam against the sort of fool who feels the need to buy their tapwater in PET bottles, but I digress. So people buy horsepower. People buy large vehicles based on truck platforms.

As CAFE forces vehicles to become more fuel efficient - without addressing the underlying consumer demand problem! - manufacturers are being forced to use smaller and smaller engines. This means adding turbochargers to cute little aluminum blocks, narrower cam lobes and variable displacement oil pumps and smaller oil control rings all to reduce the internal drag, and thinner oils which offer zero cushion on connecting rod bearings. All of this gets stuffed into a full-size pickup truck with a trailer hitch. They're intolerant of real-world conditions and use, and because of their complexity they're expensive to repair. These vehicles will not have a long lifespan - sure, you might get a good fleet average mileage, but if 50% of the vehicles don't make it to the 100,000 mile mark, they're getting replaced faster with all the environmental damage of producing and disposing of the vehicle.

Maximizing vehicle life is an important part of reducing the vehicle's overall environmental impact.

There's a great YouTube channel where the owner of a full-service used auto parts business takes apart modern engines and shows you what failed. No prior knowledge of engines is required to understand this. Some engines are spectacularly broken. And Eric talks about what will last, and what won't, with an entertaining sarcasm.

Recycling? The lead-acid primary battery gets removed, then the car gets crushed and shredded. Only the steel and the aluminum get recycled. Anyone who thinks that any other material in a car gets recycled in any quantity has never seen a car shredder in operation. ASR (Auto Shredder Residue) is a special waste stream now consisting mostly of mixed plastics, smashed safety glass, and the crap people leave in their cars when they junk them. All that plastic gets landfilled.

Because for the past 30 or so years, it has worked very well for MS to keep their main products barely useable, rely on lock-in and chase the next big thing so they can get their dirty hands on it early and lock more people into more products.

That is exactly wrong. Beta versions are there to find bugs. If nobody complained about them, they won't be found. So if you try beta versions, please DO complain about bugs.

I guess "vibe-something" is going to be the anti-word of 2026. People are slowly waking up to what it actually means to let the AI do the work.

I'm not dissing AI, I'm using it extensively myself and there's a few AI whitepapers with my name on them. But like any tool, it can be great when used correctly and ruin your day when not.

That doesn't mean what they do is automatically legal.

I'm pretty sure there's a demand for "murder my husband", or for "can someone please drown my neighbour". And yet it's illegal to offer such services.

Also: Voters. Smokers are still a fairly substantial fraction of the population, enough to swing a vote, especially if, and that appears to be the trend in most western democracies these days, there are two opposing political sides roughly evenly matched.

I mean, does it not strike anyone as a very weird coincidence that we have almost perfect 50/50 splits in so many countries?

No, but they do everything BUT force to make it the most attractive option. Just as one silly example: With wages and prices as they are, having both partners work full-time is basically required unless you're in the top few percent of earners or inherited wealth. So who's going to cook? After a long work day? Convenience food is the obvious choice. You are not being forced, but unless food is a high-priority item in your life, you are very much steered into that direction.

Because the owners just want to sell Monotype. The long term prospects of the company do not matter to them. They just want to make the current sales numbers look good to a prospective buyer. This is probably why nobody wants to buy Monotype.

In the USA car companies are bribing politicians to keep fuel economy standards low because they do not want to spend money on R&D. Meanwhile the Chinese car makers are designing dark factories that crank out electric cars that are better and less expensive than anything made in the USA. Ten years from now there are going to be Chinese factories in the USA cranking out amazing cars. And it is going to be a bloodbath for the companies that want to keep living in the past.

China already won this war. They have robot taxis that cost a fifth of Waymo's. Xiaomi has a dark factory that manufactures a smart phone every second. There are already Chinese humanoid robots turning up at trade shows. They're years ahead of us and they have more research universities training more roboticists than the USA ever will. This initiative will fail just like Obama's attempt to beat China at making solar power tech did. Trump needs to pick fights the USA can win.

Remember the days when you could have a gaming rig with a killer Intel CPU, the best Crucial RAM on the market, a great Canopus GPU, Windows 2000 was stable and secure, and you still had money for pizza and beer? Now Intel sucks, Crucial won't sell to gamers, a great GPU is week's wages, and Windows 11 is almost as bad as Windows 95. We have lost so much!

On the up side, nobody is commenting about the Penis Bird anymore.

A Chinese company, Great Wall Motors, recently showed off the first motorcycle ever designed with a straight eight engine. It also has a touchscreen UI and a retractable windshield. They're years ahead of the rest of the world.

Can you let Tim Cook know that?

I'm an Apple fan, but the money they charge for internal storage is ridiculous, especially given that I can buy an external SSD with 2 TB for like $150 if I shop around a bit.