Even the summary mentions that this is different to the "shark skin" effect. People have no attention span these days.

Fast, effective, included the nView Desktop Manager to include transparency and window-shade mode to any window, and it was under 100MB installed.

Why nvidia drivers are now larger than Windows XP itself is a mystery to me, and they've always been a concession that has gotten bigger, slower, and more confusing than what they replaced.

Boeing has a mechanical linkage between the pilot's and first officer's controls. It's designed so that you can break it in an emergency by forcing the controls. The audible "dual inputs" warning is an Airbus thing where they use sidesticks with no mechanical linkage.

You think 1,393 miles is impressive? I did 7,950 kilometres last year - half marathon distance every day. Almost made 8,000, but not quite. I'm taking it a bit easier this year, though.

I was hoping to find out whether this is a viable business model for new startups, but they only ruled that it took too long for Musk to bring the lawsuit.

1. The vehicle is only at the preorder stage; they're not shipping any as best as I can ascertain. Pricing isn't listed, either.

2. The vehicle is only available as an SUV/Pickup. While the modular design has merit, there is no sedan available.

3. The website makes no claims regarding privacy, except in its privacy policy regarding the website. The closest indicator is the absence of an infotainment system, but that doesn't mean that it lacks a telemetry module; there is no specific indication that it lacks one.

4. If it's not shipping yet, it will likely still be subject to forthcoming laws regarding kill switches; they have made no claims to the contrary. ...So, while I would LOVE for Slate to be the starting point, and I'd even switch to an SUV form factor to get it AND pay double the cost of a Camry for it...I don't think it's really reasonable to have a "put your money where your mouth is" stance when the vehicle is not available for purchase, is only available in one form factor, and where the company makes no claim to lack a telemetry module. I'm open to a solution, but a Slate gives me zero confidence that it is, in fact, that solution.

That can be rectified.

Even on a stock Google Android phone, one can at least SOMEWHAT mitigate data collection by not-installing certain apps. To my knowledge, Meta doesn't get data if you don't install FB/IG/WA. Also, one could leave their phone at home and drive somewhere if tracking was undesirable; while by definition, one cannot avoid that if the car itself is doing the tracking. Even if tracking is unavoidable on the phone, 'airplane mode' can assist in certain contexts.

Also, crazy as this is, there are still 'dumb phones' that exist, which may still involve selling location data or call logs by the carrier, but don't have the sensors or software to do the level of tracking that stock smartphones do. Some people do opt to get those instead.

The fact that they're in vehicles, without buyers being meaningfully informed, where even customers who do opt out of data collection still get their data collected, and don't have an 'airplane mode' available to them...nor a simple "remove this fuse" stipulated in the manual to negate the telemetry parts at a hardware level, nor a manufacturer that specifically sells a 'no telemetry' model (one CAN get a Fairphone with LineageOS out of the box; I haven't found a 2025-model car sold in the US that is analogous). While mass transit in the EU might be the extreme-but-possible solution, that's simply not the case in the US outside of some metro areas, so car ownership is a necessity, even more than a smartphone is.

Smartphone tracking is bad, but there are solutions, even if they are hard. Vehicle tracking is worse, because it's way more expensive to get that wrong than getting a Graphene install wrong.

Wavetable synths gave you a different set of trade-offs due to limited sample memory. You ended up with low effective sample rate at low pitches. If you compare Super Famicom and Mega Drive soundtracks, you can see the composers tailored them to the systems' strengths. For example, Mega Drive games could do a more convincing rendition of saxophones and brass. The Roland Sound Canvas was what most PC games with MIDI soundtracks were developed against. It was the first proper General MIDI synth module, and did a pretty decent job. Everything else was a fallback mode. The next big step forward was Yamaha's AWM.

I think this may be because in the 60s there was far less violent crime, so the only murders out there were domestics which are trivial to solve. It would interesting to test the idea.

This isn't true. After peaking in the '90s, violent crime is basically back down to '60s levels now. The generally accepted hypothesis is that the rise in violent crime was mostly due to burning fuel containing tetraethyl lead, and the subsequent drop is mostly due to reducing exposure to lead (and other heavy metals).

"AI" proponents keep touting language translation as something LLMs do well, yet they're absolutely dreadful at it for pairs of languages I'm familiar with. "AI" translation cannot get pronouns right when translating to/from languages where pronouns depend on the relationship between the speaker and listener (e.g. Korean and Viet). Admittedly it can be ambiguous if you only have a single sentence, but "AI" doesn't get better with more context. Give it enough material that it's unambiguous to any human, and the "AI" won't even be consistent between sentences in a paragraph. For another example, it can't deal with implicit topic when translating from Japanese. Someone recently posted an "AI" translation of a Japanese video game that never had an English release, and this was really obvious right from the intro. There's a guy telling you what you need to do, but the "AI" translated it as him saying what he needs to do. Once again, it's basic stuff that no human would screw up. You're trying to claim it works at "a super-human level" when out here in the real world, it screws up stuff that any kid who's been to a few language classes can get right. It makes the rest of your enthusiasm for "AI" seem completely misplaced.

the US is not trying to make the rest of the world dependent on US manufacturing by undercutting everyone and putting them out of business

That's exactly what the Bretton-Woods agreement was supposed to do - make US exports artificially cheap to try and put everyone else out of business.

...except for the 2015 version, every other version of Unreal Tournament can be spun up and made to work perfectly?

Same.

Also same...but something tells me that if Bitwarden were to do that, there would be a Vaultwarden fork the next day.

Even if there wasn't, browser-only access is annoying but serviceable, and it exports well enough to move to something else.

Tell me you haven't bought a Windows PC in a while without telling me.

They ALL encrypt the drives by default or any user intervention. For home users, I *disable* it as part of the initial out-of-box setup, because Bitlocker is enabled by default and the key is uploaded to the Microsoft Account users are forced to use/create when doing the initial machine setup.

Now, the REAL fun is that Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decided that BIOS firmware updates are worth sending to users via Windows Update. Well, when those BIOS updates happen, they can sometimes trip the TPM in a way that requires the BitLocker key to be input in order to unlock the system. While MS will display the key's ID, it doesn't show the MS account it's tied to, so if a user forgot which e-mail address they happened to give during setup, or no longer have access to that account, the user loses access to their data because of a BIOS update that was probably either optional, or legitimately fixed a security vulnerability that required the laptop to be physically accessed in order to perform. 9 out of 10 laptop owners would absolutely prefer "a thief could potentially access my data if my laptop is stolen" over "i could lose my data if MS and HP decide to send an update"...keeping in mind users cannot opt out of updates, even to the extent of "update Windows, don't touch my BIOS".

So yeah, the story is legit; I have personally had to give people the bad news on this topic on more than one occasion, Pepperidge Farm remembers when BitLocker was a function Microsoft only included with Windows 7 Ultimate, but now it's enabled by default for home users with no meaningful awareness or consent given to do it.

Apparently, it's not ransomware when Microsoft does it.

Same...but the parents love it because they're cheap and easy to replace without data migration drama, and schools love 'em because of Google Classroom and Workspace functionality that Google gives to schools for peanuts while being checkbox compliant for bad-stuff-on-the-internet policies.

I'm grateful that I grew up learning to own my data...but I can appreciate that Google really made it seamless to not-worry about it.