Cars last longer because of engineering competition to drive quality in vehicle design and assembly.

The ODB2 standard congealed a lot of emissions hassle, and ultimately forced prolonging service life in many product lines.

Although many shade tree mechanics of an older era are gone, there are many new ones that mod their cars, or simply repair them without the need of expensive dealer service costs; this is also part of the Right To Repair movement, where secret sauces hidden in the CANBUS. connected, multi-system firmware present in most cars.

Hackers have figured out what's what for many models.

And while convenience features are nice, any engineer will tell you that more features means more things that can go wrong. Owning some vehicles is like death-by-a-thousand-cuts as desired features slowly decay. Common parts become rarer and rarer.

The no-button approach also means a single point of failure-- the all-important console.Features become combines, all in a race to the bottom.

Increasing compliance costs and the need for profitability push car makers to make unwise choices. Button-based vehicles required ten seconds of familiarity to drive safely. Console-based devices require far more, and also cause visual distractions instead of intuitive look-and-feel controls.

It's just not as simple as you describe. Worse, international-market focused vehicle makers, especially the Europeans, make a center console because they must adapt to a left of right side steering basis-- it's cheaper just to build holes in the chassis and move the steering column left or right, thus not having two different dashboards and assemblies.

Consumers will choose among the offerings that suit them. The auto industry used to use specs to drive vehicle sales. Now, the motives and marketing are lifestyle-appeals.

And... so.... why the need for extra memory, rumored GPU support, and etc.?

Um, no, the whole model isn't on the phone. I didn't suggest that. Instead, each app will grow into blimp-sized monstrosities, load phones down with MCP traffic, and drag phone performance to a crawl, all while increasing net traffic meteorically.

Prove me wrong.

Even if Windows was open sourced tomorrow, stem to stern, who would even want it? It's full of immensely cobbled code, patched 200x, and still barely works.

You can't see the code today. Open source at least give you that. You can only poke an amorphous code base, or alternately, pray.

Prayer never helped me much.

Visible code did.

It's for this reason that most models should be treated as a malware worm vendor looking for a spot marked X, where X is your turf.

No one wants this. AI on your phone is one of the worst ideas I can imagine. You have a 4K screen-- and now you're trying to do pixel edits on animation?

You want to find your way through Manhattan traffic at 4pm on a Friday in your Jeep? Imagine wickedly insane requests, seemingly unlimited by token costs, barraging your phone. Remember metered minutes and texts?

These models aren't compact. 5G traffic, which is sort of tenable in most areas now, is going to MCP'ing fifty requests a minute to answer simple questions. Have fun, folks, when your call gets interrupted because of model flow request on TOP of concurrent streams from fifty of your friends nearby. Even 6G doesn't cure THAT.

Or they'll sell the "anonymized data", including calculated bra sizes.

This is a pretty invasive move on Comcast's part. Only the lawyers will win this one.

There are no barriers to how humans get "replaced" by AI. Are we here to benefit humanity or benefit tech bro stock prices?

The whole marketing campaign behind AI was targeted at CEOs to cut their labor costs. This makes them salivate like Pavlov's dogs.

Did the marketing appeal in a "work smarter, not harder" way? No. It was aimed at laying off huge swaths of workers. Not just worker bees, but the creatives in coding, systems management, development, but also other worker bees.

Not everyone needs creativity in their work, although it helps.

People now pump their own fuel in most states. You now walk up to a checkout and scan your own stuff. You order at a screen at McDonalds. Heaven forbid walking into a Starbucks and buying a coffee at the counter.

All of these are small cuts, and ultimately, fealty to the stock price on any given day. Job creation through AI isn't quite the goal. Lowered cost-of-goods is the goal, and the goal of capitalism in general. Do the profits filter down to worker bees? Unlikely.

Take Internet search as an example. AI engines seek to trap the thousand results and deliver you a neat package of "an answer" even if it's wrong. Any stupid AI engine can deliver believable results, subverting the thousand others that have the same answers-- perhaps authoritative, even trustable result.

Yep. Trust is built.

1. Rapidly iterative and successive models, all of them looking like dot-zero problem children do not imbue trust.

2. Rapid inter-cross dealing tech companies, all fighting with each other for dominance using the dot-zero madness does not imbue trust.

3. Models that fight each other, jump barriers and hack into companies at will, does not engender trust.

4. Digesting rivers, streams, farmland, for data centers whose parts can't even be purchased, does not build trust.

5. Creating turf wars between the models of different countries does not earn trust.

6. Creating incredible parts shortages and pumping component profits does not become trustworthy for supply chain users.

7. Bozos like Sam Altman and his merry-go-round of allies makes many people very queasy.

8. Jamming Co-Pilot down the throats of users, changing ToS to fit more mad infiltration goals to the desktop does not make people want to trust Microsoft, specifically.

9. Inability to show that AI helps, rather than lays off workers does not build trust.

The man is a fool, and so are those that become hypnotized by early success, ignoring pretty frightening failures in AI and the chains of monopoly grabs that are going with it, not to mention data center densities that are clearly unsupportable, financed by pump-and-dump Wall Street fans.

Humanity? Did you say humanity? War, even tech turf wars, leave many suffering humans in their wake. That didn't used to be true; computers were enablers, not *disablers*.

The Internet was built on gamers, pR0n, and dubious fun.

In its foundling days, these were university colleagues and DARPA. Social media were weird things, now long gone through Darwinian evolution. It's become highly monetized, and not really within the control of end-users.

Worse the dearth of public policy makes it the Wild Wild West on a scale out that only Wall Street might've imagined (and monetized).

So what if there are dick pics? Others might get useful work done and not be dependent on the micro-costs that make users the product. It's refreshing. Yes, it takes discipline. You have to hold your nose.

But you're holding your nose, rather than drowning in X, FB, Insta, ad nauseum. Give it a chance.

And those solutions don't work.

You can do all the DNS snooping with your MTA agent, and spam removal doesn't work.

You can search for plentiful buzzwords and twit-filter trends, and you'll still miss a huge swath of goo.

This "they" you speak of thrives on user rage disguised as "engagement". They monetize it, and instead of actually spending money on things like abuse@ account monitoring, or IP filtering, they let it all slide, leading to the cesspool we have today, uniformly.

This is marked to 0, but it's true.

What were once price/earnings ratios, and other useful metrics have been:

- Pumped to insane P/E
- Sold to data centers no one's built and many vehemently dislike with
- Unstable public funding support in some data center site acquisitions + poured in capital for
- AI that routinely breaks all barriers to hack into other systems while
- Racing against other models to do still worse based on
- BS and uncurated input data
- For absolutely unproven general use modeling by an unsuspecting business herd desiring to save COGS because
- Lowering labor costs is a religion to them because
- They must feed shareholders while the infrastructure vendor, NVIDIA, sells future annuities based on future deliveries for future products that they have circularly sold like great zeppelins of yore.

This historic scam of inflated value falls to the ground when only one part of this dastardly plan is punctured. You thought the crash of '29 was big? Look at the numbers right now. This is a fool's game from one end to the other.

Only the money men will make any loot, and a lot of empty buildings and food bank lines are going to follow. You can't grow corn in a data center; the concrete floors are too tough for even John Deere.

If you try to map this to evolution of brains, consider the biggest problem.

Where garbage in == garbage out, much more garbage in == much more garbage out. Size of a model doesn't inherently make it more useful, just as a huge volume of brain mass doesn't make you hyper-intelligent.

This isn't even able to be mapped to Nyquist thinking, or von Neumann. Bigger isn't better; better is better.

The bird rubric is also a red herring.

This about protecting the all-important petrochemical industry, just as removal of EV emphasis and the 100% Chinese EV tax and ban protects Texas votes.

Those votes tip the balance of power in DC fundamentally and directly.

German auto makers are at at critical time; sales are down, competition is up, reliability seems worse in comparison to their competition.

BMW subscriptions are one way to make cheap (low COGS revenue). This hurts every German automaker. The impression is that such madness will find its way into the Porsche-Audi-VW chain, and makes every new German car suspect.

With the entry cost now almost out of reach, once the German auto industry starts to collapse, banks (financing both vendor and consumer) also becomes questionable, the labor strife higher, and one of the great components of the success of the EU, weaker.

BMW is unlikely to listen. They're scared and with good reason. But these "innovations" will hurt them, a perfect storm of financial disaster blooming.