Yes it makes use of the thumbwheels, but that's missing the point. You have to go to the touch screen first before being able to do ANY of that. Sure, it's fine once you're in that mode for the scrollwheels, but getting there is completely obnoxious when you're also trying to drive.

Go to the screen...menu -> controls -> mirror icon. Adjust one. Fumble with screen to select the other mirror, adjust.

On my Mazda3 and every other car I've owned it's a selector switch and a joystick on the door. Very intuitive and within easy reach without ever looking at it. They've been that way since the 80s when power mirrors came to the masses. My '85 Celica had the same setup.

AC? If it's not in the little controls in the bottom corner you have to flip-up the larger control screen, and do weird pinchy things with your fingers to adjust the vents, looking at the screen while driving. Fumble for the fan speed at the bottom of the screen. Try to slide around to adjust the temperature at the bottom of the screen.

Compare to conventional car with knobs where you can take one glance at where your hand is going and do it by feel.

There are reasons why certain things are the way they are. It's because a company spent a LOT of time doing ergonomic studies and trials. I hate it when people throw out all that work in lieu of something else just because it's different, without a lot of thought and study first. It's putting the cart before the horse.

"OK, what would you do if you couldn't have any buttons, how could you make it suck less?" I feel they're working backwards from 'terrible' to 'only mostly terrible'. Not much of an improvement.

She wanted it, and she actually likes it. I found it ridiculous when I drove it, but she likes all the creature comforts. More power to her, I just avoid it. I think I'm a more of a driver-centric experience sort of person. She likes all the bling and frilly features and does not drive as much as I do.

That is not what they found. What they found is that if you spend 60 minutes doing the homework with AI, you learn approximately as much as someone who spends 60 minutes doing it without AI. If you spend 20 minutes doing it with AI, you learn as much as someone who spends 20 minutes doing it without AI. Etc. The only real difference is that the AI people get way better homework scores, and as a result, tend to stop spending as much time, and thus tend to learn less.

That's what this preprint study found.

100% this. Even a short 5-minute quiz with just a couple questions at the start of each day will do the trick. But you simply can't rely on homework scores to be a proxy of learning or time spent studying anymore. Brief daily quizzes on the previous day's material will force them to.

Also, It's not like students have the excuse of, "I couldn't study, I didn't have anyone to explain X to me" anymore. The very AI that they might otherwise use to cheat on their homework can also explain to them the things they missed in last year's algebra class that are blocking them from learning this year's calculus, or whatnot. Congrats - you now have an infinitely patient personal tutor who will spend hours dumbing things down for you until you get it. Now you have no excuse - learn the material. It becomes all about actually putting the time in.

Yeah. There's been widespread misrepresentation of this (preprint!) in the media. What they actually found: test scores correspond to how much time you spend doing homework, regardless of whether you use AI or not. Which should not be a surprising result! Of course, the AI people, esp. those who had been using AI for more than a few months, stopped spending much time on their homework, and then their test scores fell to match the non-AI users who didn't spend much time in their homework either.

The TL/DR is, in today's age, you cannot use test scores as a proxy of how much time a user is studying or knows the material.

There are of course some caveats, beyond the fact that it's just a preprint - notably that there's nothing to separate why the user started using AI to do their homework, so there's potential confounders in there. For example, if a student is in a poor family, maybe they had to get a job to help pay the bills. But working a job itself can lower test scores - for example, having to work late the night before an exam. So there are some confounder problems with the study. That said, I'm sure the general conclusion is correct: time spent doing the thing = amount of learning the thing (relatively independent of what tools you're using in the process).

There was nothing automatic about Google's trustworthiness. It simply counted up links that lead back to a particular page. If it had more links it was (supposedly) a better page. Almost immediately webmasters around the world started gaming the system. Google still restricts some of the things my account can do for hidden links that were added to some ads on websites that I ran in like 2001. GoDaddy and all of the other big web hosting companies of that era all rose to prominence on the strength of gaming the PageRank system.

I am sure that other industries tell the same story.

PageRank might seem trustworthy to you, but that's only because you weren't trying to game the system back in the day. I can assure you that, right from the start, people were abusing PageRank in precisely the same way that upsets you now. The only difference was that registering a domain back then cost $70 for two years, and you probably created the links you used to game the system by writing Perl. That raised the barrier to entry significantly. However, there was still real money to be made in that arena, and whether the winners paid Google directly, or paid for back links to their content (or both), I can guarantee you that the road to your trust was paved in money.

In the end Google has decided that the most reliable way to have publishers show that their information is trustworthy is to force them to pay for the privilege. Coincidentally that also happens to be the method that makes Google the most money. For years an entire SEO industry has thrived around the idea that if you pay someone enough money they can trick Google to steal your information instead of your competitors. Now we are finally at the endgame and Google doesn't even send traffic. They simply summarize the information for their customers. Chances are excellent that you don't even leave the google.com domain.

Google's competitors are simply doing the same thing at a different domain. All of them make their money by charging publishers to show up prominently in search ranks. Whether you are rooting for Oceania, Eurasia, or Eastasia it's Big Brother all of the way down.

Everything in this space lately has been a huge turnoff. Modern cars were never so physically capable, safe, and smooth handling, and yet they are absolute garbage in the human interface department. Giant touchscreens and gadgets are the equivalent of chrome and giant tailfins gone amok in the 1950s.

Quite happy with my 2016-era Mazda with a basic infotainment setup, bluetooth to my phone which has everything I need. My truck that I use to haul things occasionally is 26 years old. I have a bluetooth to cassette adapter in that one (a lawful-evil wedding of technology) and yet it works fine.

The wife has a Tesla, and while it has an amazing powertrain, it is just so aggravating to interface with in so many ways. No buttons for the mirrors. No buttons for the wiper. (there's one button on the end of a stalk to activate the wiper+spray automatic thing) If you leave the auto-wiper on it randomly activates and smears the windshield in the driest of weather. The door handles are terrible. The lack of any kind of physical controls for climate and entertainment is terrible. It is super distracting to try to do anything while driving. It calls home to mother and reports on everything you're doing. The auto dimming mirror, like all auto-dimming mirrors, doesn't dim enough nor when you want it to. The adaptive cruise control constantly slams on the brakes on highways with grade level intersections or if you're coming up on a hump on a road that hasn't been graded flat. The insurance is sky high. The tires wear out quickly due to the weight, and are very expensive. Anything saved in gas is made up for in those other things.

You can see where they had all these ideas and just didn't think them through. Whereas traditional auto manufacturers understand a lot of these things and even on their electric offerings still have plenty of physical buttons and not-ridiculous interface peculiarities. I got a ride in a friend's Hyundai Ioniq5 a little ago and it was great. Felt like a regular car with lots of buttons. But they are priced as such that any savings in gas is made up for in the overall cost of ownership of the car. So you're not doing it for that, you're doing it just to have the other features of an electric car or feel better about yourself. I don't feel it's worth it for that. My cars are paid for and the daily driver is absurdly cheap to fuel and maintain, so I'll stick with it until some sanity returns to the modern car market. (unlikely...)

I feel like I'm in a constant race to flee enshittification : Used to use Cursor (it's still my only option at work), but then Musk bought it, and they instantly went in on hard-sell tactics. Switched to vscode + copilot + OpenRouter, but was getting concerned about API costs. Just yesterday I set up a Tencent TokenHub account with their Max package, which required that I switch off copilot if I wanted to be able to use some models like Kimi K3 (had a temperature=1.0 requirement, copilot doesn't let you set temperatures and hardcodes them to very low), so now it's vscode + Pi + TokenHub.

Sigh. Please don't make me move again...

(Not that Tencent is in any way "the good guys"... but they're also providing a very generic product)

Ah, the good 'ol "No True Communism" argument :)

"It suggests" if you ignore that their confounder control is terrible. First, sugar wasn't the only restricted food in post-war Britain - there was also rationing of eggs, butter, cheese and meats that ended during the same timeperiod. So you're not actually testing the effects of sugar consumption, now are you? Also, the early 1950s was a period of rapid change in the US, including the maturation and expansion of the NHS (founded in 1948), the introduction of new childhood vaccines, major environmental shifts (for example, the Great Smog of London in 1952 vs. the 1956 Clean Air Act). Saying "all changes = sugar" just based on birthdate seems absurd.

It's also worth mentioning that there's also survivorship bias - anyone who died before the study couldn't be enrolled, and there's also no actual linking to any maternal / childhood dietary logs. Also, the ratios of cancer differences they're describing aren't small, they're massive. Are we to attribute a lung cancer difference on the order of smoking vs. nonsmoking households as being to sugar, or due to, you know, smoking (or pollution) trends not accounted for in their cohort?

No, the worst part about ads is that they exist at all in a form that intentionally disrupts your attention.

That fundamental issue is then exacerbated by the current societal tolerance for lies, and you get intrusive advertisements that are deeply misleading.

So, why are you tolerating current advertising at all when there are tools that effectively eliminate it?

The assumption is that using your phone / infotainment system to search for, possibly purchase, and play a new release is an attention-demanding task that takes substantial time. The consensus above is that Spotify's UI, in particular, is poor, and thus requires extra interaction, and thus attention off the road, exacerbating the problem. We know that attending to a phone, even briefly, is mutually exclusive to attending to the road. That alone is an explanatory mechanism for the increase in fatalities.

But then we augment that supposition by the additional effects that new music is also a distraction, albeit much lower grade than operating a phone. It might be a lesser effect, but listening to a song or three is also expected to span longer time than interacting with a phone, so might have substantial cumulative impact.

An additional effect that I have not seen mentioned above is the expectation that the demographic listening to top releases is likely to skew younger, and thus contains drivers with less experience than the population. Less experienced drivers are at far greater risk of accidents of any sort, and are more sensitive to distraction.

And, as a parent of teenagers, the solution is clear to me: do not frelling use your phone when driving, period.

Way to out yourself as being American by being simultaneously loudly, assertively ignorant and racist at the same time.

** - Collective guilt is a fallacy; modern Germany is a highly democratic constitutional state with a commendable record on teaching against extremism; Marx and Engel drew heavily from French utopian socialists (e.g., Saint-Simon, Fourier), while it was the Russians who actually implemented communism; World War I began with the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Bosnian Serb nationalist, triggering a chain reaction of ultimatums and alliances involving Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Russia, France, Germany, and Great Britain, with any individual state bearing guilt for the war being a notion firmly rejected by modern historians; Hitler was born in Austria-Hungary and was an Austrian citizen until he renounced it in 1925, not gaining German citizenship until 1932; the East German government and the Stasi was forced on the people of Germany by the USSR, and it was not a global phenomenon "brought to the world", but rather dissolved with the GDR in 1990. TL/DR: Go fuck yourself.

I never sold any power to the grid. I just offset some grid usage with my own power.

the Facewatch system has a 99.98% accuracy rate,

So one in every five thousand people who walk into your stores is going to be falsely accused of a crime? Wow, thanks for making abundantly clear that people should NOT shop there...