All I'll say is, they're not calibrated anywhere near as accurately as you seem to believe; and that I'm not talking about after-market add-ons, I'm talking about the OEM markup on sub-$100 hardware.

If you're trusting the edge of that cliff to actually be right at the red line on your camera, you're going over anyway.

More to the point, it doesn't take a $6k computer with access to lock everything in your car behind a paywall just to get a video feed from the back of the car to somewhere on the dash. It takes a $20 camera and a $50 dumb display (and that would in most cases give a significantly higher quality image than the garbage auto manufacturers are using).

There is a reason not to have both - Because there's absolutely no reason volume needs to go anywhere beyond a pot inside the radio. The entire rest of the car doesn't need to know or be able to override the physical position of that pot.

The same is true for virtually all features that don't directly affect the operation of the engine itself (and even most of those!). Even when we're talking about something like power windows or HVAC, the buttons don't need to do anything more than physically bridge the dumb-as-shit DC power bus going to the corresponding motor.

We're building modern cars as a giant ball of points-of-failure glued together with software. Software that can fail, can lag, can ignore us when the manufacturer would prefer we listen to their ads. And that the real "cost" here - Nothing to do with $0.25 knobs and everything to do with locking core features behind a paywall.

Ad-sponsored is fine for "free" services like broadcast TV and mobile games. When I'm paying mid-five-digits to own something, BMW can fuck right off with this rent-seeking!

A million years ago I thought there was probably some synergy between my gmail account and getting better, personalized search results. That never was realized, but oh well. I can't even recall the last time I used google for anything. I use Kagi for search now but even then it's use is pretty minimal. Now that the need for search engines is being replaced.... why would I ever use a google product? What value does the brand "google" even bring to the table in 2026? Other than Kagi I haven't been actively trying to "degoogle" but the lack of interesting or useful products is really striking for such a large company. The last thing I want is yet another google app yeeting marketing telemetry back to the google mothership.

Sorry, 38% of people support them, or merely don't hate them passionately enough to commit several felonies destroying them on sight? I find it hard to believe anyone on the correct side of the thin blue line actually wants this garbage.

And that's not even touching on the blatant fourth amendment violation going on, which I don't expect Joe Average to even recognize much less care about. Who wants Uncle Sam or his proxies watching their every move?

Gallant forms a partnership with a preexisting top STEM university, buys them a few new tech toys, and sets up a scholarship to promote people going into field-X.

Goofus forms a partnership with the University of Phoenix, burns two billion on a giant faux-gold plaque of his name, then rants about wokeness when nobody sane enrolls.

Five points if you can spot the difference.

It's not often I say this, but China definitely has the right idea when it comes to executive liability for corporate misdeeds".

Everyone is misunderstanding the intent behind this. The key phrase in TFA is "unlicensed AI output".

Music charts don't measure popularity, they do their damnedest to create it. From the famous RIAA payola scandal (which very much still happens, it's just structured slightly differently to remain legal) to the latest breakout nepo-baby somehow charting in the top ten despite nobody ever having heard of them the day prior - The various recording industry groups exist to promote their members - who are not the actual artists - and couldn't care less about accuracy.

There's nothing human about "the machine" (now an oddly ironic description) fearing AI generated music because it very much is an existential threat to them. I'm neither a fanboy nor hater of AI, but it won't be long before it doesn't suck and these whores can no longer control the market.

Yes - "Thank you sir, may I have another?"

We live in a world where everyone on the planet, on every side of the issue, knows perfectly well 34-time felon and adjudicated sexual assailant Donald J. Trump is at the very least a pedo rapist, a corrupt and incompetent businessman who managed to bankrupt the licenses-to-print-money that are casinos, and was quite possibly Epstein's boss rather than merely a prolific client of the largest human sex trafficking operation known to modern history. And yet somehow, his base is willing to draw a line in the sand over some mythical official release of the Epstein files. The same Epstein files that would 1) completely exonerate him if his story is true, and 2) have already been sufficiently released and/or leaked prior to redactiongate to eliminate any reasonable presumption of innocence.

This is a relatively minor retaliation case. Unless Kegsbreath needs a distraction from his next drunken compromise of opsec, this ruling will be publicly acknowledged with some whining, then privately ignored anywhere it matters. It's a hefty uphill battle to ever "prove" Anthropic doesn't get a particular contract in violation of Lin's ruling.

You realize Netanyahu is Jewish, right?

I can't speak for the GP, but in my case it was a sort of "constructive dismissal" that finally pushed me away from all things FB-related.

I used to enjoy outing scammers on IG. I was even so naive as to think I was in some small way doing the platform a service by sticking a red flag on its bad actors. Whoops, guess what, folks? Scammers drive engagement and that's all these platforms care about. So I started getting progressively longer mutings after every post or comment I'd make, regardless of how tame - It got to the point where I finally rage-quit after getting a three-day ban immediately (as in, the notification arrived exactly as I hit post, so there's not even a chance I was reported that fast) for commenting something like "nice sunset, wish I was there!" to a close friend.

I have to admit it's somewhat changing how I write - Not because I use AI to help me write, but rather, my own writing style pretty much meets most of the criteria listed. Case in point, there's a negative parallelism right there and I wasn't even trying for an example. It's an extremely effective rhetorical device, and AI be damned for trying to steal it from us!

Low-frequency word choices, hyphens/dashes/em-dashes (I use hyphens rather than em-dashes, but most people have no idea what the difference is), and Oxford commas? Check. And okay, that last one was intentional.

Accordingly, I now consciously try to sound at least a bit less like AI when writing, mostly through the use of more metaphor and sensory references that have no meaning to an AI.

There is no country on Earth where you're required to own works you cite from. It may be all but impossible to access some content without paying, but once you've seen it - including unlawfully* - you can reference it to your heart's content and there's not a damned thing the author or publisher can do about it.

Google is clearly trying to firewall off their own issues with mass copyright infringement during AI training by passing the buck to the end user. Not happenin', guys! If this rent-seeking scheme actually works in any form, it will just make Gemini everyone's absolute last choice for literature review.

* Yes, there are of course exceptions like classified material and trade secrets, but that's not what Google is talking about here.

Jobs was a completely non-technical stuffed shirt. The only things he brought to the table were his narcissistic self confidence and a sleazy ability to sell other people's work.

And make no mistake, those are valuable skills, if your goal is to get rich rather than to build the best toys. Even under the most charitable possible interpretations, however, it's still a fundamentally parasitic relationship. The "doers" tend to suck at selling ourselves, while the weasels are good at rooting through our scraps and claiming whatever shiny garbage they find as their own.

Serious question - How does the Online Streaming Act work in practice for content on demand? When a Canadian tries to binge the latest season of Stranger Things, is NetFlix required to say "nope, go watch this Celine Dion concert first to get our CanCon ratio up"?

I get how it could apply to randomized content like streaming radio, but the very concept seems incompatible with "choice".