You are right. A screen that does not replace physical controls is a nice thing.

And I agree. Any vehicle that doesn't have a proper dashboard in front of me, where I need to look to the side to see important information, is a no-buy for me.

yes, it's a short list. But it's a start and a kind of "red line". I am hopeful they move that line to include other things that people use while driving all the time.

Are big screens nice? Sure, yes.

But if I have a choice between good physical controls and a big touch screen, I'll take the buttons and switches any day, thank you.

My 10 year old BMW has voice commands and a map that's always been more than enough for me. Sure, it's not as large, but while driving I don't want a big map - I want an indicator that tells me "next turn left in 500m" - and I have that, not on the main display but right in front of me on the dashboard. Newer models have it on a HUD.

Nothing in what you wrote makes a LARGE screen necessary.

They don't have to be better. They just have to be competing for the same ad money and users.

I had to add minimum paragraph and sentence counts to the prompts it uses to keep it from trying to write a few terse sentences each time.

I noticed this in Claude (from DDG). It invariably tries to shorten sentences or make them more compact and concise. Sometimes that can be good, but most times long-winded sentences are what are needed.

and there is no way I can find to make it stop popping up giant intrusive ads for their other services every single time I open it.

Just like Firefox. There is no easy way to turn off being harassed by an intrusive pop-up telling me about a new update.

There used to be. It was a simple checkbox. But somewhere along the way someone had to justify their existence and removed that simple checkbox in favor of harassment.

It's time YouTube gets some actual competition. Maybe it'll force them to revert some of the enshittification it's been going through. The crap is near unusable these days.

I don't know a single person who ever said that they want more or bigger touchscreens in their car.

Quite the opposite. I want physical controls and so do most people I've talked to. This is a car, not an iPad. Most of it I should be able to operate without taking my eyes off the road. And a touchscreen doesn't offer that.

In fact, Euro NCAP agrees. If you want a 5-star rating, you need physical controls.

The only people who want touchscreens are the car manufacturers, because it's cheaper and easier.

Would like to add one tidbit because I've had this same conversation at work. The professor stated they used AI to help edit only after hundred of hours of writing. In other words, they did the heavy lifting and only used AI at the end to help refine what they had already done.

Is this any different than a human editor? If I write a book, do what I can to edit it down, then go to an editor who makes suggests, removes or reorders parts, and so on, is that any different than having AI do the same thing? In both cases you wrote the words. In both cases you went somewhere else to help edit.

If people claim that using AI to edit a work is "cheating" because it's no longer your work, then the same should apply to a human editor.

Dude, Robert, drink some raw milk, relax, and go back to filming the Real Food Show. Everything will be fine, friend. And if it's not, why not try to eat some roadkill bear? It'll undoubtedly make you feel better.

"Can we get it in cornflower blue?"

Don't mock it. Cornflower blue can be valuable.

That's a good point. Yes, it could be Anthropic simply making sure that they can't be blamed if someone doesn't disclose AI usage. Now they can say: "We did everything we could to make sure AI usage is visible".

Though I doubt it'll hold up in court unless the watermark is obvious. Because, again, the law requires disclosure. I don't think a hard-to-detect watermark would satisfy that demand.

I like your perspective overall, but you're fundamentally wrong about the use of a driver's license during a traffic stop -- it's used to identify you, so they can also run you for warrants. It's not just about whether or not you're currently licensed to drive.