Ideally, pay cold hard cash to opt in.

Second choice would be to provide some real add-on value to opt in.

What's really going to happen if opt-out becomes too toxic for twitch: They will go opt-in but enshittify the product for those who don't opt-in, touting a "better" (meaning maybe as good as August 2026) experience for those who opt in.

Sort of like the "opt in" toll roads in places where the free roads went from being decent to dangerous due to "lack of funding" to pay for maintenance.

The parallels between this and letters of marque are scary.

I'm reasonably confident there were other, previous known-at-the-time deaths from trebuchets but the records of their deaths or the reasons for the deaths have been lost.

https://www.youtube.com/supported_browsers?next_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DCrbp8Y_yCIs

is not what you want

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Crbp8Y_yCIs

may be what you want.

You can bet that both black and white hats are poking around any popular tool that allows collaboration.

Teams, Discord, and others likely have high-impact bugs yet to be found.

If it has a high false-error rate the city may miss out on revenue and someone with a warrant may not be arrested, but any false-positive is an injustice to the person pulled over.

I'm willing to be the one-in-10,000 false-positive from a license-plate misread but not the one-in-100 (1% false positive) or 1-in-4 (25% false positive).

On the other hand I can tolerate my city missing out on ticket revenue or a missed warrant-arrest because only half of its license plates can be confirmed as "almost certainly correctly read."

Because you have the actively user-hostile version, as discussed. It is extremely sad that such tech is user-hostile, and it is equally sad that there aren't enough regulations in place to mandate that such options are opt-in-with-informed-consent, or able to be disabled in a way that retains as much functionality as possible while still respecting an opt-out, but since there is not, the options are either:

1. accept your system in the state in which it currently exists, complete with the ads or potential for them, or

2. disconnect and claw back as much functionality as you can.

You've accepted the first, and it's 100% your right to do so. However, since the situation we currently live in does not allow for both.

If all characters had the same failure rates, that would be a plate-failure rate of about 25% per plate. Yes, I know it's not the same for each character, so the per-plate accuracy may be higher.

Until computer-only recognition is about as good as either human-only or human+computer-only recognition, you need a human in the loop.

This is the insidious two-step.

Flock probably didn't *accuse* anyone. They probably "indicated to law enforcement that further investigation is recommended". Flock gets out of it because it was "simply a recommendation", the PD gets out of it because they were "following standard protocol".

If there were really justice in this world, they would both be facing a $100M lawsuit (paid from the pension fund in the case of the PD), unless they agreed who would accept responsibility as a matter of formal record, in which case, the responsible party pays $100M and the 'whoopsie' side got only $1M...and then let the relationship strain as a result. ...but this is why the two-step exists - it protects both.

You fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of my proposal. The purpose of my proposal is for AI agents to tell web sites "you are gaming the system, we are going to do whatever it takes, no matter how inefficient, to make sure you don't."

A correctly written, correctly-implemented "human filter" would render this invisible to the AI.

It's principle, not principal. AIs are not my pals.

Have the chatbot remote-control a regular web browser, do human-like scrolling taking enough screen shots to capture the primary content, then run the screen through optical-character recognition using a "human filter" so it will only "see" things that a human with normal vision would see.

In practice this is much easier said than done. But if web site hosts insist on gaming the system, this is one way to counter it.

Yes, do it. This is Slashdot, so I can meaningfully recommend what I did: buy a used Android phone like a Pixel 6a or something like that if you don't have one lying around. Then, load it up with iodeOS...there's an app stack that'll replace almost everything you requested.

CoMaps and Sygic GPS both provide these, the latter being $18/year and working completely offline.

Spotify still works; I also use either AntennaPod for podcasts or PowerAmp ($7 once) to play the music I loaded onto it.

...yeah, disconnecting the car makes this one impossible, no getting around it.

OwnTracks, possibly combined with Reitti on the server side if you're feeling a bit extra.

well, Sygic and Comaps both show distance to destination, and the last five cars I've owned have showed me miles-to-empty on the ICE side; I'd imagine the EV side will do the same, and from there it's just a subtraction problem. Sygic does have an EV mode; I don't know how that behaves, but it probably narrows the gap a bit.

Agreed...and that's why the systems are desirable to buyers...but since it's clear that these systems can and will be actively used to make money for the OEM, there's a trade to be made. The aforementioned setup isn't a drop-in replacement, but it checks off many of the things on your list.

That said my car has never shown ads, fuck BMW and I highly recommend no one ever buy their cars.

Yet. BMW has been the most aggressive at post-purchase monetization, but the others will follow.

Well, the thing is that having a frictionless ordering process that allows more sales-per-hour is good if the goal is to sell coffee, but the point of a Starbucks, originally, was to be a 'third place' that wasn't the home or the office, so paying $4 for a cup of coffee or $8 for a thousand-calorie caffeinated milkshake was entirely justifiable when the value proposition was "paying for a place to sit down with a cup of coffee for an hour". Shifting to a coffee pickup location means that the value proposition shifts, and paying half as much for a cup of coffee twice the size at 7-Eleven while I'm getting gas tends to win out on both cost and convenience - dissuading customers from sitting down and hanging out gives fewer reasons for people to *go to Starbucks*.

Likely, but for different reasons. I left T-Mobile about two years ago, after being a customer for over 20 years. They weren't less expensive than Verizon or AT&T anymore, and they pissed me off for other reasons...but having a retail channel means being able to make a few dollars off accessories with new phone sales, it means having a first-point-of-contact with a rep who, at least *used to* help address customer issues from tech support to billing discrepancies, and so forth. I could understand perhaps reducing the number of stores, but if they're going to give the same service level as an MVNO (buy a phone on Amazon, everything is an online transaction), they're going to have to compete on price way better than they currently are.

It's possible that T-Mobile is looking to be a more muted player in the field and quietly make more money by just being the network of the MVNO's, but I don't think they'll be able to compete with Verizon and their retail presence without having a retail presence, any more than they'll be able to compete with the MVNO's on price.