People say this, but I was riding with one of my friends awhile back and he stalled out on a green light and I couldn't help but bust out laughing. He'd been driving a standard for years and just had a brain fart. It just seemed hilarious to me because it's an experience I never have driving automatics (and as of the last few years, an EV).

Driving around town, I occasionally see people with standard transmissions rolling backwards or having a hell of a time just trying to keep up with what I consider to be gentle acceleration in my Chevy Bolt. I get that some people might really enjoy that archaic way of operating their vehicle and find the quirks endearing, but personally I prefer the instant responsiveness of an EV - the "go pedal" really just goes.

In an EV, when the traffic slows down, some of your kinetic energy actually gets put back in the "tank" via regenerative braking. I'll take that free refund any day over some nebulous feeling of being more "connected" to the act of driving.

Plus, many modern vehicles now have driver assistance systems that can react much faster than a human anyway.

Anecdotally, no. I had a '19 Versa with the CVT and it was starting to get a bit squirrelly before I traded it in. It wasn't even close to having enough miles to need the tranny fluid changed. It also had those absolutely obnoxious fake shift points, which was another aspect that motivated me to be rid of that car.

I'd venture a guess that the majority of Americans don't love driving, because it's a monotonous chore that was forced upon us by car-centric community designs. We tolerate the endless strings of traffic signals in town and the stop-and-go pace of overcrowded highways because there's no other viable option to get from A to B, not because we enjoy it. Plus, the proposed fix for this situation always continues to be "just add more lanes", because the only thing worse than being stuck in traffic is riding public transportation next to someone who hasn't bathed in a week.

This is entirely why companies like Tesla have been pushing self-driving so hard (even if they've been less than successful at delivering on their promises) - a lot of Americans would gladly pay to nope out of having to deal with the act of driving completely, while still being able to retain their own little personal bubble separating them from the rest of the public while they travel.

I think the OP was going for satire. It's hard to tell these days.

It's not copyright infringement. Copyright doesn't protect ideas, only the specific form an idea takes. This is why, for example, there's many sci-fi seafaring tales, but in space books, TV shows and films.

Heck, I finally got around to watching that Wednesday series on Netflix and they basically did that whole school for exceptional outcasts trope, which is so heavily used that it actually ends up divided into several sub tropes.

Your UID is too low to not be aware that mergers and acquisitions always end in enshittification.
 

I'm a night owl too, and I honestly don't care which one they pick as long as they get rid of the biannual clock fuckery. It's the losing an hour of sleep that makes it rough, once that's done away with I couldn't care less that I'm actually being "tricked" into waking up an hour earlier than solar time.

How about we just don't? It's not as if you won't be able to go to the store that closes at 10PM for groceries if your employer doesn't let you off until 5:00PM when others are off at 4:00PM. Also, a lot of us don't have kids and we'd consider it a perk to work at an employer that isn't fucking with the clocks twice a year to align the work schedule with the schools (or at least makes it something you can choose an an employee - many companies do let you come in an hour earlier or leave an hour later).

Society schedules things in a far more ad-hoc manner these days anyway. Even "Prime Time TV" is basically a dead concept, replaced by on-demand streaming.

Now we have solar powered LED lighting though, so it's NBD to install some lights at the bus stop.

And "walking" to school? Hah, these days the kids that aren't riding the bus or being chauffeured by their parents are on e-bikes and e-scooters (which either already have lights or they can be easily added).

We can bust on Microsoft all day and all night, and they deserve it, but the fact that their ability to find and fix these problems has greatly increased is a good thing. Software is incredibly complex, and no software more complicated than "10 GOTO 10" is free from the potential of security problems. Microsoft's QA has gone downhill in recent years, but now it's getting better apparently (even if it's after the fact). They are not going away, so this makes all our lives better.

I wrote a file searching utility in C++ about 30 years ago. About 15 years ago I ported it to Python and found it to be faster than using the Windows directory enumeration APIs, and I've been using that ever since. It just searches filenames, but that's all I need.

"NOTE: Experiences vary by region." says to me that Microsoft doesn't even know what their changes will do.

Feature request:

Implement more engaging side quests after the main goal of winning capitalism has been completed.

In my neck of the woods, idiot human drivers regularly still somehow manage to get hit by our commuter train. That's astoundingly easy to avoid - just don't stop on the train tracks. The bar for autonomous driving being better than humans is very, very low.