Sigh. Gboard made a mess of that post and I didn't hit preview. My apologies for the noise

No you can't. Mainly because there really aren't any available not do I expect their ever will be. Except for Tesla and polestar, there are no Chinese EVs that meet north American standards. This was true before the EV tariff. Tesla was the biggest importer of EVs made in China.

But even if you could actually buy a Chinese EV I'm Canada you'd have to import it into the US, subjecting yourself to the tariff of you were allowed to import at all.

You honestly argue the sheer amount of music available in the 90s was just as much as today?b I think you completely missed my point. In fact you quoted one part of my post but actually responded to the unquoted portion. I never said music wasn't simple before. I was referencing the sheer volume now on Spotify and implying that the amount of it means the amount of garbage is therefore much greater also even if the proportion of good to bad is better or the same as before. And now we have an algorithm driving people to the trash and it's doing it in ways radio never did or could do before.

Clueless but still has plenty of money to burn. The only way to effectively run OpenClaw with Claude is to pay $100 a month to anthropic. So I'm not so sure the bot owner isn't complicit and not out to deliberately cause mischief.

True, but the volume today is orders of magnitude more. But also music has gotten more and more simplistic in recent years, relying on hooks to grab listeners. Rick Beato expresses it much better than I.

Modded Troll, really?

Will Hyundai ever fix the stupidity where you cannot precondition the battery for fast charging without being forced to use the in-dash navigation system? Seems so dumb. It's just a software switch they need to expose.

In general this insistence on putting wheels on a computer really turns me off of EVs, though I really want one. EV makers seem to think that drivers are too stupid to drive without the navigation system on telling them how to drive to their local grocery store (which happens to have a fast charger in the parking lot).

In 20 years? The big three US automakers have been focused on the luxury market for years, ceding much of the affordable compact car market to the likes of Kia and Toyota (foreign-owned, some domestic production). GM, Ford, and whatever you call Chrysler hardly make any cars anymore. They mostly make trucks and luxury SUVs. And they have been very successful at it and make tons of money. But the side effect is that few average Americans can really afford their products right now.

When GM's CEO whines about Canada letting in Chinese EVs , the hypocrisy is on full display, since that is a market they decided they don't want to bother with anyway. They were happy enough to try it when the could get the subsidy.

Youtuber Low Level did a pretty good video on this vulnerability. Yes it is a bad vulnerability and yes it is serious, but it's not like a user isn't warned several times when clicking on such a link.

He also pointed out that the drive to put AI into everything now makes restricting process permissions a lot harder. For example in the past there was no reason to ever let notepad.exe access the internet. Now with copilot integrated, it's regularly accessing the internet. I don't think the boys at MS were thinking this through clearly.
https://youtu.be/sZ8aAkeZ6dw

And yet I use it every day. For example, NotebookLM is quite amazing for multi-document analysis. One recent interesting use was to dump a whole bunch of invoice emails into it and ask it to help us reconcile a transaction we just couldn't match looking it over by hand. LLM's ability to look at pdfs, scans, and email text and find information and patterns is very impressive. I also use it to help me find things in large PDF documents. It always footnotes what it finds so you can see the sources. And it's actually capable of some non-trivial math and logic, which I found surprising.

Recently we built an app for doing farm record keeping using Google Antigravity. The LLM AI did the development and deployment. All existing record-keeping apps' data entry is awkward in a variety of ways. This app lets me press a button and I can talk to it. "I'm planting corn on field 5. The planting rate is x seeds per acre, and putting down 10 gal/ac starter fertilizer." It parses that out and fills in a form, breaking down what I said into individual crop inputs (seed, fertilizer, etc). It's even smart enough to use the phone's GPS and determine whether I am in the field I said I was. If it thinks I'm not it asks if I made a mistake about the field number, which is kind of important. Anyway I'm impressed and somewhat horrified by it.

Is it worth the billions? I dunno. There is definite value in it. But honestly the way it's being marketed to the masses as a toy is definitely less valuable and more wasteful.

The correct command is /clear usually.

Last week I praised Claude code, especially the cli here on slashdot. I still think it's currently the best but it's also the most expensive. But the competition is getting a lot better (and cheaper). I've been using the opencode cli lately with several models: Kimi K2.5, Kimi K2.5 Thinking, OpenCode's Big Pickle, and Qwen3 Coder Next. Using them through OpenCode's Zen service and also OpenRouter (for Qwen3 Coder Next), they are all about 1/2 the cost of Claude's models, maybe less.

Of those I feel that Kimi K2.5 Thinking is probably the closest to Claude Opus 4.6. The rest are quite good at most things, and Qwen3 Coder Next is very fast. Qwen3 Coder Next also has the potential to run on "reasonable" local hardware.

Apparently drones flown by drug cartels actually are an increasing problem at the border. I'm not clear if they are just surveilling border patrol positions or actually carrying drugs.

Very interesting. So Fedora and Ubuntu install fine then?

Okay but I installed 22.1 for someone a while back (that was the latest). They do the updates when prompted. They are still on 22.1 now, though 22.3 has been out for a quite a while. And further Mint devs apparently intend to enable users to stay on 22.1 until EOL, despite 22.3 or whatever they end up, getting security updates, but not the other upgrades that come with 22.3.