I wouldn't mind a Hilux. Getting 22 MPG from a V6 without the need for turbos or any other voodoo was a nice thing.

I still think it is a miracle when I see one of the old Hilux based class Cs that gets 20+ MPG. It barely can get out of its own way, but those units were self-contained and pleasant to camp inside... and with 4x4 capability, they could go to some decent places. Digressing, the RV industry is like the vehicle industry. You can't find a small class "C" motorhome, or one on a pickup truck. Smallest you will get is a 24 footer that needs two parking spots, and is exactly 108 inches wide, making it not fun to park, while the older ones were not as space-filling, allowing for a much easier time parking.

The BYD Shark is getting tons of sales in Mexico.

It would be nice to see it here in the US, but the US likely will continue to have the shittiest and most overpriced vehicle selection in the developed/developing world.

Sadly the Ramcharger was killed... renamed to the REV, pretty much. I am interested in this truck too, but it has one disadvantage... it is heavy. I think around 8000 pounds total. The fact that one can fill up at Buc-Ees, then park it at the Superchargers while one goes shop can allow one an impressive range. It also had a pretty notable payload capacity (2625 pounds).

What I'd like to see is them make a 2500/3500, but a serial hybrid. Maybe a smaller battery, even if it means the range extender will be on more often. It would, provided the maker provides a decent inverter, mean that I have jobsite power for a welder and other tools without needing to bring a portable generator. Or just use the battery to power a truck camper's air conditioning unit when camping in the southwest US during the summer without having to run a generator or an engine.

Had Ford put in the toolbox range extender that they patented a year or two before introducing the Lightning, I wonder if it would have had a different fate. I like everything about the Lightning... except the fact that the eMPG towing is definitely less than normal, and the roads I'm using to tow stuff are rural Texas... where it can be 30-40 miles before hitting a main highway and charging stations.

RAM is going in with the REV, and I'm reading others are going to try serial EV hybrids, so it will be interesting how that turns out. Overall, other than weight, you sort of have the best of both worlds.

I am going to assert this isn't your garden variety hoplophobia, but more of wanting to remove 3D printing from the hands of the average person, because (to those regulators) only larger companies should be inventing and selling products... and the products should only be coming from China or whomever lines their pockets.

There are other ways to deal with ghost guns. None of them are addressed. This is about removal of a technology from the hands of the average person.

Someone with any sense wouldn't be wanting to destroy one of the main core mechanisms for decentralized manufacture unless they had a dog in the hunt somewhere.

A lot came from US code. Easy fix... fork it, or if really worried, have AI rewrite the code in a clean room style, like what malus.sh offers. Bonus points if it gets rewritten in a better language like Rust for performance and safety reasons.

F/OSS isn't the issue. It is closed source solutions... or even worse, services that are what one wants to get away from.

What US software? One can use Ceph or Hadoop and have a multi-PB private cloud on F/OSS.

The only place I see that is lacking is a replacement for MinIO because it was abandoned... but I'm sure if someone funds a fork of it, it would be updated and be brought current. MinIO would give S3 compatibility and object locking.

Private clouds are not rocket science these days. If one doesn't want a F/OSS solution, there are numerous solutions that you can throw on an array of generic supermicros with drives on them to create a high-availability, private cloud.

There has been a way fundamental change of attitude in software development places over the years, in my experience:

In the 1990s, things were being "paved". So, most software was being focused on breaking new ground. One project, we had to roll our own communications platform, using two rounds of DES for speed, store shared secrets because of RSA patents. It wasn't great, but we did things nobody did.

After the 2000s, there was a commercialization, especially making stuff "secure" due to Sarbanes-Oxley [1]. Then came 2010. Fundamentally, after the smartphone wars and patent scramble, after ~2013 or so, we still saw a lot of programming to make tools and useful stuff in the DevOps arena, although everything else in the computer world was static.

Now, we don't see anything new and cool coming our way, outside of (for the most part) smoke and mirrors AI stuff. Do we see something as groundbreaking as Jira (especially before 2019 and the license changes), Git, or even stuff like Artifactory? Not really. DevOps has all but died with nothing other than maybe a new feature... if lucky.

I would say that until we get money coming in for startups, so we can get another Veeam, or another round of useful tech companies, being a coder or in software development as a whole is pointless, especially because here in the US, if the AI doesn't "replace" you, and the offshore coding firm doesn't, then the H-1Bs or the B1s will. Other countries are wising up and are working on having some sovereignity, so these are the markets that likely will be growing.

[1]: Holy fsck, SOX compliancy back then was a clusterfsck. The suit wearing chatter primates they called consultants had companies rip out entire server rooms of Linux hardware to replace with Compaqs running NT or Windows 2000 because Windows was "SOX compliant", and Linux "wasn't". Nobody even read what SOX was about.

Sometimes, I wonder if we should go back to Bochs style VMs. They are painfully slow, but holes like this won't be able to punch through to the main server.

Even something like MS-DOS 6.22 + Windows 3.1 wouldn't be bad. The one thing I'd like to see open-sourced is the Stacker code, as that did some pretty surprising reliable voodoo for its time.

One PGP edition had a lot of problems being OCR-ed. The one after that fixed it, where it was using a better font, checksums, standard spacing, etc.

I may not be remembering this right though.

The Apple Store's ease of cancelling subscriptions is very nice. Especially when dealing with some media outlets where the only way to cancel normally is to call by phone, and pray they don't hang up on you after throwing "offer" upon "offer" at you, then handing you to another person, then another. Apple forcing purchases being done through them allowed for easy cancellation.

I really dislike the mandatory subscriptions where one signs up and is forced to pay a bunch of monthly payments. In this job market, one can lose their job at random, for no reason, and then where does that money go for the subscription if not paid for? Does it cause loss of use of the AppleID? That is scary.

I don't like being locked into year contracts. I'd rather just charge it on a credit card and pay a year ahead, if I have to.

I'd be wary of that... PCs are catching up with consoles when it comes to DRM. TPM chips, mandatory user accounts, and the trappings consoles had with them. By default, Windows ships with BitLocker on, which, unless manually turned off, the protectors deleted or saved, can be a show-stopper later on.

Linux is the target of attack with the age verification stuff.

macOS is sort of in the middle. You don't need an AppleID to set up a Mac, and it can run just fine without any cloud based stuff going. I'm sure there are some individualization things one can go off of like machine serial numbers, and there is DRM present for audio and video stuff... but it isn't like Windows where one of the reasons Windows ME was created was for a secure audio path, to guarentee every driver going from disk to speaker was "secure" for DRM purposes.

Right now, any PC is better than a console, IMHO, but that different is starting to close.

I'd like to see the new CEO make Apple more enterprise and business friendly. Start selling a complete ecosystem again, which may not make as much money as the devices directly, but it is profit coming in, and people would buy them. For example, if Apple started making an updated Time Capsule with S3 capability for backups (including object locking), a streaming server where devices can use that server for GPU rendering, revamping ABM/ASM to have more business-friendly features, and offering an enterprise model iMac, this would go a long way. One feature that would be nice to have is being able to reboot a device if it hasn't seen an internet connection in a period of days, or it notices its geolocation renders it out of bounds. At least get it to the BFU (before first unlock) state, which would be annoying for the user, but can mean the difference between data being secured, versus it completely dumped. Other things that would help would be "users", so company stuff could reside under a completely different context than normal personal stuff, similar to what Android has. This way, a remote wipe by a company to a personal device not owned by that company only would nuke the company profile and its section of the filesystem.

After that, iCloud needs some updates. Snapshotting would be nice, or the ability to store long term archives that would require a form of authentication for them to be modified or deleted. Maybe even focus on having iCloud be a M365 replacement?

Even though Apple had some cool things, there wasn't much in the way of groundbreaking new products. The Vision Pro has its uses, but I really don't see much adoption of it. Maybe look at markets like home servers.

Of course if Apple could make a cheap, reliable backup solution with media holding 1-10TB native, the world, both consumers and enterprise would beat a path to their door.

What AI brings to the table is better software. The next step is having hardware that can feed the LLM what is needed via sensors and allow the AI to control lots of parameters on the machinery. For example, being able to notch a belt tensioner a bit tightly to compensate for wear and chain stretch, or rate/de-rate loads on gears due to the detected wear on the cogs. If it is a transmission, if it can't shift into a certain gear, create different shift points to work around it until the transmission can be serviced. For engines, there is a technology that uses solenoid activated valves, and being able to tune valve timing (and also make sure the valves are closed before the piston slams to TDC) can provide features like the ability to shut off cylinders and have it actually be useful, especially with a turbocharged system.

The next step is getting hardware to work with AI, just like we went from mechanical to electronic for most things.