This is why it's better to separate the car from the entertainment system and just use it as a dumb screen when it comes to apps that are not directly related to the operation of the vehicle. It's easier to manage something like that on a phone. If it kills android auto, just switch to bluetooth audio until it's fixed.

And GM wants to get rid of Android Auto and Apple Car Play? Expect more of this, plus locked-in, walled garden garbage so they can sell more of your data...

Consider the cost of a new EV, and the insurance, the end of the federal EV incentive program this year and what an Uber driver makes these days, and it may not be enough of an incentive. Certainly, Uber trips are probably an ideal case for electric vehicle use (short trips, lower speeds with stop and go regen braking) but the economics of Uber driving are probably pretty touch and go from the various reports I am reading. (I would like to hear from Uber drivers directly on this matter)

Most Uber and Lyft rides I've taken are in older, well maintained cars. They probably are owned outright or the payment is reasonable. Insuring an older internal combustion car is cheap. Yes, there is a savings in fuel with an EV IF you can charge at home most of the time and you have an EV discount with your provider or you live in an area where electricity is cheap to begin with, but often the other costs can outweigh that. Just looking at the payment and insurance for my wife's (purchased used for around $30k) Tesla, and I am not sure if there is any financial savings in the fuel costs in the end, compared to my high-MPG Mazda3 which is paid for and is cheap to insure, and has had almost no maintenance needed since new, No one who is just getting by is going to do it out of the the kindness of their heart for the environment.

You also have to consider the shelf life of the battery, and amortize the cost of the car over time. A lot of these things don't matter if it's your personal vehicle and you're getting enjoyment out of owning an EV on top of it being useful, but if you're looking at it as a business case that you depend on for your survival, it's a different matter.

Any rideshare drivers here who would like to comment? The above is speculation based on my own experience owning both types of vehicles at the same time, but not as a rideshare driver. I have more questions than answers.

I think this incentive would appeal most to someone who lives in a household with multiple incomes, where the rideshare income is supplementary to another, higher income. Then it would be an incentive for someone who can actually afford to take advantage of it. My three cents.

I don't see a mechanism for the little guy to 'opt out'...case in point: I have a popular youtube channel, I don't want OpenAI harvesting it without compensation. How do individual social media accounts opt out? Sounds like they are just negotiating with major studios at high levels. Aren't they scraping social media as well still?

We need a clearinghouse for photography and video as well. I'm guessing this is just for Microsoft AI. There needs to be one for all models wanting to use copyrighted content. It would suck to have to upload your stuff to 10 different clearinghouses.

something like this would help stop the bandwidth leeching going on right now on every site on the internet, in addition to the IP theft.

A new validation mechanism is needed to verify and filter for human authored works in a large and growing variety of fields. This will likely involve being not lazy, and not relying on AI itself to vet for human created works. The current methods are obviously less and less usable as AI becomes more and more skilled at impersonating the tone and feel of human authored works.

I think this will necessarily mean a return to a more analog, labor intensive review of works and manual vetting of authors through social connections, voice calls, etc. to make sure the person actually exists. The problem and the solution is that it will create barriers that are harder to surmount to get your legitimate work published. Other commenters have mentioned the need for non-corporate or university independent citizen scientists to still be able to submit papers without a huge financial or labor burden. How do you reconcile that? How often does that actually happen?

The thing is, a lot of these tech companies rely on making everything automated for maximum profit margin with minimum labor. They just want a cash machine that prints money once set up and lightly maintained. That approach is antithetical to to the high-touch solution needed here.

What barriers would you use to stem the flood of fakes that are automatically or semi-automatically submitted, and then thoroughly vet the remainder? Fees for submission? Even a very low fee, say $20, would stop a lot of auto-generated fakes from being automatically submitted.

This problem is also very acute in the self publishing world - low quality re-hashes of fiction and fact-based books showing up on Amazon and elsewhere. Wikipedia articles turned into books, fiction books plagiarized into other fiction books. The scam is that if you upload 10,000 fake books, which are easy to generate, you just need a small percentage of them to sell every now and then to start making some serious money. It's very tempting, the tools are all there, and some people having nothing but time to set this type of grift in motion.

...that I cancelled my account a long time ago. It was completely and utterly useless.

I'll continue to stick to my traditional IMAP / POP account on my own domain. There is nothing trying to 'think' for me there and I can set up my own filters on my mail client if desired.

I have a paid account at Vimeo that I use to privately share videos for clients. They are known for their high quality / high bitrate streams and tools for business users. I imagine now the price will get jacked up and then the service ultimately shut down when everyone abandons ship after they've looted what they can out of it.

Our charger has a long cord, even if the charger was inside the cord could run outside and you could shut the door on it.

As it happens, that's not a problem either. I put the charger outside on a north facing wall under a large roof overhang where it's protected from the elements. The Tesla wall charger is waterproof and designed to live outside. I've had zero issues with it.

Besides, isn't it usually recommended not to park an EV in the garage due to fire hazard if something goes sideways?

The car parks right next to where the charger is, we plug it in every night and it's on a timer to start after 9 when the cheap rates kick in. Between the TOD Prime rate that SoCal Edison gives for EV owners and charging almost entirely at home, the electricity for the car is basically free, as our power bills are actually lower on average than they were before we changed rate tiers.

I personally don't care for the car (it's my Wife's car) due to the driver-hostile control setup (no buttons) and the fact that it tracks your every move, but it works for her because she has a long daily commute and we were spending a lot of money on gas every month.

Thanks for the update. I did use Seatguru fairly recently and the information on my particular flight was still valid as far as I can tell, but maybe I just got lucky. I did notice that it was transforming into a booking gateway to maximize revenue. I've bookmarked the new site and I will refer to it for the next trip.

Always consult seatguru before booking...they have maps of the layouts for each plane for each carrier, and you can see the lemons....

You know, some of us are introverts and hate talking to machines. I don't want to have to interact with a machine pretending to have a human-like personality. I don't use voice input on anything except occasionally when composing text messages using speech-to-text, and even that's aggravating and useless half the time because it gets so many words wrong. No thanks.

Have they found a less energy intensive way to separate H2O into its component pieces? Otherwise you may as well just burn the source fuel directly without the conversion loss. If it can be done with electricity, powered by wind, solar or nuclear, then it might be an OK storage medium for things that have to move long distances.

As some other commenters mentioned however, there are serious downsides to even doing that in terms of storability and safety. It would be better to pour research into making more efficient electrical batteries for the same application.

Right now nothing beats the energy density of gasoline and related fuels. Electric is probably the best bet in the near term, but likely not for aviation unless they solve the weight problem too.

He's wrong about the Facebook part. The SocialFixer extension for Firefox does a huge amount of stuff for the Facebook experience and it's still active and usable. I couldn't use FB without it. You'll see like 10 'suggested' items blocked and minimized, and then actual friends' posts. It's so helpful. I'm reminded of what a garbage dump FB is when I occasionally use the app on my phone, which is the full unfiltered experience the way they want you to see it. It's all ads and suggested posts. SocialFixer allows me to continue using Facebook as a place to connect with friends and groups with shared interests, as it was in the earlier days.

Mazda's legacy button layouts plus the dial are really great. I have a 3rd Gen Mazda3 and it's nearly perfect. There is a touch screen but it's never used. The dial turns and also pushes for select, and there are some other buttons around it for getting back out of menus and a home button, and some shortcuts for various things. All within comfortable reach just between the gear selector and parking brake (real mechanical parking brake handle!) without having to raise your arm and glance away from the road to make sure you're finding a button. It's all done by feel.

On the steering wheel is volume, track skip (which works in Spotify for it's normal 15 second skip function forward or backward to skip through commercials) and cruise control. Also a phone answer and hang up button.

About the only complaint I have is the A/C fan speed is two buttons rather than a knob, but at least the temp adjust is a big fat knob. They gave up room for a fan knob in exchange for dual temperature knobs for passenger and driver.

The Gen 4 Mazdas are similar, with better Android Auto / Car Play integration and a nicer screen, and are still fairly new, a lot of low mileage cars still available through CarMax, etc.

If they are going to rely on voice commands I'm done. I don't talk to machines. If it's still usable via buttons, fine.

My wife has a Tesla and the UI experience is awful. Absolutely awful. The only good thing about it is the drivetrain. It's like owning a supercar in terms of acceleration. Other than that, I would consider Teslas to be actively driver-hostile. I avoid driving it as much as possible. I hope they will eventually be considered a quirky novelty relegated to the dustbin of history, while more traditional button interfaces make a comeback.