EVs are now a direct replacement for ALL consumer use cases. If you need to tow your shitty trailer home from London to Prague twice a week then bad luck. Charging stations are common enough now.

And you clowns don't think that your OS is a fragile pile of crap if it's that easy to fuck up?

Seriously? Do you even know what the job of an OS _is_ ?

You are right. A screen that does not replace physical controls is a nice thing.

And I agree. Any vehicle that doesn't have a proper dashboard in front of me, where I need to look to the side to see important information, is a no-buy for me.

yes, it's a short list. But it's a start and a kind of "red line". I am hopeful they move that line to include other things that people use while driving all the time.

Are big screens nice? Sure, yes.

But if I have a choice between good physical controls and a big touch screen, I'll take the buttons and switches any day, thank you.

My 10 year old BMW has voice commands and a map that's always been more than enough for me. Sure, it's not as large, but while driving I don't want a big map - I want an indicator that tells me "next turn left in 500m" - and I have that, not on the main display but right in front of me on the dashboard. Newer models have it on a HUD.

Nothing in what you wrote makes a LARGE screen necessary.

They don't have to be better. They just have to be competing for the same ad money and users.

It's time YouTube gets some actual competition. Maybe it'll force them to revert some of the enshittification it's been going through. The crap is near unusable these days.

I don't know a single person who ever said that they want more or bigger touchscreens in their car.

Quite the opposite. I want physical controls and so do most people I've talked to. This is a car, not an iPad. Most of it I should be able to operate without taking my eyes off the road. And a touchscreen doesn't offer that.

In fact, Euro NCAP agrees. If you want a 5-star rating, you need physical controls.

The only people who want touchscreens are the car manufacturers, because it's cheaper and easier.

I have to disagree, for several reasons. First off, file sizes just keep increasing. Instead of people thinking their televisions at home look great in "full 1080 HD resolution"? Now, everyone's moving to 4K TV, with 8K being the high-end offering. That means streaming television supporting those higher resolutions is going to use 4x to 8x the bandwidth it used to.

Second, any avid gamer knows how big the downloads have gotten for modern games. The regular updates they push out, alone, are typically 35GB to 350GB+ in size. Now, imagine you've got a family at home with at least 2 or 3 people playing online games on their machines. They don't want to have to wait 20-25 minutes to start playing every time it says an update is required first.

Beyond all of that, though? I've found fiber connections used in an office environment are handled a little differently than what people have at home. EG. I can start uploading 4 or 5 large archives to, say, Microsoft Azure cloud storage, right in the middle of the workday -- and nobody else using the office network even notices. That's largely because we have multi-thousand dollar routers in the office and they're properly configured to prioritize certain types of traffic like VoIP phone calls, and to throttle connections intelligently so everyone gets a fairly equal piece of the total connection "pie" as they work. It's not that reasonable to expect residential users to have similar setups, or to even know how to configure them.

My cable provider now offers 2GB download speed service, but it's problematic in the sense most people still have devices with wired Ethernet ports that only handle up to 1 gig. speeds. I have a pretty expensive Linksys Atlas mesh router at home (cost $850 or so for the 3 piece set, a few years back), and it doesn't have a port on it faster than 1 gig. for the cable modem to attach to.

Obviously, the provider is happy to supply their own combo modem/router to use but with a monthly cost attached.

But there's just not a good reason in 2026 to not make a least gigabit connections a standard offering. Nobody's "unfairly discriminating" against services like satellite with any of this. Those technologies have always been considered wireless alternatives to use when you're in too rural of an area to expect anything else. Invest in building out fiber networks and those techs will just become what you use when you're mobile.

Honestly? I think your last statement there is a key point that should receive a little more attention. It seems possible --- heck, even prudent -- for a person to question possible negative outcomes from mRNA vaccines, while still fully recognizing that it makes good sense to use one on an existing disease. Even in a nearly worst-case scenario? You're talking about cancer, which surely kills a person if not treated, vs a theoretical risk of some long-term problems from an mRNA vaccine (some of which even anti-vax types admit aren't showing up except in a certain percentage of vaccinated people).

That has much more to do with people being creatures of habit than being stupid.

I'm old enough to have spent a long time driving cars before voice recognition was a thing. Probably dating myself here, but I remember how excited my friend was when he got a new Nissan Z car and it actually spoke to him, saying things like "Your fuel is low!" and "The door is ajar!"

I spent years trying to utilize voice recognition systems when they came out, and was consistently frustrated. Some required I memorize their specific set of words they understood (cough, Chrysler ...) and didn't do anything else. Others just couldn't understand what I said half the time. By the time any of these systems in cars worked well, I'd given up on them as more hassle or gimmick than they were worth.

At least w/Infotainment touchscreens, you get visual confirmation of what you picked/selected. Voice commands get super annoying as soon as it misunderstands you once and starts the wrong process.

My home server is an old HP Proliant DL380P that's full of DDR3 memory and 18 LFF SATA drives. Even though it's probably circa 2014 or so, it just keeps on reliably doing what I need. Currently running TrueNAS Scale on it with Plex, NextCloud and a TailScale VPN. (May also spin up a dedicated game server for "Pal World" since our extended family have been playing it a lot lately.)

Every time I think about retiring it for something newer -- it just doesn't add up financially to do it. The crazy memory and mass storage prices right now will keep me away from that idea again for a while, I think ... baring a complete main board failure.

For what it's worth? The "K shaped economy" is something not all economists think is a "new normal" for America.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/e...

It's at least one possibility that the "K" is staring to reverse course a bit, with the "legs" of the K starting to move closer together again? "Income inequity" isn't necessarily a thing that needs to be stomped out/removed. But it's really important that the low to middle income people don't continue on a downward trend of losing purchasing power while doing the same amount of labor/work to try to earn it.

It's probably a core component of a free-market capitalist society that as you earn more money than you need to survive, you're able to leverage it via investing to potentially earn still more. That's where you'll always have some income inequity. The people who haven't been successful enough to invest surplus income will be behind those who do. Again though.... I'd say there's nothing wrong with that. The problem is when people do everything they're able to do to earn what they need and still keep falling short of their basic needs. There has to at least be some long-term path to "get ahead" if you're just treading water to survive.

That's a good point. Yes, it could be Anthropic simply making sure that they can't be blamed if someone doesn't disclose AI usage. Now they can say: "We did everything we could to make sure AI usage is visible".

Though I doubt it'll hold up in court unless the watermark is obvious. Because, again, the law requires disclosure. I don't think a hard-to-detect watermark would satisfy that demand.