Buttons are fast.
Buttons are positive.
Buttons are easy to learn.

Voice is slow.
Voice is subject to noise.
Voice is subject to music, in particular music that isn't coming from the car's systems.
Voice is subject to multi-voice conflicts / conversation.
Voice is subject to misinterpretation.
Voice can give passengers access to driver-only decisions.
Voice can give bystanders access to driver-only decisions.

However, buttons cost more — and that's the motivation for the claim.

In addition, touchscreens and menus are actively dangerous because they remove the driver's visual attention from the road.

In other UI news, Apple, not satisfied with having put the charging port on the bottom of the "magic" mouse, has put the power button on the bottom of the latest Mac Mini.

I swear, I want to take a rolled up newspaper and just beat on some of these incompetent decision makers until the paper turns to dust.

I don't know why it's the wrong time. Any time for this move is okay. Just do it.

If Bezos were telling the truth — and clearly, he's not — he would see to it that the paper had no "opinion" section. You know, so it could make an honest attempt at reporting the news instead of trying to influence people by publishing the opinions and reasoning of various movers and shakers.

But he's not doing that. He's taking one action: keeping the stated and clear opinion of the paper's editorial crew (which has been openly stated outside the paper's environs as favoring Kamala Harris by the editorial crew) from being printed in the paper.

It's a completely transparent implementation of a pro-Trump move.

And as far as tradition goes, opinion sections have been, and remain, ubiquitous across almost every newspaper out there.

Bezos is a chump making a douche move.

This will leave the market free to be exploited for profit by those reputable companies who can be bothered to produce high quality software through the choice of secure development tools, defensive programming and testing

Well, that leaves out Apple and Microsoft, based on software release behaviors to date.

...as little as 3-4 bit precision (which is such a low bit precision that it makes more sense to think of it as a lookup table of exponentially growing values than as actual floating point math).

Even with FP8, you just need to generate (once) a 64k-entry table of results, and then there's no CPU/FPU FP math at all to do the 2-element "multiplication." 8BOpA as MS8 bits, 8BOpB as LS8 bits, results in a direct 16B index to the answer from the 64k table.

The significant cost of FP8 versus FP3 or FP4 is in the storage of the data; FP4 is twice as efficient, storage-wise, although it sacrifices considerable accuracy. FP3 is counter-indicated as alignment will be cross byte/word/etc. (in a traditional computer memory architecture) or else there will be wasted bits and hence inefficient storage.

64K tables are nothing in today's memory contexts, and certainly irrelevant compared to the memory impacts of all the weights (or even a layer of weights in a layered computation model) in any usable LLM.

If the government mandates this, will they be paying for the replacement of the EV battery and charging circuits?

There's another use case lurking here; rather than just (or even at all) feeding battery power into the grid and so imposing more charge-discharge cycles on the vehicle, any vehicle with auxiliary solar panels (like these) can switch to feeding the grid once the battery is already fully charged.

It's also worthy if one EV can charge another; for instance, someone runs out of charge, a kind-hearted motorist can stop and provide some juice. Auxiliary roadside services (like this) are already somewhat available, but you can be pretty sure that's going to be fee-based. There's still room in the world for the occasional good samaritan.

Microsoft says Office 2024 will require a Microsoft account and an internet connection

So far (referenced to the non-sub version of Office21), all that's been used for is to let you know you can downgrade to the subscription version of Office any time you like to get whatever new features / fixes you absolutely must have. You can just click the offer away and carry on. I find this to be acceptable; Microsoft's not force-picking my pocket the way Adobe would.

It's also worth pointing out that Office21's sub-downgrades have never once tempted me with a new feature of any kind. If I can read and edit submitted manuscripts, I'm all good.

I will buy this. I want a license and a fixed cost. Not a shitty subscription.

Exactly. I have the 2021 version; happy to upgrade to the 2024 version now.

Subscription-only applications are straight up anti-consumer fishhooks. Looking directly at you, Adobe, you assholes.

The regulatory agency was of two minds about it.

...innovative TNT batteries stored a lot more energy than Lithium Ion.

It's all about the discharge rate.

Any "ranking" system that doesn't rank completely separately...

o Markup (HTML, CSS, Markdown, aa_macro, LaTeX, etc.)
o Interpreted (Python, Perl, Ruby, Javascript, SQL, etc.)
o Compiled (c, c++, c#, etc.)
o Metal (Assembly)

...I find to be both entirely unserious — and mildly hilarious. What they're doing here is just like counting the number of grapefruit to determine the level of interest in pizza.

Tell me instead about the current President Monster who has the power NOW to end war, and won’t.

Oh, you mean the leaders of Hamas, the ones who started this particular episode of horror with the outright murder of 1,139 people, continue to hold hostages, won't give up, and continue to use all of Gaza as human shields. Those monsters. Yeah, about that.

What you want is for us to stop supporting the attacked party and hope that makes Israel give in to the hostage takers. Which it is not likely to do; US contributions to the Israeli military are a fraction of their military budget — and they really want those hostages back. Hamas could end this right now by simply giving them up.

Of all the choices in front of the US, going with Hamas' desires seems like the absolute poorest one. Just my opinion, of course. :)

Wires are just more reliable

Also, no battery concerns. I'm perfectly happy with my wired mouse and keyboard.

I have a couple of shows, various vintages. Bought them for the functionality they advertised at the time. Which was indeed useful. However...

When Amazon eliminated the nice clocks feature (last present in the echo show 5) and started using them as advertising display devices, I had a few different shots I'd taken of my sweetheart printed, attached truly black paper to the back of the prints, and double-sticky taped them on the display surfaces.

Now they're oddly-shaped "dots."

If Amazon ever offers a reasonably priced ad-free + interruption-free service that continues to support my smart home stuff, they can have my money and I'll uncover the displays. If not, whatever. Nothing lasts forever, and if there's one thing we can count on, it's corporations dependably fucking up a good thing. Also, whoever decided to sell these things at a loss and whiz-banged up the "we'll make it up later by abusing the users" idea should be demoted to delivery driver.

How the hell do you watch Netflix?

Why would I want to watch Netflix (or similar)? Constantly being fish-hooked into paying subscription fees, content that disappears over time, dealing with network interruptions...

I'm perfectly happy with my Bluray and DVD collections. I can rewatch good content, resell poor content, enjoy interruption-free playback, and entirely avoid the incredibly toxic mess movie theaters have become.

As for "smart" TVs, not my problem. I have a number of displays, and they all work just fine without the Internet. I doubt I'll ever need another (not exactly a spring chicken here.) If one dies, I'll just toss it and connect a different one. The only one I'd actually miss is my projector. But it's a luxury, not a necessity.

Considering how many people have bought into the subscription mindset, I am pretty certain the "how awful can we make this before they give up on us" mindset of enterprises from TV manufacturers to software factories will get a lot worse before (if) it gets better.

Right now is sort of a "golden time" where we can still get entertainment media and playback hardware, functional computing software and hardware, even vehicles that don't fish-hook. But it's clearly a race to the bottom. Very glad to have avoided it.

I do miss when game machines were "shove this disc in and play", though. Still, none of mine of that era have died, and even older good fun is still good fun.

Robots and AI.

This strikes me as almost certainly correct. However, I'm expecting the transition itself and the initial economic forms to be pretty awful. There's too much inertia in our (US) legal system to manage a change of this magnitude with any grace.