I'd love to buy into SpaceX the space company. Not so much into SpaceX the AI company. Their valuation is based on xAI and X for a large part, and their outlook on their total addressable market is over 9/10ths AI - a market in which they are at the moment not all that well positioned.

That sounds like an issues with the tests, not the grades.

So what do these things do if ingested by animals, like humans?

In other words they still have more labor and safety regulations in place than the average state. You know... "known to the State of California to cause cancer" stickers all over everything, etc.

Because you have the actively user-hostile version, as discussed. It is extremely sad that such tech is user-hostile, and it is equally sad that there aren't enough regulations in place to mandate that such options are opt-in-with-informed-consent, or able to be disabled in a way that retains as much functionality as possible while still respecting an opt-out, but since there is not, the options are either:

1. accept your system in the state in which it currently exists, complete with the ads or potential for them, or

2. disconnect and claw back as much functionality as you can.

You've accepted the first, and it's 100% your right to do so. However, since the situation we currently live in does not allow for both.

Yeah we can always have an LLM discuss recycling based on the word soup it has ingested from the internet, maybe make a video defying all the laws of physics showing recycling of a mixed waste landfill, and consume a lot of electricity in the process.

That's the beauty of each state being allowed to have the governance model that its citizens want. Don't like it? You can exercise your freedom of speech and right to vote, or you can move to another state. In some states, like Ohio, governance is carved up into tiny pieces - State -> Counties -> Townships -> Cities / Villages.

You may have a village of 1,000 people, with its own tiny town hall for the mayor, its own fire department, 3 person police department, school system (that can pretty much make most all the education decisions they want), the ability for the residents to vote decide what tax rate they want levied against them to pay for their schools, on and on. It's often good, and sometimes bad, but it's about freedom and diversity and the ability to set up a system that the voters want.

Then you can go to another state where everything is hyper standardized (but still specific to that state). All of that is deeply ingrained into concepts of freedom and governance, checks and balances. Sure, it allows towns to do really stupid crap, and if citizens don't like it they can mobilize and vote people out, elect one of themselves to do things differently, etc. Happens ALL the time, and is happening in my small town right now actually, as a number of town council members are about to be shown to the exit in just a few months over some things they tried to pull that got the vast majority of citizens in an uproar.

This is the insidious two-step.

Flock probably didn't *accuse* anyone. They probably "indicated to law enforcement that further investigation is recommended". Flock gets out of it because it was "simply a recommendation", the PD gets out of it because they were "following standard protocol".

If there were really justice in this world, they would both be facing a $100M lawsuit (paid from the pension fund in the case of the PD), unless they agreed who would accept responsibility as a matter of formal record, in which case, the responsible party pays $100M and the 'whoopsie' side got only $1M...and then let the relationship strain as a result. ...but this is why the two-step exists - it protects both.

Virginia does not own Dominion Energy. They just regulate it (set rates, etc). They would regulate the resulting corporate entity after a merger, whatever that is, just the same as they do now, as is their right to do so as a state.

I suspect this will get shot down, as Virginia does not have the right to control this (it is interstate / federal level for one thing).

Yes, do it. This is Slashdot, so I can meaningfully recommend what I did: buy a used Android phone like a Pixel 6a or something like that if you don't have one lying around. Then, load it up with iodeOS...there's an app stack that'll replace almost everything you requested.

CoMaps and Sygic GPS both provide these, the latter being $18/year and working completely offline.

Spotify still works; I also use either AntennaPod for podcasts or PowerAmp ($7 once) to play the music I loaded onto it.

...yeah, disconnecting the car makes this one impossible, no getting around it.

OwnTracks, possibly combined with Reitti on the server side if you're feeling a bit extra.

well, Sygic and Comaps both show distance to destination, and the last five cars I've owned have showed me miles-to-empty on the ICE side; I'd imagine the EV side will do the same, and from there it's just a subtraction problem. Sygic does have an EV mode; I don't know how that behaves, but it probably narrows the gap a bit.

Agreed...and that's why the systems are desirable to buyers...but since it's clear that these systems can and will be actively used to make money for the OEM, there's a trade to be made. The aforementioned setup isn't a drop-in replacement, but it checks off many of the things on your list.

That said my car has never shown ads, fuck BMW and I highly recommend no one ever buy their cars.

Yet. BMW has been the most aggressive at post-purchase monetization, but the others will follow.

Well, the thing is that having a frictionless ordering process that allows more sales-per-hour is good if the goal is to sell coffee, but the point of a Starbucks, originally, was to be a 'third place' that wasn't the home or the office, so paying $4 for a cup of coffee or $8 for a thousand-calorie caffeinated milkshake was entirely justifiable when the value proposition was "paying for a place to sit down with a cup of coffee for an hour". Shifting to a coffee pickup location means that the value proposition shifts, and paying half as much for a cup of coffee twice the size at 7-Eleven while I'm getting gas tends to win out on both cost and convenience - dissuading customers from sitting down and hanging out gives fewer reasons for people to *go to Starbucks*.

Likely, but for different reasons. I left T-Mobile about two years ago, after being a customer for over 20 years. They weren't less expensive than Verizon or AT&T anymore, and they pissed me off for other reasons...but having a retail channel means being able to make a few dollars off accessories with new phone sales, it means having a first-point-of-contact with a rep who, at least *used to* help address customer issues from tech support to billing discrepancies, and so forth. I could understand perhaps reducing the number of stores, but if they're going to give the same service level as an MVNO (buy a phone on Amazon, everything is an online transaction), they're going to have to compete on price way better than they currently are.

It's possible that T-Mobile is looking to be a more muted player in the field and quietly make more money by just being the network of the MVNO's, but I don't think they'll be able to compete with Verizon and their retail presence without having a retail presence, any more than they'll be able to compete with the MVNO's on price.

Now complete with garbage misogyny, antisemitic genocidal nutbaggery, and the rest of the horrible baggage of the Saudi Terrorist Crime Family.

This. This right here is the answer.

Google search originally was creepy-accurate because it was built on the work that was done elsewhere. While other search engines looked at frequency of search terms and other easy-to-game metrics, Google did it based on links, meaning more linked-to pages got preferred rankings. That worked for a very long time, until that too got automated and SEO slop took over search indices. Google itself began to have more and more ads creep into search results, and reward clearly-seo-slop over the sort of sites people actually wanted to find. Sites got so plastered in ads and tracking scripts that they became utterly unusable without an ad blocker, even for people who WANTED to support the sites...then there were the cookie banners, then there were the modal overlays...and if you had a labor-of-love website that legitimately had useful, human-created or curated content that was useful and functional...you were buried on page six of the search results because you were competing against the SEO slop and backlink farms.

and then ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Perplexity came around and were able to sift through all the crap to give everyone the paragraph they were actually looking for in the first place.

You dug your own grave, Axios...when your website takes a minute to load its moving video ads, people tolerate it in the absence of an alternative. Gemini is terrible for 101 other reasons...but if it puts the slop sites out of business, I'll accept the tradeoff.

The good should not be an excuse to introduce a bunch of bad, even if the good still outweighs it. The bad should be rigorously minimized. I am not against such cameras, under certain conditions:
1) Strict limitations on what they can be used for. That also sets limits on data retention and on who has access to it (absolutely no 3rd parties)
2) Audits and oversight of how the system is being used, with real consequences for violations. The benefits of each use case to be evaluated from time to time, insufficient benefit or too much opportunity for abuse means the system will no longer be used for that particular use case.
3) Ironclad security to ensure none of this data ever gets out.
And 0) Those limitations on use should be tested against a more fundamental set of (ethical) rules, to ensure that the use is not expanded from "protect the children" to "auto-fine jaywalkers".

Only problem is that I wouldn't trust most governments to get any of these points right.

"Needs more Excel training" should not be the answer to any problem.