We came back from flying to visit family for Christmas one time and someone had left a light on in the car. The guys at the park and fly lot boosted it for us but my father was concerned that the battery had frozen and cracked. So we drove for a bit and he parked at an autoparts store that sold batteries before turning off the ignition. Unfortunately he'd had the window open because it was too cold for the defroster.

The battery had indeed cracked and was toast. Since the car was loaded with Christmas presents and it was a power window, someone had to stay outside. Since I was the same someone who had left the light on, that someone was me. Which was okay, except the store didn't have any charged batteries so I had to wait in the frozen car with a window open while they charged a new one.

We're all posh divas. I paid extra to get radar cruise control in my current car, which was well worth it. It also came with power (meh) heated (very nice, no more scraping) mirrors. I recognize that my fondness for my first few cars is nostalgia and that I wouldn't like them at all if I were driving them today.

You know, even if it works somewhat (which is doubtful), who is going to keep the AI updated when nobody gets to maintain and extend their own expertise?

Methinks we will see a number of really spectacular enterprise deaths and falls to irrelevance in the next few years, most with a clear trace to LLM use.

Yep. Nobody could have expected that, except everybody with a working mind. But these seem to be really rare on C-level ...

You are clearly too cheap at 4x.

1. You sure these are the same people? There are LOTS of people in the world, some people complain about spyware AND either don't carry a phone, or carry a dumbphone or run Graphene or something similar.

2. Online shopping and credit card usage can be limited; one can buy their laundry detergent on Amazon with an Amex and still pay for their kink toys in person with cash. One need not opt out of the surveillance tradeoff EVERYWHERE to still desire a means of making private purchases in certain cases.

3. Most of the surveillance done in a car is done after the car has been paid for by the user. Money has changed hands, but the OEM still seems entitled to sell data the driver generates. The selling of the data does not benefit the owner of the vehicle at all, only the person gathering and selling it. This is different than a payment processor or online merchant that provides a service that has some benefit to the user - access to goods not easily available through traditional retail or where retail purchase would involve prohibitive distance or transport requirements being some examples. In the case of credit card companies, yes, they most definitely make money off purchase data...but they also use it to combat fraud and mitigate liability, which cash simply doesn't make possible. And, in the case of smartphones, even stock ones, data harvesting is more selective, and the phone can be left home, while the car cannot. Yes, data is still harvested and used in ways that don't benefit the customer, granted...but it *does* provide a counterbalance that a remotely usable vehicle kill switch does not.

"But muh smartfownnn" is such a lazy and overly reductive argument against a very complex situation that has plenty of room for nuance and specifics.

And 70s safety, pedestrian or otherwise, isn't something to aspire to.

It's funny, you'd think things like that would scare the hell out of people. I learned to drive in a full size van and the tiny little windows so far back and giant blind spots scared me every time I had to back up. When I got a small car the visibility was amazing.

Is it, though? Serious question, I looked into this some time ago...and they make NO claims of this. They claim they don't have an infotainment system, fine...but that doesn't mean it lacks a GPS tracker, a "tattletale" connection that sends CANBUS/ODBII data back to a mothership somewhere, and/or a remotely accessible kill switch.

If you've got documentation that says that the Slate lacks these things SPECIFICALLY, I'd love to read about it...but when I looked, they made no claims of this and made no spectacle of it in their privacy policy...so 100% sincerely, if you've got a citation for this, I'd LOVE to read it.

You're correct about blinding, but you generally do need a controlled experiment to demonstrate causality. Sometimes that experiment can be natural, e.g. different regulations in countries or states that are otherwise similar.

There are lots of controlled experiments on pedestrian safety and vehicle design. It's part of European safety standards. It's been adopted by the American NHTSA this year, although they've mysteriously decided to use a pass/fail rating rather than their usual five stars.

This study doesn't establish that high hoods are dangerous for pedestrians. It estimates the impact of that already well-established factor in actual road casualties.

So...

1} Aside from some Teslas, there's nothing preventing an EV driver from getting out of a car that wouldn't also prevent an ICE driver.
2} Basically nobody extinguishes an ICE fire either.
3} ICE are more prone to burning than EVs are.
4} Just as EV SUVs exist, ICE sedans exist. The height of the hood isn't tied to powerplant.
5} Dashcams typically point out of the vehicle and rarely record audio (though many can).

I learned to drive in a full size van. The GP's instructor would have gotten me hilariously killed.

To be fair, there's (to my knowledge) no evidence that driving a larger vehicle causes distracted driving. While it's nice to imagine that's the case, it'd have to be studied. As much as I'd like to assume drivers of those massive vehicles are less attentive drivers, we don't know that's the case. Anecdotes don't count.

They should have required that drivers of commercial trucks require commercial licenses, commercial maintenance schedules and operator hours tracking.

Capitalist economies give us roughly 99.999% of memory today. What alternative source do you suggest to meet demand?