You truly are just endlessly a prick. You give yourself these ridiculous airs and graces as though you are fearlessly telling truth to power, when in reality you’re being a cock on the internet telling someone they use Apple Maps to get to the shops because they say they use the service in their home country. This isn’t bravery, it’s stupidity. And it’s even more stupid that you pretend that you were saying something dispassionate, when it’s patently obvious you were attempting some sort of idiotic insult along the lines of my being too dumb to get to the shops without the help of Apple Maps. So you can get fucked good and hard by the moral horse you’re trying to ride in on.

I didn’t accuse you of insulting people, I said you were being a dick.

And for someone who claims to notice everything, you seemed not to notice that “living in the UK and using Apple Maps” is not functionally equivalent to “using Apple Maps to go the shops”.

I have met plenty of people who are dicks and plenty of people who are not. I’ve met plenty of people with autism and plenty of people without autism. These are orthogonal categories. You may or may not be in the person-with-autism column of the matrix, I couldn’t possibly comment. But you’re definitely in the person-who-acts-like-a-dick row of the matrix. At least here on Slashdot.

You really never miss an opportunity to be a dick. Funnily enough, the UK has quite a lot of places within it, and I don’t know them all, and I travel around enough within it that a map is helpful. I don’t use a map to go to the fucking shops, you nugget. I use it to go to a climbing festival in Sheffield or drop my daughter at a summer school in Dorset, etc.

I live in the UK and spend most of my time here. It is good in the UK, where, to repeat, I spend most of my time. Sometimes I travel and then it is not good, but because I spend most of my time in the UK, which I will mention again to see if it sinks in this time, I don’t experience the problems of Apple Maps most of the time and only experience the ways in which it is good. I said all this quite clearly the first time, I don’t know why you feel the need for wilful editorialising that is clearly not in accord with what I intended. You are just such an endlessly pointless dickhead about this kind of thing. I don’t know what psychological purpose it serves for you, but it’s very fucking irritating for the people you interact with.

My experience has been that Apple Maps is pretty reliable in the UK, and I value the integrations eg with my calendar so that it will auto-suggest a destination. It's less good, though, when I need it most, eg when visiting another country where Apple has just not been able to map with the same degree of accuracy. I'm just back from Bogota, and the issue remains as always that Apple Maps doesn't have the same reliability when you plug in a destination eg a restaurant or shop. It may or may not have been added to the database with the correct name. Google Maps doesn't have this issue, but the interface on iOS devices is horrible.

”though [Trump’s] public statements and policies [on AI] appear to change week by week”

They don’t appear to change. That would imply the policy is set as A. Then changes to B. Then to C. That is not what happens. It’s just the dodderings of an idiot who hasn’t the first fucking clue but thinks he has. It’s not policy and it’s not statements he makes. It’s drivel, no more and no less, and should be treated with the contempt it deserves.

they can sell it to the White House team

the evidence suggests that the Peltzman effect partially offsets the benefits of some ADAS systems, but nowhere near enough to cancel them out entirely. The strongest evidence points towards a modest reduction in net benefit, with the size of the offset varying enormously by the type of ADAS involved.

For several major ADAS features, there is strong evidence of substantial net safety benefits, not least from insurers’ claims data, which find reductions in crashes of around 10–50% depending on the system. If risk compensation were fully cancelling benefits, these reductions would not appear in real-world claims data.

Maybe it will be more of an issue with more advanced systems eg levels of autonomy. But maybe not, because a large fraction of active human errors will be eliminated. The issue is that while the number of errors removed by automation is very large, and the number of new errors introduced is much smaller, the introduced errors may be disproportionately severe and attract considerable attention because they are novel and often surprising. But the empirical equation that matters is Net risk = Human errors removed - Automation-induced errors added, with all errors weighted for severity.

Most people substantially over-estimate their own driving abilities. The more that cars help them and the less humans alone are making all the decisions, the better.

Buses are fantastic, when done well. In London, they’re done very well and they’re excellent. Clean, quiet, calm, and there’s still no pleasure quite like being at the front on the top deck of a double-decker, especially now so many routes are now served by EVs and thus are smooth, free of vibration, air-conditioned, and quiet. I have a car, I walk, I take the tube, and I use the bus, depending on the circs. Multi-modal for the win. (I don’t use Lime bikes, but my son loves ‘em).

I’m in Bogota, Colombia at the moment, where almost all the Ubers are these tiny and tinny little stick shift econoboxes, typically at least 10 years old. The traffic is dense and stop-start, and there are hills everywhere, and being driven around in these things is just awful. It’s so herky-jerky and hard on my back and coccyx. They stall on the hills. The engine is screaming half the time. I’ve had the luck to be picked up by one EV in the time here, and my god, the relief for my poor old arse was quite literally palpable. This EV was definitely capable of jumping off the lights at warp speed, but the ample power and smooth acceleration meant the driver didn’t feel the need to do it, and when we hit traffic, it was so smooth by comparison. It was really quite striking. We got the hotel car from the airport on the first day, and that was a big automatic SUV of some sort, and it was pretty much a half-way house experience.

More than 35 years ago, well before the Internet, BBSes ruled.

One I was a pillar of was nothing but a wall where you would post anonymously (or not).
The software was written to verify the typing rate to make sure that no text was uploaded

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!

I wrote a special terminal program that would randomize the time between characters to foil that BBS's rejection of uploads...

(Oh, it worked, and the dude running the show never found out).

Cuba has a mix of domestic, institutional and national level installations, same as everywhere else, as I mentioned above. Why would you think it would be otherwise?

But not as fast as I'd have imagined, tbh. 1GW added in 2025, which took renewables from 3 to 10% of Cuba's energy mix. I'd have imagined they'd have put in more like 5GW by now, but I guess they really are pretty small and poor, so it's tough for them to finance, whether at individual, institutional or national scale.

I found both of these articles quite interesting:
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/0...

https://www.aljazeera.com/feat...

OK, but those are all ancillary and not core. You implied core capability in your original phrasing: “ software does need to be updated because most EVs use connected car features and software for DC fast charging. Your EV may work fine in 15 years, but it may not support certain DC fast chargers“

Some (relatively minor) features may stop working, but you’ll still be able to charge 15 years from now.