Years back I was interviewing people for a coding position. We went through the standard tech stuff and then did a bit of project to see how they thought. We said (this is circa 2009'ish I think) - imagine you're on a team creating a new phone. You don't have time to test all the functions, so which would be your top two functions to ensure working?

All a bit Kobayashi Maru - obviously you can't release a phone testing only two functions, but we wanted to see what they'd prioritise. The very best answer we received was this one: "I would make sure it has the ability to call emergency services." Their thinking was that this was likely the most critical feature of a phone for both a user, and also for the manufacturer to avoid being sued. Absolutely great answer.

And yet here we are, with the post above. Taking the thinking of this interviewee - the ability to work with emergency services is important for general society, for the user of the vehicle (so they don't get in trouble) and for the manufacture of the vehicle (so they don't get fined/sued/both). Absolutely critical.

Likely bots.

The tyre burst annoys me. The Air France Concordes didn't have the same safety features as the British Airways one - specifically, the BA ones had guards against burst tyres.

Virgin Airways wanted to buy the BA planes to keep them flying and offered to, but BA just didn't want to give them a public relations win so refused to sell. Shambles all round.

Another ancient here - I still try to convince the admins to give me my first account back, this one - number 13802. The place both has and has not changed - it always had its share of ranting, but people do seem to knee-jerk more negatively to developments than in ye olden days.

Note that I created my account, saw that nearly 14,000 people were here and thought "what's the point? Who will ever possibly hear me in a place with 14,000 people?". Now of course, you can get ten times that for a picture of a dog's nose.

Surely the Commodore Callback will come to save us. Surely. Any moment now. Phone of the moment.

Similar to phones though, you don't have to buy every 18 months. The one thing it might do though is affect second hand prices more, which is likely a good thing for affordability.

Yes, often as a first step to legislation. In the sense that "we tried to let you self-regulate, you didn't, and so...".

I'm speaking here about EU and UK politics, can't speak for the US. It's actually quite usual to do it this way.

People should watch Dark Star. "How do I know you are not false data?" "Doesn't matter, the concept is valid no matter where it originated from".

Anecdote only from me of course.but for what it's worth...I'm left-handed. Subconsciously I consider left = "towards what I know" and right = "going further out". This applies to walking, driving...all of it.

I know it's not actually true of course, but if faced with an unfamiliar t-junction while driving or perhaps I'm just out on a walk to get some distance in, that's how I think of it.

It's testable, I agree. However as a left-handed person where my dominant side is the left...I always go left if I can.

Interestingly, though admittedly this is purely my anecdote so take this as such, this translates to driving too. Unknown place, just driving for fun, reach a t-junction and have to choose? To me left = "towards where you know" and right = "going further out". Even if that's not actually the case, that's just how my mind sees it at first glance. Wonder if that's also looked at, and also if it's affected by location (I'm in the UK, so would drive on the left).

...and then the reveal that you can't have it unless you have an M3 chip or later, plus 12Gb of RAM. So that's all the new Neo owners out then isn't it - that's a serious miss.

That's actually not as far away from ours (UK) as I expected. I just did a rough calculation and I make it $8.43 here (converting £1.66 per litre into gallons and USD).

My EV I charge overnight and draw 22kWh per night given my commute, for 7p per kWh. My range is 90 miles, so a spot of converting tells me I pay $2.06 for 90 miles of range.

Seems ok to me.

I bought a Roland S-1 Tweak Synth this week. Absolutely lovely bit of kit, one of the best things Roland have done for a while. It's relevance to this conversation though is that it has a built-in, non-user replaceable battery and is charged by USB C.

I've kept my Roland synth from 1989, and there are people with synths much older than that. While never massively user-serviceable as a genre, this is the first time I can think of that there's a definite life span on these things. Just like a phone, eventually this battery is going to wear out and have severely reduced capacity. I have to imagine that, as with vintage synths or older phones, someone will probably start a service for replacing the battery but wouldn't it be nice if they didn't have to and the design had been thought of in advance?

Yep, was more thinking of the "people using wired don't care about the DAC" part than the actual machines we're talking about.

Quite the opposite. A strong use-case for a jack is low-latency audio, and tht's the kind of thing used by people who use their machines for audio and music production. I'm a heavy user of Logic, and would absolutely not let wireless headphones anywhere near it.

For "people who don't care the DAC sucks", there's wireless. For people who do care about the DAC but only for listening to music or conversation etc., then wireless also exists. For those who care about both quality and latency, and that's really only for specific use cases these days, then wired is the way.