Chevrolet stopped providing (selling) updates to my 2016 Colorado's nav system, so I bought a Garmin standalone unit for maps and just use the colorado screen to connect speakers to my phone and stream.

If it ever started doing that ad thing (not likely since they aren't doing updates on my truck) I'd rip out the built in and put in a third party unit.

Honestly, part of me wants to go in and rip out the OnStar box so they don't decide to monetize my driving telemetry without my consent. (they charge too much for the onstar crap)

Just for context, when its predecessor RIPA, Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, came in it was said to be used only for cases such as terrorism etc.. Instead, it was found that councils started using to check people were putting things in the right rubbish bins for collection.

Robust safeguards indeed.

I've honestly no idea if it's possible, but if they could find a way to get Steam Input into there or the equivalent of their own then I could use it. I have an original Steam Controller, you used to be able to use it on non-Steam games but for a few releases now Steam took that ability away. Some way of emulating or creating an alternative to Steam Input would be superb.

"AI safety experts said the new disclosures paint a portrait of a group of cutting-edge labs whose ability to develop dangerous autonomous hacking agents outstrips their ability to keep them under control."

No, it paints a picture of incompetents who don't know how to air-gap. Cutting edge? Lab agents: "Please hack this thing". LLM: "I have hacked this thing". Lab agents: "OMG. Sentience!".

If it's drawing on training data that has humans talking about, lets take a recent example, model x on Hugging Face being a good way to break a boundary and its been told it break boundaries then of course it's going to go to Hugging Face and talk to model x. This isn't unpredictable.

Although, from my two second check just now, Venus is technically considered within the Goldilocks zone for this solar system it is right on the very inner edge of it. This finding differs from Venus in that respect, making it more interesting as a possibility.

All highly speculative of course, but to be fair that's exactly what the article says. Atmosphere detected, everything else speculative.

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.

Also, the majority of us (in said minority) are probably running ad / tracking blockers (I run uBlock Origin on Waterfox with NoScript - which probably makes it easy to fingerprint me .. if not precisely, then as someone who is not going to watch/see their ads).

So yeah it would need to be a nonprofit or a paid engine.

I really liked the idea of Kagi but their reliance on Yandex (Russian owned /operated engine which Putin has had increasing say over since 2019)

I mean, I think somewhere there are projects that have made their crawler result set available - maybe there's room for a nonprofit to build a better interface / search on one of those?

I dunno, it's one thing to understand on a high level "we need a reliable up to date index, and then make a fair, transparent search system that implements a patent-free ranking algorithm (is Page rank up yet?) and just searches using provided keywords and respects 'exact quoted phrases', but it's quite another to build something that can keep that index updated, and that can handle queries at scale and not cost so much that its impossible to do without an advertising model.

Are we great again yet?

Ok Ok low effort reply there but truthfully this is a direct example of brain drain due to an administration that is downright hostile to science. We used to be the envy of the world in terms of our research institutions and science.

The more the nationalists try and keep others out and the more they make science into a political point the more folks are going to just give up on America.... and I don't blame them. If I had any "in" elsewhere (family history, available opportunity) I'd leave

Sorry in truth I really wish they hadn't made science and education and many peoples very humanity and human rights political...

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.

I'm ambivalent on this... On the one hand - google killing yet another thing they bought and then threw out after picking the parts

On the other hand, I can't stand emojis and pointless animated gifs.

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.