"Who would have thought that school buses would be turned into the mass surveillance state?,"

As soon as they heard about the cameras? EVERYBODY.

The original article was written with AI and it shows.

Side mirrors almost always leave a large blind spot directly behind and close to the vehicle. There's a reason that when firefighters are reversing their appliances they always have at least one of the crew physically get out and watch the area behind the vehicle.

Even a rear window and rear view mirror almost always leave a significant blind spot low and close behind the vehicle, which is why reversing cameras became a thing. When they're done well, they really are significantly safer, as well as sometimes making it a lot more reliable for most people to park the vehicle in difficult spaces.

One of the modern innovations I really would like to have is full AR on my windscreen. I want unexpected hazards highlighted in real time, particularly those that are more easily detectable by non-visual sensors, like big potholes or animals obscured by vegetation near the side of a country road. I want the actual driving line I need to take to follow my planned route through complex junctions overlaid slightly on my view of the road ahead. I want light amplification for night driving, ideally combined with some other technology that can reduce the glare from oncoming headlights to prevent dazzle.

Although I only want all of this if (a) it's implemented well and (b) any additional data it uses is reliably up-to-date and (c) there's an emergency shut-off that instantly clears everything off the windscreen in case anything goes wrong.

Don't worry. You probably have funky modern door handles that don't work when the power goes out anyway. Not that the power in an EV is likely to go out if it's underwater or on fire or anything.

Oh, don't be silly. Next you'll be making even more absurd claims, like that car theft was already a solved problem 20 years ago thanks to immobilisers, or that having separate physical controls for essential functions that you can find and use without taking your eyes off the road for several seconds to mess around with a touchscreen is safer, or that no-one ever hacked 100,000 cars at once from 1,000 miles away back when they didn't have always-on remote connectivity and allow OTA updates to their essential control systems.

Yes, as long as you're the one in the big, heavy car, it's great. Shame if you're the kid it's reversing over though.

Do you ever use reverse gear? What's behind you is pretty important when you're going backwards...

Yes, Apple's shared RAM model really works for them in the context of running LLMs locally. It's a huge advantage. As you say, not much use for those running other platforms, though.

I'm impressed that anyone can afford a new development PC in 2026. I'd need a second mortgage with the price of the RAM, SSD and GPU these days!

The US tends to import heavy sour crude and export light sweet crude. We have the refining capacity for heavy sour, which is more capital and energy intensive, so that works out economically. We have extra heavy refining capacity now because in January Dos Bocas went on line in Mexico, so Mexico can now refine more heavy and export more lucrative refined products. Fortunately for US refiners, we also got a new source of crude (very heavy and sour) when we "liberated" Venezuela.

In general, the heavier and more sour the crude, the harder it is to refine; if the US suddenly had an excess of light sweet and a shortage of heavy sour, US refineries could still handle it.

And not sell any routers because to have a sufficiently American supply chain they'd cost 4-10x as much and be unavailable in quantity (the domestic suppliers for the relevant components are pretty low-volume because they only exist to support the military)

Existing router manufacturers will get exemptions, which will prevent them from challenging the law in court. Would-be newcomers will not get exemptions and thus be out of luck, because they won't have the resources to challenge the law.

And when those quotas aren't met, standards are lowered to magically make more people qualify that otherwise wouldn't.

The FAA didn't even stop there. They made a "biographical questionnaire" which had no objectively correct answers, and then handed out the answers they wanted to the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE) to be passed on to black candidates.