I love you Angle-Westerns, you're all so obtuse!

(That made your whining sound particularly dumb.)

I've been driving EVs since I first got a used Tesla S (2014 P85D). I have a 2020 Chevy Bolt EV I use as my daily driver right now. I recently rented a 2025 Toyota Camry Hybrid, which seems to be in high demand and very highly rated/recommended out there.

My experience was ... disappointing. Now granted, it delivered on the fuel economy part. I drove it several hundred miles over a few days' time and when I went to refuel it before the rental return, it only needed 6 gallons of gas to fill it back up. But the whole driving experience felt like a big step back from any EV I'd driven. You had the constant sensation of a gas engine turning on and off at various times, and a constant reminder the battery pack in the vehicle was tiny and only a part of a more complicated system. (You could put the car in "EV mode" to make it drive only on battery, but it would only allow it at very low speeds, like driving around parking lots.) Ultimately, it was just a car lugging around all the things required for an internal combustion engine AND electric vehicle parts at the same time. Double the complexity and a rolling compromise. (Better interior than I'm used to seeing w/Toyota though.)

I'm kind of confused w/Honda. Their "EV strategy" seemed to me like it was basically about trying to sell that Prologue which was really a GM designed car getting rebranded as a Honda product + hand-waving that they'd do cooler stuff soon.

Truthfully? I think one of the big challenges with EVs across the board is trying to mask the high cost of the battery pack, motors and other electronics involved. You can "do it right" by not caring and slapping a high price tag on it. Then you get an EV that still maintains people's expectations for "fit and finish", a nice interior, and really good handling. The BMW i4 eDrive 40 is a great example here, or even the Porsche Taycan EV. But most people just want a cheap car that's reliable, avoids the need for gas fill-ups and oil changes, while still handling well and feeling like corners weren't cut on the build quality, interior and exterior. That doesn't really seem to be doable, yet? Tesla sure doesn't. They just design vehicles that few people think look great on the outside. but "wow" them with all the infotainment / computer capabilities on the inside. Keep the interior really bare-bones but put that big touch-screen front and center to distract them. Spend enough on the seats so they're really comfortable, but use a real basic "skateboard" suspension and frame across the whole product line. It goes fast enough in a straight line so they'll ignore other handling issues.

Don't get me wrong. I like Tesla vehicles. I'm just being real about what one is and isn't. I don't think an established brand like Honda is comfortable making all those compromises, and they're just not seeing a profit margin in converting what they build now into a full EV?

Amazon I.T. .... your ridiculous middle management and their obsession over metrics make stories like these pathetic, yet not unexpected at all.

I.T. is going down a spiral where management treats you like a "digital janitor". I'm old enough to remember this being a fairly respected career path. People in most offices had a combination of fear and awe of the "I.T. guys" because ultimately, there was a realization the entire business relied on the technology to survive. If the server or network went down, everything ground to a halt. You simply didn't treat the team poorly who held the keys to the kingdom.

It's a very different atmosphere today. Now, everyone's worried about how to cut costs and achieve the maximum return. I.T. may be critically important to a business's success, but nobody cares. There's the constant suggestion that AI is about to replace half of them anyway, and the trick is to wring every bit of productivity out of the existing staff until they quit. Then you just replace them and repeat.

If you're reading this and thinking, "It's not like that at all where I work!", congratulations! You're part of a diminishing bit of sanity out there. The last place I worked like that, though? The owner passed away and the company was sold, and it's no longer an exception to the rule.

The idea someone needs to micro manage their "knowledge workers" to the extent they keep tabs on how many feet their mouse has rolled each day? Well, that's plain insulting they'd even think it's sensible!

They never really talk about any of them except for the educational discount, to my knowledge? But for as long as I can remember, Apple also offered military discounts:

https://www.apple.com/shop/bro...

They also run government employee discounts, typically by way of special online stores you have to shop in. For example, Washington DC government workers can go here: https://dchr.dc.gov/page/apple...

I'd agree, except it really depends what you want to do in life. Where AI really does more damage than good is in the Fine Arts. So far, AI has "empowered" the stealing of original creative work by cartoonists, painters and paid photographers, to regurgitate it into "mash-ups" it pretends it came up with organically in response to requests to "draw me a ". It's, similarly, encouraged producing musical jingles and pieces that devalue real, human musicians as part of the process. (If you're a small business looking for a catchy jingle or theme to put in all your radio commercials today? Chances are you opt to save a little money by AI generating something up via a service like Suno, instead of hiring a professional musicians who writes them. That results in AI "synth singers" that all start to sound alike as you hear enough of the content, and to at least some extent? Music that sounds generic and canned, too, due to a limited number of drum riffs and fills, guitar licks and other details the AI uses repeatedly when instructed to play in specific genres.

Even if you believe this is just part of the transition of AI into something far better than it is today? You're just cheering on a world where it will become a special treat to pay premiums for a "real, human-crafted work", while the masses only consume AI art. That doesn't bode well for society in the future, if you ask me.

A stock kernel on an MRI machine?

No, I don't want that level of DIY on any equipment that is critical to anything.

Almost nobody runs stock kernels. Stock kernels are used by distributions to build their own kernels.

That MRI machine is running on a 1.2 kernel. Maybe 2.0. It's separated from the hospital network by a firewall.

If the MRI machine is getting attacked then a LOT has gone wrong already.

They got a bad rap because they put out garbage that failed and they left the customers deal with their garbage. It's not that something has a defect, it's how the manufacturer deals with it.

The F-150 is not a good example. My brother-in-law owned one because he had a friend that was a Ford mechanic and only paid for parts. He had a few recurring issues.

I don't get the "loyal customer" comment. Did Ford do something special for you or did Ford give you the product they advertised in exchange for your hard earned cash?

For me Ford represents the worst experience I've ever received from a car dealer and a manufacturer. They basically said the lemon is your problem. Never bought a Ford since.

I've owned European, Asian, and North American vehicles and have never had a another company abandon their product like Ford. For me a vehicle is a tool like a server, if it doesn't run and meet my needs then the warranty better be respected. Just imagine how you would be treated if your payment was defective.

Customers have met their obligations for years, where is the loyalty towards customers. All we seem to be receiving in return is enshitification.

I mean, most everyone's mad at Trump over implementing these tariffs (and rightfully so, IMO, if only because of how haphazardly it was implemented). But now, you've got companies demanding a refund when it was mostly the consumer who really paid them. (I didn't see many places eating the cost of the tariffs and holding prices where they were? If that had happened, the typical consumer wouldn't have cared so much about them.)

Knowing these companies have no plans to cut prices, it makes it sort of accurate for Trump to praise the ones who won't try to claw back the money. At least as additional revenue to the U.S. government, it technically goes towards servicing the national debt as opposed to tax increases.

Boom meet bust.

Agree with you completely. To me, the real conversation here is probably about whether or not AI has gotten far enough to do a viable simulation of consciousness.
I would be a little disturbed if Dawkins concluded Claude AI is truly "alive" from a few days of interacting with it ... but not sure that's what he's said?

At what point could an AI be treated like a "friend" despite it just being computer software? And by treating an AI as conscious, perhaps it's only a suggestion that interactions with it stay parallel with the ones we'd have with humans. (If nothing else, an AI that adapts and learns partially based on what's typed to it in conversations would suffer from "garbage in, garbage out" if people kept telling it ridiculous things they'd never say to other people.)

Which is a bit crazy since the llm probably trained on the open source code to begin with

"Hey, what's the big deal? We used to append 'P.S. I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail' to every outgoing email way back in the day, and no one ever had a problem with that..."