You'd think they would be useful in snow, but my 2025 BRZ's traction control will reduce power to the point that the car stalls out instead of letting the damn wheels spin in 2nd gear so I can make it up a snowy hill. (Thank God the car has track mode which disables all the nanny devices, but still, most cars don't have that mode).

I say this with the utmost respect. If you think that having to care about what gear you are in is too much for an already 'dynamic environment', for everyone's safety, especially your own, PLEASE stop driving.

You are at the edge of being overwhelmed as it is with your automatic vehicle by your own admission, any extra things you need to focus on, like the state of your engine's load, the gear you are in, and forecasting if you might need to downshift or upshift is a distraction, and not a feeling of being in control?

Either you haven't driven a manual car, or you haven't seen a good driver operate a manual transmission. There is no distraction from the road. The driver is literally in FULL control of the car without taking their eyes off the road. An automatic cannot tell you're about to take a right turn, it won't downshift and hold the gear throughout the turn, it will absolutely decide that engine load is low and upshift for fuel efficiency destabilizing the balance of the car for example. The solution, they added traction and stability control to compensate. You are not in full control of your vehicle if you're driving an automatic. Don't take my word for it, you have all the proof in your own experiences. Does your car stop accelerating the instant you let go of the gas pedal or does it keep accelearting for a moment, even though you've let up on the accelerator completely? That doesn't happen with a manual transmission.

But genuinely, if you feel having to take in any extra information while driving is a distraction, please reconsider continuing to get behind the wheel.

2: Safety features and self driving. Lane assist (for the most part), traffic jam assist, and park assist are all highly requested features that come to mind that simply cannot be offered with a manual transmission. Self drive is right out. Even emergency braking would be considerably tougher with a manual.

Sorry, you're quite wrong on that one. I also am in Canada and drive a Subaru, mine is a stick shift and a sports car, and it's riddled with this safety/nanny system crap. Automatic emergency braking? Yup! It'll stall the car when it activates unless you have lighting fast reflexes and manage to depress the clutch nearly instantly. Lane Keep assist? Yup. Adaptive cruise control? Yup! And if you're not paying attention and fail to downshift as it slows down, it'll happily stall the car for you, automatically. Also, traction control? You better believe that if you're trying to start the car in 2nd gear to get out of a bit of snow, the traction control system will cut engine power so much it'll auto-stall your car for you.

So yeah, safety features are jammed/shoved into the manual cars as well. But they are idiotic and wouldn't be needed if people actually drove their car instead of sat in the car pressing the gas pedal while doom scrolling on their phones. It's almost like having to shift gears, and pay attention to the car's behaviour and revs, traction, etc. keeps most people off their phones when driving stick. (Sadly I say most as I have seen the incredible lengths to which some idiots go to in order to use their phone while driving a stick shift.)

That's horrifying. I'm glad my kids are almost out of school if that's what's coming.

I love scapegoating individual developers as much as the next guy, but if you take a look at the Win32 API, you'll find loads of fun "features" such as:

- Every single function that takes a string has two implementations: one that ends with the letter A (and takes its strings as ASCII) and one that ends with the letter W (and takes its strings as UCS-16). And then it has a preprocessor-define (with no suffix) that gets expanded to either one implementation or the other, based on your compiler settings.

- windows.h defines preprocessor-tokens for min() and max(), which means any C++ program that ever calls std::min() or std::max() will error out with a very strange compile-time error, if it included windows.h first; the work-around is to define NOMINMAX first to prevent windows.h from polluting the namespace.

- Modern windows is perfectly capable of arbitrary-length file-paths, but ships by default with a 260-character filepath limit anyway, "to preserve backwards compatibility with older software that expects that limitation to be enforced". To get correct behavior you have to hand-modify your registry; otherwise you find out about this limitation when you go to unzip a .zip file and the unzip mysteriously fails even though the .zip file is valid.

These are all defects that other OS's simply don't suffer from, either because the other OS's were designed correctly from the beginning, or because the people in charge of the other OS's long ago took the hit (in short-term breakage) and fixed the problems rather than letting them linger forever to preserve backwards compatibility.

All Windows developers (good and bad) have to deal with these issues, probably forever, and every line of code they add to work around these problems has to be supported and debugged and tested as well, hence the damage compounds.

Before Trump, it was a cultural norm that a President of the United States was expected to follow ethical and moral guidelines as well as laws; not only because anything less would be dishonorable and a disservice to his country, but also because otherwise he would pay a steep political price for his unethical behavior. Trump's most significant political innovation has taken the form of figuring out how to convince a plurality of the American public that the only real standard for Presidential behavior is "whatever you can get away with".

Imagine it's ten years from now, and for $199 anyone can buy an in-home UPS from Home Depot with enough capacity to keep their lights on and their ice cream frozen for 48 hours. Once most houses have one of those, most power outages become more of a minor nuisance than a significant problem.

Part of it may be a dysfunctional corporate culture, but a lot of it is a consequence of Microsoft's business decision to maintain backwards compatibility at all costs. When you're committed to retaining every design mistake, forever, the complexity of the codebase just keeps rising, which means that less and less of it can fit into anyone's mind at one time, which means more mistakes are made going forward, and the technical debt just keeps compounding.

LG hasn't made phones in years.

Will it have a Genuine People Personality? Perhaps a cheerful and sunny disposition?

Intel had no problem selling StrongARM and its Intel-developed successor Xscale. It powered a whole generation of PDAs, palmtops, etc. They sold off their ARM IP to concentrate on x86. We got to see how well that worked out with Atom.

Perhaps the real problem is that there is simply no reliable way to tell a real human's post from a generative AI's post anymore, since by the AIs are trained on the posts of real humans and are asymptotically becoming indistinguishable from them. You certainly can't simply go by post-quality, since the some of the smarter bots are better posters than some of the, err, less-well-informed humans.

Because of that, it's hard to feel good about putting any real effort into a social media conversation, because in the back of your mind you're always wondering: am I engaged in any kind of constructive activity here, or am I just unknowingly humping a rubber doll that Zuckerberg (or somebody) has provided for my amusement?

A Dyson sphere would have significant environmental effects too, and it's equally likely to be built.

For what its worth, people TALk a lot of sh$t here but our murder and crime rates are actuallly pretty low.

US intentional homicide rate is 5.763 per 100,000 population. That's considerably higher than the wild west known as the Philippines at 4.348, and Liberia at 3.087. It's more than five times Scotland at 1.038, Germany at 0.911 and Australia at 0.854. It's over ten times Northern Ireland at 0.521, and twenty times Japan at 0.229. US murder and crime rates are not low.

As a visitor, I've had random Americans yell death threats at me on the street. Never had that happen living or working as a foreigner in China. Do you have any actual experience or are you just parroting the domestic propaganda you've been brought up on?