I have a Model 3 at the moment. I’ve had it for almost 5 years and it’s generally been great - cheap to run, quiet and comfortable on longer trips but still fun to drive on back roads.

Recently it had its first major breakdown, and although Tesla service did manage to take care of it, it’s got me browsing for new EVs - but now, buying a Tesla is not the foregone conclusion it once might have been.

First, they have been making some truly stupid design choices in their latest facelifts (deleting the indicator stalks and gear selector).

Second, their CEO has now gone completely mask-off fascist.

Third - after a few years for the competition to catch up, we now have genuine alternatives from other marques which are just as good if not better EVs than Tesla’s offerings.

I think my next car will likely be a Polestar 2.

I decided to set up Fedora on my new laptop as it was either take a chance on that or spend like 3 hours debloating a Win11 install.

It’s been over 10 years since I last tried dailying Linux, we have come a long way in that time. Everything just worked out of the box. No fucking around needed.

Even relatively niche stuff like my thunderbolt dock and the laptop’s fingerprint sensor was picked up. And, thanks to the investment Valve has been putting into Wine and Proton, pretty much every game I’ve tried has worked with no issue.

Next time my desktop is due for a clean install I’ll definitely be doing the same there.

How often do you need to travel the entire range your car allows?

If you do need to drop everything and drive across country in an EV, you should be stopping at service stations to do short fast charge sessions anyway, as with modern fast chargers and battery tech you will typically go from something like 30% SoC to say 70% in only a few minutes. This saves a lot of time on longer trips.

If you are driving an EV by depleting the battery completely and then charging it back to 100% every time, you are doing it wrong.

Didn’t he become a Commodore, not an Admiral?

Por qué no los dos?

They do, but only in the front.

The only reason to use the button is that when you press it, it lowers the window slightly so that it clears the door trim when you open it (the windows are frameless).

Although, I don’t see why that couldn’t have been integrated into a single mechanism rather than having two separate controls for the same function.

Solution: don’t read that shitrag. It was always a waste of paper, now it is a waste of bandwidth as well.

Not exactly crazy but just mysterious…this was at a software company I worked at many years ago. It was one of the developers in the team adjacent to ours who I worked with occasionally - nice enough person, really friendly and helpful, everyone seemed to get on with them really well and generally seemed like a pretty competent developer. Nothing to suggest any kind of gross misconduct was happening.

Anyway, we all went off to get lunch one day and came back to an email that this person no longer worked at the company, effective immediately. Never saw them again.

No idea what went down - but the culture at that place actually became pretty toxic after a while, which led to a few people (including me) quitting - so maybe they dodged a bullet.

I’ve tried Copilot and to be honest, most of the time it’s a coin toss, even for short snippets. In one scenario it might try to autocomplete a unit test I’m writing and get it pretty much spot on, but it’s also equally likely to spit out complete garbage that won’t even compile, never mind being semantically correct.

To have any chance of producing decent output, even for quite simple tasks, you will need to give an LLM an extremely specific prompt, detailing the precise behaviour you want and what the code should do in each scenario, including failure cases (hmm…there used to be a term for this…)

Even then, there are no guarantees it won’t just spit out hallucinated nonsense. And for larger, enterprise scale applications? Forget it.

My daily driver is a pure EV, but while I was on holiday a few months ago I was driving a Yaris Hybrid as a rental (which to my understanding is basically a Prius drivetrain in a Yaris body).

Fuck me it was terrible. Every time I applied even mild acceleration it sounded like the valves were going to eject out of the engine, meanwhile it had about as much get up and go as a sedated elephant. 0-60 in four to six business days. On ramps were an interesting experience.

The only saving grace was that we only used about a third of a tank of gas during our week long trip.

I’ll stick with pure electric thanks. No complicated drivetrain with multiple systems to go wrong, no compromised performance, enough range to get me everywhere I need to go, and good enough charging infrastructure (at least in my country) to make longer journeys trivial.

Honestly, I am surprised it took them this long. This technology has existed for a while, there is even a standard for it (see: SCTE-35).

The harsh truth of the matter is that YouTube is a victim of its own success. The sheer scale of what is needed to keep the platform running at its current level of activity is something that I think most people don’t give a second thought to. It requires a truly astonishing amount of technical expertise, infrastructure, monitoring, throughput capacity, not to mention sheer compute and storage, to keep it running. And that is considering the technical side alone, never mind the business that has evolved around it

All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit. And so here we are.

There are niche alternatives like PeerTube, but in practice it is currently in no state to be a drop in replacement. If the fediverse had to deal with the amount of traffic and content from YouTube in its current state, it would collapse immediately. This won’t change until the user base begins to increase, but to do so requires an incentive for people to jump over. And sadly, far too many people just don’t care enough about avoiding ads to do so.

I think in the long term there will be a reckoning; no matter the size of your platform you are not invulnerable to change. Nobody back in the early 2010s could foresee Twitter falling from grace, and look how that turned out. YouTube will eventually die, the only question is who will be footing the bill for what replaces it.

In the meantime, if you’re unable or unwilling to deal with YouTube’s ads, or pay to skip them, then just don’t engage with the platform at all. Read a book. Touch some grass. They haven’t found a way to monetize that (yet).