even though I do not trust self driving cars at this point in time, i would much rather trust literally every other manufacturer’s version of self driving tech except tesler.

and good luck getting those regs passed with this congress and this administration. it’s likely never going to happen unless the auto industry demands them.

are animated lights cool? debatable. in my opinion, kinda.

are animated lights practical? no. I actually think they’re more of a distraction. I need several use cases of where animated lights other than at car start up play an actual useful role in operating the vehicle.

car companies are going away from the practical and into the cool factor and I don’t think it’s a good thing. those huge car fins on caddys looked cool but provided absolutely no practical functionality (I even believe that studies showed it made them less safe. disclosure: I’m pulling this out of my rear end but I think it’s true).

oh I agree. the thing is elon has explicitly said that he doesn’t want a bunch of knobs in his cars and they should only have a central control screen to run everything. even the backup shift device is a touch sensor somewhere around the rear view iirc (never driven one nor do I want to). I essence, an entire continent is telling one company explicitly that your cars are not the safest on the road no matter what you claim. that’s going to be a massive hit on the company’s reputation and value and it couldn’t happen to a more deserving induhvidual.

sounds like europe is really sending a very loud, deafining FUCK YOU to elon and tesla.

and I am absolutely here for it.

especially if you don’t have an iphone. I have seen so many accessories and apps that were made for use on iphones which would also be useful for android devices as well. my transplant clinic has a patient portal that has an app for iphones but nothing for android so you have to use their website.

anyone with a tenth of a percentage of business sense could tell you a business that produces nothing but eyeballs to advertisers will be a massive failure if said business does anything to piss the owners of said eyeballs off.

and experts are confused why traded-on-the-markets social media companies are in freefall.

never used it in any practical function. i tested it to see if it was realistic and i found it extremely wanting. as in, it sounded nothing like the prompts i gave it.

the absolutely galling and frightening part is that the tech companies think that this is the next big innovation they should be pursuing and have given up on innovating anyplace else. it was obvious to me when i saw that they all are pushing ai shit on me with everything from keyboards to search results. i only use voice commands to do simple things and it works just about half the time, and ai is built on the back of that which is why i really do not ever use voice commands for anything anymore.

I’m glad for them.

they don’t make electric vehicles. they make human sized battery powered over engineered poorly designed toys that were somehow street legal.

is there anything android auto compatible?

i think when they rebranded as alphabet, they repealed that corporate philosophy.

i would much rather have a chinese ev with that long range battery tech and framework than an american car company’s ev option not including tesla which i don’t even consider a car company. they’re a shit tech company that makes shit cars shittily.

this is another reason why I hate apple. other tech companies would rather follow apple than forge their own design path.

I also hate the tech reviewers who reinforce the belief of apple design superiority that pushes this false belief that encourages those bad design changes.

let’s hope so.

somebody used my email address to order stuff from temu. the only reason I know about this is because paypal sent me a notice saying they were tracking my order.

fortunately for me, my paypal information (other than my email) wasn’t breached. after I notified paypal they told me they would monitor my account for suspicious activity and they hadn’t noticed any. and as it turns out neither was my email. I’ve got 2fa turned on and never got a suspicious notification.

if it’s that easy to use any email to order stuff these companies are showing they have no security and need to go.

I honestly don’t think twitter will ever go away until all of a majority of all major sports teams and leagues, a majority of legislative body members, and major news and wire services have a sustained and active presence on bsky. it right now is literally coasting on everything that made it useful pre 2022 and every stupid fucking thing elon has done to make the twitter experience worse hasn’t done enough to cause a critical mass of people to jump.

once you see major popular twitter accounts like rex chapman, mark hamill, taylor swift and the like (and I say this not because of their politics but because of their massive follower base) regularly post on bsky you can probably start closing the book on twitter.

i had to login for some functions at work. i believe the minimums were 8 characters, 1 caapitol, 1 number. and we all hated it, because the passwords had to be changed every 90 days, and you couldn’t reuse passwords. eventually you are going to run out of things you can reasonably use that you could remember and then would be forced to use some sort of password manager. but OOPSIE you couldn’t install any software on the office computer so you would have to resort to writing them down somewhere. it was a mess.

fortunately corporate decided to just change the entire system adopting most of these rules, min 15 characters, no special character, no hints, no forced changing passwords unless you think you have been compromised or just want to change it. we do have to use 2fa to access some things if you aren’t sitting at the office computer but other than that people are much happier about passwords now.

there are too many points of failure for me to ever be comfortable using the cloud as a primary storage option.

i’ve always maintained this opinion when “the cloud” started being touted as being the future. and yet more corporations (including mine) are reliant on it. i mean sure, i can log in on my home computer and have some access to stuff as though i were physically at the office but that convenience ain’t worth the headache if the main storage site crashes.

who else but a genius would buy a social media company, remove the things that made it functional and useful, reintegrate and allow to overpopulate elements that made it worse, and destroy a multi-billion dollar icon and name render useless a word that the thing you bought created and is universally understood because he thinks calling stuff X is cool?

not only a genius but ta soooper genius.

I wouldn’t buy one. good job. elon destroying your brand name.

there’s a lesson that I learned in college that I still follow today: never eat lunch at lunchtime. unless I’m traveling I’m not eating at peak periods anyway so I really wouldn’t be affected by this pricing change.

I still don’t like it though. unless that wendy’s is the only game in town (literally) this isn’t going to be good for business.