There's also something wrong with the map alignment. I think the tiles are being rendered with the wrong placement - the underlying map doesn't match reality.
Mazda managed to avoid the touch screen plague until relatively recently. Their latest models seem to have adopted Android based infotainment with touchscreens though. I've got a CX-5 that's 3 years old and it's pleasingly touch screen free. Also the driver aids are mild and unintrusive.
Excluding whatever's going on in China right now, there's just not that many small brands left. You only have to have a passing interest in cars to be aware of pretty much every global car brand - excluding high end supercars, kit car weirdness and whatever mayhem is happening in China.
I recently upgraded to a car with CarPlay, and it's actually a worse user experience than just having my phone on a really solid Brodit phone holder.
For example - when using Google Maps on my phone I can pan around the map to look at nearby places really quickly - maybe while I'm stopped at traffic lights, and then reset back to the navigation. Spotify in CarPlay is really hard to use - much harder than the normal app. Whether it plays the song you want seems to be a game of chance.
I've spoken to a lot of people outside of software development who feel this way. It's mainly a sense of "what is this for?". It's obvious that the presence of AI means everyone has to use it, but it isn't obvious yet exactly what good it will bring to most people.
Certainly in my own life it's made some things easier. But that just means I move on to the next thing quicker - the treadmill never stops. Does AI improve my life yet? I'm not so certain. It also has huge environmental costs, pushes up energy prices, pushes up computing hardware prices and sucks attention away from other things.
Is it cool? Yes. Is it likely to be society changing. Yes. Does it make anyone's lives better? TBC.
The whole TLD is blocked by my work firewall. I imagine you don't get complaints because the few people who are blocked just don't know what you do. How would they even complain if they can't access your website?
The problem I've found is that enough people don't feel strongly about it.
I've had plenty of conversations recently where people say "yeah, but social media is harming kids. Banning it is good". People broadly see the headline "think of the children" and think, "yup, let's protect children".
To me, there's all sorts of downsides - the death of small discussion forums, pushing interesting online experiences out of the reach of teenagers, the creeping surveillance and, worst of all, the complete end of the open internet (when inevitably it doesn't actually work). But most non-tech people just don't see that.
The currently in place age verificaton system is a joke. It's trivial to circumvent them - not just via VPN, but also because there's countless websites that just don't care. The social media ban will bring more of the same - and then they'll have to ban VPNs and bring in website firewalls.
Who wins? The established tech companies, who have big enough legal departments to comply with increasing red tape. How is a new social network going to legitimately compete with Facebook now?
But when I say all this to people I know, they just don't see it. Most people are not tech people.
If you're being detained for the rest of your life while your money languishes in a hole in Timbuktu, it has been taken from you. Money is only valuable because it has utility. If you can't use it, it's not yours.
> From perspective of your tenants, that money still goes into a void, no matter how nice you are.
Surely that's the case for all sorts of services we pay for. Renting a house is paying for a service. The money disappears and in return you get the service. A nice landlord (and by nice I mean - responsive to problems, following laws, empathetic to the tenant, trusting of the tenant etc) provides a better service than a bad one. Unfortunately you rarely know which kind of landlord you have until you move in.
I think it's fair to say that there are bad landlords, and that there are circumstances where landlords are exploitative. But that doesn't change the fact there are also circumstances where landlords provide a useful service to people. Buying a house isn't always practical - landlords should exist to provide a service to people who don't want long term financial commitments.
There must be 10s of millions of x86 PCs with unlocked bioses in the UK. The issue won't be running an open device. The problem is software - what does someone running Linux do if the government mandates online services require proprietary attestation APIs?
It's scary how quickly the banning is moving. The problem is what happens next. When they realise that banning things doesn't really work. The next logical step is severely limiting internet traffic.
In the short term, compute becomes an appreciating asset.
In the medium term, everyone ramps up production. Huawei and other Chinese companies work really hard to develop in-house alternatives. At some point, the hype cycle will peak and less money will flow into datacentres (yes, this will happen. It always does. Even for technologies that change society. The bubble always bursts).
The question is not if this will happen. It will happen. It's just a question of when it happens and how big the magnitude of the cycle is.
This is such a misuse of the word poor. Have you actually been to a poor country?
The UK is poorer than the US - sure. But it's wealthier than most other countries in the world. Not just in terms of GDP per capita or average household wealth, but also in infrastructure terms - the cumulative effect of being a wealthy industrialised country for so long is a huge amount of infrastructure.
I think it's fair to say that UK wealth growth has slowed at the same time as many other countries have caught up. So the UK is no longer the leader it once was. But that's very different from saying it's a poor country. It's just not.
I think GDP per capita can also be misleading though - the GDP per capita of Luxembourg or Brunei is high, but they're such small countries that it's kind of irrelevant.
Setting aside the special cases (tiny, oil money, weird finance sectors, tax havens etc) there's basically a handful of countries which are clearly doing something right - the US, Taiwan, the north-eastern European countries (Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden). Most of the other "developed countries" are sitting in the same sort of GDP per capita range of $65-$75k. Ranking these isn't so meaningful - the difference between the UK and France is only 1.5%.
In peak covid video chat time I had a call with someone with a Portal connected to their TV. It was so much better than laptops and webcams for family videocalling. I would have bought one immediately had it not been a Meta product.
It's disappointing that 6 years later there's still no solution. The window has passed for my kids - but it would have been really nice to be able to have large format TV based video calls with the grandparents. I tried to set something up with a laptop, but it was always too janky and fiddly to work well.
I'm not convinced by this. I've had good managers and bad managers. Generally the manager isn't "doing the work", so much as setting the direction and smoothing the path. The current state of AI tools still need "good managers" to set the direction, otherwise they end up nowhere. Especially in large complex projects.
Maybe at some point the AI tooling will be good enough for me to say "do my work for me today" and sit back. At that point, yes, I am irrelevant and could be replaced by anyone else. But is it anywhere close to that right now? My experience says no.
Perhaps the current models are capable of that with the right tooling - some system to define clear goals and stick to them. I haven't seen evidence of that yet though. Have other people?
I quit AI Pro earlier this year for the same reason. I went to use it one day (I don't think I'd even used it much in the preceding week) and found that my limits had been reduced overnight and my usage was already too high. I had something like a 7 day wait until it reset.
I get you have to change limits, but reducing limits in a way which both applies retroactively and has a really long reset period is just infuriating. If they'd applied the new limits more gently or at the next billing period I'd probably have continued paying.
I don't mind paying a fair price for a service that provides value, but I really hate having a service I think I'm paying for rug-pulled with no clear justification.
http://lrampen.com