Should be two pronged - tariffs on cloud and other services while fostering competitive local alternatives. While it’s possible knock up a cloud out of anything there is nothing in Europe as coherent as the offerings by Amazon, Google or Microsoft. And there should be.

And you thought Alex Garland’s Civil War movie was fiction.

If you need to use AI, be aware that there are MANY free models and training options. No reason to be locked into proprietary service.

Stick to the showrooms and dealers. The victims in Las Vegas was just owners who brought their cars in to be fixed.

I do not believe for a second that communications within the Whitehouse are inadequate, or if they were, could not be solved in a secure manner. Slapping a Starlink in a few places sounds like an invitation to backdoor all communications. Not only that, it is an invitation to sidestep obligations to preserve government records.

Tesla doesn’t have that excuse. The original Roadster, Model S and Model X all had fairly conventional controls. They deliberately undermined the safety of their vehicles over time by aggressively removing physical controls in the model 3 and Y and revamped S. It probably saved them a few bucks, but at the cost increased risk to human life. If they get penalized in safety tests for their penny pinching then so be it.

I think Euro NCAP ratings would have more teeth if it was mandatory for manufacturers of standard passenger vehicles to submit a reference model for testing. Voluntary testing doesn’t work since manufacturers would be averse to submit cars for testing if they thought they’d get a bad score. And while Euro NCAP does sometimes buy cars for testing, they don’t do it for every make and model.

And if the cheapest dogshit cars on the road (Kia Picantos, Dacia Sandero’s etc) can have buttons, dials, wipers and indicators then so should everything above it. Companies like Tesla remove controls to cheap out on having to make a part, but they attempt to pass this off as innovation when it puts people’s lives at risk.

Maybe it will, but for the time being it hasn’t. The experience is so vastly better than Twitter, that it’s a no brainer to jump over. It also helps to have a decent competing platform that people like to suck users and influence away from the platform that Musk turned into a cesspit.

Bluesky is like Twitter but with about 1/10th the idiots, and no mechanism that the idiots can elevate their racist, moronic hot takes above other comments.

I certainly find it funny that Tesla’s waiting list went from five years down to zero. Even Tesla’s biggest fans who actually stumped money on this thing produced video after video griping about its price & brokenness.

But frankly it was kind of obvious from the get-go that it would be an expensive, uninsurable, lemony asshole death mobile. I wonder if the next time Tesla announces something and Musk spews lie after lie about it that people will start to cotton on that nothing he says can be taken at face value.

Democracies have to start making laws that stop assholes like Musk from interfering in their domestic politics - including and up to imposing heavy fines, service shutdown and personal criminal liability. If a person is not a national and domiciled in that country they should have no right to influence that election through campaign contributions or any other assistance.

USB C cables have been all over the shop since the beginning, and chargers. I remember even 5 years back the problems they had. Part of that is the cables and chargers are “active” in the sense they negotiate charge rates and other functionality between either end and if one end is dumb or doesn’t respond properly you get the 5V 2A default. On the other hand if you have a USB C 4.0 lightning cable and two compliant devices then potentially you could be powering 2 monitors, keyboard, mouse, wifi, a graphics card even AND charging through one cable. It’s actually incredible when it works properly.

While this is good news, the likes of Apple will still find ways to be “compliant” while still being total assholes about it. e.g. the device might charge with USB C but they’ll gimp the data transfer rates on non-pro phones. And they’ll do the same when mandates about repairability come in - all of a sudden the battery will have a bunch of expensive DRM’d up the ass circuitry attached to it that will cripple the phone if its not recognized or registered by one of their techs and means Apple can kill old phones by being “out of stock” of the battery.

And they still are. Toyota and Honda in particular have been spent billions on FUD and harebrained hydrogen projects and then wondering why China is eating their lunch. Meanwhile the doors are closing for non-EV manufacturers in markets which are going all electric coming up to 2030. Japan’s auto industry will probably survive in some form but there could be a lot of casualties.

RFK jr is going to kill and cripple a lot more kids if he gets the chance to. He’ll make pretend polio / measles is eradicated and then somebody will get on a plane where there are cases, and it will spread amongst the unvaxxed and kids will die. When this happens he should be charged with negligent homicide but I doubt that will happen.

If you don’t use Twitter then I don’t see any reason to try Bluesky since it could basically be described as classic Twitter. But if you liked Twitter until it because a cesspit of far right shitheads, crypto bros, bots, and ads then give Bluesky a go.

Over a million people joined Bluesky after the election and seem to be using it. Also a lot of news & media companies have moved over too. So I would assume that at least that many users have disappeared from X or their activity has diminished. On top of that all the bots have gone home now the election is over so the amount of activity must have suffered. And Bluesky is basically old Twitter so people are settling into it and liking it.

I would advise anyone who still using X to give it a try. And if they want to use X for whatever reason - uninstall the app, install Control Panel for Twitter into their mobile browser and browse that for a relatively bullshit free experience - no ads, no algorithmic lists, just what you subscribe to.

People pay YouTube instead of using an adblocker?

The US and Europe has become acutely aware that too much semi-conductor manufacturing has been outsourced to China and other Asian nations and they’re trying to build some back domestically. So that’s the geopolitical reason for it.

Personally I’ve never left Firefox. Used to develop on it when it was still called Mozilla, and I’m happy it’s still around. Privacy is a major strength of it compared to other browsers.