It’s a sign of how bad the situation is that we talk about car repairs in terms of hacking.

Documentation should be mandatory, and DRM on this stuff mostly forbidden.

For the FP4, I think I’m going to go for e/OS, because of the official Android Auto support. I want to degoogle, not root, and most other OSs require quite a bit of mess to get AA to work.

That may be ok for an Arduino, but for a car I’d really like to be able to get support, which may be tough with a smaller provider, unless they really use generic components and document their stuff decently, which I’d really have to be convinced about. And let’s not even get into the software support.

And I write this from my 2yo old Fairphone 4, which I plan to degoogle during the holidays, while I sit in front of my 7yo Thinkpad.

I use Arch BTW.

Edit: And my chinese vacuum cleaner runs Valetudo.

The Chinese ones tend to be less enshittified? Having just recently about how Xiaomi cars disable software updates if you change the headlights, allow me to doubt that.

Both have slightly narrower seats than a normal car

The Multipla’s seats are narrower than a normal car? Are you american?

have heating and are leather

I think the FRV was also a significant step up in price. That being said, I never understood what’s supposed to be good about leather seats.

Both are very car-like to drive

What else should they be like?

but the Honda has way better engines and better reliability.

The one I had was the natural gas version. It might as well have been on pedals. And the noise on the motorway, between the engine and the aerodynamics, was horrendous.That being said, we got 380000km over 19 years out of that one, so not too bad.

That said, getting parts for the FRV is a pain, because there weren’t many made and the wider body means that a surprising number aren’t shared with other Honda models if the same era.

Getting parts for the Multipla was pretty easy, despite the wider body most parts were somehow shared with much smaller cars, like the FIAT Brava.

It was the Honda HRV, and it couldn’t hold a candle to the Multipla.

The Multipla had 6 full size seats that could all comfortably hold adults, plus the backseats where individually removable. I loaded a couch sideways in that car. Absolutely brilliant.

The middle seats on the HRV were significantly smaller, no comparison in terms of usefulness and versatility.

a couple KDE tweaks even made PiP work fantastic

Tell me more

That wouldn’t be so bad per se… Many improvements in human conditions have been achieved by automating stuff and kicking people out. Think of the green revolution.

The problem is that the use case here is to massify the production of literal shit, like clickbaity articles on social media content, or ever larger volumes of advertisement. Those jobs don’t need to be replaced, they just need to go away for good.

Are we really going to use an AI to write motivation letters from a list of bullet points, to send it to an HR that will condense it into a list of bullet points using AI? Seriously?

Personally, I find myself in a bizarre situation.

I have some open source ““Ai”” solutions that I find really really nice and helpful e.g. the image search in Immich, or LanguageTool which bills itself as an AI spellchecker.

At the same time I am horrified at the stupidity underlying 99% of big tech AI stuff that gets wall street hot.

But… Isn’t that kind of the point? Slashing computational cost so that we can deploy that stuff wherever it’s needed without a tenfold increase in the world’s energy bill?

Whether we should do that at all is a very different question.

But that already happens all the time. Vedy often the rights end up in the hands of some corporation and the author gets to have ~zero say in how it’s used.

Doesn’t seem to have been a particularly big issue.

The whole “Apple products are great because they control both software and hardware” always made about as much sense to me as someone claiming “this product is secure because we invented our own secret encryption”.

I don’t find it at all annoying to keep NewPipe up to date.

I think you may need to take a look at Obtainium.

As someone who got a physics degree and knows some shit, the first couple seasons are not too bad. The physics/math jokes are mostly fairly accurate, and those shows happened as nerd culture was getting mainstreamed. The first Avengers movie were several years away. I can’t really say whether the series had a part in this mainstreaming, but at the least it was in the Zeitgeist.

I grew up in the north Italian province. Being a nerd didn’t make you an outcast, but definitely an odd one.

The first couple seasons came out while I was doing my bachelor (i.e. the equivalent of undergrad) and with its caricature of some quirks I could recognize in many of my friends and colleagues, it made me feel at least acknowledged.

Then it got progressively worse as they kept looking for more and more ways to drag it on, lost those qualities I found positive, and I really gave up not too long after that.

Edit: I still need to point out that Star Trek TNG is peak comfort TV, together with maybe The West Wing or some Doctor Who.

Somehow that still makes sense.