Any vaguely recent car is constantly reporting its location back to its manufacturer.

I’d be very intrigued in a system that lets me leave my phone in my (waterproof) pocket and access audio and navigation on Bluetooth. Let’s get this on bikes asap

One of my big worries with the way people are using LLMs is that they’re being trained to trust whatever they spit out. Hey Google, what’s the nutritional content of peanuts? And people are learning not to ask where the information came from or to check sources.

One of the many reasons this worries me is that very soon these businesses are going to need to recoup the billions they’re spending, and I wonder how long until these systems start feeding paid promotions to a population that’s been trained to accept whatever they’re told. imagine what some businesses, or governments, would pay to have exactly their choice of words produced on demand in response to knowledge queries.

Interestingly, my family subscription more or less halved a few months ago, which I was NOT expecting, but which was very welcome

It would have a massive effect. Transport (car) emissions are one of the larger - and growing - sources of emissions.

And we can’t hide behind “But the corporations…” because ultimately what they produce gets used by us.

So to answer your question: riding a bike when Global Capital wants you to keep buying cars and pumping oil into them is one of the best acts of defiance you can make

2 and 3 are massive. I’m on Mastodon, but am having a much better time on Bluesky. Mastodon is full of gatekeeping and policing and people complaining - Bluesky is just fun and interesting, like Twitter 12 years ago

I know. But I was satirising GPT’s bland writing style, not providing facts

“Shits are frequently classified into three basic types…” and then gives 5 paragraphs of bland guff

Important to know that real-world testing shows that PHEVs are rarely plugged in and just burn oil much of the time

Except people don’t plug in their hybrids and run them on fossil fuels. Hybrids are yet another way the FF industry keeps itself going while pretending things are being fixed

People need to hire vehicles occasionally rather than buy more polluting vehicles against some rare edge case

Loads of people - probably most people - didn’t have Sky. When did shoveling cash at Murdoch become some sort of minimum entry level for society? Not having a TV would be vaguely interesting, but not having Sky means nothing

Windows 11 has better window shadows than Windows 10. That is literally the only improvement I’ve found

It’s incredibly selective about which topics it’s good for. Want insight into advanced mathematics or new programming languages and people there have amazing insight. But they bring the same level of confidence to the discussion when talking about topics they’ve no idea about.

Have a look at marginalia.nu - it’s like a return to the old days

Ironically this article reads like GPT output

Let’s leave aside the fact that everything produced today by so-called AI is absolute dogshit. Let’s pretend it produces things that it’s asked to produce. Even in this version, where’s the pleasure in watching a story you’ve just created with prompts? The point of story is to be taken on a ride by somebody else - ideally someone you trust to give you a satisfying ride and not waste your time.

I mean, just look at the way Microsoft are trying to ram “AI” into every interaction with every app right now. As the big players make it more and more non-optional, people are going to have to work really hard not to put anything into, say, Word that they don’t want sent back for analysis

Why would billions of us stop our excess pollution when we can just kid ourselves a handful of billionaires are doing it all? /s

Nobody can audit the code for all their apps. Even within an ideal world where the code is all open, people don’t have the skills or the time. Sensor permissions are supposed to be a system so that people can have a strong level of confidence in apps without needing those skills and time, and so not having the ability to control this sensor is a problem - but an OS problem