Hybrid cars are great if you want the worst of both ICE and EV worlds.

But also if you want the best of those worlds. Specifically: instant acceleration of the EV drivetrain and increased range provided by ICE.

A Dodge Ram hybrid might not be the best example, but do watch some reviews of Chinese EREVs that aren't available in the US. The gap is striking.

Governor says “regulation is hardly ever the answer” for Iowa’s dangerous nitrate levels in its drinking water.

That and paying to offload legal liability to a vendor.

Lots of great, free, widely adopted open source technology solutions aren't adopted by public sector because their legal staff won't accept the liability of not having a paid contract that makes guarantees. Great use of tax dollars.

>>Great use of tax dollars.

I get the sentiment but just note that if you discuss this in public your answer to the problem of staff watching video of kids is... less regulation?

Also a weird set of features to remove from pre-TCL products. This one has me perplexed:

> Set Top Box (STB) TV Menu: - The Set Top Box menu will be removed. - A Control menu will appear instead.

Ah, they’re all one package of functionality: Enrich broadcast TV control and schedule functionality through maintenance of third-party integrations, such as set top boxes or cover art. Because Sony isn’t the authoritative source for an icon for Burn Unit or Hospital Grace or whatever (I made those up, hopefully they’re not real!). Certainly every single integration costs time and/or money. (IF you could charge money for a service, would you give it for free to Sony?)

I wonder if they’re predicting a collapse in data harvesting revenue, or just found that inflation-adjusted wage decreases have shrunk the top end out of their TV market and so they’re cutting corners.

Is there anything running on Blacksky other than Bluesky with more than say, 100 active users?

AOL never even got to that level of dominance in the internet 1.0 era.

The point is it's not a distributed network if one node is 99.9% of all traffic.

No. You get prompted something like “Application wants access to your Documents folder” and “Application wants access to your Downloads folder” on first attempt of each folder.

Not always though. Adobe’s apps seem to be able to do whatever fuck they want whenever they want. I want so badly to stop them from creating a bunch of bullshit files in my Documents folder but there simply is no way to do it.

The article seems to be saying that is true unless you implicitly and somewhat invisibly grant access via the file picker.

Happy Easter morning

As an aside, what new cars don’t include location tracking?

My experience is they all have satellite connections and require some level of telemetry. My car throws a persistent check engine light and error message on the radio if you disconnect the telematics control unit.

I don't have this info unfortunately. I can say from personal experience that you can remove tracking from the 24 and older Subaru BRZ for about $50 usd, or less if you make your own passive adapter. I can also say the 24 and older low trim brz does NOT have tracking installed from the factory. From my research before buying the brz, many if not all Subarus of this era use the same hardware. There's an older version of this hardware as well that can also be deleted (and should be deleted because it's an older cellular tech that is no longer active and leads to battery drain while the car is unused).

The only problem my car has now is an occasional failure of Android Auto with a time sync error. There's an ota update for the head unit available that may or may not be related. I don't plan to install it. I only put 1000 miles on the car before removing the cellular connection so they could log the engine break in period as being done correctly for warranty purposes, so I'm not sure if it was an existing issue or related to removing cellular.

Afaik, having built in gps is not an issue since it's a receiver and doesn't transmit. The tracking issue is because of cellular.

I would check if the low trims exclude telematics before buying a car. If so, you can probably remove it from the higher trims but do your research.

You know what they say about assumptions. They don’t hold up in court.

Kind of like assuming tariffs are used for public benefit.

You may almost think that criminal and civil cases are handled differently.

Ah yes we can only rely on assumptions when someone's freedom rather than money is on the line.

We could rely on facts when making determinations. Like the fact the government said foreign countries were paying for the tariffs.

Fact: Costco explicitly told the public that part of the price increase in some of their goods was having the customer "absorb" (pay) the price of the tariff.[]

  "When we looked at -- we also source flowers from Central and South America. We looked at that item and decided that while we were able to offset some of the tariffs through similar activity that we did increase some price there because we felt that, that was something that the member would be able to absorb and it was more of a discretionary item there."

[] Q3 2025 earnings call