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

Hard to get too excited when Norway funds all this by selling fossil fuels

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

There’s a substantial body of research on how mythbusting lies can be counterproductive because as part of doing so, you repeat the lie and this helps people remember it.

Also, and this is more speculative, but surely there’s probably some survivor bias here? There are probably many thousands of populists neither of us has ever heard of because they haven’t had their voices amplified.

Don’t give these people publicity

That shouldn’t affect GDP - after all, America is much further away and has a bigger GDP than any of these. Indeed, GDP being what it is (a rough measure of total economic activity) I suspect being far away from the hub, like Greece, would likely boost it: think of all the economic activity for your shipping and logistics businesses

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

Here’s a really good analysis of how it’s not true the Boomers have all the money - there are lots of very comfortable Millennials too. It’s more complicated than people like to think

The problem is that the populist, nationalist right tends to be good in opposition, because they can shout simplistic slogans and don’t have to actually deliver anything.

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

Yes. The “Cyclists don’t use cycle lanes” line also comes right from the angry right list of grievances. If there’s a cycle lane and people aren’t using it, it’s self-evidently not good enough. And this is hardly surprising when most cycle lanes are cheap afterthoughts that increase danger and inconvenience