Thanks!

Thank you - that’s a really useful answer. I’ll check them out

Thank you - I’ll have a look at that

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

This is greenwashing. Global aviation uses almost 100 billion gallons of fuel per year. If we even began to address a fraction of that with magic new fuels (which won’t happen) it would require incredible amounts of growing, and if we had that sort of amount of agricultural capacity available on this planet, capable of producing crops at a price the aviation industry is prepared to pay, we wouldn’t have any hunger on the world.

Don’t fall for this. There isn’t such a thing as green aviation. I’m not saying there should be no flying, but we can’t carry on as we are and magic away the consequences. In particular, don’t fall for the snake oil salesmen trying to distract you with appealing non-solutions

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

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

Kagi is good, but for rare topics try search.marginalia.nu

And your solution is…?