Yet another thing we have entire books and movie series about what will go wrong, and probably how. Yet somehow a way will be found to make it go wrong in exactly those ways.

Naturally the price for the cheapest model will also be going to up several orders of magnitude more than the cost of materials, labor, and healthy profit margin to account for that as well I’m sure.

Someone found something that still depends on the control panel that will not be easily moved or done away with I bet.

Musk is learning the lesson Google and Youtube learned years ago with the “adpocalypse”. If the whole house of cards depends on ad dollars you have to keep them happy.

Unless Musk is going to take X (Twitter) completely subscription only, or fund it exclusively out of his own pocket, he is not going to get that “anything I want goes” utopia he keeps crowing about.

Trump has historically been for or against whatever he thinks will be the best for him.

My complaint is not that the “appliance” solutions exist for those that want them. But that there is next to no room in the market now for options that are not those “appliance” solutions for those that do want them but also want to take part in the modern tech world with things like NFC payments without having to trick the services with Magisk modules.

The world of mobile phones is a real world example of what we avoided on the PC back in the day when the IBM BIOS got reverse engineered allowing for someone to put out an IBM compatible PC without having to pay the tithe to big blue first.

It has been pretty depressing to me that the tech literate have been so easily lulled into accepting such things in the name of “cool toys” and “security” virtually everywhere in modern life besides the PC/laptop/server spaces.

This sort of control and gatekeeping from the likes of Google, Apple, and Qualcomm was not something that was hard to see coming a mile away, yet we all collectively let it happen anyway.

I worked somewhere like that back in the 2008-2010 time frame. Thankfully, there was a extension, I believe the name was “IETab”, that would spawn a new tab in Trident (IE’s browser engine). So you could set certain sites to launch in one of those tabs and everything else would use standard Firefox. None of the people I supported were any the wiser. They just thought everything worked in Firefox.

Granted it was only that seamless because Windows already had that rendering engine built in. There are some extensions that do something similar with Chrome, but because of more modern security standards and whatnot you have to install extension helper applications which is gross.

This kind of shit is why Googles (and anyone else that tries it as well) ever increasing push to put a layer of ads into anything is so off putting to me. Sure ads are annoying, but they are also probably second only to social engineering as the method for someones device and accounts getting compromised.

I personally will not go back to the days where just the act of visiting a website and clicking on nothing has a good chance of loading some Javascript and infecting my browser or whole device with the drive by malware of the day because the shit heads that run the site are to lazy to vet what they are letting their site call out too and the third party ad networks are to lazy to vet what sorts of things they are allowing their ad networks to serve.

I think MAGA is an unspoken admission that there are a lot of easily swayed people in this country that have been failed by the existing system.

Even if deep down they know it is all BS they can’t allow themselves to acknowledge it because that would mean having to face the reality that they don’t have much of a future to look forward to for various reasons.

A lot of people can’t take that mentally and keep going day to day, so they just go along with the crazy because it seems easier to go with the delusion.

I dream of working somewhere where this kind of effort is appreciated enough to motivate me to put in the effort of actually doing it.

They are just butt hurt that this whole thing really shines a light on how inaccurate the line of “the world runs on Linux” truly is.

The world runs on a lot of different things for different reasons and that does not fit nicely into their Richard Stallman like world view.

If all of the parts of the internet that the average person finds useful goes down, then it matters little that technically “the internet” is not down. If it can’t be useful then it is as good as “down”.

This is not gonna stop until the consumer puts their money where there mouths are and stops using Windows until Microsoft back peddles. Money is all a company understands so that is where you need to hit them if you want them to listen. But as a group the consumer has a very weak constitution when it comes to having to do something that is good for them in the long term but causes them short term inconvenience. A lot of parallels to the modern corporate world in that.

Tesla will probably be a case study one day in how to get the lead in a market that is hard to break into and somehow squander it.

Sure, I could. But I wanted to leave the original post as it was for transparency. I figured that was the most “open” thing to do.

Doesn’t appear you can do anything of that via the Drive mobile app. Maybe one day they will make that possible.

If they can ever get a spreadsheet application I could fully get away from Google for that kind of thing without losing out on anything I care about.

Nothing wrong with that setup if everyone is on board with it.

If they aren’t going to charge for access otherwise then I don’t think being ad supported is such a bad thing. Much more honest than subscription pricing and ads in my opinion.