piltdownman

The grills of articulated trucks/16 wheelers aren't aerodynamic and are testament enough on their own tbh.

The stats back it up - one long-term tracking project in Denmark found an 80% decline in insect abundance between 1997 and 2017. The 'Bugs Matter' initiative in the UK similarly found that the number of flying insects hitting car license plates dropped by up to 72% in under two decades.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/car-spla...

AI has been a core tenet of web search for years in the backend. They're an inherent part of the indexing and return of results BECAUSE of the wholesale AI slop pollution of the internet. You can see this explicitly play out using DDG or similar 'non-AI enhanced search' without expected QOL conveniences like Image Search, which ends up polluted with AI generated websites.

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/

High tariffs make shipping certain high-value Chinese EVs economically unviable or politically restricted for one.

Since Q2 the Chinese domestic market has also moved away from European brand prestige toward advanced technology and user experience tailored to that demographic.

Many of the self-assist or park features are simply illegal for use in export markets - e.g. Huawei ADS Level 3 autonomous driving is not legally approved for public consumer use in either the European Union or the United States.

Similarly, the 800v charging architecture is more frequently skipping onboard converters and cannot charge at stations below 800v, ruling out 97% of public chargepoints in the EU.

Subsequently, the top-end stuff like the Maextro S800 is not officially sold by Huawei or JAC through a factory-backed dealer network in Europe.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/25/business/chinese-luxury-b...

This is technically correct, but the inferral is Google forcing some kind of Faustian pact on the vulnerable.

Simply put, Google's Search and AI tools are now inextricably combined. If you opt-out of AI tooling, then by proxy you are opting out of what Google choses to provide as a 'Search' offering.

It's not a punitive measure, just the reality of a paradigm shift.

You're well over the 90 day mark where E10 is well into its degradation and standard unleaded is starting to sour. A nice problem to have in many respects, but just to be aware!

TBH the market demand will ensure a Toyota Camry/Honda Civic 'invincible' style runabout will emerge that basically anyone can run into the ground and still depend on. The real issue to me is the morality of the production of the parts, particularly things involving rare-earth metals.

I mean the core feature here is a vastly simplified drivetrain and often modular parts borrowed or 'appropriated' from the best of existing marques. There's a lot less to go wrong versus any existing ICE platform, and the Chinese EVs that make the Western market are generally the budget/barebones models outside of the the high-end BYD stuff.

In comparison, the last two generations of ICE cars from Europe/US are the most mechanically complex in history in order to meet strict emissions laws.

The main point of contention is around support for the integrated cloud connectivity and continuous OTA software updates. Ultimately that will be clean-room decompiled or otherwise audited for PII/Security Compliance to the point where reverse-engineering for LTS is trivial.

Other than that, just as displayed with walled-garden Apple products, a robust, decentralized aftermarket will emerge from the legions of SEA hackers.

They used to operate in a legally consistent Western Democracy. They no longer do. OpSec for most involved in basic social activism needs to now be at the level of 'Journalist in a Dictatorship' or stricter.

At this point there's a non-zero chance you and your employees are detained on spurious national security grounds, or simply end up in an ICE internment centre - accidently or otherwise.

In reference to the laws handling stolen goods; the law holds you accountable if a reasonable person in your exact situation would have suspected the item was stolen.

For example, if the item was derived from a repository of stolen goods that was already illegal in the US on the basis of it being a repository of stolen goods.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/09/pirate-library-m...

Well if you really want to get into legal rather than moral distinctions, the company has already admitting to breaching the CFAA twice.

(1) They admitted its Claude models had breached the systems of three companies since April; including Huggingface.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-30/anthropic...

(2) More to the point, it 100% breached the CFAA by securing unauthorised access to a U.S. state government website hosting election-related data, pulling aggregate vote-count statistics from a gated government dashboard. The state government itself confirmed the access was entirely unauthorised.

https://seekingalpha.com/news/4657023-anthropics-claude-bypa...

If a human security researcher had deployed an agent that behaved this way, it would constitute a textbook felony under the CFAA for accessing those systems without authorisation.

Unfortunately different rules apply when you have the power to buy off Congress and the Appeals Courts.

Most recently a US appeals court ruled on 5 August that Amazon was unlikely to succeed on a claim that Perplexity's AI agents violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by covertly accessing private Amazon customer accounts.

https://www.rte.ie/news/technology/2026/0807/1586941-artific...

RIP Aaron Swartz.

They were already eligible for damages as per the class-action settlement, but several Stanford professors actively opted out of the blanket class-action settlement to pursue Anthropic individually for higher damages.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/opinion/claude-pirated-bo...

Damn right too.

And I presume the Anthropic CEO will be indicted on 13 felony counts under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and for wire fraud. Like Aaron Swartz, right?

Right?

N.B. JSTOR explicitly settled with Swartz, suffered no financial harm, and begged the federal government to drop the case. The government refused and prosecuted Swartz anyway. Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion primarily because of the theft and storage of the files, but this was somehow a Civil issue...

TBH I feel that whatever totemistic or workflow quirks you need to keep maintaining flow state is perfectly logical. Software Engineers keep rubber ducks for a reason.

Taking a slice of the pie for Haliburton via force is one thing, but OPEC are ultimately the De Beers of Oil and act in the same fashion.

The UAE leaving in May'26 and now getting involved in the fight against the Houthis, while Qatar donated Bribe Force One to Trump, is quite telling as to how this is going re: the US though.

It's colloquially known as the Hague invasion act as it's ultimate mandate is to invade the seat of the ICC. Literally the first line of the the wiki article.

//The admin is going after the court on the basis of it prosecuting American allies. However, America loses NATO if they were to invade over this.

Do you believe that's not part of the design at this point?

NATO's founding multilateral principles and the USA have been leading parallel lives for quite some time. Trump already started a war in Iran without mandatory consultation, described them as a 'paper tiger' repeatedly. As the Wpost reported on 3rd April '22, Bolton claimed that Trump came very close to leaving NATO in 2018, and Russian President Vladimir Putin “was waiting for that.” [1]

In addition, the executive branch will take no notice of any 'binding' mandates or statutory notice periods, as already demonstrated in the 2020 withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty.

Indeed, Congress literally had to enact 22 U.S.C. § 1928f (the Kaine-Rubio provision) in 2023 which expressly prohibits the president from exiting the North Atlantic Treaty without prior congressional authorization. But since any subsequent enforcement is dependent on legal resolution by the Supreme Court, it's not worth the paper it's printed on.

//but the US has a surprisingly poor record when it comes to fighting without allies

Agreed, but a great record at privatising their lands, mineral rights, and energy sources on the behalf of the GOP and aligned industry. You don't need to win a war if you can profit immensely off it and/or disenfranchise your domestic opponents.

// While I'm sure Trump did his usual thing with regards to the death of Harry Dunn, "war crimes" is on a somewhat different scale to "dangerous driving".

A false equivalence. Trump intervened in a case where the ultimate charge was life imprisonment of a CIA Agent based on their inability to drive on the right side of the road or stay off their phone.

The point was that if he'll personally intervene in such a contextually miniscule matter for an intelligence asset, then he can be assumed to intervene with significant force in the case of the ICC taking custody of an 'ally'.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/04/bolton-sa...

I mean for just the EU you have:

Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) which enforce mandatory governance and processes like resilience testing and cybersecurity lifecycle requirements.

GDPR & Data Protection frameworks which requires architecture to support CRUD operations on all PII, data minimization, customer-managed encryption architectures and so forth.

...and the anti-vibe code framework aka the EU AI Act, which requires human oversight and data quality controls.

This is completely aside from any industry specific engineering codes like in Finance where you have to adhere to things like ISO 20022 or iXBRL/ESEF standards, user accessibility mandates, and PCI Compliance mandates for things like Security Architecture over and above the CRA.

Which will all have things like reprogrammable firmware and FPGA aspects to support paywalled proprietary features.

We already support it to some extent with licensed hardware codecs (HEVC, AVC, VVC etc...), licensed DRM like HDCP, and individual device licensing for audio technologies like Dolby Atmos, DTS:X and video technologies like Dolby Vision.

European countries need to get off Mastercard/Visa and US Tech and Energy dependencies first, otherwise it's just a shakedown by the US every time they hit an external legal system.

// If European countries banded together to direct their banks to offer services to the sanctioned ICC judges, for example, I think the US would back down on that - yes even under Trump, although there would be some bluster first.

That's a very good way to force the Hague Invasion Act to manifest in some form or another.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...

Trump personally intervened when two US spooks were driving on the wrong side of the road in London, with the driver most likely on her phone, killed someone, and then fled the country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Harry_Dunn

Compare this with a hispanic american who severely injured someone in similar circumstances. Extradition granted and was convicted for a 32 month prison sentence in the UK.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y89k07we3o

For Indies, sure. For AAA you've got egregious DRM that can compromise your system to an unimaginable degree. These flaws were so structurally dangerous that Microsoft permanently blocked SafeDisc and older versions of SecuROM from executing in Windows 10 onwards.

Capcom in 2016 should have been prosecuted imo - their attempt at "DRM" installed a kernel-level driver (capcom.sys) that intentionally disabled Supervisor Mode Execution Prevention (SMEP), allowing the kernel to execute code in user space...

The current Denuvo DRM to combat 'piracy' (always ALWAYS a pricing issue) is now encouraging both legal and high-seas users to use hypervisor-based bypasses to circumvent its many shortcomings. This is basically handing over the keys to your house in the AI age.

It gets worse - they only introduced this EULA after losing their subscriber database on multiple ocassions.

IANAL but apparently also opting out gives you less power in a mass-tort as your class will consist entirely of a contextually miniscule group.

"Sony's EULA, however, eliminates anyone from a potential class except for individuals who specifically opt out. If a person who opted out later chooses to pursue a claim, the class will, at most, consist of those persons who opted out. Nt enough people will opt out. The class is virtually guaranteed to be too small to make it worth any lawyer undertaking representation. So by opting out, you are registering yourself into a group that has no power and no meaning."

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/kk36d/lawyers_thoug...

Its feasible up to 32" to use a computer monitor and android box, but over that monitors seem to be up to 3x the price for equivalent specs versus televisions.

A 65" 4K TCL is about $400-500. Cheapest equivalent monitor is over $2k that I can find.

EU protects it at a federated level, and no contract terms can override mandatory local statutory rights. Indeed most US-centric EULA clauses are considered invalid or unenforceable in the EU.

Ever hear of Farming-as-a-service?

https://agroinformacion.com/en/agtechmachinery/john-deere-su...

Or Driving? BMW had to pivot over initial outrage, but in 2022, they launched a "Functions on Demand" program that required drivers to pay a $18 monthly or $180 annual subscription to unlock physical heated seats and heated steering wheels.

https://www.drive.com.au/news/bmw-admits-heated-seat-subscri...

Sony are even more egregious - unless you opt out within 30 days, you are subject to Binding Arbitration via the Sony EULA for example.

This means you have to settle Disputes between you and Sony through a neutral private arbitrator rather than a judge or jury in a public courtroom, and you give up the right to participate in any class-action tort.

Stockholder value is now predicated entirely on things like recurring revenue, growth, and MBA short-term profit seeking. Enshittification of existing SaaS and 'smart' products is a feature, not a bug.

Unless something drastically changes in the US stock market, any publicly traded technology company of significant size is basically mandated to prostrate themselves to the altar of fiduciary responsibility to stockholders.

Intermittent network failures in europe-west2 region != vibecoding

And that's why they love field sobriety tests on the basis of 'You were unusually slow' or 'You swerved over the line' or 'You were driving an older car in a known drug hotspot' or 'A car matching your description...'.

This quickly escalates to 'Why are you so nervous? You're sweating', 'Your speech patterns and eye dilation gives me probable cause to suspect you', or simply 'What's that I smell?'.

Everybody needs to buy at least one dashcam with motion record, and learn two simple statements:

"I don't answer questions" "Am I being detained"

Even if you're a shark of a criminal attorney, this is literally all you should ever be saying to an American law enforcement official.

Terry v. Ohio is a concrete stop-and-frisk precedent. Driving carries more burden and less rights in the same scenario.

6) The dog was going to alert regardless of what was in or not in the car. That's their usual go-to for parallel construction for probable cause when they ping a plate with Flock.

Welcome to QWERTY-MIDI, around since the advent of DAWs basically.

https://beijaflor.io/qwertymidi/