I have a Model 3 at the moment. I’ve had it for almost 5 years and it’s generally been great - cheap to run, quiet and comfortable on longer trips but still fun to drive on back roads.

Recently it had its first major breakdown, and although Tesla service did manage to take care of it, it’s got me browsing for new EVs - but now, buying a Tesla is not the foregone conclusion it once might have been.

First, they have been making some truly stupid design choices in their latest facelifts (deleting the indicator stalks and gear selector).

Second, their CEO has now gone completely mask-off fascist.

Third - after a few years for the competition to catch up, we now have genuine alternatives from other marques which are just as good if not better EVs than Tesla’s offerings.

I think my next car will likely be a Polestar 2.

I decided to set up Fedora on my new laptop as it was either take a chance on that or spend like 3 hours debloating a Win11 install.

It’s been over 10 years since I last tried dailying Linux, we have come a long way in that time. Everything just worked out of the box. No fucking around needed.

Even relatively niche stuff like my thunderbolt dock and the laptop’s fingerprint sensor was picked up. And, thanks to the investment Valve has been putting into Wine and Proton, pretty much every game I’ve tried has worked with no issue.

Next time my desktop is due for a clean install I’ll definitely be doing the same there.

Not at all.

Lemmy is overwhelmingly militantly anti-Tesla, which is understandable considering who owns it, but it does mean that users tend to interpret any neutral or factual statements (basically anything that is not outright criticism) as having a pro-Tesla bias.

In this case, all I am stating is the fact that this specific change currently only affects corporate users. That could of course change in the future.

There is a rich history of cloud based data providers pulling the rug from under users with no warning. Look at what happened to Nest users when Google took over.

There is most likely an overlap on what you can get from the OBD port, but generally speaking the API will provide more high level info e.g driving status, mileage, live location - and the OBD port will provide more low level data e.g. detailed battery stats from the BMS, energy usage, etc.

Highlight where in the above post I am defending anything.

Something to note: Tesla has two vehicle APIs, the Fleet API for commercial accounts and the Owner API for individuals. This change currently only impacts the Fleet API.

If you are an individual owner who accesses your vehicle data from the Owner API (usually via a self hosted tool like TeslaMate), this does not affect you. Yet.

How often do you need to travel the entire range your car allows?

If you do need to drop everything and drive across country in an EV, you should be stopping at service stations to do short fast charge sessions anyway, as with modern fast chargers and battery tech you will typically go from something like 30% SoC to say 70% in only a few minutes. This saves a lot of time on longer trips.

If you are driving an EV by depleting the battery completely and then charging it back to 100% every time, you are doing it wrong.

That also means we can still use the expansion cards for the Framework in any other device that also has a USB-C port. Need an SD card reader or a 2.5Gb LAN adapter? Not a problem, I’ll just grab one from my laptop.

Didn’t he become a Commodore, not an Admiral?

Por qué no los dos?

Solution: don’t read that shitrag. It was always a waste of paper, now it is a waste of bandwidth as well.

In Voyager, he’s shown to have pips. In fact, switching him over to Command mode shows a deliberate animation of pips showing up on hid collar.

The EMH is never shown with pips on Voyager. The “ECH” was shown with pips appearing on its first appearance, however:

The only other time the ECH mode was used in a genuine emergency (Season 7, Episodes 16/17), he did not have pips.

There was an entire TNG episode (Season 6, Episode 12) whose plot centered around this:

Geordi and Data spent half the episode experimenting with beaming (inanimate) holographic objects off the holodeck, to no avail. With that said:

Nah, the SWAT would have to arrest themselves.

Even without an official rank, on Voyager he was still considered a Department Head and (more importantly) the CMO, which gave significant authority (even exceeding the Captain on certain medical matters), regardless of whether or not he was ever given any pips. The same thing would likely apply on subsequent postings.

If he ever had to be assigned a rank for clerical/administrative purposes, it would probably be the default required rank for a Starfleet CMO candidate for the class of ship he was serving on.

I’ve tried Copilot and to be honest, most of the time it’s a coin toss, even for short snippets. In one scenario it might try to autocomplete a unit test I’m writing and get it pretty much spot on, but it’s also equally likely to spit out complete garbage that won’t even compile, never mind being semantically correct.

To have any chance of producing decent output, even for quite simple tasks, you will need to give an LLM an extremely specific prompt, detailing the precise behaviour you want and what the code should do in each scenario, including failure cases (hmm…there used to be a term for this…)

Even then, there are no guarantees it won’t just spit out hallucinated nonsense. And for larger, enterprise scale applications? Forget it.

Regarding battery degradation - I’ve owned my EV for 4.5 years now, and its battery is still at 93% of its original capacity. That equates to maybe 10 miles of range lost, from an original range of around 230 miles. At that rate, it’ll still be giving usable range in 10, 15 years from now. It’s even warrantied to keep over 75% of its original capacity for 8 years / 100,000 miles - if it fails to achieve this (likely due to some defect), it’s replaced for free.

And when it does eventually need replacing, it can be recycled into something like a home storage battery - where the power demand is not as high, but still more than enough to power everything in your home for days. Meanwhile, the car can be upgraded to a brand new battery, which will likely last even longer.

Edit: In fact, I tell a lie - I did have to replace a battery on my EV recently. The 12v lead-acid battery, that ICE cars also rely on.

You might have seen a quest, where if you stream a specific game to your friends you get a free in-game item, but these are not advertisements.

…

Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers

I have no interest in streaming “quested” games, and whatever deal Discord has done with the developer to encourage users to engage with such games (and by extension the game’s microtransaction economy), and regardless of what they call it, is by definition an advertisement. If you can’t see that, then you are an ad campaign exec’s wet dream. Either that, or a troll.

Discord enshittification is well under way, just this week I have started seeing ads in the client just above the voice channel status in the bottom left. Cancelled my Nitro immediately, no point if they are going to shove ads in my face anyway.

Currently looking at alternatives, Revolt looks promising, and can be self hosted.

For digital copies, they could bury this into the EULA and make it a requirement that you agree to it before you make your purchase (IIRC some storefronts do this already).

However for physical copies I suppose there could be a case made if the duration of support was not disclosed at the time of purchase (or it was not printed somewhere on the outside of the packaging).