Musk is well-known for bringing a project to a close way late and way over-budget. He’s the king of overpromising and undelivering. After a couple years of “next quarter, I promise!” they’ll be wishing they’d bought the bulldozer.

Yeah, lol. All the robots need is any actual robotics, and then they’re good to go!

they can do “policing” even more effectively than ICE.

A bulldozer with a brick on the pedal can do “policing” more effectively than ICE. That’s not much of a flex.

He desperately wants people to think he’s cool.

You’re not crazy, but it won’t be Elon who does it. The Tesla robots are nowhere near ready for production. This is vaporware, just like the Roadster.

Sorry, I left out the part where most RSS fetchers are not hosted by the user. Of course it is self-hostable, but that’s by far the less common use case.

Images and CSS aren’t natively a part of RSS, though (and in fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen an RSS feed or reader that tries to do any CSS rendering at all). Assuming you have a third party downloading your RSS XML, all of the tracking capabilities are outside of the RSS spec itself, and dependent on you clicking on a link or something after you get the RSS feed.

If you want news and articles from the sites you appreciate to come to you directly and not be filtered through social media first, RSS is what you want. You get every link, and often the full text of every post, and you aren’t at the whim of an algorithm.

Spam-free? It’s literally only what you’ve specifically asked it to deliver you. If a site starts spamming its RSS feed, you just unsubscribe from the site.

Tracker-free? There’s literally no way anyone could track you through RSS. It’s just an XML file and can’t run any arbitrary code.

I use it for everything I can: news sites, blogs, YouTube channels, social media feeds for people whose content I don’t want to miss. There are even services that will let you subscribe to an email newsletter through one of their inboxes, and they’ll convert it to an RSS feed for you to follow so it doesn’t clog up your actual inbox. I especially like reading webcomics through it; it makes sure I get everything, and I don’t lose my place, get spoiled by a later post, or have to rely on the whims of social media.

I love RSS.

Interesting. That’s the one thing I would miss the most about bailing on Nova. I’ll have to check this out.

“Most people?” Sounds like you’ve gotten yourself into a filter bubble, my friend. Only two people I know use it regularly, but adjusting for my own filter bubble, I think most people have played with it a couple of times, found it wanting, and maybe use Gemini in the Google search results when it comes up.

If it doesn’t have wide adoption, it isn’t a boom. It’s just sparkling speculation.

Yep, I’ve done that. Hardware changes are more effective than software changes, though. Every time.

Well, it’s not an LLM, but “AI” doesn’t have a defined meaning, so from that perspective they kind of already did.

I mean, it’s probably fine. I’ve just had a Pixel for long enough that my standards are too high. I have kids, and we just moved across the world, so I take a lot of photos.

Yeah, that one too.

According to Wikipedia, Russia has 143M and Ukraine has 33M. So not too far off!

hmm. That’s true. And dangerous, lol.

I don’t really want that much control removed, though. I just want to have a little bit more friction between my serotonin-starved brain and the cortisol river on Facebook.

I think the main purpose is probably to provide a more-usable “dumbphone” experience. I know a lot of people (myself included) who would love to doomscroll less, but need a more full-fat version of Android for work or family. Using Digital Wellbeing and the like gets part of the way there, but not the whole way. With this, the weird aspect ratio means that pretty much all video is going to be letterboxed to a crazy extent, which could be enough to make bypassing those controls feel pointless. And then they used that extra space for a physical keyboard, which is genius. If this thing had a better camera, I’d be all in.

People often don’t know that they have a choice. It enables itself.

Agreed, good catch.

For me it’s the text (too regular and perfectly-ruled to be hand lettered, but too much variance between the letterforms to be a font) and the little AI artifact on the random doohickey directly under the bottom left corner of the AI computer monitor:

Aside from that, it’s just the weight of unmotivated choices. Why is the “good” side of the image grayscale while the “bad” side is in color (a human probably would’ve done it the other way)? Why are the desks drawn slightly differently while the person, chair, and computer are drawn the same (a human would’ve probably made everything identical to better illustrate their point)? Why all the random clutter on one but not the other (if the point was to make the AI computing experience look scattered and cluttered, surely they would’ve made it more overwhelmingly cluttered, but if it was for verisimilitude they’d have put clutter on both desks)? Also, subjectively, the “AI” logo on the screen suggests a pleasant experience, not an oppressive one.

An unmotivated choice on its own isn’t necessarily an AI calling card, but enough of them together alongside one or two smoking guns can definitely make the case pretty strongly.