EV owner here. 50 miles is not practical, beacuse then I need another for the other 2% of trips that are longer than that. This also ignores detours or traffic jams, when google will try to reroute me over a longer, but faster route. Plus, the “50 miles” readout you get is always just an estimate and the real range depends on temperature, driving speed, start-stops and how much elevation you need to cover. Some 30km trips here cost me 50+ EV km because its all uphill in one direction. I usually add 30km to my trip as required charge, because when the battery reaches 25km the car starts to complain with a nervously blinking battery readout and a “Charge now!” message on the dashboard.

“But then you just charge during the trip!” - Well this only work if i go somewhere where i know where to find RELIABLE chargers. I am well aware that there are good apps that show me charging locations, but getting a charging spot I can actually use is a different story:

• charging station can be used by someone else, or there is queue and each car will most likely charge for 30+ mins. Of course, sometimes some inconsiderate pricks will hog a spot untill their car is fully charged, even if it takes his frikkin tesla 2h
• charging stations close for repairs, sometimes for weeks
• some charging stations need an account or RFID-tag before you can use their (but not other) charging network
• other charging stations require you to bring your own cable
• some charging stations dont have the connector you need for your car
• some stations on the map are bogus, for example that one at my local volvo dealership that only exists to charge the showroom and customer cars, but is not accessible to the public.

Not saying EVs are bad, but the charging infrastructure still needs some work to be reliable and accessible. Petrol stations always have some large, obnoxious signs on the side of the road that you cant miss; Charging stations are sometimes just a tiny grey box on a wall and a 5-space parking lot, or behind a building and you never notice it when driving by.

Forums existed when everyone had a 1024x800 computer monitor on his desk, before mobile Webbrowsers where a thing. The layout did make sense at the time.

You underestimate how affordable or accessible a computer was in the eastern block. For reference, a color tv that is “mass produced” and didn’t need much expensive high tech parts would cost as much as you would earn in one year - if you manage to find one in a shop.

For a computer you needed to find keyboard, drive, monitor, software and the computer itself which would be at least equally expensive to a color tv.

All the chips had to be manufactured locally in the eastern block, because there was an embargo on western computer tech. RAM alone was 10x more expensive because the manufacturing process was very inefficient.

It’s almost as if car manufacturers and big oil write the laws to increase their own profit margins…

No, it would use the same Microsoft auth it already uses for xbox, outlook, windows etc.

Well the mouse and keyboards are actually pretty good…

a set of only 9 characters

🤔

OCR existed long before the 486. AFAIK it was already used in the 70’s or 80’s to scan mail and presort them based on the postcode. I remember that postcards had light orange boxes (presumably because this color was invisible to B/W scanners?) with dots inside where you where supposed to write the postcode numbers in.

ChatGPT can recognize text on images already.

That are some good points, i didnt really hear about deepmind for a long time and forgot about it. But replacing google websearch with “AI” really sounds like a decision made by marketing department, where they dont understand their own product, their customers or the techs limitations.

Unless of course they want to remove/hide all outgoing links from google search, so the user will spend more time there and google has more opportunities to show them ads from their own ad network, instead of losing the visitors to another website…

Results might be very different if you are inside china, or write in Chinese characters.

Baidu, please tell me about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre.

Wow, in the 2000’s and 2010’s google my impression was that this is an amazing company where brilliant people work to solve big problems to make the world a better place. In the last 10 years, all I was hoping for was that they would just stop making their products (search, YouTube) worse.

Now they just blindly riding the AI hype train, because “everyone else is doing AI”.

Only if they have a killer app that people are willing to pay for…