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.

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.

Not exactly crazy but just mysterious…this was at a software company I worked at many years ago. It was one of the developers in the team adjacent to ours who I worked with occasionally - nice enough person, really friendly and helpful, everyone seemed to get on with them really well and generally seemed like a pretty competent developer. Nothing to suggest any kind of gross misconduct was happening.

Anyway, we all went off to get lunch one day and came back to an email that this person no longer worked at the company, effective immediately. Never saw them again.

No idea what went down - but the culture at that place actually became pretty toxic after a while, which led to a few people (including me) quitting - so maybe they dodged a bullet.

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.

I grew one during lockdown, decided I liked it and kept it. I suspect I am not an anomaly in this.

I went from a manual to an EV. For an everyday use point of view there is just no comparison. Acceleration is effortless, start/stop traffic is no longer a nightmare, it’s quiet and refined. It is the ideal daily driver. Even on longer trips I no longer feel fatigued after driving for 4-5 hours (the enforced charging stop helps with that).

I personally would not go back to an ICE car in general, manual or not, for everyday use.

From an enthusiasts perspective, however, this is a different question. I wouldn’t rule out getting an ICE manual for fun/weekend use in the future - the kind of driving where you can actually enjoy the level of fine control and feedback that a manual gives you, rather than just wasting it in traffic. But it would have to be something pretty special.

I can’t speak from experience as I don’t own any Amazon devices, but I have read reports that it seems to work fine with the FireTV variant of Android.

The dev has only tested it against Chromecast with Google TV, with that said I’m using it on a Shield TV and a Shield Pro and it runs fine on both.

Google is already doing this with their default Android TV launcher. I tolerated their home screen ‘recommendations’ for a while as they occasionally highlighted something interesting to watch, but one day I switched on the TV and was greeted with a huge advert banner for a fucking watch on the home screen.

At that point I spent a few hours setting up FLauncher on all my ATV devices.

Same. Coming up to 4 years owning my Model 3 with no major issues and no work needed other than normal serviceable items common to all cars (tyres, wiper blades, cabin filters, etc).

On the flip side, one of my old coworkers who got his Model 3 at the same time as me had a litany of problems from day one. We used to joke that his car had been built by an intern on a Friday night before a major holiday.

I don’t do enough miles these days to justify getting rid of a perfectly good, functional, almost brand new car and buying a new one - I plan to just run it into the ground instead.

I don’t think I’d buy another Tesla in the future, though. Not necessarily because I care what people think of the car I drive, but because Tesla has made some astonishingly stupid decisions with their new/refreshed cars. No physical drive selector? No TURN SIGNAL STALK? Yes, because I love having critical vehicle controls on a movable surface. Come on now.

I use both. Pi-hole running in a docker container on one of my home servers which my gateway is configured to assign as the default DNS for all clients, and uBlock Origin on all my browsers to catch everything else.

Pihole is pretty good at catching ads on platforms that are not suited to browser based blockers (IoT devices, streaming boxes etc) but it isn’t perfect and is best used in conjunction with another solution.

Unlike oil, rare earth minerals can be recycled to a degree. What is today your car battery may end up in 10+ years as someone’s house battery, or a power bank or other low-load energy store. The raw materials can eventually be recovered to an extent as well.

A resource disaster is inevitable either way as nobody wants to give up the convenience that we have become accustomed to. Encouraging affluent economies to adopt EVs is pure damage limitation at this point, our biosphere is already fucked from over a century of waste emissions, the least we can do is try and find solutions that don’t involve burning fossilized plant matter for every car journey.

Sony-Ericsson W350i. Had it for about a year before I got my first Android device, an HTC Hero.

BeamNG. Logged hundreds of hours just mindlessly driving around crashing into stuff and fucking around with vehicle customisations.

Doesn’t really surprise me, I’ve had a Steam deck since launch and the performance on Windows titles has always been impressive, even considering its relatively low-end hardware.

The only thing preventing me from dual-booting my desktop is lack of software RAID support in most distributions (by this I mean RAID configured in the BIOS but not using a dedicated hardware controller).