Ideally I'd like to keep my cake and eat it: keep navigation (preferably offline), spotify, etc. working but disable the telemetry, remote control, etc. From what I could gather, Teslas can use Wifi (your phone's hotspot) as a backup uplink. So depending on how they've implemented the cloud features, after disconnecting the antennae, you might be able to set up a tiny router and whitelist certain DNS queries, HTTPs connections, etc. But it might also be that they just use a big ol' VPN tunnel to the mothership and pipe all the cloud features through it.

Slightly less ambitious: does the navigation in Teslas work offline? Offline maps and route calculation have been around since the 00's in standalone GPS navigators, so it's not impossible.

How do you get hired if you do happen to have proper FreeBSD skills? It's notably absent from all the job listings.

What we really need is 10x more expensive, durable clothing that you buy every 10 years. And the cultural shift to go along with it. Not Mao suits for everyone but some common effing sense. But I guess that's bad for business and boring for consumers, so...

Well, of course all the Garmins and Tomtoms available now have "built-in wifi for updates" and often BT for phone notifications too. Sure, I could just not configure either but what if I want a navigator _without any radios_ and with controlled updates via SD card.

Maybe a dedicated Android phone in the car with offline OpenStreetMaps installed and airplane mode on is more realistic. Or some old 2nd hand navi that's still updateable.

This is supposed to be The Economist?

Also I can't imagine how being handed a bunch of autogenerated terraform and ansible code would help me. Maybe 10% of my time is spent actually writing the code, the rest is running it (ansible is slow), troubleshooting incidents, discussing how to solve them & how to implement new stuff, etc.

If someone works in a devops position where AI is more of a threat, I'd like to hear more about it.

As for Home Assistant, I share your sentiment. I run my own stuff because I want to understand my infrastructure (vs. a black box from Philips) and to minimize the amount of code running around.

I'm sure HA is a better opaque box than the commercial ones for many people, but running it would still leave me with the same feeling of having outsourced critical knowledge - plus the compute costs.

The whole emoji phenomenon is a kind of infantilizing cultural rot -- it makes serious, static documentation and tooling resemble a children's book and hinders live communication by encouraging vague single-pictogram messages and the expression of raw emotions (genuine or not) instead of mature and balanced thoughts.

but enjoy your meds, anyway

I didn't have a huge beef with the proprietary emojis on old skool Skype and MSN, TBH - they were technically bound to those platforms, and the platforms mostly to private social spheres where they'd form part of the local slang. (And where Skype was used at work in the 00's, people actually refrained from them and acted in a businesslike manner).

Modern day emojis being part of unicode implies that they're somehow universally understood, and that it's fine to sprinkle them around in any kind of social context. Quite horrifying, really.

But they're not too different from the set of infantilizing pictograms that did make their way into the standard & that grown-ups are now expected to deal with.

It would be "unbelievable" if a multibillion company decided to be helpful and erase your data just because you deleted the binary that created them (actually, it wouldn't, but let's not digress into how those companies are stripping away our agency by mobile-ossifying everything).

The whole Mac idea was that there's no "uninstall process" with opaque windoze registries etc; what the Finder shows you is simple enough for an average user to understand. Like dragging an "Application" or a CD-ROM into the Trash to get rid of it. Of course they ruined all that with ~/Library/{Preferences,Application Whatever,Kitchen Sink}/.

Turns out your UNIX with a human face ate its children afterall. With relish.

Also, "uninstallable" means "cannot be installed"

I had already lost hope of finding a civilized email client. This is what all software should look like.

Thank you.

And until the user-hostile changes (mandatory setup wizards) began creeping in a few years back, one of the venerable classics that you could still rely on.

Pretty sure the new version is going to be a steaming pile of modern usability horrors; reduced features, cheeseburger menus, unreadable UI elements because it has to "look modern", all powered by Electron & co.

Can't say I'm surprised though.

KMail is categorically unusable; the editor makes me scared to type anything. And looking at the process list behind it (a dedicated mysql, daemons running left and right) is nightmare fuel. Hence it's Thunderbird and Outlook web for the work calendar...

And it's not exactly lightweight either. I've had to upgrade from an i5 T450s & 20 GB RAM to a T470p with i7-7700HQ and 32GB to keep things from OOMing and being generally sluggish.

KDE is still my daily driver though, largely because the excellent QTStep theming [1] at least gives you a semblance of a civilized, old school user interface. I just wish there were more usable QT-based applications around to make use of it.

[1] https://store.kde.org/p/1211687

Some glitches for sure and I couldn't actually draw in Excalidraw, but I obviously wasn't expecting to.

Reviews from past years concentrate on it being "easy to adopt because it resembles Windows xyz".

OP's review implies it's easy because it's less buggy than what the more common distros are offering nowadays.

Being a daily victim of KDE on Debian and Fedora (and old enough to remember how good things were 10-20 years ago), I hope the latter is true. Maybe I'll find out in a couple of days.

Learn some Estonian and spend time in the smaller towns and cities.

And yes, Estonian customer service is often short and to the point. It's not necessarily an expression of rudeness.

Very useful anecdote - thank you