I tried looking into this too but couldn't get further than some reddit bickering and a handful of forum posts. Not a Tesla owner myself but might want to be if the privacy issues can be fixed.
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.
I wouldn't be surprised if they "sold" (at a nominal price) the extra stock to a company outside the union for "resale" (burning in India or dumping into the ocean)
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...
I thought about getting a traditional navigator to avoid even relying on phone navigation.
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.
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.
First, thank you for the article, this is exactly what I need.
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.
Well, at least then you could think of the addons as local slang. It's still unnecessary, but limited to the social circle at your workplace.
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.
I guess I should feel relieved that I don't at least have my work discussions littered with these ones.
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.
No. The user data, preferences etc under ~/Library/ belong to you - whether it's 3 kB of preference toggles or 3 decades of email.
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.
Thunderbird still is pretty fast, though not as fast as before.
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.
Yes, it's buggy as hell. Whether you run on Debian stable or their own Neon distro, you're just switching one set of bugs to another.
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.
Ubuntu LTS based, apparently has been around since 2009.
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.
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.