Yeah, the situation reminds me of BlackBerry. I had the 8900 and it was my favorite phone. I remember when they finally did have a little App Store thing and it was terrible. They threw it together in a hurry so I can only imagine how shitty the dev tools were.

Where I’m going with the comparison to VW is we don’t know where that rabbit hole goes with Tesla. Diesel-gate just kept getting worse for VW the more investigators dug into it. Tesla appears to be an even less professional operation. I can only imagine what would come out if there was a real investigation there.

I remember it being good hardware and the OS was actually really good. It felt very fast when a lot of Android phones still felt sluggish. What they really screwed up was the third party apps. Nobody was making anything for it and they didn’t give developers a reason to. It was a product that should have succeeded if not for bad management.

The first iPhone didn’t come with those things. There wasn’t even an App Store until a year and a half after it came out. The first gen was pretty much crap. It didn’t have 3g when other phones of the time did. It had the best browser but it was slow as shit. The whole page would turn gray when you scrolled around. There was no copy/paste. You couldn’t sync with Exchange. It was missing basic features that other phones of the time had. It was probably the 3GS or the 4 when it got really good.

I wouldn’t say that having played with the new one for a few days. Spin it up in a VM and check it out. It looks good, it works well, the new App Store app is actually good. It’s so much better than that crap Gnome Software app. It’s still a good recommendation for new users - probably a better one now than the last couple releases. I think 24.04 will be very popular when it comes out.

I dabbled with Mint around 2010 or so. It was a nice distro back then. I haven’t seen it recently. Might have to take a look.

Snaps have been awful in the past, but they are dramatically better in 23.10. With most of them, there’s really no noticeable difference. LibreOffice is still pretty slow though.

I don’t get the complaints about mounts. So you run the mount command with no arguments and there’s a bunch of them. What’s the big deal? If need be, just use grep to filter out snaps.

I wouldn’t say they are tricking users either. They are transitioning to a new package manager. For better or worse, snaps are the future of Ubuntu. They are handling the transition by layering snapd on top of the legacy base.

I’m not some rabid Ubuntu fan. I’ve never used it beyond just checking it out from time to time. But, objectively, it’s a great distribution. They pretty much check all of the important boxes. It’s easy, it’s reliable, it’s secure, it’s a mature organization, there’s good community support as well as paid support, and it’s Linux. Unlike Red Hat, they give away the same exact product they sell to enterprises and even provide years of updates without a support contract. They do a hell of a lot to push Linux forward, particularly on the desktop, and we all benefit no matter which distro we use. They’re ok in my book even if snaps are meh.

I believe you are correct. Maybe they are latching onto the range issue because it affects every Tesla owner, past and present. Also very easy to prove.

This is an SEC filing. They are required to disclose to investors that this is going on and could impact their investment. Pretty standard stuff. They are not complaining that the feds are hurting their business or scaring people away from buying their cars - at least not in this filing. All they are saying is there’s this significant thing going on that could have an impact on the company’s value.

It would probably be smart for Tesla to settle this quickly and quietly because their range estimates are completely bonkers. Some kind of “agree to disagree on testing methods and we will pay up and do a better job” thing without this going too far. A VW diesel-gate kind of situation would be devastating to them. Elon is such a polarizing figure to begin with and there are some pretty good EV alternatives out there now. The only real killer feature they have left is the Supercharger network. Before anyone says FSD, it’s a scam and it doesn’t work.

Anything but Manjaro. I won’t get into the reasons why because it’s easy to find, but suffice it to say that it’s an amateur distro that makes dumb mistakes.

If you want rolling, Arch, Tumbleweed and Endeavour are the first places to look. Maybe even Fedora because it updates very fast, although it’s not rolling.

Linux is Linux and you will be running the same or similar apps on most distros. One of them isn’t magically going to use less RAM. That’s dictated by the apps you run and the kernel’s memory management. Hell, you want to use RAM. It makes things faster and it’s doing nothing sitting there unused.

Just find something you like and stop worrying about it. Endeavour is a fine distro. If you want something a little more minimal then go with Arch. Fedora works too.

You could even use Ubuntu. For all the shit it gets for being a noob distro, there’s nothing really wrong with it. There’s this ridiculous notion that you’re supposed to start there and then move to a more advanced distro. They are all packaging similar software and have a convenient package manager. Unless you have a specific use case, there’s less difference than you think.

Cool! The exo-planetary stuff and astronomy is interesting to me. I’m loving the data we are getting from JWST. There was recently an article about possible biological chemical processes on a faraway planet. The asteroid sample NASA collected also contained the building blocks for life. Not too long ago, we got to see the first picture of a black hole. There’s just so much out there to explore.

I wonder if we would even recognize other intelligent life if we found it. Could we figure out how to communicate? We can barely recognize intelligent life on Earth. Humans eat octopus and it’s one of the most intelligent creatures we are aware of. We still look right past them.

I mean, if you are so disinterested in the conversation that you would ask the internet how to have your side of it rather than check out the show, maybe you just shouldn’t have that conversation. Change the subject or tell them you’re not into it. Who cares if they believe there are aliens?

Personally, I find it impossible to believe there isn’t other intelligent life out there. It’s not because of blurry photos or spooky stories. It’s that the universe is just so vast and there’s so much we will never understand about this place we are in. How can it not be out there? Frankly, it takes more faith to believe there isn’t something.

With that perspective, I do occasionally find those shows interesting. Not because it’s proof of anything but because it’s fun to watch and wonder what it is. It doesn’t have to make you a believer or a non-believer. There’s obviously something in the videos. What it is and where it comes from is entirely different. It’s just entertainment for people who like to indulge in a little speculation.