What, don’t you enjoy the incredible feature of your car being a rolling computer that constantly gets over the air software updates? Don’t you want to experience the joy of being stuck waiting for a forced Windows update, but instead of your computer it’s your car? Why would anybody not want this incredible and so clearly beneficial experience?!?
The microtransactions are one issue among many. To be frank, putting microtransactions in a $70 USD title would still warrant negative reviews in and of itself, but the the game is also having catastrophic performance issues and crashing on PC for what seems to be the majority of players, to the point of many Youtube channels covering it that did not get press copies being all but unable to play at all.
It doesn’t matter if a game has a lot of good elements, if it has bad ones and people cite those bad elements in negative reviews it’s not review bombing, it’s consumers giving an honest review of a product.
There are in fact a huge number of reliable counters to drones, including but not limited to anti-aircraft gun systems, anti-aircraft lasers, RF jamming devices (especially effective against cheap/makeshift drones), and several more. Drones are currently an emergent threat without a robust countermeasure scheme, but given their massive role in the Ukraine war that is not going to go unaddressed for long. From a purely mechanical standpoint, small drone munitions are also physically very vulnerable, making them readily destroyed by anti-air autocannon fire or even laser weapons if you assume RF jamming will not solve the problem.
There is a massive fundamental difference between having a person see your face in public, or even having a basic security camera record your face, and having a system recognize your biometric data and stalk you through every public environment with extreme precision.
The general public should absolutely not accept the imposition of being expected to be followed through every public place by private corporate entities for undisclosed purposes. We can and should aggressively push government representatives to take strong regulatory action to outlaw this behavior and aggressively punish violations.
Will making these efforts actually change matters? Maybe, maybe not. Will throwing your hands up and just assuming it’s impossible to change anything and that we should all just lay down and accept it as fact lead to the worst possible outcome? Absolutely.
This is the crux of it. Should people expect actual unlimited data? Maybe not, if you’re tech savvy and understand matters on the backend, but also I’m fairly sure there’s a dramatically greater burden on Google for using the word “unlimited”. If they didn’t want to get stuck with paying the tab for the small number of extreme power users who actually use that unlimited data, then they shouldn’t have sold it as such in the first place. Either Google actually clearly discloses the limits of their product (no, not in the impossible to find fine print), or they accept that storing huge bulk data for a few accounts is the price they pay for having to actually deliver the product they advertised.
For people authoring original content who may end up having the only copy of a given piece of news-relevant data in their possession, using a lossy compression method to back it up sort of defeats the purpose. This isn’t stashing your old DVD collection, this is trying to back up privileged professional data.
Even if Edge was marginally better than Chrome (it’s not), allowing monopolistic practices simply for the sake of slightly evening out a corporate race to the bottom is not a good standard. The actual solution is a browser like Firefox that actually has some remote respect and business interest in user privacy, and to aggressively litigate both Microsoft and Google for the use of their dominant service platforms to cross-promote their other products to captive audiences.
The unintended part was people noticing and it making it into the news cycle, everything else was very clearly exhaustively planned and intended.
Getting out of the Google frying pan and into the Microsoft fire is in no way better. Both options are exploitative anti-user monopolies, and both Chrome and Edge are the same browser engine under different corporate skins that aggressively violate your privacy in numerous ways for their own gain.
The fact that Microsoft’s constantly more aggressive use of their OS platform to artificially push their search and cloud platforms hasn’t triggered multiple huge antitrust cases is a pretty dire indicator of how little regulators are willing or able to safeguard the public from monopolistic behavior by large tech companies.
They are not being “honest”, they are representing flawed and problematic data patterns integrated into their models, because the capabilities they actually posses are dramatically less than companies and the general public seem to be happy to assume. LLMs aren’t magically going to become pop culture evil robots that want to kill us all, but what they have already become is tools for unethical corporate exploitation and the enablement of more advanced scams and disinformation campaigns.
“A bit misleading” is, I think, a bit of a misleading way to describe their marketing. It’s literally called Autopilot, and their marketing material has very aggressively pitched it as a ‘full self driving’ feature since the beginning, even without mentioning Musk’s own constant and ridiculous hyperbole when advertising it. It’s software that should never have been tested outside of vehicles run by company employees under controlled conditions, but Tesla chose to push it to the public as a paid feature and significantly downplay the fact that it is a poorly tested, unreliable beta, specifically to profit from the data generated by its widespread use, not to mention the price they charge for it as if it were a normal, ready to use consumer feature. Everything about their deployment of the system has been reckless, careless, and actively disdainful of their customers’ safety.
While it’s true that EVs can be built with fewer moving parts in the drive system itself, and that companies could absolutely produce longer lasting vehicles if they focused on longevity, there are still a lot of parts of a vehicle that simply will not last beyond a certain point. The moving parts of an EV still cover everything in the suspension, wheels/brakes/steering, and a number of other components that are very costly to replace, not to mention the underlying frame/unibody of the vehicle itself being vulnerable to wear over time depending on the conditions it’s driven in. “The few moving parts that wear out” still covers a huge swath of a vehicle, even if you take the engine and transmission out of the equation.
Well-built EVs with a focus on longevity and repairability could extend the lifespan of the average people mover by a great deal, but at the end of the day cars will by nature eventually reach a point where the cost to repair some major core component becomes too great to justify, outside of rare or collectable cases.