> Yet every car is converging on an unholy child of a minivan and a small crossover SUV
Because it's a local maximum of utility. Most people don't care that their car "lacks personality" or "looks ugly to auto enthusiasts" - they just want it to be safe, efficient, and capable. Crossover-type vehicles generally get you the best combination of the three.
To add to this: I see anonymity becoming more desired by the general population as surveillance and threat of law enforcement, car thieves, and road rage amplifies.
Blending in feels much safer these days. Much like herd animal behavior.
Same. I just bought pretty much the cheapest used EV I could find that looked alright to me and had enough range. Happy as a clam.
I'm not interested in wasting tens of thousands of dollars on slightly more comfortable seats and stuff like that. I could, it just doesn't seem worth it. I'd rather have the money for other things.
Maybe next time I'll buy a slightly more premium car like a Volvo EC30 or something like that, if I can find a nice used one for a decent price. I don't see any reason to buy new cars. In my market a 4 year old car (still under warranty) is literally less than half the price of a new one. I don't think the warranty is worth that much.
Strong disagree on crossovers providing the "best combination of the three." People seem to think this, assuming that their purchases are influenced by thought... But based on my observations (and physics); Sedans, coupes, or anything with less mass will be safer, more efficient, and more capable. It's actually the tendency of people to purchase crossovers and even more massive vehicles that results in smaller vehicles being seen as "less safe". It has created an arms race of sorts, but doesn't change that F=ma. Car companies want to sell you a crossover because it's good for them, not us. Just stop and think for a minute why there are no SUV motorsport series... Enthusiasts have competitions for almost every type of vehicle except the type that most people buy. SUVs / crossovers are like dull, heavy knives wielded by the inexperienced and uncaring.
> Sedans, coupes, or anything with less mass will be ... more capable
I beg to differ. They may be safer and more efficient, but they get those advantages by trading off cargo and passenger space. A crossover can carry a heck of a lot more than a sedan and still fit 5 people - hence why it's the "local maximum."
SUVs and crossovers actually tend to have less useable interior area than vans or station wagons. Another advantage of vans and station wagons is that they're built on chassis similar to sedans which allow you to maintain a low center of gravity for better handling.
Cool - now let's see how much it costs in compute to generate a single clip. (Also, notice how no individual scene is longer than a handful of seconds?)
It's simple enough that I can easily typeset CS theory homework (with all the fancy notation that entails) without having to subject myself to the insanity of LaTeX or the friction of a standard word processor.
But at the same time, I can also crank out a full paper in a (professor mandated, LaTeX templated) style without raising any eyebrows.
The fact that it's a "real" programming language is also lovely - I have a very simple template (took me an ~hour to write) that ingests TOML descriptions of recipes and marshals them into pretty, standardized PDFs for my recipe binder.
If this means that I no longer have to wait around for five minutes to have a supermarket employee unlock the laundry detergent, then I approve. Yes, there are privacy concerns, but I care more about law and order at this point.
> if you're popping in and out expansion cards all the time eventually the ports are going to fail which seems like a really weird design choice
Anecdotally, I've developed a bad habit of fidgeting with my expansion cards by popping them in and out. I've probably put them through several hundred cycles like that and they still work fine - I think the fact that the cards are "rail-roaded" into the slots helps a lot, since it makes it very difficult to apply pressure at an angle to the internal USB-C port.
Minority report: I will likely just switch to an iPhone, despite my typical gripes with Apple.
I've always seen my smartphone as a tool that doesn't do "much" (compared to a "real" computer) but can be relied on to always do what I need, whereas the inverse is ~true for my Linux desktop. (Think "bank app" versus "running Photoshop.")
By this metric, the only thing that historically ranked Android above iOS for me - even despite all the Google concerns - was sideloading and general openness.
Now that that's basically gone, I may as well move to a mobile OS that at least pretends to give a damn about my privacy.
Quoting myself from elsewhere, but I would like to make a legislation proposal: all natural gems must be marketed as "crude" due to impurities not present in their synthetic counterparts.
This would end the De Beers cartel basically overnight by smashing the "appeal to nature" fallacy that "natural gem" marketing and pricing relies on.
It's extremely telling that nobody (developer or consumer) takes the Epic Games store seriously, in spite of their effort to undercut Steam on this front (0% on the first mil, and 12% after that - to say nothing of the free game promos.)
Epic has offered self-publishing tools for a while. They do involve a human review step, but one look at the piles of NFT shovelware available shows that the bar is in Hell.
(Granted, Steam isn't too picky either, but at least they draw the line at unregulated speculative assets.)
Because it's a local maximum of utility. Most people don't care that their car "lacks personality" or "looks ugly to auto enthusiasts" - they just want it to be safe, efficient, and capable. Crossover-type vehicles generally get you the best combination of the three.
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