I have a teeny tiny 2015 smartphone with a headphone jack, an SD card, the SIM removed, and a copy of Foobar2000 installed. It was never fast enough or capacious enough to be a very good portable internet portal, but it runs something simple like Foobar2000 very, very well. The battery still lasts longer than the one in my actual phone does. And it was (in a sense) free. Reduce Reuse Recycle.
…users can query Siri about, like asking the AI assistant what they should cook with the ingredients they have in front of them … may also use the cameras to help with things like turn-by-turn directions.
Those are some pretty underwhelming use-cases. I can’t see the world beating a path to anyone’s door for that. Even if you were so excited about these features that you were willing to overlook the privacy concerns, it seems like the phone you’ve already got would probably be just fine as a conduit for such services.
That’s great but technically: Not a car.
If the drive motor / braking motor isn’t rotating, it’s not inducing any current, so there is no regeneration happening. Whatever system is holding your car (someone’s car) stopped on a hill, it is not ‘regen’. Period. Full stop. No argument possible. To believe otherwise is to believe in free energy.
I am about 99% sure your idea of “magnets” holding a car stopped on a hill is based on some kind of misunderstanding, but I’m not an electrical engineer. If you’ve read something that explains this, and you can link to it, I’ll look at it.
I never apply brakes when on a hill, as regen braking covers that to.
But what about coming to a complete stop on a hill? There’s no way for regen to do that, there has to be motion for it to work.
Do you know for a fact that your car (in “B” mode or whatever it is you’re using) doesn’t engage mechanical (friction) brakes on your behalf when appropriate? Or is this an assumption?
In fact, according to BMW, drivers of current EVs pretty much never activate their mechanical braking systems, relying instead on their electric motors to handle the job.
I didn’t think the regen could bring a car to a complete stop, like at a stop sign or a red light. They’re certainly not using the motors to hold your place on a hill, are they?
Or are they just saying BMW drivers never stop when they’re supposed to?
Sure, you just have to finish the whole haircut in 25 minutes
The “old” clock app already had a Pomodoro feature (which I did not realize existed until recently) and you can argue this is a logical progression, I guess.
Are there pornos out there with multi-day narratives that are longer than feature films?
There are. Streaming has apparently freed lots of genres of media from formatting / scheduling expectations.
A system prompt hints at local AI-powered productivity features, specifically optimized for students. For example, the Clock app’s Focus session will act as a ‘Productivity’ assistant that breaks down tasks into clear, actionable steps, and it works by inferring the task category, then referencing the coursework of the student.
It would be great if there were a way to use AI to help people learn more effectively. But this feels like a way to train young people to become dependent on AI assistance for tasks/skills we humans used to be able to do well enough without AI. An addiction, rather than an assistant.
First published: 01 April 2026
Now, is that cause for worry or am I silly?
Are you aware of the “Multiple Clipboard” feature? Which is a deceptively simple productivity boost, a game-changer, a hidden gem in a sea of dark Windows patterns?
I imagine that “lawmakers” are going to find themselves more scrutinized, more surveilled than anyone else, because extorting them for information, favors, bribes and so forth will be much, much more lucrative than trying the same thing with nobodies like you and me.
This is an informal way of transferring state power from the people to “the cops,” in the broadest sense of that term. It’s the logic of the Mafia: If you have something on everyone, you have more opportunities to act through unwilling intermediaries.
They didn’t include this in the release notes? What in the world is going on?
It depends which AI you ask, no? Ask AI made in a mostly white country, you’re going to get pictures of mostly white people. Ask AI made in a mostly Asian country, it’ll be mostly Asian people.
…it’s just what’s more common.
I think you’re misunderstanding the author’s objection here. The problem is exactly that the genAI will reflect “just what’s more common,” and that in doing so, it over-represents that which was already over-represented. It glosses over variety and difference, it reduces the past to a cartoon. It’s the next bit that’s important:
That makes “AI” perfect for creating the form of idealized, fictional “past” that fascists love to allude to (“make America great again“), a past that never existed but that needs to be saved or restored…
This is how the original 20th century Fascists did things, too. It’s not a hypothetically Fascist appeal, it’s a historically Fascist appeal.
They killed Pocket (they didn’t just remove it from FF) some time ago.
“In The Midst Of Unpopular, Catastrophic War Of Choice, Trump Allies Call For Draft” would perhaps not be a totally neutral headline but I feel like it would be more honest, more forthright.
“This allows us to integrate freeform electronics onto a broad range of substrates, including biopolymers and living biological tissue, all within a desktop-size printer without the needs of complex facilities or labor-intensive manual processes.”
Think of the conspiracy theories we got for the COVID vaccine. Now, think bigger.
Why weren’t they going after this 10 years ago? I think I’ve just gotten into the habit of “open in new tab” because I know there’s a good chance “back” won’t do what I want.
Frankly, here on PieFed, “back” to a feed isn’t very useful, because you’ll just land somewhere in the feed, not back to the place where you started. “Open in new tab” solves that as well, for certain very small values of “solves.”
This headline highlights how insaneo the conventional wisdom has been. Consider a similar headline announcing the situation before:
“Multi-Billion Dollar Venture Capital Backed Money Evaporator Factory Generously Subsidized By Tax-paying Public”