I wish the smartcar didn’t suck so bad. We need alternatives to this “turn them upside down and shake the coins from them” approach to cars. We kind of screwed ourselves here in US because you have to drive places, you can’t walk. Even big cities aren’t that walkable (with the exception of a dozen neighborhoods sprinkled about a half dozen cities).

> Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare – but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it's a dream they can't give up on. [...]

> But even amid all the complaining about cars getting stuck in the Internet of Shit, there's still not much discussion of why the car-makers are making their products less attractive, less reliable, less safe, and less resilient by stuffing them full of microchips. Are car execs just the latest generation of rubes who've been suckered by Silicon Valley bullshit and convinced that apps are a magic path to profitability? [...]

Absolutely worth a read https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-de...

Digital payments ruined everything... video games are ruined, apps are ruined, now cars are ruined.

What next, fridges? "I see you bought ice cream. The optimal storage temperature is -18C, the cost to enable this mode is $5/week. Enable now?"

No, digital payments didn’t do it, lack of laws did. Courts can’t keep up with the pace of innovation to protect us from greed.

I’m ok with an app charging an install fee if it’s worth it. I’m ok with games selling micro transaction cosmetics. I’m not ok with features being behind yet another paywall or subscription.

It’s plain old false advertising. If I buy a car and it has a turbo, I expect it to go turbo. If I buy an app and it’s supposed to make things pretty, it better make things pretty. If I buy a cheeseburger, I don’t want to be charged extra for the condiments put on it or the onions, pickles, lettuce. I expected that comes included as part of Cogs.

> Courts can’t keep up with the pace of innovation to protect us from greed.

I wish we would start getting product innovation and not just Greed Innovation.

We would need to have laws against enshitification and limit patents to no more than a decade. Then we would be forced to innovate or lose competitive advantage. Greed Innovation will just bring more piñatas to hit.

We need to learn to protect ourselves by not buying that product.

Sorry, but a large percentage of people have never left their home state. The US is effectively a collection of 50 countries that formed an American Union, so it sounds like you are suggesting that EU people would have no problem walking end-to-end across all of Europe, but that we are the ones who need cars.

Blaming dirt for political failures in providing better accessibility to transit seems like a pretty weird starting point for a discussion.