piltdownman

You're well over the 90 day mark where E10 is well into its degradation and standard unleaded is starting to sour. A nice problem to have in many respects, but just to be aware!

TBH the market demand will ensure a Toyota Camry/Honda Civic 'invincible' style runabout will emerge that basically anyone can run into the ground and still depend on. The real issue to me is the morality of the production of the parts, particularly things involving rare-earth metals.

I mean the core feature here is a vastly simplified drivetrain and often modular parts borrowed or 'appropriated' from the best of existing marques. There's a lot less to go wrong versus any existing ICE platform, and the Chinese EVs that make the Western market are generally the budget/barebones models outside of the the high-end BYD stuff.

In comparison, the last two generations of ICE cars from Europe/US are the most mechanically complex in history in order to meet strict emissions laws.

The main point of contention is around support for the integrated cloud connectivity and continuous OTA software updates. Ultimately that will be clean-room decompiled or otherwise audited for PII/Security Compliance to the point where reverse-engineering for LTS is trivial.

Other than that, just as displayed with walled-garden Apple products, a robust, decentralized aftermarket will emerge from the legions of SEA hackers.

They used to operate in a legally consistent Western Democracy. They no longer do. OpSec for most involved in basic social activism needs to now be at the level of 'Journalist in a Dictatorship' or stricter.

At this point there's a non-zero chance you and your employees are detained on spurious national security grounds, or simply end up in an ICE internment centre - accidently or otherwise.

And I presume the Anthropic CEO will be indicted on 13 felony counts under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and for wire fraud. Like Aaron Swartz, right?

Right?

N.B. JSTOR explicitly settled with Swartz, suffered no financial harm, and begged the federal government to drop the case. The government refused and prosecuted Swartz anyway. Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion primarily because of the theft and storage of the files, but this was somehow a Civil issue...

TBH I feel that whatever totemistic or workflow quirks you need to keep maintaining flow state is perfectly logical. Software Engineers keep rubber ducks for a reason.

Taking a slice of the pie for Haliburton via force is one thing, but OPEC are ultimately the De Beers of Oil and act in the same fashion.

The UAE leaving in May'26 and now getting involved in the fight against the Houthis, while Qatar donated Bribe Force One to Trump, is quite telling as to how this is going re: the US though.

I mean for just the EU you have:

Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) which enforce mandatory governance and processes like resilience testing and cybersecurity lifecycle requirements.

GDPR & Data Protection frameworks which requires architecture to support CRUD operations on all PII, data minimization, customer-managed encryption architectures and so forth.

...and the anti-vibe code framework aka the EU AI Act, which requires human oversight and data quality controls.

This is completely aside from any industry specific engineering codes like in Finance where you have to adhere to things like ISO 20022 or iXBRL/ESEF standards, user accessibility mandates, and PCI Compliance mandates for things like Security Architecture over and above the CRA.

Which will all have things like reprogrammable firmware and FPGA aspects to support paywalled proprietary features.

We already support it to some extent with licensed hardware codecs (HEVC, AVC, VVC etc...), licensed DRM like HDCP, and individual device licensing for audio technologies like Dolby Atmos, DTS:X and video technologies like Dolby Vision.

For Indies, sure. For AAA you've got egregious DRM that can compromise your system to an unimaginable degree. These flaws were so structurally dangerous that Microsoft permanently blocked SafeDisc and older versions of SecuROM from executing in Windows 10 onwards.

Capcom in 2016 should have been prosecuted imo - their attempt at "DRM" installed a kernel-level driver (capcom.sys) that intentionally disabled Supervisor Mode Execution Prevention (SMEP), allowing the kernel to execute code in user space...

The current Denuvo DRM to combat 'piracy' (always ALWAYS a pricing issue) is now encouraging both legal and high-seas users to use hypervisor-based bypasses to circumvent its many shortcomings. This is basically handing over the keys to your house in the AI age.