Ubuntu Touch is such a nice user experience. If it had an Android-tier app ecosystem it’d be a very nice daily driver.

There’s also just no real incentive for them to do it. The number of devices running fully de-googled Android forks are miniscule in the grand scheme of things. Everyone running devices with non-standard Android but which still uses Google Play Services and the rest are just as valuable to Google as the ones running stock. And it suits Google to have the small ultra-privacy hobbyist market still running Android forks, even de-googled ones, rather than moving on to something else entirely.

For as long as it’s still under the Apache licence, they’re still obligated to release the source under the terms of that licence. They’d need to change the licence to stop providing code; which as you say, they could do, but that would also kill AOSP entirely overnight so is a bit of a bigger problem than the one described in the OP.

Is it possible? Sure.

Even then, not really. Not legally, anyway. Open source licences require that the user be provided with the source code (if requested) alongside the binaries. If they roll out an update to Android (to code which is under an open source licence), they have to release the code at essentially the same time. Rolling out an update and then withholding the source code for an unnecessarily long time would be against the terms of the licence.

Yep. Feel like I see more Ioniqs than anything else, although things are gradually diversifying.

You don’t know that. The people of Kepler-452b might well be suffering under a truly awful automobile industry.

BYD is eating everyone’s lunch at the bottom not just Tesla.

It’s not just BYD. SAIC (whose main international brand is MG) isn’t far behind, Chery (whose main brands are Omoda and Jaecoo) are starting to get about too, and there are myriad smaller Chinese marques.

Chinese cars in general are really hitting the market hard.

It’s a real issue. A strong use case for LLM search engines is providing summaries which combine lots of facts that would take some time to compile through searching the old fashioned way. But if it’s only 90% accurate and 10% hallucinated bullshit, it becomes very difficult to pick out the bullshit from the truth.

The other day I asked Copilot to provide an overview of a particular industrial sector in my area. It produced something that was 90% concise, accurate, readable and informative briefing, and 10% complete nonsense. It hallucinated an industrial estate that didn’t exist, a whole government programme that doesn’t exist, it talked about a scheme that went defunct 20 years ago as if it were still current, etc. If it weren’t for the fact that I was already very familiar with the subject, I might not have caught it. Anyone actually relying on that for useful work is in serious danger of making a complete tit of themselves.

Fair point.

Redirect it to Blue Sky instead.

VW says the production version of the ID. EVERY1 will be the company’s first vehicle to feature a new “powerful” software architecture that promises over-the-air updates. (Software has proven to be a bit of a pain for VW, with bugs and infrequent updates plaguing its ID family of vehicles for years.)

Yes, it is!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_constellation

there’s also GNSS which is mostly used in Europe and Scandinavia

GNSS is the generic term that covers all satellite navigation systems (GPS included).

Galileo is the EU/ESA system you’re thinking of.

GLONASS (Russian) and BeiDou (Chinese) are the other two major constellations with global coverage. The only other full system I know of is NavIC, which is Indian and has only regional coverage.

Most devices actually connect to all of them. I’ve just checked my phone, and it’s connected to all of GPS, Galileo, GLONASS and BeiDou. People just say “GPS” because it’s catchier than “GNSS”.

They’re not going to create entirely new ones just for this vehicle.

If you read the article (I know, controversial) you’ll see that that’s exactly what they’re suggesting they’re doing, yes.

Personally I wouldn’t hold my breath that it’ll be better, but it is going to be completely different to their current software stack.

Concept cars are, by definition, not actually finished. Nobody will be able to buy the car that was being shown at the car show. The car that will be on sale in 2-3 years will be a thematically similar but fundamentally different creature.

Things like the onboard computer software/hardware/data sharing model won’t be defined yet. VW’s first party servicing costs or the price of replacement brake pads are not defined yet. It’ll be a job for a future car journalist to report on all those things once it’s actually defined.

It’s a concept car; none of those things are actually known or knowable yet.

I’m not sure I really understand the point of this. Even if you hate Mozilla, the Gecko engine is excellent and it would make far more sense to fork it than to start a new one from scratch.

Building and maintaining a browser engine is hard. FOSS means that everyone is of course free to pursue the projects that interest them, but this doesn’t seem like a great use of effort to me.

Perfectly readable white text on a black background on my devices. The problem must be on your end.

Git is the underlying code management and version control system. It can be used directly, and also forms the backend to a number of other systems.

Code “forges” are platforms which integrate a version control system (like git), a code repository (a file server), and front end utilities.

Some git forges are open source, others are proprietary. Certainly with the open source ones, but also with the proprietary ones in some cases, you can either self-host or use a hosted service.

GitHub is a proprietary forge, and GitHub.com is the company’s fully hosted service. They’re now owned by Microsoft.

Gitlab is an open source forge. Gitlab.com offers a hosted service, but many projects self-host.

Forgejo is a fork of Gitea which is a fork of Gogs. These are all also open source. As far as I know, neither Forgejo nor Gogs offer a hosted version, but Gitea does.

A few other notable forges include GNU Savannah (open source), Bitbucket (proprietary), Sourceforge (proprietary), Launchpad (open source), Allura (open source).

At the end of the day, they all do the same thing. They have different feature lists (especially around some of the project management and user interaction side), different user interfaces (some are shinier and more modern, others more minimalist), and different communities and support models. You choose that one that works best for your needs.

GitHub is probably the most feature-rich (and/or bloated) of them. GitLab is competing in the same space, and self-hosted GitLab seems to be something of a sweet spot for many projects that want a premium experience without needing to use a proprietary Microsoft product. I don’t have much experience with Forgejo or Gitea. The rest tend to exist in their niches.

Are they cheaper? Even over 1M miles or whatever a truck engine is expected to go?

Yes, significantly so. Hydrogen fuel cells have a much shorter lifespan and higher manufacturing/replacement cost than lithium ion batteries. The compressed gas tanks are also very expensive and have a limited lifespan (albeit a relatively long one, compared to the fuel cells).

And as hydrogen scales up, it’ll get cheaper. It’s currently a bit more expensive than gas (about 3-4x), but that’s with hydrogen transported from some plant somewhere. If it’s locally generated from solar, it’ll probably be quite a bit cheaper.

Market rate hydrogen is currently about as cheap as it’s possible to get, because it is almost exclusively from fossil fuel sources which are gradually winding down.

Locally produced electrolysis hydrogen suffers from very low efficiency rates; about 2/3rds of the power used to produce the hydrogen is lost in the process. Assuming you don’t have an enormous overabundance of power being generated, it’s more efficient to store the power locally in batteries (which don’t have to be lithium ion if it’s for static storage; other chemistries become competitive if they don’t need to move around) than it is to store it as hydrogen. And if you’re generating a huge overabundance of power such that throwing 2/3rds of it away seems sensible, in most cases the question would be why you don’t make a grid connection and feed in anyway (extreme remote locations notwithstanding).

Hydrogen remains a solution desperately in search of a problem.

If your aim is to generate locally, why not just use batteries? They’re cheaper, more efficient, and more reliable. Why have the lossy and very high maintenance electrolysis and hydrogen storage/transfer process involved?