The lack of official touchscreens/GPS/center console media etc seems like a good step - at the very least, unnecessary antennas and microphones should be easier to spot/replace with an old MP3 player with one annoying song.

So genuine question: are the parts like batteries/motors safe and otherwise good enough to be used in ICE conversions? Or is there some kind of software/network boobytrap to be circumvented? The car itself is a horribly flawed surveillance box, but it seems like the flaws I’ve seen are mostly a sort of problem by compilation, like the finished product is worse than the sum of it’s parts. Is there a chance at least that this overproduction could help provide parts for conversion vehicles?

Genuine question: would fiberglass and resin adhere to this material? I’m familiar with it from patching up old boats and canoes and could see that being an easy weekend project.

It’s definitely getting harder and harder to draw genre boundaries - cyberpunk quietly infiltrated mainstream scifi to the point where you can find cyberpunk elements in almost any modern scifi. Not bad for a subgenre the corporations and marketers misused and overused until it crashed. I remember people talking about it like a joke in the 2000s so I’m very pleased it won in the end (though I wish people treated it more like a warning than a roadmap).

I can definitely see the inclination not to include Murderbot (I thought twice about including it on the list) mostly because it doesn’t feel cyberpunk. It’s very clean, there’s no sense of decline or collapse the corps are ruling over, and the locations by and large don’t fit the usual. Heck one area is lowkey solarpunk. I think it has a ton of cyberpunk elements, story beats, etc, but it’s almost fridge cyberpunk, you have to walk away and think about it before enough of them line up. And feel is a big part of the genre, I think.

I think Gibson stories are my main reread, partly because I think they work a little better when you already half remember what’s going on.

I also reread the Murderbot books quite often, they’re kind of comfort food stories for me.

I rewatch Cowboy Bebop sometimes for the same reason.

I reread the webcomic Black & Blue fairly often but that’s mostly because the person making it has been absolutely hammering out pages for years now and I almost always need to reread before I can catch up.

Thanks for working so hard to keep the community going! I really like this place

TBH even if they got robo taxis working (and I think that’s a big if without lidar) they’d be even more of a lightning rod for vandalism than personal vehicles and dealerships. They’d more thoroughly represent Tesla than personal cars and they’d be safer targets than dealerships since they could be summoned into a known (camera free) environment which would minimize risk to anyone who wanted to paint it or drop a rock on it or whatever. Especially if they were active long enough for their behavior and routes to get predictable.

The panels falling off and hubcaps flying off seem like a decent reason to avoid the cybertrucks at least

Agreed, that mess was when I realized he was a tool. That said, most CEOs are some flavor of bastard and buying almost anything means giving your money to some exec who doesn’t deserve it so I can understand overlooking it at that point.

As the competition got better and he got more overtly fashy, buying a Tesla became more and more a political statement rather than a normal purchase. Sucks for the early adopters but most ire seems to be reserved for the cybertrucks.

I’ve heard that before for porche, but I’ve also heard that electric vehicles tend to require less maintenance overall since there are many fewer mechanical parts. I don’t know anything about this particular model so I guess I’m wondering which holds true in this case.

This is very cool - not quite as cute as the canoo (RIP) but it seems quite practical and I hope it makes it to market - I’d like a small electric truck someday.

Last spring we started a small oyster mushroom farm (the kind where you drill holes in a fresh log and hammer in pegs with spores in them, then seal them with wax. I’m hoping we’ll see lots of mushrooms sprouting this summer. I also tried to get sunchokes established but I think the squirrels might have watched me bury them and dug them up.

I’d like to keep working on crops that’ll grow under tree cover this summer.

The series reads well as one big story with a few different arca, especially if you get the big volumes. It’s very much worth reading - try to get a high rez copy (so not Amazon) so you can appreciate the remarkably detailed crowd scenes

It’s nice that their incentives finally line up with something I want. Now if only building surveillance into new cars was somehow unprofitable.

Super cool that these are actually happening! I read about them a lot while researching modern sail ships but it’s hard to tell if new tech like this is really happening until they build it.

I had no idea so much of their power was from hydro! It sucks that a drought can cause such disruption to the grid but I admire their ambition (in power generation and in their car rules).

It’s easier to make your own electricity than to make your own gasoline.

All big companies do. The only thing mitigating that is regulations and the US is generally laxer than other places (like Europe and Canada) on safety standards.

No worries! And good luck!

Throwing in a little odd advice for the secondhand scene - even if the shops are bad, I’ve had some good luck with estate sales and cleanouts (where a family or realtor basically opens the home to anyone who’ll cary stuff away and save them the trouble and cost of throwing it out). It can feel kinda bad, picking through stuff in that context, but we’ve saved a bunch of nice old tools and kitchen stuff that way, and the houses generally have everything else you might need for a house. Personally I think the best BIFL stuff is old and made before they really perfected enshitifying their products.

The cleanouts I’ve been to we found through postings on our local free groups (which I also really recommend) or word of mouth, but I used to know some folks who went to them professionally, looking for merchandise for their own businesses, so they must be advertised somewhere normal people would find them too.

I got to visit a car museum once - I was surprised to see that there was a brief window where gas, electric, and steam cars were all equally bad and folks didn’t seem to know which format would become ascendant.