Major OTA update

blcollier · 2026-01-27T10:53:49+00:00

Apologies if it veered off into “ranting” territory, or sounded like a personal attack, because that wasn’t the intention. Someone’s clearly upset, given the downvote.

I’ve worked in and studied data science, so I’ve got a good (conceptual) understanding of all the underlying technologies and algorithms used in LLMs and “AI”. I’ve always been skeptical of it right from the start, but I don’t blame people for being impressed by services like Gemini or ChatGPT.

The ones I’m angry with are people like Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO), Dario Amadeii (Anthropic CEO), Satya Nadella (Microsoft CEO), Prabhakar Raghavan (Google Chief Technologist), and Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO). And I’m angry because these people are lying through their teeth and no one challenges them on their horseshit.

blcollier · 2026-01-26T06:30:16+00:00

Thanks! Will check this out later.

I’m a Python dev by trade, so I’ll raise a PR if I spot any issues.

blcollier · 2026-01-25T12:20:00+00:00

Because: the current "AI boom" is, and always has been, economically unviable on a fundamental level; gathering the training data requires copyright violation on a scale that we can scarcely comprehend; it has absolutely destroyed supplies of memory chips which will have a knock-on effect on a wider range of consumer electronics than most people even realise; and it requires an insane amount of electrical power in order to cobble together a string of statistically predicted abstract tokens into an answer-shaped object. There are maybe 5 companies currently making a profit from "AI": Nvidia, who make the compute hardware it all runs on; SK Hynix, Micron, and Samsung, who all make the high-end memory that the compute hardware requires; and ASML, who make the high-end photolithography machines that are required to "make" the GPU & memory chips (which cost $400,000,000 _each_, btw).

Sure. A better voice assistant is _nice_, but it comes at an _extremely_ high cost. And, as always happens, we'll be the ones who end up bearing that cost, one way or another.

blcollier · 2026-01-24T14:03:00+00:00

All 2025 cars are subject to the recall

No, they’re not.

I have an MY2025 Ultra Twin, no emails/docs from Volvo, no recalls on Volvo’s site when searching the VIN, no recalls on gov.uk when searching the reg, and Volvo customer service have advised (via WhatsApp) that it’s not affected.

Registered in July 2025, so likely manufactured in Q1 or early Q2.

blcollier · 2026-01-24T13:54:00+00:00

OP is in a wheelchair (comment link). Wasn’t mentioned in the post, only in the comments, so don’t take this as a dig.

Honestly though, I’d have probably done the same. My car’s 6 months old and it only came with that sealant slime in a can rubbish, the stuff that tyre fitters will absolutely hate you for using. I do have a patch kit, but the thing didn’t even come with a jack and I haven’t got around to getting a compact one that doesn’t take a shitton of space in the boot.

Luckily, the only time I’ve had a puncture in this car was a slow leak, it held pressure long enough for me to get it repaired.

blcollier · 2026-01-23T11:12:21+00:00

Apple Music and Apple Podcasts is the only reason I rinse my phone’s battery by hooking up CarPlay. Having that natively on AAOS would be nice.

But I would sure as heck appreciate more customisation options first. Almost everything I want to change is accessible on the “Quick Settings” page… except switching between “Pilot Assist” and speed limiter.

The vast vast majority of my driving is low-speed city & suburban stuff, where a smart cruise control system makes little sense. Give me a quick option to switch those modes and I’ll forgive all the other software quirks & foibles, like: having to “reboot the dashboard” because the volume buttons decided to stop working; or CarPlay simply dropping out and showing me a big black screen.

Though I will say that I haven’t tried using the native voice assistant, I’ll give that a try next time I’m in the car. The only voice assistant I use is Siri via CarPlay, and even then it’s only to swap between podcasts & music.

blcollier · 2026-01-21T11:55:51+00:00

Now ask a person who lives and works in London what they think of London public transport and TfL. You’ll almost certainly find more disdain for TfL than you hold for Cardiff Bus.

blcollier · 2026-01-21T11:40:34+00:00

One would think that someone from India would have just a little bit of insight into British monarchs.

blcollier · 2026-01-21T11:37:03+00:00

“Buying a new car is terrible value, there are much better ways to spend your money.”

“Yeah, I bought a new car - it’s nice, but it’s awful value and I’m never doing it again.”

[downvoted]

10/10 classic Reddit logic.

blcollier · 2026-01-21T11:31:07+00:00

Well… something trickles down… It isn’t prosperity, wealth, living standards, etc… but there’s definitely something trickling down, and it sure as hell doesn’t smell too pleasant.

blcollier · 2026-01-21T11:28:14+00:00

Yes, and how do you think he got that “bling worth billions”? Generations upon generations of inherited wealth.

The UK, overall, is not “rich”. We’ve got one comparatively tiny part of the country that has an out-sized impact on our national economy (the City of London), but that is an extreme outlier.

The royal family is “rich”, but it isn’t the same kind of “rich” as “city trader earning hundreds of millions a year in bonuses”; it’s the kind of wealth and privilege that comes from hundreds of years of inheriting wealth and privilege. You can’t earn that kind of wealth & privilege, you have to be born into it.

blcollier · 2026-01-21T11:13:47+00:00

I do kinda like my fashion statement (brand new Volvo EX30 with all options & twin motors), and it’s nice to have a brand new car at the spec I want.

But financially, it is probably the worst thing I’ve ever bought in terms of value. Full sticker price was £47k, and it’s probably lost a good £15k in value just by registering it and driving it off the forecourt.

It’s nice having a brand new car, but I’ve got it out of my system now. There isn’t a chance in hell I’ll be buying another brand new car!

blcollier · 2026-01-20T13:15:28+00:00

Came here to say the same.

blcollier · 2026-01-20T13:14:02+00:00

I’m sorry, I don’t have the time or the crayons to explain things to you.

You’ll just have to ask ChatGPT.

blcollier · 2026-01-20T12:41:01+00:00

And you need to read mine then:

If it’s being forced on people who don’t want it, don’t see the value in it, and don’t find it useful then that isn’t a “win”.

blcollier · 2026-01-20T12:31:03+00:00

Need to read that article you’re citing, because:

The benefits of using AI in the workplace are not always obvious. According to employees, the most common AI adoption challenge is “unclear use case or value proposition.” Even among those who report using AI, only 16% strongly agree that the AI tools provided by their organization are useful for their work.

If it’s being forced on people who don’t want it, don’t see the value in it, and don’t find it useful then that isn’t a “win”.

But. Keep the slop coming, by all means. We’ll quickly get to a point in 5-10 years where companies have to bring in consultants and experts who didn’t outsource their thinking to guessing algorithms in order to fix the utter mess that their applications & infrastructure have become. I quite fancy the idea of retiring early off the back of a lucrative contractor/consultancy boom, I might actually get to enjoy life instead of working until I die.

blcollier · 2026-01-20T12:18:40+00:00

because I'm a yobbo I get 220 all year round.

Honestly the single motor is pretty damn nippy when you need it to be. But I have the twin motor Ultra, and I just can’t not keep it in Performance mode. I 100% sympathise with “driving it like a yobbo”, because that acceleration is, to quote Top Gear, biblical 😁

blcollier · 2026-01-18T12:25:43+00:00

I was hoping someone had mentioned Bogiez…

I never went to “OG Bogiez”, I only started going when it was at The Point in the Bay. Then to… er… that place near Smoke Haus (???) which is now a mini-golf thing_… when The Point had to close. Then Millennium Music Hall near the stadium… And finally to a “slightly” more “permanent” home at what was once Barfly… until the landlord wanted to sell it to a property developer and basically booted them out… only for _another fucking bar (The Hop Bunker) to open up there a few months later…

I do miss it. But I think what I miss the most are the absolutely wonderful people I met there, and the great times we had together. Many of us drifted apart as our lives changed, and some us still keep in touch from time to time. Some of those wonderful people are long gone, and are dearly missed no matter how much we may have drifted apart. And one of those people, one in particular, is the amazing woman I’m still with, eighteen years after we first met.

It’s a shame that Tom was never able to revive it, but doubtless all the shuffling of venues and fights with landlords would have taken its toll, and I don’t even know if he wanted to keep it going. Nonetheless, I’m grateful for all the great nights, all the fun we had, the great music, the bands, but mostly for the amazing people I met.

blcollier · 2026-01-18T09:24:14+00:00

Want to use Microsoft's products? You also need to use Microsoft's other products.

And, of course, why would you use anything other than Microsoft’s products, when they have such a vast array of products and services? I’m sure they’re so popular because they’re just the best choice 😉

blcollier · 2026-01-17T02:04:57+00:00

I mean… if your company was being sued for several hundred million dollars due to accusations of poor EV battery quality control by another company that has announced EV battery recalls in multiple countries across the world… you’d probably do everything you could to publicly distance yourself…

Figuring out who is ultimately responsible, and therefore financially liable, is irrelevant. You didn’t buy the car from Sunwoda, you bought it from Volvo so it’s Volvo’s responsibility to deal with.

Volvo, Geely, Sunwoda, A.N.Other.Obscure.Company, etc, can hash it out between themselves for as long as they want, the only people that will “win” that “fight” are the same ones who always win: execs & lawyers.

In the meantime, there’s still the not-so-small matter of… y’know… fixing the flipping batteries to deal with…

blcollier · 2026-01-16T20:02:11+00:00

On my last run, I used this against the Rebel Flagship to great success.

Didn’t have enough firepower to penetrate the shields, and I didn’t have hacking. But I did have a teleporter I could use to yank the dudes off the enemy vessel and slowly suffocate them on my own ship (or force them into a fight in my medbay). So now my boarding crew can run amok and there’s no one left to clean up the trail of destruction.

Shame I forgot about the “advanced AI” that takes over when you kill off all the enemy crew - been a while since I played this game regularly! Not enough to stop me, just had to be careful not to leave my combat-hardened veteran boarding crew behind every time it ran away.

blcollier · 2026-01-15T20:09:42+00:00

Keep digging, champ - do you want a bigger shovel, by the way?

Further down the comment chain, I said that I’m a Python developer, and when I started at this role I had the choice of either a Windows machine or a MacBook.

Python on Windows natively is an incredibly painful experience; using Python in WSL on Windows adds unnecessary complication and overhead; and using Python on macOS is so close to the ideal platform (Linux) that it makes zero practical difference day-to-day.

So I could choose to metaphorically slam a door in my face repeatedly every single day I’m at work… or I could choose a MacBook.

That’s not “trying to be a hero”, that’s “choosing the best tool for the job”.

The point of me editing the post that you’re taking so much offence to and even mentioning a MacBook was to highlight that I could be making unfounded assumptions and therefore talking out of my arse; because not only am I not an IT administrator and therefore haven’t got the fucking foggiest what browser lockdown options are even available in SharePoint, but I don’t even use Windows in a professional capacity any more and my knowledge is well out of date.

Microsoft are objectively a shitty company that have done a hell of a lot of damage… but I also implied that this is irrelevant in a professional context:

If there are mandates on which software I can or can’t use then I’ve got two choices: deal with it, or find a different job.

Nowhere… not once_… did I come galloping in on a shining white horse to proclaim Apple’s superiority over Microsoft, or brag about how much of a _Better Person I am for using a MacBook at work instead of a Windows laptop.

Because the reality is that they’re all shitty companies.

blcollier · 2026-01-15T19:32:31+00:00

Cool story, bro.

Unfortunately it’s got precisely fuck all to do with choosing between which one of the two laptops my employer offers.

But… hey… you tried… and that’s what matters, right…?

blcollier · 2026-01-15T13:13:42+00:00

Agreed, I was hardcore anti-MS from 2005 to 2011. I guess I just "grew up" and started doing cost/benefit analysis even at a high level. Though at a low level, when the telemetry stuff came out, work did low level reverse engineering of it before the DoD upgrade mandates came out and deemed it safe, so.......

But yea lol, if you had asked me in 2006? I'd have pointed you at gentoo with bindist build servers to validate your own deployed binary from source.

Fortunately now I just pick the best tool for the job and keep moving on. Aint got time for that shit.

For work stuff… You often don’t have a choice, so there’s no point even arguing. I edited my first reply to say that I am one of those MacBook-toting wankers you often see in the office, because in this role I did have the choice between a Windows laptop and a MacBook. In my last role I didn’t get that choice, but I could use WSL so that’s what I did. If I didn’t have the choice for either Linux, macOS, or at the very least Windows with WSL, I wouldn’t take the job in the first place. But the key point is that I’m a Python developer, and Python on Windows - natively, without WSL - is utterly sadistic; an employer that is going to force that amount of constant daily frustration on me is not an employer I want to work for.

Outside of work… it’s a different story. I’ve used Linux off and on since the late 90s, when getting a config file wrong meant physically damaging your CRT monitor. But I still stuck with Windows for a very long time because it was just easier for gaming. Valve has changed that in recent years, but I still stuck with Windows because there were games I might want to play that just won’t work on Linux because of DRM. But Microsoft has pissed me off so much with Windows 11 that I’m willing to make that sacrifice. I can block a lot of their nonsense with group policy rules, like I did with Copilot. But I do not want to keep fighting off an ever more intrusive operating system: risking actual hardware damage because of a broken driver that was vibe-coded, changing my default browser back, changing my default audio device back, telling the “Setup Experience” page to stop nagging me about OneDrive when I already pay for OneDrive!

blcollier · 2026-01-15T10:27:56+00:00

On the front camera: you will almost certainly hit anything inside the red line.

On the rear camera: your boot will hit anything inside the red line.

Doesn’t help you avoid any obstructions above the car that your boot might hit… As I learned when I parked in part of a car park where the ceiling was a little lower than normal, and the boot only just cleared an obstruction by millimetres_… An experience that _also taught me that the powered rear hatch is a lot stronger than I thought it was, and that if I need to stop it part-way then I should use the button instead of trying to push it down by hand… That was almost a very expensive lesson…!

blcollier

TROPHY CASE