Mint’s mouse acceleration was what killed it for me. Setting acceleration to “constant” still felt rubber-bandy and fucked up, and there’s no obvious “Off” option. That was a hard stop. It never felt like I was using my PC but instead a rubber-bandy immitation. I immediately switched. It’s frustrating considering that the rest of the OS seemed OK, I could have seen myself using it if not for that.

Bazzite immediately felt “good” to use right out of the box. No baked in acceleration weirdness. Kudos to the team for really putting in the effort to make this old gamer feel right at home in it. Now going on over a year of it and still loving it.

Great, yet another case of: we want to build cars but “nobody” (a.k.a. everybody except piece of shit investors) wants reliable and inexpensive cars that aren’t spying on you.

So we need to unlock money from venture capital / rabid ai hype / insert sketchy bubble here, to build expensive luxury cars with fake self driving while selling all your data completely outside of your control.

Your assumption about how datalogging works is incorrect.

In short, sensors almost never store local data which doesn’t even matter if those sensors are depowered. There is absolutely nothing to be afraid of here.

So yeah, sensors do not locally store data except in very rare and high-cost cases not found in basically any consumer electronics. There needs to be a datalogger or handoff to a datalogger of some variety. While the ECU or MCU of a vehicle logs data, there’s not a permanent memory of every action you’ve done with the car because it literally doesn’t have enough memory. Doubly so if some of the sensors such as GPS are physically unplugged or depowered as in my case.

So, no amount of malicious action from a dealer would extract location or even more basic data from a car. The only thing they’d see are the basics of the ECU or MCU which has been common for every car produced since OBD2 became… a thing.

I’ll also add that an easy solution to this is not to go to a corporate dealer (all Chevy dealers are shit anyway to be fair). While the independent mechanic might have to buy proprietary diagnostics from the manufacturer, they aren’t going to re-enable systems like GPS or telemetry if you tell them not to because they care about you coming back and thus have an incentive not to fuck you over.

I bought a used Chevy bolt EV, for now I’ve pulled the onstar system fuse which kills the telemetry and GPS+cell antenna. No tracking with no power, it’s my car and my battery so I decide what gets my power.

I’m not interested in letting any of these companies screw me over behind my back regardless of who is “less evil,” but I’ve gotten so used to the convenience of EVs that I won’t do without one.

I use my phone for navigation and music/podcasts and that still works just fine.

Might at some point look at a more sophisticated way of doing this like removing just the onstar module or terminating its antenna, but for now it’s fine.

Here I am thinking that it would be sick to have more multilingual coworkers. I’m struggling through learning the basics of a couple second languages (not complaining, it is what it is and I’ll get there eventually). So its nice to have a native or fluent speakers around to help communicate with someone who doesn’t speak english that well. Or at all. At work our english-speaking offices expect people who are stationed there to be able to speak English, or to learn it if they don’t. But it’s not mandatory to speak it in-office. Usually it’s just faster for people to speak other languages with non-english locations or ESL people. Honestly its usually it’s the other way around, with people in other places learning English to talk with us, but that doesn’t always work out well. Its nice to be able to do both.

Your (edit - former?) manager sounds sheltered and unprofessional, to say the least. I hope HR gets involved (unless they’re racists too…)

I agree that’s the reality here, but that doesn’t mean people will acknowledge it. I mean… look at what people who are willfully ignorant and/or intentionally hateful have done to the west. They’re still saying shit like “better work harder, scrub” even though that’s complete bullshit and applies just as much to them as anyone else.