effectively limitless

And it’s generated anyways, no matter if we pull some minuscle amount of it out or not. 47 terawatts all the time (according to wikipedia), or all the power we currently consume per year in about 150 days (assuming my quick math is even close). Of course we can’t (and probably shouldn’t) capture 100% of it, but there’s plenty of energy to at least shut down few coal ovens.

XKCD 605

actively going out of your way to remove the existing support is petty and just an asshole move

Sure, but the dev doesn’t owe anything to anyone. He of course could ask community for help with this, sugar coat every answer, spend his (I assume already very valuable and sparse) free time to deal with assholes while trying to organize wider developer base to manage the issue and so on.

But he/she is still not obligated to do so and most definetly not obligated to deal with assholes all day every day instead of working with the passion project. Anyone around here thinking this is a wrong call can step up and volunteer to manage the thing, you don’t even need to know how to code, just filter trough the crap and create meaningful tickets and find people from community who’re willing to spend their time on fixing it.

Also, at least in here, lease costs (like all as-a-service things) are considered to be flexible while own hardware and specially workforce are static costs. And no one wants to increase static costs, even if it’s clear as daylight that flexible cost only flexes upward over time unless the company suddenly shrinks by quite a lot.

pre-installed interface

Doesn’t pretty much every car already have CAN bus?

You’re correct. All packages installed via dpkg/apt are on that list. What isn’t included are appimages, flatpacks, snaps and other non-dpkg software if you happen to have any.

You’re absolutely correct. I have few smart switches around the house and automations for yard lights and stuff like that are pretty nice to have but I still have the physical switch where the dumb switch was to interact with if the automations are down or I just want to override them. The ones I use even accept the same faceplate than traditional ones so there’s no change on anything unless you want to automate things.

Society has apparently forgotten the good old ‘call me when you get there’-thing. My wife travels by car with our kids now and then for 300-400km at a time and it’s nice to get messages/calls like “we’re at X, stopped for coffee” or “we got here”. That’s all I need and it’s also a part of relationship and communication. There’s no value on following a dot on the map. They even had a small accident one time and I heard about it soon enough. Even if I had their live location it would mean absolutely nothing as they were over an hour away, it was way more important to get proper help there before notifying me instead of getting distracted by my calls/messages at that time.

The recipent is your partner.

And provider of whatever service you use to share your location. Being a bit paranoid about your privacy in this day and age is not just fearmongering and tinfoil-hats.

It can be extremely usefull for example for grabbing shit in a mall

Or communicate in advance that it’ll take 30 minutes for you to find your shit and then meet up at a cafe, by car, at lobby or whatever. Live location doesn’t add anything to that, assuming it even works reliably enough inside buildings.