The big thing is the (supposed) mid-$20k base price. Exact pricing hasn't been announced yet (and seems likely to increase, what with tariffs and unpredictable AI-based electronic component shortages). But if they actually do manage to bring a small, practical electric truck to market for, say, $27,000 and they can actually produce them at scale so there isn't a years-long waiting list to get one...
Well, that will be a big deal, I think.
And, yeah. Doesn't seem like it will be spyware on wheels, since it doesn't even come with an infotainment system. You're meant to mount your own phone or tablet to the dash instead. Those, of course, have their own spyware issues. But you could always just not do that if you're worried about your privacy -- you'd have no nav and no music, but also no spyware. Or just use an old tablet that doesn't have an internet connection or something.
I’m not sure if other people want to read the pedantic truth anyways. I’m glad you filled this void.
Glad my pedantry could be of service, lol!
The instructions for installing on ubuntu only work because of ubuntu’s popularity.
True, but this is still a very real effect with real-world benefits.
(And I wouldn't necessarily say it's just Ubuntu's popularity. More like, due to Debian and Debian derivatives' popularity, of which Ubuntu is one. Since there are so many popular distros out there that are Debian-based where Debian-style install instructions will work (and quite a few people running Debian itself), it makes sense to give Debian-style install instructions first.)
Also if you can copy-paste commands, you can also just follow build instructions.
In my experience, not so much.
Because even if you follow the instructions exactly, you'll always run into some problem due to your build environment not being quite identical to the developer's build environment, some library being half a version number off, and then cmake fails with a cryptic error message. So then you downgrade that library to the older version and try again, and this time it fails with a different cryptic error message that you can't make any sense of at all this time, or the compiler quits because it says the code is formatted improperly on line 1437 and now you're left wondering whether it's an issue with your compiler or whether you should go in and edit the source code yourself to try and fix that supposed formatting error...
I don't know... I've tried this approach a few times -- usually as a desperate last resort -- and it never seems to actually work. In theory, it should. In practice ... good fucking luck.
Obviously, the important thing is that they're against Western Imperialism, and that's the only thing that really matters, right? Obviously, women's rights can afford to be set back a thousand years or so, as long as it's for the greater cause of defeating Western Imperialism.
Given the kind of incompetent fuckwits they've been hiring, that's not surprising at all, really.