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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • The difference is that Uber’s model of using an app to show you the route, give driver feedback, be able to report problems and monitor and track the driver, etc. is actually a huge improvement to both rider safety and experience compared to calling a cab company and then waiting who knows how long for someone to show up and hopefully bring you where you want to go.

    Not saying that their model of gig workers, or dodging up front training is good, but they legitimately offered up a fundamentally better taxi experience than anything that came before, which I think encouraged regulators to really drag their feet on looking into them.




  • “This isn’t a meeting about the budget per se”

    “This isn’t exactly a meeting about the budget”

    If you finish those sentences, it becomes clear why per se is used:

    “This isn’t a meeting about the budget per se, it’s a meeting about how much of the budget is spent on bits of string”

    “This isn’t exactly a meeting about the budget, it’s a meeting about how much of the budget is spent on bits of string”

    In this situation, using per se provides a more natural sentence flow because it links the first part of the sentence with the second. It’s also shorter and fewer syllables.

    “Steve’s quite erudite.”

    “Steve’s quite intellectual.”

    I think intellectual might be a closer synonym, but intellectual often has more know-it-all connotations than erudite which seems to often refer to a more pure and cerebral quality.

    “Tom and Jerry is a fun cartoon because of the juxtaposition of the relationship between cat and mouse.”

    “Tom and Jerry is a fun cartoon because of the side by side oppositeness of the relationship between cat and mouse that is displayed

    For those to say precisely the same thing it would have to be more like the above which doesn’t really roll off the tongue.

    “I don’t understand, can you elucidate that?”

    “I don’t understand, can you explain?”

    Elucidate just means to make something clear in general, explaining something usually inherently implies a linguistic, verbal, explanation, unless otherwise stated.

    Honestly, these all seem like very reasonable words to me for the most part. I can understand not using them in some contexts, but for the most part, words exist for a reason, to describe something slightly differently, and it takes forever to talk and communicate if we only limit ourselves to the most basic unnuanced terms.


  • When people use industry specific jargon and acronyms with someone not in their industry.

    It is a very simple rule of writing and communication. You never just use an acronym out of nowhere, you write it out in full the first time and explain the acronym, and then after that you can use it. Doctors, military folk, lawyers, and technical people of all variety are often awful at this.

    Usually though, I don’t think it’s a conscious effort to sound smart. Sometimes, it’s just people who are used to talking only with their coworkers and just aren’t thinking about the fact that you don’t have the same context, sometimes it’s people who are feeling nervous / insecure and are subconsciously using fancy terms to sound more important, and sometimes it’s people using specific terminology to hide the fact that they don’t actually understand the concepts well enough to break them down simply.



  • Suda suggested that one reason is publishers and developers focusing too much on Metacritic scores, and deciding to play it safe and stick to what is conventionally known to ‘work’ instead of taking risks with new ideas.

    I think most people are missing that they’re talking about them from a dev and publisher standpoint, not consumer / gamer.

    And from that perspective it is problematic whenever things that are supposed to be used to assess something become targets to shoot for. Oscar bait, teachers teaching the test and not the subject, etc.




  • you are literally doing what i mean when i say you are making assumptions with no evidence. there is, again, no reason to believe that “driving more efficiently” will result from mass-adoption of automated vehicles–and even granting they do, your assumption that this wouldn’t be gobbled up by induced demand is intuitively disprovable. even the argumentation here parallels other cases where induced demand happens! “build[ing] new roads or widen[ing] existing ones” is a measure that is almost always justified by an underlying belief that we need to improve efficiency and productivity in existing traffic flows,[^1] and obviously traffic flow does not improve in such cases.

    I’m doing nothing other than questioning where the induced demand is coming from. What is inducing if not increased efficiency?

    The whole point of induced demand in highways is that when you add capacity in the form of lanes it induces demand. So if our highways are already full and if that capacity isn’t coming from increased EV efficiency then where is it coming from? If there’s no increase in road capacity then what is inducing demand?

    but granting that you’re correct on all of that somehow: more efficiency (and less congestion) would be worse than inducing demand. “efficiency” in the case of traffic means more traffic flow at faster speeds, which is less safe for everyone—not more.[^2] in general: people drive faster, more recklessly, and less attentively when you give them more space to work with (especially on open roadways with no calming measures like freeways, which are the sorts of roads autonomous vehicles seem to do best on). there is no reason to believe they would do this better in an autonomous vehicle, which if anything incentivizes many of those behaviors by giving people a false sense of security (in part because of advertising and overhyping to that end!).

    You are describing how humans drive, not AVs. AVs always obey the speed limit and traffic calming signs.

    you asserted these as “other secondary effects to AVs”–i’m not sure why you would do that and then be surprised when people challenge your assertion. but i’m glad we agree: these don’t exist, and they’re not benefits of mass adoption nor would they likely occur in a mass adoption scenario.

    We haven’t agreed on anything,I said I was open to your reasoning as to why those effects wouldn’t happen, then you didn’t provide any.

    the vast majority of road safety is a product of engineering and not a product of human driving ability, what car you drive or its capabilities, or other variables of that nature. almost all of the problems with, for example, American roadways are design problems that incentivize unsafe behaviors in the first place (and as a result inform everything from the ubiquity of speeding to downstream consumer preferences in cars). to put it bluntly: you cannot and will not fix road safety through automated vehicles, doubly so with your specific touted advantages in this conversation.

    You think you can eliminate all accidents through road design?

    You are literally ignoring every single accident caused by distracted driving, impatient driving, impaired driving, tired driving etc.

    Yeah, road design in America should be better, AVs should still also replace crappy wreckless humans. Those two ideas are not mutually exclusive.


  • they can. induced demand is omnipresent in basically all vehicular infrastructure and vehicular improvements and there’s no reason to think this would differ with autonomous vehicles

    Yes, I have no doubt there would be induced demand, but that extra demand wouldn’t be at the cost of anything. Induced demand is a problem when we, for instance, build new roads or widen existing ones, because then more people drive and they clog up the same as they were before. That’s a bad thing because the cost of adding this capacity is that we have to tear down nature and existing city to add lanes, and then we have more capacity that sits at a standstill leading to more emissions.

    But if AVs add more capacity to our roads, that will be entirely because they are driving more efficiently. We’ll have the same amount of cars on the road at any given time, they’ll just be moving faster on average rather than idling in traffic jams made by humans. Which means that there will be only relatively minor emissions increases during peak times, fewer emissions emitted during non peak, and we won’t be tearing anything down to build more giant highways.

    okay but: literally none of this follows from mass-adoption of autonomous vehicles. this is a logical leap you are making with no supporting evidence—there is, and i cannot stress this enough, no evidence that if mass-adoption occurs any of this will follow

    You’re asking for something that does not exist. How am I supposed to provide you evidence proving what the results of mass adoption of AVs will be when there has never been a mass adoption of AVs.

    and in general the technology is subject to far more fabulism and exaggeration (like this!) than legitimate technological advancement or improvement of society.

    Again, it’s never actually been rolled out on a mass scale. It’s a technology still being actively developed. Neither of us know what the end results will be, but I put forth plausible reasoning to my speculation, if you have plausible reasoning why those things won’t come to pass I’m all ears. For instance, what is your reasoning for believing that AVs could never be fundamentally safer than human drivers who are frequently tired, angry, distracted, impaired, impatient, etc?



  • And here we see decades of automobile industry propaganda in action. There is only the car, or no mobility whatsoever.

    Please cite where I said that.

    You remember how everybody was just trapped inside their houses for centuries until the Ford factories started cranking out Model Ts?

    Um, yes. Obviously not remember directly, but that is what is in history books.

    Most Americans lived in small rural communities and seldom left their farm and immediate community. When they travelled at all it would be by horse and buggy, and would take forever to get to the nearest train station, and then forever from the end of the line to wherever they had to go. If people lived farther away you would see them once every couple of years and otherwise letter write them. Cars fundamentally changed how much the average person travels in their life by huge orders of magnitude, and society is now oriented around individual families and communities being much more spread out. I think this is flawed, but I also think it’s unlikely to change given the realities of basic things like housing costs making it unaffordable to live where your parents did.

    We should build out robust train networks to reduce as many cars as possible, but at the same time the idea that you’ll eliminate cars completely is quite frankly, completely divorced from reality. I personally do not own a car and have spent a used car amount of money on a cargo bike to avoid having to buy a car. But guess what? There is still a very clear limit on the size of object I can transport (smaller than virtually any piece of furniture), it’s unpleasant to infeasible to use in the rain depending on the load, and it is flat out unusable in the winter with snow and ice, so I end up using a car share service semi-regularly. I’ve thought about putting on bigger wheels, extending the bed, adding better suspension, a roof, and another set of wheels for balance, but now I’ve invented a car. And that’s not to mention driving out to nature preserves for camping, hiking, rock climbing, mountain biking etc. nor visiting family and friends who live out in the country not near any bus stops or train stations.

    As long as cars exist, AVs will be better than human drivers, and literally no one has ever presented a remotely feasible and practical plan for eliminating cars.


  • This is a fundamentally flawed argument.

    First of all, if people are getting to where they want to go faster, easier, and happier, that is a good thing. If you want to argue that everyone needs to be a hermit who never leaves home and orders everything on Amazon then you will never get your way because people fundamentally want to travel to see the outdoors and nature around them, to see their family and friends, and just to adventure. Eliminating vehicle deaths by making travel impossible is not a noble goal.

    Secondly, it’s based on the idea that people even can drive more than they already do. Road congestion in most major cities is already the limiting factor that pushes people to bike, walk, or take transit. Even if AVs make it easier and cheaper to take car, you’re still not going to do it during rush hour when you can bike.

    Thirdly, it’s based on the idea that AVs are only going to be slightly safer than human drivers. We have no reason to think that’s the case. Humans are fucking terrible drivers, and it’s highly likely that AVs will be several orders of magnitude safer than the average human driver.

    Fourthly, it ignores other secondary effects to AVs, like suddenly not needing nearly as much parking, freeing up both parking lot real estate, but more importantly, freeing up on street parking, creating more room for actual traffic to move, and their increased patience not causing constant traffic jams because they tailgated someone and then slammed on the brakes.



  • Starfield’s biggest flaw was in trying to make a grand space game given that Bethesda’s strength is sandboxy, exploration focused, RPGs.

    I am of the mind that exploration fundamentally does not work in a space game because the scale is too big. There’s waaaay too much space on even a single planet to populate with meaningfully interesting things to find. So there’s maybe one or two interesting handcrafted things per planet and you spend all your time in system and galactic scale maps to find them, rather than stumbling across them while out on a walk.

    The only space games that work imho, are either ones with tiny planets like The Outer Wilds, or ones that are more linear and driven by very good writing and space is more of a backdrop than the actual millions of km you have to travel through and explore (like The Outer Worlds, or Mass Effect).

    So I think Bethesda has a higher chance of success in literally any other, more limited, setting, given that writing isn’t their strong suit, but all that being said, I still don’t know if they’ll course correct.



  • masterspace@lemmy.catoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlIs federation that good?
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    15 days ago

    Were those on Lemmy.ca, or Hexbear? If Hexbear users want to call out Canada for being a right-wing country on Hexbear, many of whom are Canadian themselves, why does that mean it would spread to Lemmy.ca?

    It’s literally the stated reason they defederated. If you disagree it’s up to you prove otherwise.

    Communists have and continue to do so, Capitalists continue to produce a system that ruthlessly exploits workers for Capitalist riches.

    Name the country. Vietnam known for its working conditions and lack of exploitation? How are those Chinese Uighurs doing?


  • masterspace@lemmy.catoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlIs federation that good?
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    15 days ago

    That doesn’t bear out when compared to Hexbear’s thread, which was more level headed on average. The issue is in political disagreement, which Hexbear was willing to open, while Lemmy.ca was not.

    You seem insistent on it being politically motivated, yet that thread had far more vitrial that would have required mod cleanup than a typical lemmy.ca thread.

    Just go through and count the usage of kkkanadians.

    I restate, again, Capitalists making use of FOSS tools does not mean it is Capitalist, or compatible ideologically. Capitalists will use what’s available, users will use what works and aligns ideologically.

    Then FOSS isn’t inherently ideologically anything.

    Capitalism does not function even in theory for Material Goods. If it functions in theory but not in practice then the theory is wrong. That’s why Communists put a large emphasis on actually touching grass and developing theory through practice.

    Lol neither system has ever produced a practical , implemented system that is good for the average worker.