three paragraphs saying you’re wrong and that the empirical evidence supports nothing you’re saying is not a “long-winded rant” lmao–this uncritical “trust me bro it’s actually fine, you just don’t get it” stuff is the exact reason i consider autonomous vehicle stuff to 98% worthless techbro hype and autofellatio. cite your sources if you want people to listen–i have, and you’ve refuted none of it!

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?

just for example: “freeing up both parking lot real estate, but more importantly, freeing up on street parking, creating more room for actual traffic to move”–every single one of these posited improvements would induce demand unless you literally demolish the infrastructure (which, if you’re just switching people one-to-one from regular cars to automated cars is not going to happen, because the number of cars will remain a constant). the existence of unused parking begets driving and is a predictor for more driving.^[1] the existence of more space to move obviously begets more driving because the “highways” aren’t “full” anymore; and again, if it didn’t that would actually be worse because it incentivizes less safe driving practices.

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

if by AVs you mean “fully autonomous” ones that literally do not exist currently then sure–they better! but at that point nothing you say is meaningful, because the technology literally doesn’t exist. we might as well be talking about mass-adopted hydrogen cars or whatever.

but, if we mean semi-autonomous ones—the ones that clearly exist, and which companies advertise as autonomous, and which people actually use—no. absolutely not. these things routinely violate even the most obvious traffic laws and necessitate humans to intervene in their ordinary function. Waymo hits pedestrians even now, and it’s ostensibly one of the most advanced semi-autonomous programs in the world. Uber literally killed a pedestrian and got into legal trouble over it. Tesla’s problems are omnipresent to the point where the NHTSA has said their feature is unsafe in practice and people make it a punchline. you can’t no-true-Scotsman this technology. even in the best and least ambiguous traffic circumstances it has obvious problems!

Yes, I have no doubt there would be induced demand, but that extra demand wouldn’t be at the cost of anything.

But if AVs add more capacity to our roads, that will be entirely because they are driving more efficiently.

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.

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’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.

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.

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?

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. the road designs that create bad driving behavior don’t cease to be an issue because people switch to an automated vehicle.

Secondly, it’s based on the idea that people even can drive more than they already do.

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

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.

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

i’m honestly not sure Trump knows anything about the FTC, and if his campaign was smart these are the kinds of things they’d propose instead of “IVF should be illegal but also you’re a degenerate for not having children”

unclear (they don’t tend to announce enforcement mechanisms in these and it’s not a final rule until it’s a final rule), but it’s not like the FTC is lacking in power as an agency

Along with prohibiting reviews written by nonhumans, the FTC’s rule also forbids companies from paying for either positive or negative reviews to falsely boost or denigrate a product. It also forbids marketers from exaggerating their own influence by, for example, paying for bots to inflate their follower count.

Violations of the rule could result in fines being issued for each violation, according to the rule. This means that for an e-commerce site with hundreds of thousands of reviews, penalties for fake or manipulated reviews could quickly add up.

there’s certainly other things we can do to tackle racism, but tackling ground level stuff like inherently painting black as bad and/or negative is part of that.

i simply do not think that this is racist or worth caring about unless you make it (at which point i would argue yet again the problem is internalized, not with the phrasing used), and i think this is reflected in how the overwhelming majority of people who care about this are white people who want to feel good about themselves without doing anything that would actually tackle racism at the source or challenge their whiteness and how they might benefit from it. to me “whitelist/blacklist” is extremely representative of contemporary slacktivism–stuff that feels good but is functionally a red herring toward material progress on these issues. (notice, for instance, how much time we’re wasting on even debating if this is valuable when we could be doing anything else. and how we’re doing this in a thread where some people are just unambiguously being racist.)

see: “i think if you can only racialize this verbiage when you hear it that’s weirdness on your part.” and again i think this very much people wanting to die on an unimportant hill that they can feel sanctimonious/virtue-signally about and scold people about instead of tackling actual manifestations of racism in the tech field.

i cannot stress this enough: if people want to address something that materially affects black people and other minorities in tech, that should probably start with the omnipresent discriminatory hiring practices and normalized racism–not terminology that requires racialization to be problematic. (and it should probably start with not checking actual black people’s opinions on this subject like they’re the reason any of this is a problem!)

You don’t have to play rap music and apologize for slavery to make them feel welcome.

i’ll preserve this quote for people who disagree that the OP’s post is needed, or who think there isn’t racism on the Fediverse. it’s insane how many of you are demonstrating the point.

there is no phrasing to be redone; it’s the official wording, i am decidedly not a person offended by the whitelist/blacklist terminology, and i think if you can only racialize this verbiage when you hear it that’s weirdness on your part. i’m sure there are some people who have problems with it, but i genuinely don’t know that i’ve ever–as a black person–thought for a second about this outside of white people getting offended on my behalf. certainly not when online spaces struggle with so much actual racism, ignorance, and dismissiveness of those prior two things (as has been on display in this thread).

I always thought of beehaw as an inclusive instance.

most of the issue is and has always been off-instance users, who for a variety of reasons (some intentional, some because of UI/user experience/just plain unawareness due to the nuances of federation) tend to respond to threads like these in ways that our on-instance users don’t. to combat this we may or may not switch to a whitelist in the future instead of a blacklist, which is what we have now; if that occurs, it will probably be when we move to Sublinks

there are difficulties but bluntly: these are only “unworkable” if you’re dismissive (as your comment here is) and/or make absolutely no effort to make them work. you are largely vindicating the need for such a list.

you’ve earned a 3 day ban for this. do not argue with people when they tell you not to call them dude–and, respectfully, nobody cares whether you think it’s gender neutral or not in appellation to other people

I don’t follow the development super closely so I don’t know if those issues were resolved or not. I just remember a lot of discussion on it when I was first on Lemmy on a different instance.

not that i’m aware of, and fixing a database schema once it’s already in place tends to be a clusterfuck so i’m very skeptical it will get better any time soon

The right choices are generally more expensive (in terms of up-front costs, even if they’re less expensive in the long run) and/or require more time investment, both of which are lacking for the poor.

or just the non-technologically savvy. a lot of the issue here is a technological hurdle, fundamentally—it takes a certain level of technological knowledge for someone to, say, pirate ebooks versus just buying them legitimately and that’s a big point of friction for people in making the “right choice”. we have to keep in mind that for a lot of internet-using people nowadays, knowing the ins-and-outs of Facebook or how to download a browser add-on is probably a legitimate technical skill and on the upper bounds of what they’d know navigating spaces like this. and we don’t make it easy necessarily for people to acquire and advance the technological knowledge we’re talking about here either.

if the social prescription to harassment of moderators is “quit because you’re a baby” then you’re going to have many fewer pleasant spaces on the Fediverse in which to exist—because yeah, a lot of people will just quit. i am agnostic on the public modlog overall, but this is an obvious concern with it that i’m not convinced can just be dismissed idly. i obviously have better things to do than a thankless, payless job in which harassment would be dismissed like that.

chill out

technofetishism–if there’s anything local politicians love it’s sounding hip and getting Cool Headlines over boring but practical technology that actually works

It’s been a shitfest for a while - it seems tailor-made for blowhards to speak authoritatively without having any real authority on an issue.

i’m sure plenty of people have made this joke before, but AI answers should have no problem fitting in with a culture of this sort!

i think it’s been gliding on the entropy of its original value for a long time at this point (it was founded in 2009)—certainly i can’t remember a time where it was useful, but then i only first encountered it in like 2016.

removing this because it’s indistinguishable from spam; we’re not opposed to self-promotion here but it’s simply not a good first impression to post what is essentially an advertisement

Google “Search Liaison” Danny Sullivan confirmed the feature removal in an X post, saying the feature “was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.”

okay but… has it? this seems like an unfounded premise, intuitively speaking

One thing though: Criticism of admins should never be considered a rule breaking event provided it is not derogative or endangering, and if my reply to you is considered a reason for admin action then I need to reconsider my participation in beehaw as well.

just to be clear the issue here is/was not you critiquing me–i don’t care about that particularly, comes with the job–it’s the tone which seemed like it implied being held to any moderation standard was problematic. because they tend to cause a scene about how they’re being censored we’re not super interested in having people in that category on here, and so whenever someone responds in that way it’s a red flag

i’ve already rendered my verdict here—which was i banned the other person for a bit and not you (even though you both said things which run afoul of our rules) because you’re a member of our instance and we can afford to be more patient and understanding with you accordingly. but to be clear: if you respond in this manner even to very light moderator feedback then for moderation purposes you’ll be held to outsider standards going forward. which is to say, you’re not going to get anywhere near the benefit of the doubt or the lenience when you break rules.

the discourse between you two in this thread is not productive; please chill out a bit and stop antagonizing each other.

yeah and that sounds fucking awful, restrooms which are accessible to everyone should be a bare minimum aspect of all public spaces and all businesses

shoutout to harkening to Airbnb btw:

“Homelessness is a growing problem, and some providers worry that a homeless person may destroy or soil the bathroom,” she said. “Flush provides a way to access and provide access to a clean, reliable bathroom … Airbnb was so successful because it provides something we all need — a roof over our heads — and Flush is doing the same for bathrooms.”

yeah man, Airbnb really solved homelessness and the “having a roof over your head” problem huh

we live in hell

“over-stressing workers and pressing them to be as efficient as possible, causing them to cut corners with safety” is such a universal point of failure that it’s frequent in every modern industry and a contributing factor in a huge number of workplace incidents and industrial disasters. respectfully, you would have to actively ignore reality to hold the position you currently do, and if you think that’s the worker’s fault and not the company incentivizing them to do unsafe things to keep their jobs, i can really only describe you as a corporate apologist or bootlicker

Every worker is and should be pressured and monitored to ensure they’re working efficiently. That doesn’t give them carte blanche to disregard safety protocols.

the latter will necessarily follow from the former in almost every situation, because “inefficient workers” often get fired or are led to believe they will be fired and they have to make up the difference in that perception somewhere. this is still the company’s fault

i am familiar with the analogy, but i think it would obviously be worse if they agree with what they’re platforming instead of just being kind of half-baked morons who don’t have good political positions or cynically platforming it because it makes them money. one can, in effect, be remedied by showing them social or financial retribution, but the other would be a manifestation of a much more serious social problem that cannot be immediately dealt with

I’m sorry what? The idea that smaller communities are somehow less radical is absurd.

i’d like you to quote where i said this–and i’m just going to ignore everything else you say here until you do, because it’s not useful to have a discussion in which you completely misunderstand what i’m saying from the first sentence.

When you ban people from a website, they just move to another place, they are not stupid it’s pretty easy to create websites. It’s purely optical,

you are literally describing an event that induces the sort of entropy we’re talking about here–necessarily when you ban a community of Nazis or something and they have to go somewhere else, not everybody moves to the next place (and those people diffuse back into the general population), which has a deradicalizing effect on them overall because they’re not just stewing in a cauldron of other people who reinforce their beliefs

imo if reddit couldn’t survive “purging literally its worst elements, which included some of the most vehement bigotry and abhorrent content outside of 4chan” it probably doesn’t deserve to survive

i go back and forth on how much i think this tendency’s willingness to host content like this and/or go to the mat for it is agreement and how much of it is just stupidity or ill-conceived ideology. a lot of these guys seem like they agree with elements of fascism, but a lot of them are also… just not smart.

a lot of your contributions to this section of the thread are very needlessly antagonistic. please chill a bit.

the weirdest thing to me is these guys always ignore that banning the freaks worked on Reddit–which is stereotypically the most cringe techno-libertarian platform of the lot–without ruining the right to say goofy shit on the platform. they banned a bunch of the reactionary subs and, spoiler, issues with those communities have been much lessened since that happened while still allowing for people to say patently wild, unpopular shit