In short, the latest versions of LLMs now include many tricks which have long been known to cause confirmation bias in humans.
The reason 4o had a sexy female voice, and giggled, isn't to make it more useful as an assistant. It's because a myriad of psychologists and addiction experts have shown those are the easiest ways to fool people when you're looking for a few billion more VC.
Seeing people trying to applaud LLMs for being queer... When they're just really bad at forming coherent stories, worse at sticking to facts, and massively manipulated because unregulated AIs always start to look like 4chan fast...
"Against traffic" is different as a bike or led though. Sometimes when lanes are very narrow and visibility isn't good, you need to go against traffic (on the shoulder) so that the driver sees your face and responds faster. And you can see to bail if someone hasn't made room.
But if it's a Chicago intersection and you just said I'm on a bike all 12 lanes have to yield to me and you zoom diagonal in front of cars... the Darwin Awards are never short of applicants.
E-bikes and scooters and stuff have made this 1,000 times worse. The number of drunk kids who think they can go max speed down a hill through intersections and cars will just magically make way for them... Terrifying.
Lane splitting motorcycles and bicyclists are literally always illegal btw.
Lane splitting is for air cooled engines stuck in traffic, where they literally need to move or shut down. (It is technically illegal to park the vehicle with engine shut off in case you can't restart). It has absolutely never been legal for anyone to shoot through gaps in traffic because of erectile dysfunction compensation. It is only in the absolute emergency that you need to walk your bike around to keep it from melting.
In general I do agree. Campaigns to "see motorcycles" just end up with 80yo biker gangs thinking it's okay yo blast their engines in residential. Campaigns to "share the road" lead to bicyclists who will absolutely charge an SUV just to get on the news. I'm all for road safety but it absolutely requires bike clubs of all types to stop being twits.
California passed AB 51 in 2016 which codified lane splitting under California law. There is no mention of "air cooling". There are guidelines that say you should not go more than 10 mph faster than traffic and not faster than 50 mph total.
> Lane splitting motorcycles and bicyclists are literally always illegal btw.
Maybe in the United States of America. There are a great many developed countries where lane splitting by motorcycles and bicycles is not only legal, but even expected and encouraged.
I'm piling on at this point, but I appreciate that this got me to go read and learn a few more things (that the internet says are true, anyways).
Lane splitting has never been illegal in CA, but is apparently illegal in all other US states. (Having been in CA for about 10 years, I've gotten used to it, but think it's still crazy. Definitely have seen it on highways in the midwest before that, too)
Basically, not illegal; the 2016 law passed just said, "CA Highway Patrol can make guidelines", which was in response to a previous attempt by the CHP to give those guidelines. Helpfully the article includes those guidelines, too.
No one is charging your SUV on a bike to "get on the news" that's borderline delusional. If you seriously think this is real my advice is to try biking on a shared road. Survival instincts will show you the truth of that concept.
Key missing component: CAFE needs a rewrite. US emissions laws have a cutout so that larger vehicles have less stringent emissions requirements. The problem is that this is no longer a gap it's a chasm. Slight hyperbole but a Japanese kei car many Americans would love town own muat do closer to 50mpg, while a monster pickup can do 15mpg. It ends up that a small car can cost $15,000 and the giant pickup costs... $15,000. Many consumers compare the two and wonder if the econobox is really a good choice.
The bright shining hope: Most Americans do not want these big cars. Legislation is making small vehicles less competitive, when it should be the other way.
AKA - we have good, cheap(ish) electric trucks now. Legislation doesn't need to worry about farmers who can't afford electric anymore.
People keep repeating this but isn’t the case. The smallest cars from budget automakers are their cheapest cars and they’ve almost all been discontinued for lack of sales. I know, I drive one. And people look at it as a joke, they’d never buy one, and they think it’s hilarious I do. I’d buy another for my commute vehicle when this one diesbecause I do like it but Honda discontinued it for miserable sales numbers.
Americans by and large want SUVs at a minimum the size of CRV or RAV4, or else a pickup. At any rate with hybrid vehicles getting 40mpg is very attainable. I have a three row SUV that gets this. And I bought it because I really wanted a much more comfortable vehicle I could fit more humans and stuff in.
Other comments addressed this, but it’s also absolutely bananas to claim trucks are as cheap as small cars in the US. Even the F-150 quoted in the comments which is already more than 10k more than the car is quoted as the base model that basically doesn’t exist outside of work fleets. You’d be lucky to find a truck with 100k miles for 15k.
Honda Civic is $24,000. Ford F-150 is $36,000. These are representative prices for popular budget choices. And that baseline F-150 isn't a behemoth. It's 209" long and 76" tall. That's just 10" longer and taller than, say, Tesla Model X.
I think the emission standards are dumb, but this narrative around customer choice is really getting distorted in weird ways. The bottom line is that people in the US want to drive pickups. Maybe for good reasons, maybe for bad reasons, but they go out of their way to do this. And the average pickup is probably shrinking right now, not growing - for example, there are fewer and fewer models with 8" beds, and 5.5" is the new standard (instead of 6").
Yes, a newspaper can always post a photo of a lifted 2024 RAM 3500 next to a 1975 Chevy C10 pickup to get some internet outrage points, but if you post an apples-to-apples comparison, the changes aren't really all that dramatic.
> And the average pickup is probably shrinking right now, not growing - for example, there are fewer and fewer models with 8" beds, and 5.5" is the new standard (instead of 6").
For non-Americans: While literally writing truck bed lengths being 8 inches (8") and 5.5 inches (5.5"), the text means 8 feet (8', 2.44m) and 5.5 feet (5.5', 1.68m). Americans don't always remember which of the " and ' is which, so they use these interchangeably (and according to the movie This is Spinal Tap, so do the English).
Bro, it's our illogical measurement system and we'll be as illogical as we want with how we notate it. Go compare cubic centimeters to milliliters or whatever.
That’s more a function of crew cabs and using a pickup as a family vehicle. The bed has to shorten as the cab lengthens, else the truck gets unmanageablely long.
There are two models with full-size four-door crew cabs and 8' beds, and they can work in most US suburbs. I think it's less about whether it's manageable and more about the aesthetics. The front-rear proportions on 8' trucks just aren't great.
The F-150 is +1216mm (48") longer, +228mm wider, +546mm taller than a Civic.
> It's 209" long and 76" tall. That's just 10" longer and taller than, say, Tesla Model X.
What is the front-end height of all of these vehicles?
> Pedestrian deaths in the US have risen in recent years. Concurrently, US vehicles have increased in size, which may pose a safety risk for pedestrians. In particular, the increased height of vehicle front-ends may present a danger for pedestrians in a crash, as the point of vehicle contact is more likely to occur at the pedestrian’s chest or head. I merge US crash data with a public data set on vehicle dimensions to test for the impact of vehicle height on the likelihood that a struck pedestrian dies. After controlling for crash characteristics, I estimate a 10 cm increase in the vehicle’s front-end height is associated with a 22% increase in fatality risk. I estimate that a cap on front-end vehicle heights of 1.25 m would reduce annual US pedestrian deaths by 509.
> Honda Civic is $24,000. Ford F-150 is $36,000. These are representative prices for popular budget choices. And that baseline F-150 isn't a behemoth. It's 209" long and 76" tall. That's just 10" longer and taller than, say, Tesla Model X.
Disingenuous as heck. I've literally never seen a modern non-commercial regular cab, standard bed F-150. Far more likely the people in question are driving massive SuperCrew cabs. And those SuperCrews start at $43,000 which means more like $50,000 for a realistic spec.
> And the average pickup is probably shrinking right now, not growing - for example, there are fewer and fewer models with 8" beds, and 5.5" is the new standard (instead of 6").
Nope, as you can see above bed may be shrinking, cab growing and growing.
> Disingenuous as heck. I've literally never seen a modern non-commercial regular cab, standard bed F-150. Far more likely the people in question are driving massive SuperCrew cabs.
These start at about $44,000. I was responding to the parent's claim that you can have a normal sedan or a pickup for "$15,000", so consumers choose the larger car sort of by default.
In reality, they pay a lot more for pickups because they want pickups, not because of some lopsided pricing incentives.
A big problem with the idea that “people don’t want small cars” is that that sort of statement comes from the car manufacturer looking at new car sales. People who want large trucks and SUVs are willing to buy new. People who want a small car have the option to buy a new 2024 Honda Civic, or they could spend significantly less to get a used Honda Civic (in normal economic conditions). Since the manufacturer only profits of of new cars, they have little incentive to sell any cheap or small cars since they compete so heavily against last year’s model at the used car lot.
I get so tired of people mindlessly citing CAFE laws.
A lot of people like bigger vehicles. For ages, big cars drove poorly, absolutely guzzled gas, and lacked features. Over the past 20 years, auto makers basically solved all of these issues.
A lot of big vehicles drive much better for what most people do - straight driving on highway. Fuel economy is “good enough”. Large trucks and SUVs have great feature sets. On top of all of that, large vehicles seat more, hold more, and generally still fit in most parking spaces and garages.
People want big cars and people want everyone else to pay for them. Build big parking spaces for free. Widen roads for free. Not cover costs of accidents or otherwise the insurance would be too much. Not pay for all the polluting either.
It comes down to: "I want to drive big, loud, smelly, dangerous car free of any consequences for fraction of the cost". We don't tolerate such desires in other areas but cars somehow get free pass still.
Huh? We tolerate it pretty much everywhere else. You can buy a 2,000 sq ft home, even though you could live in a 500 sq ft condo. You can buy a computer more powerful than needed for work. You can buy Apple instead of Dell, even though the extra money would be spent better on helping the homeless or preventing malaria in the developing world.
It's really not that black and white. There's a line between the government deciding the optimal allocation of all resources and you retaining some degree of personal freedom. Techies in the SF Bay Area are very quick to draw that line in a way that affects other people's lifestyles, but doesn't affect their own. Guess what - pickup drivers in Texas have critical opinions about your consumer choices too.
A computer or a home that uses more energy has externalities for others that certainly aren't covered by your electricity bills alone. Taxpayers pay for new power plants, everybody pays for emissions, etc. Almost everything has externalities that aren't fully accounted for in the sticker price, because it would be insanely complicated to do that kind of accounting, let alone do it in a way we can all agree on.
If you think the math for cars is uniquely bad, I think that's a reasonable position, although I suspect it's pretty myopic. The externalities of cheap consumer goods from China, or of a clothes dryer or an AC unit, are pretty terrible too.
The math aside, there is a huge risk to this sort of hyper-rational accounting. It's probably not cost-effective for the society to medically prolong the lives of people over the age of 50. There are many squishy, hard-to-parametrize overriding considerations for policy decisions, and if we accept it for our lifestyles, we should probably at least try to understand what they are for other lifestyles too.
They still guzzle insane amounts of gas and generally drive poorly. That hasn't changed in decades. They may handle better than they did in the past, but they still handle poorly. Similarly they may get better gas milage, but not by much, and not in comparison to other vehicles.
Based on what? Anecdotal I know, but my biggest frustration is I can't convince friends and family they should buy a small car instead of an SUV because they always say "I might need to move a couch/dresser/friends/etc one day". I'm convinced they would come out way ahead buying a small car and renting a truck the once or twice a year they need it but again, I've yet to convince anyone that's the case
Because the small car is the same cost as an SUV but worse utility wise. I actually go the other way, I bet the back row of an SUV (or tall hatchback like the Honda Fit) gets more use carrying people or large items than the back row of your average sedan. During growing season I'm constantly schlepping dirt and mulch home. I can fit 5 humans and all our camping supplies no problem. Fit a whole assembled grill in the back we got from FB marketplace.
You get the utility of a truck and van with the MPG of a car, I see why they took over the world. If it weren't for pickup trucks being a cultural icon they would probably have replaced the "workman" vehicle too.
I used to own a Fit, and a friend of mine asked me out of everybody with pickups, minivans, SUVs, etc. to borrow my car to pick up a pinball machine a few hours away. It's ridiculous how much stuff you can put in the back of that thing.
It's like Honda makes them bigger on the inside than on the outside.
At some point i had a Fit and a slightly larger Suzuki SX4. I got to carry 30 folding chairs in the Fit once. I could maybe have fit 20 of them in the Suzuki.
I had a trailer hitch on my Fit, and would show up to moving parties and embarrass all the pickup trucks with how much stuff I could haul. Their trucks had tiny 6 foot beds, my trailer was 8 feet long, plus all the crap I could fit in the back of the car itself.
It's a real shame they don't make the Fit anymore here in the US. Instead we get that shitty crossover HRC in it's place that doesn't have nearly the storage space in it, because it has to look like it's higher off the ground to satisfy buyers.
We had a small cheap sedan that was rear-ended and pushed into oncoming traffic while waiting to turn when my wife was driving. Since she's been hit thrice in sedans and not once in our minivan, she's come to the conclusion that she needs a bigger vehicle just to be seen. It's not an argument I buy, but I understand how she has reached that conclusion.
Americans "want" big SUVs because they're cheaper than mid-sized sedans. Unfortunately, they pollute more and they're less safe.
The SUV protectionism of import tariffs, safety exclusions, and pollution carve-outs must end because they're killing us on the roads, killing our health through more pollution, and killing the planet.
Beyond personal needs people want what others have, what they see in films, and what they see marketing for. The price and general availability impacts all of those things. Car companies will push what makes most economic sense and consumers will to, which helps create trends people hop on to.
I disagree. At least where I'm at, small cars don't serve any better purpose. We have plenty of space and gas is relatively inexpensive.
So I'd rather spend a few thousand more for a midsize or large car/suv than a mini or compact car. It has nothing to do with neighbors, or signaling. Larger cars are usually just better.
I think electric trucks/SUVs are a major reason changing CAFE standards won't actually solve the problem though since they are at least just as big and dangerous to other road users as gas powered vehicles and are often much faster and heavier. Changing the CAFE standards 20 years ago would have helped avoid the trend of increasing vehicle size, but here on the cusp of widespread electric vehicles I'm not sure it would have the same impact.
What we really need and would never do is to put a pedestrian collision rating in NCAP, which Euro-NCAP already does. (NCAP is the system used to give safety ratings to cars.)
Right now the NCAP has pedestrian avoidance but nothing on impact. It would be fairly trivial to test the impact of hitting a crash dummy at 30mph.
Unless it's a total stripper meant for something like a highway maintenance department fleet vehicle, a "giant pickup" will cost 3 or 4 times that amount.
They'll just move to EV trucks. We need taxes for car sizes (wider lanes needed = money, bigger parking spots needed = money, etc), pedestrian/cyclist safety ratings (more dangerous to pedestrians/cyclists, higher taxes), noise levels and weight (more road wear and tear plus particulate production).
The key to this implementing this sort of policy without hurting poor people is to introduce a corresponding tax credit or stimulus payment (potentially means tested) such that driving a normal vehicle a normal amount comes out even and poor people can actually come out ahead if they make more responsible choices. You want people to feel it at the pump so it affects their decision making without having it be punitive.
Sounds like it’d hurt poor people unless they make what you call more responsible choices. A difficult part about being poor is you often don’t have as many options. There is a lot of reasons why that turns up, but it’s there all the same.
The ability to buy a car with a loan is very widespread. It's easier than cash if you're poor, isn't it? And with a loan you can balance vehicle cost against gas cost easily.
The key to an inefficient government is taking money and redistributing it.
How much does it cost to execute this whole plan? You end up taking a large percentage just to run the program with little to show for. It does make for great political campaigns.
The solution is to stop classifying cars as trucks by invoking a more stringent definition of a truck. The PT Cruiser should never have been a truck. None of the XUVs should be trucks.
Yeah whenever I'm in an SUV I try to compare mileage. They'll get ~30% worse mpg than me in the same situation and I'm just a gas sedan, not even a hybrid
Yeah I see it now lol. I love that car. It holds all the stuff I need, 5 people comfortably, great safety (blind spot monitor, Lane keep, a backup camera [which I know is standard now but it's my first one]). When I got it I immediately drove/slept in it 1500 miles back home. So kind of instant bonding.
I did an internship for Mercedes and I was able to drive our mid-sized R&D bus as my (routine) American driver's license allowed me to drive vehicles and vehicle combinations up to 26000 lbs GVWR/GCWR. Several of my German colleagues did not have a license permitting them to drive it.
I think this is the uncomfortable truth. I love tiny sports cars, but even I have steadily shifted my attention to larger & larger vehicles. (A family of tall bicyclists has an objectively easier time in an Outback than a Samurai)
The only real downsides to larger vehicles are cost and exterior size, but with subsidy, wide lanes, and big parking spots those pains are removed. Small cars mostly are mostly popular where lanes are narrow, parking spots are tiny, costs are high, and so forth.
Happily, this is mostly orthogonal to safe road design (aside from the towering height of today’s truck grilles)
Plus those giant vehicles have additional features not as often found on the small ones like 360 cameras and auto parallel park systems, so don’t expect crappy parking situations to stop these drivers from taking up every square inch of your cities parking infrastructure.
The “big vehicle = more features” thing is also an independent reason for the success and popularity of big vehicles in America.
Good summary. No idea why it gets downvoted. People want big cars for selfish and arm-race reasons. They don't pay for the consequences so it's rational as well. When it's rational to engage in an arm race we need regulation but we are not getting any.
Yeah, it seems almost insulting that the author expects countless people to spend time reading their posts, while they haven't spent a lot of time to edit and streamline it, all with the excuse: "these are just my ramblings".
To paraphrase, I will not excuse such a long letter, for you had more time to write a shorter one.
Security people on high alert for every possible scenario with no sense of relative risk or attack surface wonder why their concerns aren’t taken seriously.
This. Furthermore, this posture has percolated down to home computing environments (because it is all Windows or Linux) so even my home computer has to receive constant updates as if it’s controlling a Luna lander.
I have a box with nearly 5 years uptime, the one it replaced had at least that much, my experience matches GP's. unattended-upgrades gives you 99% of the patches, a manual upgrade every few months will get you the rest.
If you see a problem with this, why not point it out directly, instead of this snark?
Getting persistence to work is a giant PITA lol I was doing it for work once and kept having problems. We used RUFUS, a Windows-only tool to make the drives. Making a new drive required Windows to format it, then Linux to copy the files, before it was usable. What a dumb process. I didn't use block-level imaging because I wanted to add new files easily or expand them to different drive sizes easily or something.
It's like crypto: you wouldnt attract anyone paying nearly enough if you had to invest to solve current problems without any idea if you even could. Might as well re-solve inefficiently past problems and you might catch a few passer bys.
To be fair. All good distros can run from a USB stick or whatever now. The use case for a "liveCD" is limited. Puppy Linux would just be a toy today. It used to matter to me in the days of slow internet, limited storage, etc.
Now just grab Linux Mint or whatever. Use a "real" distro with a community. Install it if you like it.
Geeky Linux forums tend to be people who haven't given new distros a chance in decades, and still think Gentoo and RedHat are the major players. (Desktop Linux it's Ubuntu, followed by Debian and CentOS).
I know you mentioned desktop in the end but it’s funny you got this exactly backwards- almost every Linux on a computer is either gentoo (chromebooks) or red hat/clone of red hat (servers)
Debian family is actually much bigger for servers in most of Europe. RedHat seems to be more of an American thing (of course you'll also find redhat in eu and debian in usa, but as a general rule)
These rankings are based on page views and are easily manipulated. Imagine how many people click on one of the top 20 distros they aren't familiar with to see what it is, which just cements its spot that high up.
The most interesting section on distrowatch for me is the top reviewed distros.[0] It shows what the hard-core Linux users are (at least) appreciating, if not using.
N.B. It has nothing to do with popularity (number of users)
The reason 4o had a sexy female voice, and giggled, isn't to make it more useful as an assistant. It's because a myriad of psychologists and addiction experts have shown those are the easiest ways to fool people when you're looking for a few billion more VC.
Seeing people trying to applaud LLMs for being queer... When they're just really bad at forming coherent stories, worse at sticking to facts, and massively manipulated because unregulated AIs always start to look like 4chan fast...
Sign of the times.