oblib

There are lots of ugly cars that are status symbols. I've built and customized a few for folks who paid me to do that. This one is not just ugly though, it's a crappy design for a work truck.

That's probably the best advice you've ever offered here. Thank you!

That "truck" is truly one of the dumbest designs I've ever seen. It's right there with the "DeLorean" and uglier than the "Edsel".

You can't repair a dent in stainless steel, or even a scratch in it. So if it's actually used as a "trunk" it's going get ugly very fast and that's going to kill it's resale value.

It's comparable to the "HUMMER" in that it is a "Status Symbol" that will lose it's luster very quickly and it's value on the resale market will tank hard after just a few years.

Not to mention it will burn your skin like a frying pan on sunny hot days if you touch it.

Crash rates could be more related to weather conditions in some places, so it's not really surprising to see those didn't increase in some places where that's not as prevalent.

It's good to hear the average speeds didn't really increase much on roads where they increased the limit but not the increase in crashes and fatal accidents.

Increases in those likely correlate with an increase in severe injuries and those need to be counted too. I think it's safe to assume there are probably more of those than deaths.

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≥≥ I'm curious how much of that is accurate, versus "sour grapes" in other areas.

In the 80s I lived in LA and my mother and father came out from Illinois where they lived to visit so we took a road trip up hwy 101 to Oregon. Everywhere went there people were rude as could be.

After a few days of that I finally confronted one of them, asking "WTF is your problem?" and they told me. They said "You Californians are coming here to buy homes and land and you've raised the prices of both so high our kids can afford to buy a home or land to build one on and we've been living here for generations."

I couldn't blame them for being pissed. They had good cause.

Back in the 1980s there was a TV channel in Los Angeles that had a "News" programs that would start off with all the murders, rapes, car crashes, etc. in LA, then they had all of those in the State of California, then they went on to all the tragedies in the U.S., and then they went on to entire world.

I'd get some food on the way home from work and sit and eat it while watching the "News" At the end of those three 1/2 hour programs I felt like shit.

After a few months of that I finally realized consuming all that horrific news was causing me to be pretty severely depressed. What led to that was a horrific deadly car crash in Africa that they showed at the end of their "World News".

I realized that my own life was going pretty well and I needed to keep that in mind and be thankful. So I quit consuming all that tragedy everyday.

A few years later "Fox Entertainment Group" bought that TV station and in the years after they transitioned from "horrific news" to "political news" that is focused on "outrage".

We can see now how that's very addictive for some folks. Their current outrage of the day is "Trans" folks and they will keep promoting that as long as their viewers tune in. After a bit they'll move on to a new "outrage of the day".

A good example of that is "Bumpstocks". FOX News and their viewers screamed about their right to have those for a few months, and then FOX News moved on to a new "outrage". A few months later Trump banned bumpstocks and I didn't see a single peep of outrage from Trump supporters or FOX News. I made a point to ask some of those on Facebook about that and they all said the same thing, "I don't care".

Truth is, just like that deadly car crash in Africa, trans folks have no affect on me or anyone who's not "trans" at all. And FOX News will move on to a new "outrage of the day" and their viewers will forget about Trans folks as soon as their given a new "outrage of the day" to be mad and scream about.

They are addicted to "outrage" and FOX News (and others) supply it. But if you turn that bullshit off and count your blessings you'll detox and be a lot happier.

Thank you!

This link is to the image shown in the article but it's a lot larger and it's an animated gif.

https://drexel.edu/news/~/media/Drexel/Core-Site-Group/News/...

You work on an EV like any other vehicle.

The short answer to your 2nd question is you learn how and why cars break and people crash into stuff. I have a lot of experience with that.

I've been driving for 47 years and I've never crashed a car, or crashed into one, or had one crash into me, and I've never gotten a ticket.

That's not all luck. It's "defensive driving". To sum in up you have to drive like everyone else is trying to crash into you and the roads are always slippery, and nowadays like your autopilot sucks.

"could it be the teen can now conveniently blame the “autopilot” for his poor driving?"

I think it's much more likely the teen had the autopilot feature turned on and was not paying any attention at all to traffic.

This kid was 18 years old and was given a car to drive that has an "Auto Pilot" feature. Probably hasn't ever worked on a car in his life and doesn't know anything about how that feature works or the real potential for it to fail.

His parents telling him not to use that feature would have no effect at all.

Every time one of these Tesla cars crash someone here blames the diver for using the technology, as opposed to the company that promotes and sells it.

"This car can drive itself! But you still have to drive it yourself." is bullshit.

Most of my daily work is done with BBEdit and has been for over 25 years now.

They saved my butt last year when my old Mac Mini melted down. I had another old Mac Mini a friend gave me and when I contacted BBEdit they gave me a copy to get me back up and running without any hesitation even though I couldn't give them my serial number.

Nothing but respect for them.

It has affected me at all either. I played with it a bit a few months ago, asked it show me code for PouchDB.js and it did. It was basically a copy and paste from their website without attribution.

After pondering it a bit I really couldn't come up with anything I wanted to use it for and haven't looked at it since.

>> Sounds great in practice but isn’t realistic in the slightest

And that's also why a "self driving" car isn't realistic.

I think the proper term for what we have now should, at most, be something more akin to "Assisted Driving Features" because right now it's far to blurry.

They're "artificial neural networks" and it would seem to me it's recognizing stop signs by comparing them to images of stop signs. So I tend to lean toward "AI" is the latest "buzzword". I think in truth it's more akin to a search engine reacting to inputs, but from sensor data, than anything close to real "intelligence" of any kind.

I can see how it appears to intelligent, but it lacks reasoning, creativity, and critical thinking.

Well let's see. I think what it does is scan the internet for information and associates that with queries asking for specific information. At it's best it could provide insight for new ways to create things one might want to create, and at it's worse it might plagiarize real human's hard work and present it with no reference to those works.

The problem with this is people trust it. This stuff will be sketchy until there is car to car and road to car communication. Getting that infrastructure in place to the last mile will never happen.

That said there are aspects of that tech now that could be utilized to improve safety in all new cars and it doesn't have to be configured to "drive" a car, but instead assist the driver.

I never used Twitter much but when Musk acquired it I deleted my account.

I had no interest in following "celebrities" and I sucked at responding to posts because I'd always run into the character limit, which works great for snarky comments, but pretty much sucks for real conversations.

There's a difference between opensource and proprietary works. For example, I use "PouchDB" in some of my apps and their code is opensource, but what I make with it is not opensource.

It's one thing to make something similar, and there are often more ways than one to do that, but how would one know if AI created something unique or just copied some human's copyrighted work and presented it in a response?

TBH, I have not dug into how it works, but I did ask it to show me how to make something with PouchDB.js and it looked like it was pretty much a copy and paste from their website. That is not really an issue, but it did not attribute that code to Pouchdb.com. And, to be fair, I did not ask where it got it. But it seems to me that if they got it off the PouchDB.com web site it should tell us and provide a link to the original source.

AI is not really learning from it. It's gathering and distributing real folks hard work and maybe making a few slight changes in the language used to describe it so it's more akin to stealing or plagiarizing other's work.

So it's bascially a plagiarism machine pretending to be a "know everything" machine?

This is certainly new to me and something I'm going to play with a bit. Thank you for sharing this here.

My late `09 Mac Mini blew up a few years ago. I had a spare one a friend gave me that I fired up and when I sent an email to the BBEDit folks asking if could download and unlock that version they gave it to me without any hesitation. All they asked for was my email address. Same with the folks at "Fetch".

Adobe basically told to piss off when I asked for a copy of the version of Photoshop I'd paid for. I downloaded a version of Pixelmator for free instead and haven't given Adobe a nickel since, and I won't ever buy anything from them again.

It's trivial to limit the speed of a car. "Cruise Control" tech is pretty old.

And this subject is not about someone doing 20mph and banging into someone because they were looking at their phone. It's about selling tech that will let you go 160mph and crash into someone.

I grew up around cars, and car builders. I've worked on quite a few very famous cars. My father built custom cars and ran "Barris Kustom" for years. I learned how to build custom cars, including race cars.

I also spent years designing and building cars (vans) that quadriplegics could drive and lots of those were for guys who crashed, or got ran into by cars/motorcycle, at high speeds.

Personally, I think if anyone crashes a car that they were paying a fee to a car company to make their car go that fast that car company should be held accountable and libel for any and all damages and deaths that occur from that.

I'm sure others would disagree, but I don't care. Odds are they've never spent any time at all working with those who were paralyzed because some dumbass smashed into them at high speeds.

I made a version of an offline first app using PouchDB and CouchDB running on a Digital Ocean server. And a version that used a CouchDB installed on a local server (Raspberry Pi).

There are a few ways to do that using those tools, and it's very easy to implement. I thought it was great, especially using a locally installed CouchDB, but my users didn't really care, and I mean not a bit.

I don't have any big corporate users but there are some pretty big businesses and I could not convince them to run a DB on their side. They did not want to fuss with it.

Some of them have been using my apps for over a decade and there's not been any serious issues of downtime so there is no sense of urgency even though I've made it clear that can happen, and the importance of having their data onsite, in their possession.

I use it for my own accounts on my apps. CouchDB makes that very easy to do by itself. It's a built-in feature.

I've run my own email server for quite a few years and that's still a tough question to answer. I have thought about creating a few email accounts to test that though, but still not done it.

It would be pretty easy to test that by setting up an email server with a few accounts and make a list of sites you entered those email addresses on. If you entered those email address for just one site you'd nail down the first few they sold your email address to at least and could track who it spread to since.

Mail-in-a-Box makes it pretty easy to set up an email server. It's tough to get a clean IP that's not on a blacklist but you wouldn't have to worry about that. It will receive mail from any IP unless you block it.

Back in the late `70s early `80s I lived in Los Angeles and I'd grab some fast food after work and go home and sit down and watch the "News". There was only one channel we could get using an antenna. They had 3 half hour news programs back to back. They started out with local news, then National news, then World news.

Basically they scraped up every bit of "Bad News" they could find. Murders, robberies, car wrecks and natural disasters. After a few months of that I noticed I was getting depressed after consuming all that. I'd wake up feeling fine, go to work and get done and still feeling fine. But after that hour and a half I felt like life sucked.

So I quit watching it and the depression went with it. Since then I've made a point monitor the news and learned to keep that in perspective with what's going on close to me.

BTW, that News station was one of the very 1st to be bought up by "FOX". Since then they pivoted from focusing on tragedy to political outrage, but the effect on ones view of life is obviously very much connected to the "news" they consume, and a great many are attracted to gloom and doom and outrage.

I was lucky to get one of the Raspberry Pi 4 8GB boards before covid. That really is a great little computer. I wanted to build a product to sell using those but had to shelf it.

As I recall back then they said it would be at least 3 years before they'd be releasing another upgrade to that and we're pretty close to that now. If the supply chain ever does get back up to speed we may see that soon after.