Opinions my grandparent had about cars, c. 2000 CE:
1. Electric cars are wildly dangerous because you can’t hear them coming; they will kill dozens of times as many people as gas cars do.
2. It’s hard to get across town these days what with all the traffic caused by big busses.
3. The New Beetle should be banned from public roads since it’s front/back symmetrical: you can’t tell which way it’s going.
Cars are in fact bad but not really for any of those reasons. I remember this sometimes.
Where can I order an enamel pin that says “The LLM discourse is really tangled up and unproductive in ways that are too annoying and complex to even outline on this pin – there are a lot of different aspects to the situation that it would be unfair to leave out of even a short summary”?
@vruba Unfortunately this is intergenerational; everyone thinks I'm going to die because my Zero is silent. One headlight vs two makes a more measurable difference!
@vruba I still want to either write, or perhaps better commission, an article (or series) comparing low-speed EV pedestrians alerting noises and examining their sound and other design across makes.
1 and 2, incredible lack of critical thinking. yes, it's *electric* cars that are the problem, not... cars
3, another reason licenses should require annual driving exams if you're at the age to redeem senior discounts
@vruba my pet peeve is discussions about tech that always reduce to "capitalism is bad and is the problem". Which may or may not be true, but sure is a dead end to a conversation.
@vruba “the LLM discourse is asking a lot of questions not answered by this pin”
@vruba Maybe some matching stickers, too?
@vruba Something something “follow the money”
@vruba I am intrigued.
@vruba electric cars ARE more dangerous for pedestrians, though. There’s just far far fewer of them on the road.
This is, to be clear, me subtweeting people getting mad at ChatGPT for using a modest amount of water compared to … almost anything else you could name? Every single almond, like literally one lone almond, is about 3,000 ml of virtual water. A cup of coffee is 100,000+ ml; pee it out into a high-efficiency toilet and that’s a minimum 4,000 ml flush. May I suggest that the rogue billionaires explicitly aiming to stop paying for labor are the problem to focus on here.