The truth is that the internet kinda needs at least some ads to be viable.

It really does not.

• Wikipedia does not need ads (it’s supported by donations).
• Bittorrent does not need ads (the load is distributed to the users themselves).
• Labor-of-love amateur websites from the '90s (that had more actual useful information than the SEO-optimized lazily-copywritten (or increasingly, AI-generated) bullshit we have today does) did not need ads.
• Fediverse services do not need ads (being a combination of donation-supported nodes and, in the case of PeerTube, Bittorrent-style load distribution).

Frankly, if all the corporate content that exists only to make a buck off advertising were deleted tomorrow, the Internet not only would remain viable, it would be better off!

There’s a quote that came from ICQ’s heyday that I had in mind when I wrote that:

“The Internet: where men are men, women are men, and little girls are FBI agents.”

10/f/935 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington DC, 20535

Don’t forget to think about how to keep the salt air from corroding the electronics. Either build a spare or two that you keep sealed in plastic, or find an airtight case with an integrated heat sink or something.

Edit: you might want to look into conformal coating and dielectric grease (for the connectors) as well, although I don’t know enough about that to competently give advice beyond the mere suggestion.

That’s an interesting point there, but have you considered that even with a mechanical link and current safety features, it can still override you? I unfortunately almost drove into someone at very low speeds in a dark rainy parking lot, but the cars safety systems overrode me thankfully. I don’t think they would have been injured it was so slow, but just to show that nowadays with cars you don’t always have full control. In that case it was the brakes not steering, but modern cars can and will prevent you from changing lanes into someone in your blind spot for example.

I’ll be honest with you: all but one of the half-dozen (which is too many, BTW) cars I own have manual transmissions, and half of them don’t even have ABS, let alone any other fancy electronic nannies. I mention that to help explain the extent to which I am fundamentally Not On Board with anything that interferes with my manual control of the car. (I’m also a Linux user and a DIYer, which are some more clues to how much of a control freak I am: I expect my property to be exactly the way I want it to be and do exactly what I want it to do, and nothing else.)

Putting torque on the wheel while in these semi self driving modes disables the self driving features, but that’s software that disables it when you take over. What if that software failed and you were now fighting the self driving car also trying to steer and as you tried to steer it put equal power against you thinking the steering was rough?

Don’t get me wrong: I wouldn’t mind having radar cruise with lane-keeping for long trips on the freeway, but only if such a system were fail-safe enough that even if it were stuck on, yanking on the wheel hard enough would get the car to turn. I would absolutely insist on the maximum torque the self-driving system could apply being much less than the strength of the human driver. I don’t know if that’s the case in late-model vehicles or not, but if it isn’t, I would consider those vehicles to have an unsafe design.

The L2 driving system decides to go left or right and will send the same signal you would by steering left or right.

Exactly: the same signal. If the electronics controlling it receive one input from the steering wheel and a different input from the self-driving computer, are you sure it will prioritize the steering wheel input in every single possible circumstance? 'Cause I’m not!

I guess it’s just it’s own thing just like power steering is it’s own thing.

The difference between this and regular power steering perfectly illustrates my concern: the way power steering works is that it assists the driver’s movements by amplifying the force that you’ve applied to the wheel. If it fails, you can still steer the car; it’s just harder. (I know this from personal experience BTW: the power steering in my old pickup truck is out right now. I haven’t fixed it yet mostly because I’m still deciding whether I want to keep it or downgrade/simplify to a non-power steering rack.)

In contrast, if something goes wrong with this system, it is very unclear to me that the driver could override what the car wants to do, no matter how much force you apply to the steering wheel. Or, for that matter, if turning the wheel would be effective at all: you might end up just sawing the wheel left and right with no effect whatsoever on the way the tires are pointing.

I don’t like those failure modes! At least in a mechanical steering system, for it to fail completely like that would require something like a tie rod breaking or the splines in the steering column shearing off – in other words, metal ripping apart that (a) shows warning signs you can easily inspect for (e.g. deep rust or cracks on the tie rods), (b) you probably notice happening because it makes noise, and (b) probably happens kinda gradually rather than instantaneously because steel is ductile.

I’m not fully opposed to self-driving, by the way: it’s just that (a) I want the system to be Free Software so I can inspect and trust the code, and (b) I want it to be coupled to the steering column with a belt or a clutch or something that can slip and allow me to mechanically override it if I yank hard enough on the steering wheel.

Obviously this is first gen tech in cars, but it’s been around for quite awhile in aviation with no backup mechanical link, we haven’t all died yet.

First of all, aviation has vastly more stringent oversight than cars do, in terms of manufacturing regulations, maintenance regulations, and pilot regulations.

Second, fly-by-wire passenger jets are also just categorically different not because it’s flying vs. ground transport, but also because it’s public transport vs. an owner-operated private vehicle. If I’m already entrusting my safety to a pilot or bus driver anyway and they decide fly-by-wire or drive-by-wire is acceptable, that’s one thing. But when I’m the one operating the thing myself, it’s entirely another.

I wouldn’t trust any software from any manufacturer to steer for me, at least not in such a way that I can’t easily disable and use a mechanical manual backup.

Also, steering isn’t “power train.” If you’re gonna lump it in with something, it fits closer to the [alleged] self-driving system.

Let me get this straight: you not only actually want a vehicle that decides where to go based on software instead of with a mechanical linkage you can reliably control, but you also want Tesla, of all companies, to provide it?!

I’ll admit it was a reactionary comment as I see the sentiment a lot without any nuance and it kinda annoys me, considering I make conscientious choices all the time and people like you (maybe not you in this instance) will pass judgement and make me question myself.

I apologize for having come across as “passing judgement.” I was going for a tone closer to this (trying to shock you out of complacency), but missed the mark a bit.

It was also a little strange shitting on a places public transport infrastructure

Technically, I didn’t dispute your mention of Manchester having good public transport (which I have no reason to disbelieve); I shat on British Rail’s intracity public transport. And yeah, I freely admit that Amtrak is infinitely worse: the entire 5-million-people Atlanta metro area is served by one train a day, which shows up roughly at midnight! I figured that just means I know a thing or two about extremely shitty rail, LOL.

You have unrealistic expectations on someone who is vastly in the minority with commutes like this.

If you admit you’re vastly in the minority, then why did you feel the need to chime in in the first place? If you actually aren’t a reactionary concern troll, you need to realize that making the perfect the enemy of the good like that adds nothing to the conversation and only discourages people from embracing alternatives.

And if I’m angry, by the way, it’s because the sort of shit you just did happens every single goddamn time and is THE major impediment to actually getting shit changed. It’s not some small-but-loud minority of coal-roller (or “Chelsea tractor” in your case, I guess) blatant right-wing assholes who are stopping improvements from happening; it’s all the allegedly-well-meaning moderates quibbling everything to death for not being perfect who are the real problem!

Considering that the vast majority of hydrogen isn’t even “green hydrogen” (produced from electrolysis) but rather “grey” or “blue” (produced from cracking hydrocarbons), I don’t think it was anything more than a straight-up greenwashing scam in the first place. Even the niches where people claim hydrogen is suitable (long-haul trips without battery charging infrastructure) would be better off just burning the damn hydrocarbon as-is to begin with!

Even in the best-case scenario – “green hydrogen” produced from electrolysis – I think it would be better to immediately (at the point of production) combine it with CO₂ pulled from the atmosphere to make synthetic gasoline and then handle that with our existing ICE vehicles and infrastructure. It’s just so impractical to store hydrogen (since it’s so small it leaks through everything, yet so low-density that it requires either extremely high pressures or cryogenic temperatures to fit enough of it in a reasonable amount of space) that it’s simply not worth the effort.

You can moan at my boss for not allowing fully WFH.

IDGAF about your boss. If I were gonna moan about something, it’d be about the shitty state of British Rail or some other macro/policy issue, not anything specific to your situation.

That said, I live in fucking Atlanta – the poster child of terrible American sprawl and traffic – and have figured out how to make cycling for most trips work. I have no doubt that you can do better. Get yourself a damn Brompton (so you can easily take it on the train) and turn that 40 minutes of walking + 35 minutes of Metrolink into however many minutes of biking, for example.

I live in Manchester. Which is an amazing city for public transport. I work in Cheshire which isn’t. … Perhaps when I’m more experienced I can find a job closer to home or more remote, but for now this is all I can do.

Nothing you could say will convince me that there isn’t even a single suitable job for you right now in Manchester. Or that there isn’t a single suitable residence for you right now in whichever town in Cheshire you work in, for that matter.

Bike tires suffer similar problems.

But at a much smaller scale, since the tires are made out of so much less material each.

And my bikes go through tires fairly quick.

Quit doing whip skid stops all the time, ya hoodlum!

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No one’s saying ICE vehicles are better for the environment than EVs

I think it’s possible for a diesel vehicle running on 100% biodiesel made from waste oil to be. The problem there is that there isn’t enough of that sort of fuel to go around as long as cities keep getting designed to keep people car-dependent.

expensive and fragile hydrogen tech (keep the hydrogen on boats and trains pls).

Frankly, I’m skeptical that hydrogen belongs anywhere.

Also, trains have no excuse to be anything other than electric! If you’re spending the money building the track in the first place, it’s really not that much extra cost to put up overheard wires too.

The way to fix everything else wrong with them is to not make cars the default mode of transportation.

Say it again louder for the folks in the back!

The “everything else” wrong with cars dwarfs the issue of pollution. Cars being the default mode of transportation is ultimately responsible for everything from obesity to the housing crisis!

If I’m travelling 6 miles in to town then I’m taking the tram, but it really isn’t feasible when travelling 40 miles to work and back 3 times a week.

“My city is fucking designed wrong so the public transport sucks” isn’t really the rebuttal you think it is. Obviously, the real problem there is your city is fucking designed wrong and the vast majority of people shouldn’t have to be living 40 miles away from work to begin with!

That’s the argument I would be making, but it certainly isn’t Microsoft’s (Copilot), OpenAI’s (Codex), etc’s position: they think the output is sufficiently laundered from the GPL training data so as not to constitute a derivative work (which means none of the original licenses – “open source” or otherwise – would apply, and the recipient could do whatever they want).

Edit: actually, to be more clear, I would take either of two positions:

1. That the presence of GPL (or in general, copyleft) code in the training dataset requires all output to be GPL (or in general, copyleft).

2. That the presence of both GPL code and code under incompatible licenses in the training dataset means that the AI output cannot legally be used at all.

(Position #2 seems more likely, as the license for proprietary code would be violated, too. It’s just that I don’t care about that; I only care about protecting the copyleft parts.)

i am vaguely familiar with software licensing is GPL type of open source?

You could say that, LOL. It’s the OG of “copyleft” licenses (the guy that made it invented the concept), although “permissive” licenses (BSD, MIT) existed before.

“Copyleft” and “permissive” are the two major categories of Free Software (a.k.a. “open source”, although that term has different connotations) license. The difference between them is that “copyleft” requires future modifications by people other than the copyright holders to be released under the same terms, while “permissive” does not. In other words, “copyleft” protects the freedom of future users to control their computer by being able to modify the software on it, while “permissive” maximizes the freedom of other developers to do whatever they want with the code (including using it in proprietary apps, to exploit people).

See also: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html