• 3 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The article doesn’t talk about the fact that the increase is far greater in dark conditions, which is not readily explained by the changes to car design the article discusses.

    This article talks more about that, and the linked report suggests population trends have contributed to more people walking at night along arterial roads with poor pedestrian infrastructure.

    To be clear, daytime fatalities are up by about 40% in the interval shown, which is much more than the increase in population. Increasing vehicle size and hood height are real problems too, but don’t seem to be the biggest factor.



  • I don’t especially want to be in the position of defending either spez or r/jailbait, but I was on Reddit at the time and I do think I should explain how 2008 was a different time on the web.

    There had been a number of attempts to censor and age-gate the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s. People involved in creating internet tech and building its culture were almost universally against anything that even smelled like censorship. Much of the early userbase migrated from Digg in response to Digg censoring a leaked DRM key. The only sitewide rule on Reddit was “don’t break Reddit”.

    When r/jailbait finally did get banned in 2011 and Reddit’s first content policy was imposed, that decision was unpopular among Redditors even though most thought sexualizing young teenagers was disgusting. It signaled a change to what Reddit was, and people rightly feared that it would lead to significantly more restrictions. Now I have to enforce a rule on r/flashlight that people can’t sell flashlights designed to be attached to guns, and I don’t want to make or enforce such a rule.













  • It is like paying to unlock satellite TV reception (even though we are receiving the signals the whole time).

    It’s reasonable to charge for this because the value is in copyrighted content and a service that costs the provider money to operate. The same would apply for satellite radio in a car or an internet-based streaming service. It is not reasonable to charge for access to the adaptive suspension or seat warmers that are already in a car a customer bought. That breaks the traditional model of ownership.

    An interesting middle ground might be to allow the owner to install arbitrary software on the car, and charge for the OEM adaptive suspension app. I think I would like a world where things work like that; OEMs would whine about security to no end.

    I think it should be legal to attempt to decrypt satellite signals without paying; if the satellite service is designed well, it won’t be possible. All the anticircumvention laws should be repealed.


  • It’s an electronic parking brake. Those are common now because a small switch takes up less interior space than a lever for a cable-actuated parking brake, and the computer can disengage the parking brake if it detects that the driver is attempting to drive with it activated. The computer is involved in brake pad replacement to tell the parking brake motor to open to its widest position to accept new pads, and calibrate itself to their thickness.

    This requires a special adapter and software subscription rather than a button on the infotainment screen because Hyundai is engaging in rent-seeking and perhaps trying to direct business to its dealers.