I hate that they decided to have Morpheus hold up a battery instead of a processor because some empty suit thought audiences were too stupid to get it.

TIL Odysseys are inferior minivans.

The Aerostar I had two decades ago and the Sedona I have now both fit sheet goods just fine.

Also, I don’t think you’ve been able to buy a regular cab/8’ bed pickup easily since about the '90s.

…we don’t let them run indiscriminately across the road. They’re taught to walk to a a crosswalk to cross the road.

Really? You’re actually going to defend this classist, corporate-astroturfing bullshit, the theft of the public street away from the People for the exclusive benefit of irresponsible drivers?

Basic requirement is being able to haul sheet material (4’ wide) with no fuss.

I hate to say it, but what you actually want is a minivan.

Get a Ford Econoline pickup and an electric conversion kit. No frunk at all!

Still less radiation than coal plants release in normal operation.

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.

Inb4 the “[Choco] Leibniz — [Fig] Newton cookie controversy!”

As far as I am concerned, it’s purposefully weakly designed, because these break a LOT.

Could be sacrificial because the plastic case is cheaper/easier to replace than whatever else would break instead of it were stronger.

I would definitely like to see a set of charts like this separated out by musical genre.

That’s possible, but if that were the case I’d expect there to be a bunch of illegitimate children at his funeral.

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.

I was gonna comment “yeah, but Leibniz fucks!” but then I decided to fact-check myself.

“Leibniz never married, and his funeral was only attended by his personal secretary.”

…well, shit. The meme checks out!

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.

It used to be at least three felonies a day when violation of a website’s TOS was a violation of the CFAA (which can land you 25 years).

Did that stop being the case?

conspicuously on the same day as the Wikipedia Blackout protesting against SOPA / PIPA (PS: They’re still wanting to lock down the internet, which is why they want to kill Section 230).

Yeah, they’ve also tried to ram through ACTA, CISPA and the TPP since then.

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?!