Your example scenario is, in fact, exactly the kind of situation which justifies my point. I'm not discussing the hypothetical dreams of product designers and software engineers who always believe they have built an application environment that, to borrow Apple's phrasing, "just works". I am discussing the technological AND the economic AND the social AND the political environment that WILL govern how this is implemented. Because at the scale we are talking about, no plan survives first contact with reality.

I think you are vastly - by multiple orders of magnitude - overestimating the ease of designing, deploying, and maintaining this system and all the layers of error-checking that will be required. If you are speaking in a hypothetical simulator sense, sure, ok, yeah, such a system can conceivably be constructed with further iterations of technology we already have today. But the tone of your "it's so easy, we just make the software do xyz" reply reminds me of how all we tech nerds back in the mid 1990s were waxing poetic about the incredible future where the Internet would break down entrenched silos to democratize and distribute knowledge, education, power, and value. And here we are decades later, with wealth and power more consolidated at the top, while individual groups of humans are more tribal and polarized at the bottom.

Yes, you are correct, it is feasible for a bunch of cave troll devs to sit in dark basements chugging Bawls/Jolt and listening to Skrillex while banging out thousands of lines for smooth, elegant traffic-optimizing code. But devs and engineers will not be the ones implementing and controlling the systems they design. Any such system WILL be deployed and controlled by politicians and government contractors, and it WILL have to adapt to the whims and counter-reactions of the general public. Have you watched Congress and the Presidents over the past 20 years? Have you seen the general public lately? It is not looking particularly smooth or elegant out there.

What WILL happen is exactly the human process I describe. On the way to implement the smooth, elegant traffic control system your engineers designed, various social forces and political factions will compete and complain and put their territorial markings all over your beautiful ideas. And during THAT process, compromises will be made, features will be cut, essential components will be poorly implemented. And that's when the people involved start looking for shortcuts, such as, "Since we're already putting fully-controlled systems in some cars, and full monitoring in every car, wouldn't it be simpler to just make every car fully controlled?"

Literally the first time some human rolls through a red light, causing a computer-driven car to react in a way that either it or another vehicle plows into some little Katelynne or Colton walking to school, someone in Congress will file the first bill requiring ALL cars - even ones driven by humans - to contain the exact same safety-override mechanisms that the computer-driven cars have. And as that dialectic unfolds, we'll jump pretty quickly to just having all cars driven by the computers, For The Sake Of The Children.

The idea that we are going to build the incredibly complex pervasive IoT infrastructure necessary for computers to drive hundreds of millions of cars throughout an entire continent, and all that will just be used for a federal taxi system, is just completely divorced from the reality of how human societies work.

This applies to every aspect of the modern technological civilization. Stone Age humans had more individual deaths from random starvation, predation, exposure to extreme weather, and disease, statistically distributed over long periods of time. But the global technological civilization has the capacity to snuff a couple billion people by the end of next week. And that capacity grows in tandem with the growth of civilization.

Computer-driven cars and human-driven cars are fundamentally incompatible.

It is only a matter of time until we reach a tipping point where governments/corporations realize the answer to "How do we make computer-driven cars safe and reliable?" is "Remove the cars driven by humans whose individual behavior introduces 90% of the entropy from the system".

People are being imprecise when they say we are still decades away from self-driving cars. The actual situation is, we are decades away from self-driving cars which can respond safely and instantaneously to the exponential level of information-processing and decision-making complexity introduced by the presence of even one human being.

There is a fundamental failure to recognize that the entirety of the existing system, from the residential streets to the commercial districts to the highways which route traffic out of the current residential/commercial district into another, is inextricably human. Trying to make a computer-driven car that can behave appropriately in an entirely anthropocentric network design being actively used by millions of humans is a domain problem error. This is not the way.

Ethernet is widespread, mature technology, and we STILL have to put a tremendous amount of work into packet collisions, shaping traffic flow, bottlenecks, etc. at even medium network scale. Now imagine that we take all our existing routers and switches doing deterministic bin/hex/dec math to calculate and encode deterministic electrical pulses to specify exactly where each packet of information is addressed and how and it must behave on the transmission medium, and we give free will to some of the packets -- they can go to completely different ports than their original addressing; they can ignore router borders and go anywhere at all; they can walk out of the switch in the morning without remembering to grab one of their TCP headers; they can choose to ignore their TTL.... you see where this is going. If only 5% of packets had free will, the entire network would become unusable. If you brought in a network admin/engineer to diagnose and fix it, you know what their answer would be: institute hardware-level controls that would detect and aggressively block the malicious traffic. Because, you see, that's what uncontrolled free will is to a network, malicious.

Or to put it another way, we all know the principle of "the Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it". But if the censorship is sentient and can drive right over into your new routing whenever it wants? Nope. The S/N ratio crashes quickly.

Mark my words, in the future it will become illegal for a human to operate a vehicle, first on designated-purpose roads, then eventually on most of them. Driving your own car will become a quaint hobby allowed only within local short-hop zones, or on closed systems.

I love how much this sounds like someone talking about buffs and armor bonuses for entering a boss battle with a necromancer who only needs a few manual kills per second to then summon them back as minions to perform chain attacks, thus getting more kills to create more corpses to be raised as minions

This is why I always feel stuck in the middle in US political ideology. I agree with people on the left about many of the terrible downstream effects of corporatism, but so many of them are also true of governmentism, or have categorical equivalents.

The structure of corporate leadership (especially in the C suites and boardrooms) has evolved into a distinct overlord class separated from the daily reality of 90% of people and only or primarily concerned with the next quarter's profit results, not long-term health.

The structure of government leadership (especially in the Congressional suites and conference rooms) has evolved into a distinct overlord class separated from the daily reality of 90% of people and only concerned with the next quadrennial's poll/fundraising results, not long-term health.

I often agree with the Left's diagnosis of problems, it's that their treatment plan almost invariably boils down to "give the government more power". As if the inherent human cognitive functions that cause us to react to our economic, social, tribal, and biological pressure gradients according to corruptive game-theory principles in our corporate environments, stop existing once someone gets elected or hired by a government agency, because [waves hands] reasons.

"If only we'd give ourselves more power to stop ourselves from doing foolish things to ourselves, we could use ourselves to make ourselves not suffer from being ourselves." Which just uses several layers of abstraction to cover up the fact that it's just the secular version of "Jesus take the wheel" or "Insh'allah".

It isn't government versus corporations; it's humans versus humanity.

Congrats, you just re-invented Kengan Ashura

One of the most amusing sideshows of the past 5 years has been watching the little page-rendering / browser popup tip war between G and MSFT (and Firefox to a lesser extent). There was one point when it was very clear that MSFT devs had added a first-run popup announcing a new Edge feature, in the exact location and size to specifically cover the part of the Google.com homepage that detected your browser and would suggest you download Chrome.

The images and sounds have no harm. The harm occurs within the minds of the beholders.
The point in both those cases is that the problem isn't that speech exists; the problem is that there are masses of people who fly off the handle or act without thinking critically and assessing a piece of information. People who engage in violent protests don't get to shed responsibility for their violence and be cast as victims for foolishly believing wrong things. Unless... are you now coming out in support of Jan 6, 2021?

Otherwise, the argument you are making is almost exactly the same one fundamentalist Christian parents make for textbook censorship and so-called "don't say gay" laws.

That doesn't match the description in the article. It could be your link is the original image of the real food made by the human who first added the recipe, except when you're searching for ingredients (ie you are about to spend money) the Instacart system has been programmed to find matching recipes and then dynamically generate punched-up images with size/resolution that fits the site's pagination style templates. Perhaps it's generating the images based on market-research that people are more often induced to complete their cart purchase when presented with images that meet some observed threshold of hue, saturation, shape, etc. the same way brightly colored toons with big exaggerated eyes draw our attention more than real photos of real humans.

Yes! Or like when your fingers don't start on the home row of your keyboard, and you type a few words that have the correct number of letters and spaces but each letter is key-shifted in a basic cypher pattern. Except in this case there are 400,000 keys and each one is a word rather than an individual letter.

Which makes perfect sense with the way an LLM is applying patterns of statistical tendency derived from a massive database. If the data columns get shifted, rather than the autocomplete hitting the 90% confidence word-keys, it's caculating the correct word but then having a stroke -- A KEYSTROKE error -- by spreading out through the synonym word-cloud and hitting 2-jump adjacent word-keys.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

If you read the screenshots in TFA, it's not random gibberish. You can in fact decipher the gist of the wording if you make lateral jumps of 2 to 3 degrees of Kevin Synonym Bacon. If you think of it as a Joseph Ducreux meme filtered through Lewis Carroll dialogue, parts of it are clearly referring to table-scraps concerns like avoiding large chunks that could break off like fruits with seeds or cooked bones.

For example, the sentence: "Yet, checking with your vet for postured over-distance or guised, safe, and informative finish, over a gleam in the twang that says, 'divvy this round of lore or lend a moan to my kind-leek, cosmo cavalcade'..."

Seems suggestive of something like: "Still, to be on the safe side you should call your vet and ask for their scientifically-educated stance on a brand of food that comes in sealed factory packaging with the ingredient information printed on the label, rather than trusting some brightly-colored gimmick product or online ad that says, 'Give your dog our miracle Tastee-Treet every day..."

So maybe it should be the size of a brick. That is, I have wondered about the use cases for a mainframe+terminal paradigm in the story arc of handheld tech. Why haven't we seen an attempt at putting some of the intensive stuff - such as a processor and memory management system that has to perform task switching among many different apps and threads - into something wearable/carryable, and then leave the handheld part as a dumb screen with enough compute power to do the rendering, touchscreen feedback, and signal transmission? Basically, you have a detachable brick you can wear on a strap or leave in your duffel/purse or on your work desk, and you only carry the ultrathin display. Like a combination of dock/hotspot and a case with an external battery.

I don't know the internals of handheld tech well enough to know how much local work the chips are actually doing (and therefore drawing from the battery). I know that high-refresh constant-scrolling apps like Instagram and Tinder have a heavy battery impact from constantly pre-loading thumbnails and previews, but I don't know the breakdown of how much of that drain is from constantly processing the data and haptics on-board versus constantly dx/tx the wireless data stream with to the cell tower. If someone is sitting in the yard playing candy crush or flappy bird, does that game's processing have to be done on the interface? Something that only needs to do one or two things can be optimized significantly for size/energy over something that needs to be able to do 100.

With society moving quickly toward cashless anyway, what if the wallet is replaced by your personal edge router/CPU that does all the processing and then simply streams the minimum necessary output and haptic feedback to the various last-mile, uh, last-foot handhelds, watches, earbuds, etc.?

Yes. It promotes more efficient intra-city transit, which is the relevant scope for this subthread about city codes requiring parking allotments.

There is an entire additional discussion about the full tradeoffs once we include the cost of ROW acquisition for mass transit in post-WWII cities, once we include the ways reduced intra-city car transit may simply relocate or even worsen the parking/roads and associated energy burned for individual cars, once we consider the entire scope of a city core and the 50-100 mile residential rings around it. But that's not the scope of this particular point.

Most mid-to-large cities in the USA have building codes that require a specific amount of parking for the size of a building. This means developers have to acquire huge tracts of land relative to the footprint of the structure they actually want to build. They either put parking in a large ring around the building, or make the building footprint large enough to contain a multilevel garage. If BuildingA requires a big buffer zone of parking and BuildingB requires a big buffer zone of parking, then the distance between them is larger than it would be otherwise. And the larger the building, the larger the buffer ring. This is a major reason sprawl happens in cities whose core development happened after the 1960s. It also means only larger wealthy corporations can afford to build things, which means they get more influence over rents because there's less competition.

This has been a hotly contested issue in city management recently. The idea is that relaxing the parking requirements allows a greater diversity of business types and business owners, as well as allowing businesses and residences to be closer together, promoting more efficient transit. For example, in sprawling southern cities, people walk 100ft from Store A, get in their car, drive 300ft to the parking for Store B, then walk 100ft into the store, and so on. If Store A and Store B were allowed to be 50ft apart, that would cut down on the amount of energy burned by powering up an entire heavy ICE to transport a 200lb human 300ft.