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Comment Re:Is it a cool idea though? (Score 1) 222

even in trucking many new trucks are coming with automatic transmissions - likely with some sort of manual up/down in case you need to pick a better gear

They have been for decades really, it's just least common in OTR hauling because in that application the manual gearbox still has an efficiency advantage. They are probably most common for construction equipment because the automatic gearbox offers tangible advantages there. There's a promotional video from Allison which is pretty easy to find whose tagline is something like "continuous power" about how the benefits of their transmissions which are able to make shifts under full power, which is true; the heavy ones are full planetary gear designs and they are as convenient and reliable as the day is long. These gearboxes also don't conveniently feature more than six speeds, but on the plus side, Allison tends to give two overdrives on highway use transmissions.

The problem with consumer-level automatic transmissions continues to be reliability. A lot of the modern many-speed automatic transmissions have only a single-gear limp mode which is only suitable for getting them onto a trailer, where older transmissions often used to have two-speed limp mode, and some of the new transmissions cannot limp at all without a functioning TCM. I see that as a big drawback. Belt-driven CVTs are also infamously fragile, yet also dominant in low-end vehicles.

Comment Less precipitous yes, but... (Score 1) 222

Last year just 0.6% of new vehicles made for U.S. customers were stick shifts, reports the Washington Post, citing preliminary government data. [...] That's a precipitous drop from the 34.6 percent of vehicles with manual transmissions produced in 1980 [...] Europe has seen a less dramatic decline in stick shifts, with manual transmissions dropping from 91 percent of car registrations in 2001 to 29 percent in 2024 among Europe's largest auto markets

Those time frames are sufficiently different that you really cannot draw any conclusions from them alone, but the writing is clearly on the wall for manual transmissions in Europe as well, they're just a bit behind the curve. ICEVs themselves are going away, and are likely to stop being sold sooner in Europe than the USA, so they may well catch up.

Comment Re:10x isn't fully realized. Because _I_ catch it. (Score 1) 117

As of know I'm basically being paid to tell robots what to do. And that's pretty much the definition of a post-scarcity utopia if you ask me.

Well, it isn't for a whole lot of reasons. Zeroth, "utopia" means nowhere and it's a thought experiment. First and foremost though, the "I" in "I'm" — utopia is supposed to be a type of society and not just a state of being for a single person. It's working for you now so you are happy now. But you being able to replace all those people now somehow hasn't made you wonder if you are going to be replaced.

Another reason which is (now that I make the comparison) actually equally important is that AI is based on unsustainable resource consumption, which means that it's fundamentally not post-scarcity.

Maybe you should ask an AI what some of these words you're using mean. It seems to be making you dumber already, though, so it would probably be healthier to look them up for yourself instead of asking a LLM and having it tell you that you are a very smart boy.

Comment Re:Why only boys? (Score 1) 54

No, it's more likely that girls and women learned to mask symptoms early for survival reasons.

If you look at hunter-gatherer societies, ADHD is paramount to survival because it avoids over-harvesting. Too little ADHD produces cultures prone to driving plants and/or animals extinct. ADHD is a critical stop-gap that prevents this. Studies show ADHD gatherers will not only collect more, they will do so in ways that cause far less damage, resulting in a far better second harvest and far better sustainability.

Into more modern times, ADHD was a valuable survival trait. Too little and you became vulnerable to diseases, pests, crop blight, etc. If you wanted a stable population, right the way through to the industrial era, you needed a high level of ADHD in the population.

It is only when neurotypical bosses decided that they had to micromanage everything and decided who lived and who died on the streets that you see ADHD symptoms suddenly and massively suppressed. But masking changes nothing. The levels will still be the same, they're just hidden.

Comment Re:Why only boys? (Score 1) 54

It isn't. The under-diagnosis of girls is astronomical.

You are assuming ADHD is a new thing. No, it isn't. It is a survival thing. ADHD was critical in a very large percentage of the population for the bulk of the last 350,000 years. Without it, humanity would have gone extinct. It's merely not appropriate in a world in which neurotypicals make neurodiverse solutions a "bad thing".

Comment Re:No shit, Sherlock! (Score 2) 54

I never got myself into the whole "masculinity" obsession, even back in the 70s and 80s. The result of this was a discovery that computers launched me head-first through far fewer windows and pelted me with far fewer rocks. So, yeah, I was definitely seen as disposable though my childhood and teen years by pretty much everyone. (It's one reason anyone looking back at those as "golden years" is unlikely to win me over.)

Escapism is pretty much all I had at the time, and these days remains pretty much all I have - reality has grown far worse over the years and knowledge by the neurotypicals has not come with empathy but ammunition. There is guilt and shame in playing with creative writing or inventing, and the demons have got really bad on occasion, but you're right, it's not doing anyone any harm.

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