I am always blown away by the number of people who argue about headlight brightness saying things like "it's not the brightness, it's the angle" and "it's the height of these modern vehicles" and "these lifted trucks that didn't properly adjust their headlights".

How do all these people think that roads are all perfectly straight and smooth? No matter how perfectly the headlights are aimed in modern vehicles, the headlights brightness is a problem. The slightest hill will cause your headlights to not be "properly aimed" in relation to other vehicles on the road. That straight line you see in front of you when you're driving a modern vehicle, where the lights cut off? Yeah, ever pay attention to how many times when you're near other vehicles that line bounces up and down past their mirrors / eyes? Noa mount of adjustment is going to account for that. Sure, some kind of high tech dimming zones or whatever might help, but how much technology do we need to invent to alleviate this issue? Just make low beams low angle AND lower brightness. I'm not talking "so dim it might as well be the lights from an old Model T" either, just dimmer than retina maiming insanity. High beams? Yeah, do whatever you want with those I guess.

I am in my 40s and I realize as our eyes age it can make things like glare more of an issue, but I can say without a doubt that's not it either. Coming across cars which obviously are older and still have a more standard, old school headlight brightness, are far less bothersome on the road simply because they are less bright, and less white. While a well adjusted modern headlight, whether it be HID, LED, or otherwise, sucks to be in front of or behind.

Unfortunately, you can't in all circumstances.

I hate to say this, but I am one of the few people that actually acquired an Echo Auto. Everyone can have whatever opinion on that that they want, but I love being able to very specifically ask for music in my car in ways that traditionally Alexa was able to handle well. I am an iPhone user, and tried out Apple Music as an alternative and frankly I just prefer Amazon music unlimited. The recommendations, the stations, etc., just work better for me.

Anyways, Echo Auto allows you to use Alexa voice commands to play music in your car, but the device is really just a remote mic paired to your phone that really just sends commands through the Alexa app on your phone. Well, the Alexa APP is not allowed to turn off Alexa plus. At all. So, the echo auto is required to be alexa plus no matter what.

And it really, really sucks.

I never once implied that I was smart, only that it wasn't.

I'm not excited. Amazon keeps desperately trying to push all of my Echo devices over to being Alexa+ (by responding to something I genuinely asked about followed by "BY THE WAY, did you know Alexa+ is free blah blah blah") which stinks because I tried it and it's TERRIBLE. Stop trying to get me to use it. Also, I use an Echo Auto in my car, and you are absolutely unable to disable it there, so I'm stuck using it and it can't even figure out how to play music properly often.

I find myself yelling at the one in my car that it got my request wrong quite frequently. I use it to play music mostly, and it will often get off track, apologize when you tell it it's not doing what you asked, and even get so far off that it will outright say "Ok, sorry about that, got it, Playing XXXX song by YYY artist (the actual request)" but then going on to play something completely different.

I hope this is better than that.

This is something important to note. Sure there are vehicles which have no rear window, sure there are obstructions in vehicles that are full of stuff, sure this and that... However, average commuters out there doing their daily driving are in a vehicle with a rear window and can see things behind them in the rear view mirror.

I have a 2025 Hyundai Santa Fe and can switch the mirror between normal mirror and a rear-view camera mirror mode like this article is discussing, and the flat no depth perception mirror is not good. It is such a vastly different experience looking at something directly through a window or via a standard mirror with full depth perception and focal depth compared to looking at a screen that it is jarring to look back and forth between "reality" and a camera view. The focal distance becomes more of an issue yet when you take progressive / bifocal eyeglasses into account. I have to tip my head back and look through the bottom section of my progressive lens glasses to focus on the mirror in "screen" mode because it is close to my face, whereas in mirror mode you are focusing on the distance.

Even without the eyeglasses issue, constantly switching focal depth between really close and "out there on the road" is tiring on the eyes, which is one of the reasons I love a good heads up display in a car that gives you a speedometer and whatnot that is closer to the focal distance of the road than the in dash instrument cluster.

I think helicopter parents should have their devices taken away. I live in a district where phone use by students during the school day is prohibited, and I'm fine with that. My kids are also fine with it, because all they have are dumb flip phones. We are a tech savvy family, and our kids have flip phones.

Tyler Perry strikes again?

Access denied!

Ive looked again and realize the data is old enough to be before the mandates were put in place so it may be less likely to include many cars with the artificial noise makers, but it should still be more clear whether or not any such vehicle is included in the data set.

Looking again at the data set used and it is old enough that I now believe it likely doesn't include many cars with noise makers as I believe that was only put into law more recently, but still the data should clearly reflect whether or not that is taken into account.

Exactly. My car has the mandatory noisemaker and I hear tons of them when I'm out and about in parking lots and whatnot, EV's and Hybrids alike that are new enough to have the noise maker on them are common now and if they're included in the data it's a pointless study, as a significant portion of the pedestrians hit by EV's and hybrids are probably of the noise making variety.

Important question.

Many EV's, hybrids and PHEV's already have fake engine noise systems as required by law in the US. I have a 2023 Ioniq5 which has it, and I hear a lot of cars pulling into and out of parking lots from Toyota etc. that have it at low speeds now. So, unless I missed something in the study, I don't see this differentiation being made in the data set, only whether its an EV / Hybrid or Petrol based. If they're lumping the EVs, PHEVs and Hybrids in with the traditionally powered vehicles, then what is the point of the study because it's obviously not studying noisy cars vs. quiet cars, and seems to just be a hit piece on EV's.

Speaking strictly from a consumer perspective, self-checkout works for me for a few items or at a Wal-Mart where there is ONE checkout open out of 30 and there is a couple folks lined up there with 100 items each. In general though, when I go to the grocery store for example, I never use self checkout because it sucks dealing with those small areas and large shopping trips (family of 5 doing a weekly grocery run).

On the other hand, Wegmans for a while allowed you to scan items using the Wegmans Scan app AS YOU GO. So, I could open my reusable shopping bags and scan the barcodes of items as I go, and bag them as I see fit in my bags in the cart. Produce? Weight it with its corresponding code and the scale actually gave you a barcode / QR code to scan that would insert the item correctly into your "shopping cart" and you didn't even have to bag and label the item, you could just put it into your shopping bag and be on your way.

When it was time to finish up, pay and leave, you went to the self checkout, scanned your phone with the self checkout register, it populated everything you had scanned throughout the store, you tapped your payment, got your receipt and left... No removing things from your cart just to scan them and then bag/rebag them, just so much easier.

All I could think of was Silicon Valley, Jian Yang's "New" businesses.

There is a pattern to this as to what it does when, but it does bother me that it changes. By default, if you're doing something that qualifies as media playback / game sounds etc., the volume buttons will adjust the media / playback / sound volume. If you're just at the home screen / lock screen with no media playing it will adjust the ringer/notification volume.

This sucks, in my opinion, so a better solution overall for me was to go into settings -> sounds and haptics and turn off "Change with buttons". Then, set the ideal ringer/notification volume there (which obviously only applies when the ringer/notification mute switch isn't in the silent position). From that point forward the volume buttons only duty, no matter what or where you are, is to adjust media/general sound volume. I habitually drop that to a very low if not no volume when not being used, TBH. Then I use the mute switch on the side of the phone to either enable or disable my notifications/ringers. I don't need to regularly adjust what volume level the ringers are at, so if I ever do want to make an adjustment, it's easy enough to go into settings -> sounds and haptics and make the change there.

I actually prefer it, as I can't accidentally hit the buttons and turn my ringer to really low without realizing it. The silent switch was hard to "accidentally" flip, as it was pretty small and a tight switch (this is good IMO), and once you put a case on your phone it's easy enough to flip when you are actively trying to but difficult for anything to accidentally flip it. This new action button seems like a step in the wrong direction to me. It will eliminate the tactile feel. I carry my phone on my belt clip, and if I'm walking into a meeting I can reach down and feel whether my phone is silenced already or not and switch accordingly... No visual cue needed, no worrying about "did I feel it vibrate to indicate I made the change or not"? etc. I did not have to wake the screen, if it was lying on my desk I could see the current state at all times.