The thing is, the Amish don't try to tell the rest of the world that their way is the "obviously correct" way and that everybody else is doing it wrong, the way anti-personal mobility advocates do.
And at some point, maybe it makes sense to ask why, instead of blindly accepting and propagating the hive-mind party line exhibited in threads such as this one.
“Anti-personal mobility” is beyond absurd, absolute loony-bin stuff.
“Anti-personal mobility advocates” do not exist. Transit advocates exist, and improvements in transit also massively benefit those who need to or prefer to drive.
Most motorists absolutely hate e-scooters and e-bikes. They hate them with a white-hot passion. You will never see more road rage than against a scooter when I ride it in a traffic lane. The scooter goes about 17mph, and with 3+ traffic lanes available to cars, they will pile up behind a scooter, scream out their open windows, honk and cut me off, and spit in my face: yes literally spit all over my face, because they hate personal mobility so much.
Motorists hate anything that isn't a car and is in their way. Motorists hate Critical Mass; they hate light rail or streetcars that hog their rights-of-way; they hate pedestrians (especially when pedestrians aren't wearing the right clothes); they hate Lyft, Uber, and Waymo especially; they hate big trucks and they hate Amish people with horse-drawn buggies.
Motorists will establish coalitions to vote against public transit measures in their home towns. They have come out in City Council and other public meetings, to protest and rail, so to speak, to rail against the expansion of light rail into their neighborhoods, because not only do they hate the construction, but they hate the "type of people" that light rail brings, and ultimately they hate the gentrification that comes from a fixed-route project that will ultimately close their shitty exploitive businesses and replace them with more elevated exploitation and richer moguls.
As someone who's canvassed on transit and bike mobility issues before, I think you've spent too long in online urbanism circles. There's a kernel of truth in what you say but it's exaggerated and victimized way too much. Your examples are also pretty textbook online urbanism and ignores other vulnerable road users (motorcycles, mobility scooters, etc)
No, in fact, my assertions are wholly based on in-person interactions with motorists, in conversation and on the roads. I’ve literally been spit upon and road-raged, and many voters and taxi drivers have expressed their sheer hatred and opposition to public transit.
My assertions have nothing to do with “online circles” except here where I am breaking the bad news to y’all.
If you haven't spent time in "online circles" then why is your understanding of vulnerable road users and non-car options limited to only bikes, light rail, and Critical Mass? What about rail trails projects? Does your area follow any NACTO guidelines? How does your DOT/DPW see things?
I don't deny the general idea that motorists in the US tend to have a crab mentality on the road where they want and expect everyone in the road to only be other drivers. I've also been sneered at in various ways in every non car form of transit I've been in.
If anything, the commenter's circumscribed scope of discussion only reinforces the point that they are informed by personal experience and not the internet echo chamber. Whereas you are throwing out these gatekeep-y acronyms to establish transit advocate street cred.
In my town the issues are rail trails and kids dying on e-bikes. Are my opinions on rail banking invalid if I don't know all the rules about wheelchair access ramps at the station? Come on now.
If you're going to post something as contrarian as they did then yes. Cars are popular and the American built environment is oriented around them. You might not like it, but nobody will take your seriously if you don't acknowledge the status quo.
The exact set of topics they brought up are very online. I may be wrong about their experience with urbanism but it literally looks like something out of r/fuckcars
I assumed comment is referring to people that advocate for transit as “anti-personal mobility”, they are counting cars as the only “personal mobility” which is beyond laughable.
e-scooters kind of sit in an uncanny valley of shittiness. I'll upfront say it's not at all fair to anyone using them responsibly, but there's a lot of cultural baggage that is going to make them uniquely reviled compared to alternatives. For instance, I've longboarded all around the city of Dallas for years and nobody has ever honked at, cut me off, or spit on me. But temporary rental scooters with no permanent docking station carry with them the stigma of:
- People riding them on sidewalks to putting pedestrians in danger
- "Parking" them right in front of someone's gate, blocking the entrance to their house
- Obviously drunk partiers using them in lieu of getting a ride or taking the bus
- Groups of them sitting around half knocked over completely blocking a sidewalk or other pathway meant for cyclists, runners, walkers, and other pedestrians
Fair or not, you're like the kid using a razor scooter at the skate park. Nobody likes you but it doesn't mean they hate everyone at the skate park. They just hate scooter kids.
Yeah I do not think there are any serious transit advocates that put time into advocating for e-scooters. They are worse and more dangerous than bikes and e-bikes in every possible way.
And any bike lane infrastructure would benefit e-scooters anyway, so riding them in the road at 30mph below the flow of traffic is a sad hill to die on.
at least in England, if you use an e-scooter while under the influence of alcohol, that equates to a motoring offence whereby incurring (car) driving licence penalties, driving licence disquaifications (bans), fines, and imprisonment all apply, depending on circumstances and severity. I'm not sure if/why it would be different anywhere else
It's the folks pushing cars that are both the most strident and the most successful at pushing their "obviously correct" way onto everyone, at least in the US.
Cars are not popular becuase people pushed them. Cars are popular because the utility is undeniable.
This is true for any kind of transformative technology. Marketing and lobbying can only get you so far. If something has enough utility, it will be used regardless of what people say they want.
> Cars are not popular becuase people pushed them. Cars are popular because the utility is undeniable.
I think this is somewhat of a chicken and egg problem. Cars' utility is undeniable partially because society has twisted itself thoroughly around The Car being an assumed part of it. This societal change was both pulled (by car customers) and pushed (by car manufacturers).
Yes absolutely—I think cars have obvious utility as machines, but there has now been 100 years of building everything around them and changing laws in such a way that encourages their use: through direct and indirect subsidy, land use rules that largely outlaw building cities in any way other than sprawl that itself increases the importance and utility of cars, and various other preferential regulations that often tolerate the harms in a way that is not applied elsewhere (c.f. panic over e-bike safety vs American highway safety overall).
Cars won because they were (and are) better than the alternatives. The need for powerful individual transportation with utility has always existed, and was originally met with horses. Bicycles meet the transportation need, but not the need for utility. Cars do both, and they do it better than anything else. Even before fueling infrastructure was rolled out, you could still run a car on petroleum you bought from the chemist, which is still infinitely better than the acres of pasture you need for horses. If you had an early diesel, it would run on oil, which is even easier.
The idea that cars needed all this infrastructure that other alternatives didn't just doesn't match the reality of the history of the automobile. And yes, we've leaned on those advantages in the century since, which has also created vast areas where a car is necessary to participate in society, but we only did so because the advantages and utility were so undeniable.
I don't think a armonster was quite claiming it to be "obviously correct". But rather taking it for granted that this a valid hypothesis:
- We would have gotten most of the social utility of automobiles, without most of the social negatives, if personal vehicles had mostly never happened.
And implied from that, we should stop having them now.
Given the known ills of society, I think those negatives are pretty uncontroversial. To the point that personal car proponents have some burden to explain why we should keep it up.
THIS. But the car/oil companies did do bad things like work to undermine public transport & EVs back in day. Now we have sprawling burbs & social isolation. Phones, death of 3rd spaces & church going, etc. made it worse as people stopped having bigger families, leading to even more isolation.
Exactly. Why do they ask permission for read-only operations?! You either run with --dangerously-skip-permissions or you come back after 30 minutes to find it waiting for permission to run grep. There's no middle ground, at least not that Claude CLI users have access to.
Best policy is to just wait a couple of weeks after a major model is released. It's frustrating to have to re-download tens or hundreds of GB every few days, but the quant producers have no choice but to release early and often if they want to maintain their reputation.
Ideally the labs releasing the open models would work with Unsloth and the llama.cpp maintainers in advance to work out the bugs up front. That does sometimes happen, but not always.
We do get early access to nearly all models, and we do find the most pressing issues sometimes. But sadly some issues are really hard to find and diagnose :(
Today, AI can be pointed at an open source codebase and systematically scan it for vulnerabilities.
AI also goes a long way towards erasing the distinction between source code and executable code. The disassembly skill of a good LLM is nothing short of jaw-dropping.
So going closed-source may be safer for SaaS, but closing the source won't save a codebase from being exploited if the binaries are still accessible to the public. In that sense, instead of dooming SaaS as many people have suggested AI will do, it may instead be a boon.
To use a WWII metaphor, it's as if we killed Hitler in 1934 and instead of the Night of the Long Knives, the Sturmabteilung are now running the whole country.
Except it may be even worse than that. While you might expect some infighting among SA factions, the Revolutionary Guard is a distributed force that's ideologically united by both a common religion and a common cause.
90 million people, and fairly well educated and industrious at that. Iran is not some tribesmen at low development in Afghanistan, they would actually be a solidly developing country on par with China if they weren’t heavily sanctioned and held back by the clerics and revolutionary guard.
The whole article is just plain weird. They make it sound like a personal slight, and not a legal battle pitting two companies with a history of questionable behavior against each other.
As others have noted, it was far from a slam-dunk case that what Franklin did was illegal or unethical. "You could even pull a card out of an Apple and plug it in" is not exactly the rhetorical death blow that the author of this article was aiming for.
And I've used enough "gold standard" commercial applications, like the one being discussed in this very article, that I don't trust those either. If you recoil in horror at code written by LLMs, I'm afraid that the vendors you're already working with have some really bad news for you. You can get over it now or get over it later. You will get over it.
I can audit and verify Claude's output. Code running at BackBlaze, not so much. Take some responsibility for your data. Rest assured, nobody else will.
You are not wrong, but I just don't have time. My choices are pay someone or throw my hands up. I have been paying backblaze. But I recently had a drive die, and discovered the backups are missing .exe and .dll files, and so that part of the restore was worthless.
What time I do have, I've been using to try and figure out photo libraries. Nothing is working the way I need it to. The providers are a mess of security restrictions and buggy software.
My favorite Peanuts comic was always the one where Linus is standing at an intersection next to a 'Push Button To Cross Street' sign. He is sucking his thumb and clutching his blanket despondently.
In the last panel, Charlie Brown tells him, "You have to move your feet, too."
Agreed. Watching the intermediate "Thinking about X ... Now I'll do Y" text on GPT 5.4 lately has been like watching a hypothetical smart drug wear off.
All of the major models have been getting worse lately, not just Opus.
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