Thorny_Thicket @ Thorny_Thicket @sopuli.xyz

Exploring diverse perspectives on contentious subjects.

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2 yr. ago

When a self-driving car drives at or below the speed limit on a fast-moving highway, it can disrupt the natural flow of traffic. This can lead to a higher chance of accidents when other human drivers resort to aggressive maneuvers like tailgating, risky overtaking, or sudden lane changes. I'm not claiming that it does so for a fact, but it is conceivable, and that's the point of my argument.

Now, contrast this with a self-driving car that adjusts its speed to match the prevailing traffic conditions, even if it means slightly exceeding the speed limit. By doing so, it can blend with the surrounding traffic and reduce the chances of accidents. It's not about encouraging speeding but rather adapting to the behavior of other human drivers.

Of course, we should prioritize safety and adhere to traffic rules whenever possible. However, sometimes the safest thing to do might be temporarily going with the flow, even if it means bending the speed limit rules slightly. The paradox lies in the fact that by mimicking human behavior to a certain extent, self-driving cars can contribute to overall road safety. It's a nuanced issue, but it underscores the complexity of integrating autonomous vehicles into a world where human drivers are far from perfect. This would not be an issue if every car was driven by an competent AI and there was no human drivers.

I obviously don't know for sure, but at least it's conceivable that, in fact, it may be the case that erratic behavior of other drivers, caused by someone else driving slower than them, leads to a significant number of accidents every year that would not have happened had they been driving at the same speed as everyone else.

In this case, forcing the self-driving vehicle to never go over the speed limit literally means you're knowingly choosing an option that leads to more people dying instead of less.

I think there's a pretty clear moral dilemma here. I'm not claiming to know the right way forward, but I just want to point out that strictly following the rules without an exception is not always what leads to the best results. Of course, allowing self-driving cars to break the rules comes with its own issues, but this just further points to the complexity of this issue.

Personal finances, saving and frugal living

I don't remember ever meeting a person in real life with any significant interest in any of that.

ChatGPT writes in very distinct style and it's quite easy to tell by anyone who has played around with it. The issue here isn't necessarily being able to tell whose cheating but proving it is the hard part.

Yeah, I use ChatGPT to assist with the grammar in my posts here at times. However, I need to explicitly instruct it to only correct the errors and not make any other changes. Otherwise, it completely rewrites the entire message, and the language ends up sounding unmistakably like ChatGPT. As you mentioned, it's immediately apparent because it has a distinct style, and no typical human writes in that manner. Like you said, it's easy to discern but challenging to confirm. Additionally, with the right prompt, you can probably get it to generate text that sounds more conventional.

I replaced 60% of it with Lemmy and the rest with YouTube

Let's take a moment to appreciate how ridiculous claim you're making here.

Every other technical innovation has made the average person’s life worse.

Washing machine. Let's hear how that made everyone's life worse.

Probably somewhere around the age of 14 when most of my friends started doing "adult stuff" and I still prefered the things I had been doing up untill that point and now at over 30 I still prefer that over adulting.

I don't know if I'm actually that different from other people but I sure do feel like it. I'm quite independent. I like solitude and I tend to form my own opinions on stuff instead of adopting what people around me think.

I'm probably on the autistic spectrum somewhere and I don't think of myself as very nice person. I mean I don't treat people badly ever but I'm not much of a people pleaser either and can be quite blunt from time to time. Surprisingly many people still seem to like me so I don't know what's wrong with them.

While wages are obviously a significant factor here, I still wouldn't be surprised if the primary cause for this is simply the fact that most people aren't very skilled at managing their personal finances.

I make a pretty decent living, but in discussions with my coworkers who earn as much as I do, and often even more, it becomes apparent that many of them are essentially living from hand to mouth. In contrast, I have a year's worth of wages invested in stocks and enough cash to purchase two more cars like the one I already own. Finances and saving are subjects I enjoy discussing, but the vast majority of people have zero interest in them, and this has a real impact on their lives.

Defederating doesn't prevent them from seeing what you post. It only prevents you from seeing them

En ole varma ymmärsinkö oikein, mutta nykyiselläänhän tuo varaaja on jatkuvasti kiinni seinässä ja ollut edelliset 10 vuotta ilman mitään ongelmia. Vai meinaatko, että tuo parin tunnin kesto olisi sillä kellokytkimellä?

I love doing what I'm doing right now: waking up early and just taking 3 hours or so to enjoy a couple of cups of coffee while browsing the internet with no hurry to be anywhere.

I almost never plan anything ahead. I think it's due to my undiagnosed ADD, but I'm really the happiest when I have an open schedule and can do whatever I want whenever the motivation strikes. One day, I might just sit and browse Lemmy or watch YouTube the whole morning, and another day I'm in my shed organizing screws for 8 hours straight without eating, drinking, or going to the toilet.

Then, of course, there are the usual activities: long walks, mountain biking, cooking by a campfire, and the occasional trip with my family's boat, etc. I'm basically the most boring person you'll meet. I no longer even feel FOMO when I hear about other people's trips abroad during their vacations. Good for you, but I have zero interest in that.

Personally I've always considered a like to be more or less a retweet. I'm super picky about what I like because I know it's going to the feed of my subscribers

then the ones driving “significantly” faster are the ones decreasing road safety. No-one is forcing them to perform “unsafe overtakings and such”.

I'm not claiming it is so, but I'm saying it's conceivable that if the autonomous vehicle drives slightly over the speed limit, with the flow of traffic, it may actually lead to a statistically significant drop in accidents compared to the scenario where it follows the speed limit. Yes, no one is forcing other drivers to behave in such a way, but they do, and because of that, people die. In this case, forcing self-driving cars to follow traffic rules to the letter would paradoxically mean you're choosing to kill and injure more people.

I don't think the answer to this kind of moral question is obvious. Traffic is such a complex system, and there are probably many other examples where the actually safer thing to do is not what you'd intuitively think.

Moral questions about autonomous vehicles is an interesting subject. There's a lot of difficult questions like this that we have to come up with answers to. For example there's also the issue wether in case of an unavoidable accident should the car prioritize the life of the passengers over everyone else meaning that given the choice it's going to rather drive over a pedestrian than hit a brick wall. Human doesn't have time to think about this and react on time but AI does.

Well its an ongoing discussion with no definite answer but here's how I see it:

Let's say a car manufacturer comes up with a self-driving vehicle that is proven to be, let's say, 3 times better than a skilled human driver. It is then objectively true to say that everyone would be safer in one of these cars. You could even argue it's the responsible thing to do, especially compared to driving by yourself, right?

Well, maybe as a society, we don't prohibit people from driving, but you must then acknowledge that if you cause an accident, you would also suffer the consequences. However, even these self-driving vehicles aren't foolproof. Despite being 3 times safer, they will still end up in accidents. Who do we blame for this, then? That's what I take you're asking?

No one, really, I guess. Assigning blame might not be the most productive thing to do, and it could be more reasonable to think of these accidents as a collective risk that users willingly accept when using these products. You're already accepting that risk now, so taking a risk three times smaller shouldn't be an issue. Perhaps it's conceivable that the vehicle manufacturer pays some compensation to the victim/family too but not because it's their fault per se, but because they can afford it and it seems like the fair thing to do.

With the current systems the driver obviously. These systems are not yet advanced enough to be blindly relied on

It's possible to agree with a point someone is making while not liking the person saying it. Personally I find discussion about the topic itself more interesting than talking about billionaires.

“Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.”

-Naval Ravikant

I think that's pretty spot on. We imagine that we can't be happy because we don't have certain things while in reality we already have many of the things we used to think would make us happy. As buddhists say; "life is unsatisfactory". It's almost impossible to be satisfied with what you got because of hedonic adaptation. You'll just start wanting the next thing.

I truly belive the key to true life satisfaction is to realize how lucky we are to even be able to complain about billionaires online. Millions of people would consider their prayers answered if they could switch places with us.