It's possible to make a sedan sized car that can be power positive at highway speeds in summer; even with modern safety and features. It's the rest of the year...

The change from cd to vinyl "sound" was largely about mastering, and cheap digital production technology being not that great. But you can find examples of the same master going to cd or vinyl, and there's no benefit to the vinyl.

And I say this as someone who enjoys the physical medium, huge art covers, and tube amps.

Basically trying to retrofit busses to a development built around cars is stupid.

We don't need to optimise for space, we need to optimise for cost of transport, and door to door duration.

You have areas where leaving the cul-de-sac zone takes 15-20 minutes on foot; so you need a stop or two in the zone.

Now you have a short walk to the stop; but if you want this to be a viable alternative, you need some frequency of service.

And that means that the routs need to be active across the whole week, not just the hypothetical peak (otherwise everyone needs a car anyway).

So how do you actually get a high average number of riders per bus? More stops?

But if each stop needs to go in and out of a cul-de-sac, the travel time goes up.

Eventually people stop tolerating the extra time, and get cars.

So you end up with a case of empty busses running... Seems much worse than a waymo.

Even in an office, there are plenty of people doing a 10-6, or an 8-3 then the school run... That's before you consider that many people are not office workers only going between the burbs and the city...

Trying to keep using something that is comprised by fixed routes, schedules, and stops makes n little sense.

It's all the behaviour that we have identified as better overall if everyone follows it, and deciding that it doesn't apply to you, because you don't feel like it.

Run a red light, because you are in a hurry. Drive a truck without a licence, because you think you will be fine. Throw a party every night, because your having a great time and there is not enough resources to limit how shit you can be to your neighbours.

Part COVID, part mass migration, but the general decline in social trust is something that I really feel.

I guess I see breaking rules as fundamentally a lack of empathy.

If you are churning plans anyway, and that's the speed you want, you should have starlink in the mix.

I fully expect the NBN wholesale to keep getting more expensive, while I expect satellite providers to get cheaper.

Uncensored models tend to follow Tay's law.

We have been moving from pretty crude centering, to adaptive based on other vehicles, to intelligent enough to avoid potholes and cross lane markings deliberately (eg, passing a cyclist on an empty road).

The problem is all these options exist simultaneously, with the same marketing, and same ancap bonus points; even when the actual capability of the car varies massively.

I think only surpassed by the SETI program in terms of doing it because many nerds think it's really cool.

So the setup goes, if a doormans function is defined as opening the door, then he can be replaced by a cheap mechanical thing; this misses that he is both covering more incidental tasks, and providing a human interface to the business. These things are very valuable, but not captured in the "guy who operates the door" definition.

Booting the htpc can be a pain; personally my best solution has been wake on lan via phone. I've also used universal remotes before cec was reliable, and I had to control the screen separately.