8 points
*

Fuck yeah, I love tactical controls. There’s just something nice about something physical you can feel and manipulate.

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4 points

Like, not dying while trying to go through menus while driving

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322 points
118 points
103 points
*

Yeah, so the thing is, any amount of trust that I had has already been completely destroyed. “We don’t do it anymore because it’s illegal, trust me bro” isn’t going to cut it. Does the bill include mandatory prison time for executives for violations, or just cost-of-doing-business fines? Will this be enforced by a government regulatory body that is not literally outnumbered 20:1 by car manufacturer lawyers?

If the car has any kind of network capabilities and 100% of the car’s software is not open source, I’m not buying it. Period.

This bill would not need to exist if cars were FOSS, or if cars were non-networked. Those are the only 2 solutions that I will accept. This bill is worthless to me.

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28 points
*

Will the regulatory body be stacked with, and bribed by auto execs?

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9 points

I didn’t read too far, but,

To restrict car manufacturers and other companies from selling consumer car-related data, increase transparency regarding data practices, and for other purposes.

already skips over collecting the data, so yeah. I would guess this bill just exists for the optics, and isn’t actually intended to challenge the industry.

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7 points

I agree with you, the damage has been done. That’s why I’m looking at alternative methods of transportation, like an ebike or public transit. Hopefully your area has good infrastructure for that.

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4 points

It’s nice to have principles, but in a few years you’re going to have to find a new way to get around.

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27 points

something, something, open source car.

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35 points

Some nerd running Gentoo on his car. Has to recompile everything every time he has an oil change.

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20 points

But once it’s recompiled it runs so smooth.

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0 points

Hahaha, that’s cute.

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114 points

They are more safe since people can feel the buttons without taking their eyes off of the road. I don’t understand why they thought it was a good idea to use touchscreens.

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66 points

It had nothing to do with being a good idea. It was just the more profitable idea. Tactile controls cost more to install than a cheap touchscreen with a dogshit GUI. Bonus being you have a proprietary part, the consumer can’t easily swap out later if they want. So you’ve baked in some nice obsolescence to boot.

Ain’t capitalism great? Race to the bottom.

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16 points

Tactile controls cost more to install

Not just more to install, but also more to design. Physical controls have to be designed so they fit the aesthetic of the car and don’t look out of place. On the other hand, a touch screen can just reuse a generic UI design across every vehicle made by a particular manufacturer, or even across different manufacturers if the same vendor supplies the same OS for all of them.

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3 points

Agreed. When I said “install,” I meant everything, really. R&D, design, manufacturing, installation, etc. Even so, touchscreens are not a suitable replacement and never will be.

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3 points

In my lurking time here, I have seen many comments on Lemmy that criticize capitalism, but I think it’s not as bad as it is made out to be on here. I earn money by working, can spend my money on what I want, and can start a business if I wanted to. The best businesses are rewarded with more money while poor businesses fail. I don’t see anything wrong with that. Admittedly, it is possible that I am wrong because I have never studied economy other than the short lessons from required college classes my first two years. Do you have any objective sources where I can start to learn? I tend to be liberal/Democrat, btw.

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23 points

Free market economy != Capitalism.

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12 points
*

Your freedom to do those things under capitalism is wholly bound by your existing wealth, and wealth begets wealth. When your parents are well off, you can get into good schools, get better education, and ultimately get a better job and, really, be a better worker bringing more wealth into the already existing pool of wealth your family had. Those who have been disenfranchised by way of things like eminent domain, redlining, or the straight up prosecution of them and their fellow men simply don’t have that option to rise up. They don’t even have the opportunity to try and fail, they’ve failed by their very existence. At a macro scale, once you’ve reached the top (e.x. Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc.) you have the resources to not only out-do any of the competition but to sell products at a loss to starve your competition and bully them into submission, which big companies do all the time instead of investing in better products. It’s just good business.

Circumstance plays a lot into how much wealth you start out with and how much wealth you end up being able to accrue, so while it’s nice being not even at the top but even just the middle, it’s important to have the mindfulness to know that there are those below you who don’t have the same freedoms, and they’re not there because their businesses did poorly. Some of them are, but most are simply victims of greater powers stealing their capital.

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8 points

The best businesses are rewarded with more money while poor businesses fail.

Absolutely 100% false.

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6 points
*

I earn money by working

But do you earn enough? Does the working class earn enough? The general consensus for most people is no. The vast majority of wealth that the working class produces every year does not make it into the hands of the people who produced it, but rather the oligarchs who already possess most of the wealth already.

I can spend my money on what I want, and can start a business if I wanted to.

These are not exclusive to only capitalism. People were trading money for goods and starting businesses for thousands of years before capitalism was around.

The best businesses are rewarded with more money while poor businesses fail.

This is how it’s supposed to work in a merit driven free market economy, but that’s not how late stage capitalism plays out.

Many corporations are run by imbeciles and hemorrhage money, pursue short term profits at the expense of long term sustainability, treat their workers horribly, and rely on their monopolistic position in the market to survive rather than merit, competence, ethics, or quality. When they finally make an error that would normally bankrupt a company out of existence, they simply cry to the government for bailout money, and they get it every time because our politicians are bought and owned by billionaires and their lobbyists. This is the core principle of an oligarchy, which we are, and which capitalism always evolves into given enough time.

The rich get bailouts, the workers do not. This is a direct product of wealth inequality and regulatory capture that capitalism inherently generates.

The main argument against capitalism is that it leads to only a privileged few getting all the wealth, opportunities and freedom while the rest become wage slaves and debt slaves. It is the ultimate capitulation to artificial scarcity as if that’s somehow the best we can do as a species.

All the homelessness, overpriced healthcare and education, unaffordable housing, etc exists because of capitalism and it’s supporters look at this and say “good. fuck the poor.” or “this is the best we can do.”

I stopped being a libertarian because I was tired of the cynical capitulation.

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5 points
*

Wouldn’t your comment equally apply to being a small business owner (let’s say blacksmith) under feudalism? As a good blacksmith, you will earn more clients and prestige, while poor blacksmiths won’t get repeat business. You might be able to expand your forge and hire more people to do the tedious work of making chainmail or whatever.

I don’t know that anyone can ever provide an “objective” source on capitalism. Anyone who writes on the topic has inherent biases. Here are a few: https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-at-Work-Cure-Capitalism/dp/1608462471

https://www.amazon.com/Slow-Down-Manifesto-KOHEI-SAITO/dp/1662602723

https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/doughnut-economics-paperback/

https://www.amazon.com/What-Wrong-Capitalism-Ruchir-Sharma/dp/1668008262

https://www.amazon.com/There-Are-No-Accidents-Disaster_Who/dp/1982129689

https://www.amazon.com/Deaths-Despair-Future-Capitalism-Anne/dp/0691217076

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3 points

You’re talking about free and open competition in a perfect competition marketplace. This is an ideal (similarly far-fetched as communism/socialism*) where there are low barriers to entry, and consumers have good information to make well informed choices. In this world competition bid’s down excess profits in the long run - essentially to consumers benefit. not the benefit of producers. wages are low but it doesnt so much matter becauases competition keeps prices low.

Capitalism wants to increase the return to capital , so it works against competition to create market power (by many means including legal system power and regulatory capture as well tacit or explicit corruption) both over consumers and over their own supply chain (e.g. employees). It inherits its legacy from rentierism and landowners who also like to monopolize land, ration it and have tenants bid up rents.

‘objective sources’, on economics? Good luck. economists are so bi-assed that most of them can spew shit out of two holes simultaneously.

  • both communism and perfect competition probably work fine in a small closed community, where everyone pretty much has repeated interactions with everyone - visibility - and there will be other examples where they each work fine-ish, but on a large enough scale, anomynity and human nature come into play. The reality is human trust is excellent, but some people will abuse it when they think they’ll get away with it and that destroys it.
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3 points
*

The best businesses are rewarded with more money while poor businesses fail.

citation needed

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24 points
*

That’s true.

With a T9 phone, I used to be able to send a complete text message without ever taking my eyes off the road.

Now that I’ve got a touchscreen I’m swerving all over the place every time I try to text. It’s way less safe.

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21 points

Don’t text while you are driving. What the fuck?

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19 points

Woosh, hopefully?

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6 points

Stop fucking texting and driving.

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15 points

Yes, please just text and drive, fucking is too distracting.

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1 point
*

I prefer reading an erotic book. And well…you know where the other hand goes that isn’t holding the book.

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Deleted by creator
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2 points

Jesus took the wheel

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13 points

One word. Tesla.

It became the Apple of automobiles and everyone was rushing to copy them. Then came the fall of Elon and everyone is realizing how full of shit the company is.

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6 points

Cheap tech that looks expensive, that is why we have touch screens. Also harder to repair for the customer to do. A physcial button is easy to replace and quick.

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6 points
*

There’s a kind of people who think they don’t need to know an industry to know where it’s heading and where the progress is.

Mobile computers being thinner and replacing buttons with touchscreens are from that kind of delusions.

Now built-in chatbots with voice recognition and synthesis are all the rage. If you remember that “elevator in Scotland” sketch.

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2 points

Ullluvunn!

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139 points

Can we address headlights that are brighter than the sun now?

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94 points

my issue isn’t really with the brightness, it’s the height. Don’t get me wrong bright headlights are annoying as fuck, but a huge ass truck behind me with their headlights literally higher than my back window is insane.

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30 points

My point exactly. The brightness is great, when it works in your favor. But when a modern car sits at such a height, where the low-beams shine directly over the top of my car, it’s obnoxious

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17 points

Especially when people fuck with the ride height on their trucks. They almost always end up with the front higher than the back, relative to it’s stock setting. Then don’t bother to adjust the head light angle to compensate.

Then, on I need a massive light bar on the top of my truck. Never mind that I never take this thing off road or do any work with it. It looks cool and it’s bright and shiny.

Fuck off. Can we just tax these things properly and not v give them a lower tax rate since their classed as commercial vehicles. No one buying these massive boats uses them for more than going to home Depot once a year to buy some leaf bags.

/Rant

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16 points

That, and people don’t know how to adjust them, or are unwilling to. My parents’ cars have a dial to adjust the headlight angle for when carrying weight in the back of the car, or when towing, but they never touch the setting.

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10 points

I don’t know the white point on some of the LED headlights is extremely taxing to look at at night.

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4 points

My car has adjustable headlight height and I love it. I put em all the way down because they’re stupid bright.

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10 points
*

I hope European-style adaptive headlights become the norm in the USA eventually. Some higher-end cars have a matrix of LEDs instead of one bulb per headlight, and they can programmatically dim just some of the LEDs. If you have your headlights on but there’s a car in front of you (or on the other side of the road, whatever), the high beam will dim just the area the car is in. This happens automatically while you’re driving.

This is an option in some European vehicles (or may be standard on high end ones) but they have to explicitly disable the feature when exporting to the USA.

The USA did approve something relating to this, but it must not be sufficient since the European manufacturers are still disabling the feature in the USA.

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4 points

From personal experience in Europe, I can tell you that it sounds great in theory, but it’s horrible in practise. I get routinely blinded by headlights here and I feel like it has only gotten worse with the advent of LED headlights.

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5 points

Not all manufacturers use adaptive headlights, and on some cars it’s only available as an upgrade whereas there’s a lot of people driving base models.

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1 point

Interesting, I have those on my car and I actively avoid using them.

It can’t cope with anything more than a simple scenario (dim around car in front, deal with on coming car in other lane). If you also have pedestrians and vehicles on side junctions, then you burn their eyes.

So, I’d assumed it was a US feature (straight, wide roads) brought over here

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9 points

SHUT UP ABOUT THE SUN

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5 points

Damn, why’d you have to bring up the sun again?

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4 points

IT ALL GOES BACK TO THE SUN

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6 points

That and buttons that are almost as flat as touchscreens.

I want my clickety-click Fallout and Star Wars rugged industrial feeling.

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5 points

Its worse in the rain and even worse still in the snow.

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3 points

And for some reason my state still doesn’t have properly reflecting paint, so everyone drives with their high-beams on because otherwise you can’t see the lanes. The net result is that nobody can see anything because they’re constantly being blinded by oncoming traffic.

It sucks all the way down…

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2 points

Never had an issue with them but then I live in Europe, where auto-adjusting/adaptive lights aren’t just legal it’s a requirement if you want to make the headlights permanent high-beams.

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4 points

I wish adaptive lights were legal in the USA. Manufacturers like BMW have to disable the feature at the factory because their implementation isn’t approved for usage in the USA.

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39 points

Plotnick, an associate professor of cinema and media studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, is the leading expert on buttons and how people interact with them.

I like that being a leading expert on buttons is a profession that exists in this world. You go Rachel Plotnick.

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9 points

Leading expert on buttons says to use buttons?

Mild shock

Seriously though they are needed for many features especially cars or eyes away

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8 points

Leading expert on buttons says to use buttons?

It’s exactly what Big Button wants you to think!!! Wake up sheeple!!!1!1!11

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3 points

I’m just shocked that’s a cinema and media studies professor. I’d’ve expected human factors engineering or psychology, especially at such a psych school

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2 points

Professors don’t always teach in their actual area of expertise. I had a German language professor whose PhD was in Philosophy and activity published in that field, in English, German and French journals. It does seem like an odd combination, but probably not a lot of students signing up for a class in usability of buttons, even from the fields you would expect to study them .

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