I feel like "form your own private paramilitary organisation with minimal oversight, then expand their reach by having them take over the operations of other government departments" has been done before somewhere, as part of a larger plan.
This is a historical pattern: Bringing border forces to bear against your own population, because those border forces are trained to deal with people who don't have the rights of the state.
They dont have all the skills to do anything super complex in a sustainable way. Already proved in the first term. What their existence demonstrates is winning election is not super complex if you can find enough groups to precisely target and pander/capture attention. Social media has been a force multiplier for such behavior and the people that have emerged dont have any other skill other than attention capture. But thats short term win like full focus on marketing while product and operations have no hope of catching up. Every "large plan" will fail. Large plans in complex ever changing environments always need massive cooperation of very different skills. Never happens sustainably with just one skill dominating all.
Hey, tone doesn't translate well over text, they did not use anu tone tags, and I'm already terrible at reading tone in the best of times. Lol, can you really blame me for at least asking? Haha.
Yeah, I was aiming for irony but I should probably have added /s at the end there. It's definitely in the mid-late chapters in any "how to install a fascist regime" handbook.
This depends a huge amount on car, driver and situation. It was the right advice for a learner driver in the 90s with no stability control, no experience and no side airbags, because if you’re going to hit something, hitting it front on is the least risky way. I’m not convinced it’s the right advice for a competent driver in a modern vehicle.
It is still standard advice today, as far as I know. Tires are better, stability control is better, but all else being equal you are still much more dynamically stable and have a lot more friction with the road when the car is stopping in a straight line than when swerving.
Also, in the case of someone running a stop sign, it is far from a sure bet they are going to hit their brakes at all, so by swerving you increase the odds that you will still hit them, but now it will be while you have exhausted all your adhesion on lateral control. So now instead of a front end collision with all the benefits of airbags and crumple zones, you are at a significant risk of rolling the car or spinning off the road and hitting something immovable with a part of your car lacking crumple zones.
The common mistake is people swerve and brake, which is a terrible combination - you should accelerate through a sudden manoeuvre, as it maintains control through it, much as you should accelerate through corners in general.
Wunibald Kamm begs to differ. For his circle, it doesn't matter if the additional force that causes the friction to be insufficient is forward or backwards on top of the side force. In critical situations either use your friction for lateral xor longitudinal action, never both at the same time. Brake hard, but then sail through the curve. You want that vector to move along the circle and never leave it. As that is very difficult for an untrained driver, better switch hard between both modes.
True if we all drove unicycles - but in the real world, tyre wear is uneven, brake wear is uneven, loading is uneven, the surface is uneven, and those differential forces are what modern ABS seeks to control.
The key difference between braking and accelerating is that in the former case, independent, potentially differentially worn brakes, apply force unevenly, making the chance of a loss of traction on one or more wheels higher. With acceleration, that force is applied through a differential, meaning it will be far more likely to be appropriately distributed.
If you want to decelerate while swerving it can be done, but it should be done through engine braking - and the tricky bit there is matching revs as you drop the clutch back in, otherwise you have too much retarding force and overcome the coefficient of friction, resulting in a skid.
Easier for those of us who grew up with double de-clutching and no synchromeshes, but when you’re in a critical situation, it’s still an awful lot easier to apply acceleration.
In theory, it depends. In practice, slamming on your brakes is the correct call 99% of the time. To a large extent that is because of the "competent driver" part. I'd expect 80%+ of drivers to consider themselves just that, whereas the truth is of course the opposite.
So, the correct advice is to say "brake, don't swerve", so that drivers internalize that their first thought and reaction in any emergency should be to brake. Teach them to actually brake—fully press on the pedal—while you're at it.
A slightly more nuanced advice would be "brake first, swerve as needed as a follow-up".
But I would never in good conscience be able to give anyone advice to swerve instead of braking.
Absolutely. I was recently driving on a motorway in Portugal when a boulder (giant chunk of granite, 10+ tonnes) fell off the back of a truck - right in front of us, in a heavily laden (7 pax and luggage) car. Immediate massive cloud of dust, I checked my blind spot, veered across two lanes, and continued our journey, unscathed. I looked in the rear view, to see the car behind us jump on the brakes instead of evading. They caught the boulder.
Nobody killed, according to the news, but several taken to hospital in critical condition.
Oh, I say unscathed but our tyre exploded the next day, as apparently we caught a fragment, and again, that’s not a “slam on the brakes” moment, but rather “trundle to a stop on the shoulder and walk to the conveniently nearby tyre shop”.
It might not even be the leadership at this stage. It’s entirely possible that “rounds of conversation” is a metric that their reinforcement learning has been told to optimise.
Everybody wants to lose their jobs. Almost by definition your job is something you do not because you want to, but because you need to earn a living. Even if your job coincides with your hobby, you would prefer not to have your economic welfare tied to it in a way that drives how you engage with it.
We are on the verge of making this possible, if a bunch of myopic morons -- people who have never been right about a single long-term trend in history -- can be convinced not to screw it up.
You're using a very loose definition of "losing your job".
Not everybody agrees with your definition of what a job means (some people are very passionate about their jobs; not me but I understand their point of view), and regardless, "losing your job" is a thing that is forced upon you and is a source of distress for most people, not something people "want". Many people throughout history, after losing their jobs, never recover (either psychologically, or in terms of the economy not giving them a place to recover).
To be clear, I don't subscribe to the following view at all, but a lot of people derive their self-worth from their occupation. Don't you remember, a few years back, an infamous comment made by someone on HN stating that "if you're fired from your job, you've failed as a person"? It was thankfully downvoted to hell, but it goes to show you your perception of jobs and job loss is not at all widely shared.
Even if nobody wanted to live without a job, until we reach some sort of post-scarcity utopia, the current AI trend is a threat.
Don't you remember, a few years back, an infamous comment made by someone on HN stating that "if you're fired from your job, you've failed as a person"? It was thankfully downvoted to hell, but it goes to show you your perception of jobs and job loss is not at all widely shared.
So, how about responding to a point I made in this thread, today, instead of a post made by "someone on HN a few years back?"
That post seems to have gotten your goat, and I can understand that, but I did not say (and would not have said) anything like it... and I don't, in fact, remember it.
Even if nobody wanted to live without a job, until we reach some sort of post-scarcity utopia, the current AI trend is a threat.
We can't reach post-scarcity without AI. If we could have, we would have. It's technology -- and only technology -- that is even giving us the luxury to think and talk about post-scarcity.
> So, how about responding to a point I made in this thread, today, instead of a post made by "someone on HN a few years back?"
It was only a counterexample to illustrate my point. I did address your point in general, that your assertion that "everybody wants to lose their jobs" is both tone-deaf and false.
> We can't reach post-scarcity without AI
Maybe. But more importantly, it doesn't explain away people's justified fears.
Whan I go to the Stacioners, I ever aske for mitigated Gal and meteoric Iron fillings. I fynde that it maketh the derkest and most persistente inke. Make sure that thou onlie bye swan quill, not goose, and specifie that they sholde onlie be from the right-handed wing.
This reminds me of the time I really wanted an FT-86 (Toyota low end sports car). I spent ages researching them and reading reviews and stuff. Then they started to get popular and I’d see them everywhere and I kinda didn’t want one anymore.
I described this to a friend and he turned to me, shocked, and said “you’re a sports car hipster!” And I’ve never been quite the same since.
> If two instances of the same logic represent the same concept, they should be shared. If 10 instances of the same logic represent unrelated concepts, they should be duplicated.
“Once, twice, automate/abstract” is a good general rule but you have to understand that the thing you’re counting isn’t appearances in the source code, it’s repetitions of the same logic in the same context. It’s gotta mean the same, not just look the same.
reply