But those bots don’t have any intersection with my network, so their trust score is low.

If they do connect via one of my idiot friends, that friend loses credit, too, and the system can trust his connections less.

The trust level is from my perspective, not global.

Sometimes people’s priorities, needs, and desires are bad.

The way I imagine it working is if I notice a bot in my web, I flag it, and then everyone involved in approving the bot loses some credibility. So a bad actor will get flushed out. And so will your idiot friend that keeps trusting bots, so their recommendations are then mostly ignored.

but I’m pretty convinced that Linux is not close to being ready for normies.

Yeah. I consider myself somewhat tech savvy (I do software development for work) and I had a really bad time installing mint on my desktop. I got it to work after a day but that was far more than a casually interested person would put up with.

Snake case, usually. Some perhaps unfounded fear that something will blow up on a dash in a file name kicking around. Or I’ll do a weird typo/premature enter and part of the file name will be treated like a -flag of some sort.

Yeah I think it’s impossible to treat people with dignity and respect indefinitely while also hoarding wealth like a dragon.

I remember seeing memes about this. I think it was the “boss throws guy out the window” template.

• “How can we keep our guards loyal? Drug them? Bomb collars?”
• “Maybe you could pay them and treat them with dignity and respect”

Personally I think we should start a campaign of jury nullification and “if you’re an EMT, and they’re a billionaire, let them die”, but I’m just one guy.

Oh yeah I think I read about Zucker building a bunker in hawaii. Hopefully he dies before he can enjoy it.

I don’t think it’s the best way out of all possible options. Even if it does “create jobs”, a lot of those jobs aren’t producing much of wider value, and most of the wealth stays in the hands of the ownership class. And a lot of the jobs are exploitive, like how “gig workers” are often treated.

Changes to tax law and enforcing anti-trust stuff would probably be more effective. We probably shouldn’t have bogus high finance shenanigans either. We definitely shouldn’t have billionaires.

I think the whole system of venture capital might be garbage. We have bros spending millions of dollars like gif sharing while the oceans boil, our schools rot, and our infrastructure rusts or is sold off. Or, I guess I’m just indicting capitalism more generally. But having a few bros decide what to fund based on gutfeel and powerpoints seems like a particularly malignant form.

The new settings page isn’t as good as control panel.

Most people are some combination of lazy, uninformed, stressed, and stupid. Can’t think long term, just trying to get to tomorrow.

After COVID we have to retire “avoid like the plague”. Too many people were happy to go to plague gatherings.

The assumption that you should only do things that are profitable is faulty. I don’t want to live in a world where that’s true, and if you thought about it longer you probably also don’t. Assuming you like books, art, music, culture, etc.

I think what happened here is I went off topic and was making a complaint about cars in general and how all the space they take up is annoying, but you stayed on topic and are talking more specifically about self driving cars and waymo. So given that I see what you’re saying.

I will say that building parking structures (is: homes for cars) instead of homes for people feels kind of bad.

Cars being parked idle all day isn’t necessarily going to be a bad thing,

My complaint specifically was about cars parked on the street where I’d rather have a bike lane, wider sidewalk, outdoor dining, or almost anything else other than a parked car taking up that space.

That seems… Fine, on a skim. Plausible.

But like… are we sure we come out ahead spending decades on machine vision and self driving versus just having more human taxi drivers, and spending the money on the end goals we actually want?

I guess that’s a shit job, driving taxis at weird times and places, and doesn’t scale super well. But machine vision and self driving seems to be a decades long project.

Related: I’m not really comfortable with critical infrastructure (eg: transit) being privately owned and operated. So that might be a problem.

Though the political will being absent for anything good remains a problem, too.

Do you imagine these self driving cars are not owned by individuals, and go off to some dedicated place when not in use? That’s marginally better than "everyone owns their own car that spends most of the time idle. I try to ride a bike here in the city and there’s so much space given up to cars parked on the street.

It sounds grotesquely inefficient to have a car pick up guy 1 and drive him to the train, a car pick up his neighbor guy 2 and drive him to the train, a car pick up the guy on their corner and drive him to the station. Which I guess is what we’re doing today, except the cars get parked at both ends idle all day. So maybe it would be an improvement.

But it can’t be the end-state. We should still be working towards denser, walkable, living spaces. I don’t want to continue with the idea that the suburbs are ok.

Corruption is a problem. It doesn’t help that one of two major parties doesn’t believe government can work, and they’ll make every effort to prove it.

“See, if you don’t give any funding to public transit it doesn’t work. And if you gut the regulatory agencies, then there’s all sorts of corruption. Better privatize it, and I have just the guy to sell it to.”

I remain irritated we’re spending so much money on self driving cars instead of buses, trains, and improving our living spaces to support them.

Like you could spend billions to try to get self driving cars to work, and get part way there. And you’d still have a car-first dystopia.

Or you could spend billions to deploy buses and make walkable neighborhoods. Well understood, many good side effects.