The difference is that Uber’s model of using an app to show you the route, give driver feedback, be able to report problems and monitor and track the driver, etc. is actually a huge improvement to both rider safety and experience compared to calling a cab company and then waiting who knows how long for someone to show up and hopefully bring you where you want to go.

Not saying that their model of gig workers, or dodging up front training is good, but they legitimately offered up a fundamentally better taxi experience than anything that came before, which I think encouraged regulators to really drag their feet on looking into them.

“This isn’t a meeting about the budget per se”

“This isn’t exactly a meeting about the budget”

If you finish those sentences, it becomes clear why per se is used:

“This isn’t a meeting about the budget per se, it’s a meeting about how much of the budget is spent on bits of string”

“This isn’t exactly a meeting about the budget, it’s a meeting about how much of the budget is spent on bits of string”

In this situation, using per se provides a more natural sentence flow because it links the first part of the sentence with the second. It’s also shorter and fewer syllables.

“Steve’s quite erudite.”

“Steve’s quite intellectual.”

I think intellectual might be a closer synonym, but intellectual often has more know-it-all connotations than erudite which seems to often refer to a more pure and cerebral quality.

“Tom and Jerry is a fun cartoon because of the juxtaposition of the relationship between cat and mouse.”

“Tom and Jerry is a fun cartoon because of the side by side oppositeness of the relationship between cat and mouse that is displayed”

For those to say precisely the same thing it would have to be more like the above which doesn’t really roll off the tongue.

“I don’t understand, can you elucidate that?”

“I don’t understand, can you explain?”

Elucidate just means to make something clear in general, explaining something usually inherently implies a linguistic, verbal, explanation, unless otherwise stated.

Honestly, these all seem like very reasonable words to me for the most part. I can understand not using them in some contexts, but for the most part, words exist for a reason, to describe something slightly differently, and it takes forever to talk and communicate if we only limit ourselves to the most basic unnuanced terms.

When people use industry specific jargon and acronyms with someone not in their industry.

It is a very simple rule of writing and communication. You never just use an acronym out of nowhere, you write it out in full the first time and explain the acronym, and then after that you can use it.

Artificial diamonds can be made with a High Temperature, High Pressure (HTHP) process, or a …

Doctors, military folk, lawyers, and technical people of all variety are often awful at just throwing out an acronym or technical term that you literally have no way of knowing.

Usually though, I don’t think it’s a conscious effort to sound smart. Sometimes, it’s just people who are used to talking only with their coworkers / inner circle and just aren’t thinking about the fact that you don’t have the same context, sometimes it’s people who are feeling nervous / insecure and are subconsciously using fancy terms to sound like they fit in, and sometimes it’s people using specific terminology to hide the fact that they don’t actually understand the concepts well enough to break them down further.

For each of these, what would you use instead?

I’m not google, you can figure this out for yourself:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/12/human-drivers-crash-a-lot-more-than-waymos-software-data-shows/

Look up Waymo, then stop going on long winded rants about things when you don’t even have a basic grasp of the current state of the technology.

Jesus Christ.

you are literally doing what i mean when i say you are making assumptions with no evidence. there is, again, no reason to believe that “driving more efficiently” will result from mass-adoption of automated vehicles–and even granting they do, your assumption that this wouldn’t be gobbled up by induced demand is intuitively disprovable. even the argumentation here parallels other cases where induced demand happens! “build[ing] new roads or widen[ing] existing ones” is a measure that is almost always justified by an underlying belief that we need to improve efficiency and productivity in existing traffic flows,[^1] and obviously traffic flow does not improve in such cases.

I’m doing nothing other than questioning where the induced demand is coming from. What is inducing if not increased efficiency?

The whole point of induced demand in highways is that when you add capacity in the form of lanes it induces demand. So if our highways are already full and if that capacity isn’t coming from increased EV efficiency then where is it coming from? If there’s no increase in road capacity then what is inducing demand?

but granting that you’re correct on all of that somehow: more efficiency (and less congestion) would be worse than inducing demand. “efficiency” in the case of traffic means more traffic flow at faster speeds, which is less safe for everyone—not more.[^2] in general: people drive faster, more recklessly, and less attentively when you give them more space to work with (especially on open roadways with no calming measures like freeways, which are the sorts of roads autonomous vehicles seem to do best on). there is no reason to believe they would do this better in an autonomous vehicle, which if anything incentivizes many of those behaviors by giving people a false sense of security (in part because of advertising and overhyping to that end!).

You are describing how humans drive, not AVs. AVs always obey the speed limit and traffic calming signs.

you asserted these as “other secondary effects to AVs”–i’m not sure why you would do that and then be surprised when people challenge your assertion. but i’m glad we agree: these don’t exist, and they’re not benefits of mass adoption nor would they likely occur in a mass adoption scenario.

We haven’t agreed on anything,I said I was open to your reasoning as to why those effects wouldn’t happen, then you didn’t provide any.

the vast majority of road safety is a product of engineering and not a product of human driving ability, what car you drive or its capabilities, or other variables of that nature. almost all of the problems with, for example, American roadways are design problems that incentivize unsafe behaviors in the first place (and as a result inform everything from the ubiquity of speeding to downstream consumer preferences in cars). to put it bluntly: you cannot and will not fix road safety through automated vehicles, doubly so with your specific touted advantages in this conversation.

You think you can eliminate all accidents through road design?

You are literally ignoring every single accident caused by distracted driving, impatient driving, impaired driving, tired driving etc.

Yeah, road design in America should be better, AVs should still also replace crappy wreckless humans. Those two ideas are not mutually exclusive.

this is at obvious odds with the current state of self-driving technology itself–which is (as i noted in the other comment) subject to routine overhyping and also has rather minimal oversight and regulation generally

All cool tech things are overhyped. If you judgement for whether or not a technology is going to be useful is “if it sounds at all overhyped then it will flop” then you would never predict any technology would change the world ever.

And no, quite frankly those assertions are objectively false. Waymo and Cruise’s driverless programs are both monitored by the DMV which is why they revoked Cruise’s license when they found them hiding crash data. Waymo has never been found to do so or even accused of doing so. Notice that in the lawsuit you linked, Waymo was happy to publish accident and safety data but did not want to publish data about how it’s vehicles handle edge cases, which would give their rivals information on how they operate, and the courts agreed with them.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/12/human-drivers-crash-a-lot-more-than-waymos-software-data-shows/

Since their inception, Waymo vehicles have driven 5.3 million driverless miles in Phoenix, 1.8 million driverless miles in San Francisco, and a few thousand driverless miles in Los Angeles through the end of October 2023. And during all those miles, there were three crashes serious enough to cause injuries:

In July, a Waymo in Tempe, Arizona, braked to avoid hitting a downed branch, leading to a three-car pileup. A Waymo passenger was not wearing a seatbelt (they were sitting on the buckled seatbelt instead) and sustained injuries that Waymo described as minor. In August, a Waymo at an intersection “began to proceed forward” but then “slowed to a stop” and was hit from behind by an SUV. The SUV left the scene without exchanging information, and a Waymo passenger reported minor injuries. In October, a Waymo vehicle in Chandler, Arizona, was traveling in the left lane when it detected another vehicle approaching from behind at high speed. The Waymo tried to accelerate to avoid a collision but got hit from behind. Again, there was an injury, but Waymo described it as minor. The two Arizona injuries over 5.3 million miles works out to 0.38 injuries per million vehicle miles. One San Francisco injury over 1.75 million miles equals 0.57 injuries per million vehicle miles. An important question is whether that’s more or less than you’d expect from a human-driven vehicle.

After making certain adjustments—including the fact that driverless Waymo vehicles do not travel on freeways—Waymo calculates that comparable human drivers reported 1.29 injury crashes per million miles in Phoenix and 3.79 injury crashes per million miles in San Francisco. In other words, human drivers get into injury crashes three times as often as Waymo in the Phoenix area and six times as often in San Francisco.

Waymo argues that these figures actually understate the gap because human drivers don’t report all crashes. Independent studies have estimated that about a third of injury crashes go unreported. After adjusting for these and other reporting biases, Waymo estimates that human-driven vehicles actually get into five times as many injury crashes in Phoenix and nine times as many in San Francisco.

To help evaluate the study, I talked to David Zuby, the chief research officer at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. The IIHS is a well-respected nonprofit that is funded by the insurance industry, which has a strong interest in promoting automotive safety.

While Zuby had some quibbles with some details of Waymo’s methodology, he was generally positive about the study. Zuby agrees with Waymo that human drivers underreport crashes relative to Waymo. But it’s hard to estimate this underreporting rate with any precision. Ultimately, Zuby believes that the true rate of crashes for human-driven vehicles lies somewhere between Waymo’s adjusted and unadjusted figures.

they can. induced demand is omnipresent in basically all vehicular infrastructure and vehicular improvements and there’s no reason to think this would differ with autonomous vehicles

Yes, I have no doubt there would be induced demand, but that extra demand wouldn’t be at the cost of anything. Induced demand is a problem when we, for instance, build new roads or widen existing ones, because then more people drive and they clog up the same as they were before. That’s a bad thing because the cost of adding this capacity is that we have to tear down nature and existing city to add lanes, and then we have more capacity that sits at a standstill leading to more emissions.

But if AVs add more capacity to our roads, that will be entirely because they are driving more efficiently. We’ll have the same amount of cars on the road at any given time, they’ll just be moving faster on average rather than idling in traffic jams made by humans. Which means that there will be only relatively minor emissions increases during peak times, fewer emissions emitted during non peak, and we won’t be tearing anything down to build more giant highways.

okay but: literally none of this follows from mass-adoption of autonomous vehicles. this is a logical leap you are making with no supporting evidence—there is, and i cannot stress this enough, no evidence that if mass-adoption occurs any of this will follow

You’re asking for something that does not exist. How am I supposed to provide you evidence proving what the results of mass adoption of AVs will be when there has never been a mass adoption of AVs.

and in general the technology is subject to far more fabulism and exaggeration (like this!) than legitimate technological advancement or improvement of society.

Again, it’s never actually been rolled out on a mass scale. It’s a technology still being actively developed. Neither of us know what the end results will be, but I put forth plausible reasoning to my speculation, if you have plausible reasoning why those things won’t come to pass I’m all ears. For instance, what is your reasoning for believing that AVs could never be fundamentally safer than human drivers who are frequently tired, angry, distracted, impaired, impatient, etc?

And here we see decades of automobile industry propaganda in action. There is only the car, or no mobility whatsoever.

Please cite where I said that.

You remember how everybody was just trapped inside their houses for centuries until the Ford factories started cranking out Model Ts?

Um, yes. Obviously not remember directly, but that is what is in history books.

Most Americans lived in small rural communities and seldom left their farm and immediate community. When they travelled at all it would be by horse and buggy, and would take forever to get to the nearest train station, and then forever from the end of the line to wherever they had to go. If people lived farther away you would see them once every couple of years and otherwise letter write them. Cars fundamentally changed how much the average person travels in their life by huge orders of magnitude, and society is now oriented around individual families and communities being much more spread out. I think this is flawed, but I also think it’s unlikely to change given the realities of basic things like housing costs making it unaffordable to live where your parents did.

We should build out robust train networks to reduce as many cars as possible, but at the same time the idea that you’ll eliminate cars completely is quite frankly, completely divorced from reality. I personally do not own a car and have spent a used car amount of money on a cargo bike to avoid having to buy a car. But guess what? There is still a very clear limit on the size of object I can transport (smaller than virtually any piece of furniture), it’s unpleasant to infeasible to use in the rain depending on the load, and it is flat out unusable in the winter with snow and ice, so I end up using a car share service semi-regularly. I’ve thought about putting on bigger wheels, extending the bed, adding better suspension, a roof, and another set of wheels for balance, but now I’ve invented a car. And that’s not to mention driving out to nature preserves for camping, hiking, rock climbing, mountain biking etc. nor visiting family and friends who live out in the country not near any bus stops or train stations.

As long as cars exist, AVs will be better than human drivers, and literally no one has ever presented a remotely feasible and practical plan for eliminating cars.

This is a fundamentally flawed argument.

First of all, if people are getting to where they want to go faster, easier, and happier, that is a good thing. If you want to argue that everyone needs to be a hermit who never leaves home and orders everything on Amazon then you will never get your way because people fundamentally want to travel to see the outdoors and nature around them, to see their family and friends, and just to adventure. Eliminating vehicle deaths by making travel impossible is not a noble goal.

Secondly, it’s based on the idea that people even can drive more than they already do. Road congestion in most major cities is already the limiting factor that pushes people to bike, walk, or take transit. Even if AVs make it easier and cheaper to take car, you’re still not going to do it during rush hour when you can bike.

Thirdly, it’s based on the idea that AVs are only going to be slightly safer than human drivers. We have no reason to think that’s the case. Humans are fucking terrible drivers, and it’s highly likely that AVs will be several orders of magnitude safer than the average human driver.

Fourthly, it ignores other secondary effects to AVs, like suddenly not needing nearly as much parking, freeing up both parking lot real estate, but more importantly, freeing up on street parking, creating more room for actual traffic to move, and their increased patience not causing constant traffic jams because they tailgated someone and then slammed on the brakes.

The stated reason being political disagreement.

That was your stated reason, not theirs. Please try and keep track of your own statements at least.

Were those on Lemmy.ca, or Hexbear? If Hexbear users want to call out Canada for being a right-wing country on Hexbear, many of whom are Canadian themselves, why does that mean it would spread to Lemmy.ca?

It’s literally the stated reason they defederated. If you disagree it’s up to you prove otherwise.

Communists have and continue to do so, Capitalists continue to produce a system that ruthlessly exploits workers for Capitalist riches.

Name the country. Vietnam known for its working conditions and lack of exploitation? How are those Chinese Uighurs doing?

That doesn’t bear out when compared to Hexbear’s thread, which was more level headed on average. The issue is in political disagreement, which Hexbear was willing to open, while Lemmy.ca was not.

You seem insistent on it being politically motivated, yet that thread had far more vitrial that would have required mod cleanup than a typical lemmy.ca thread.

Just go through and count the usage of kkkanadians.

I restate, again, Capitalists making use of FOSS tools does not mean it is Capitalist, or compatible ideologically. Capitalists will use what’s available, users will use what works and aligns ideologically.

Then FOSS isn’t inherently ideologically anything.

Capitalism does not function even in theory for Material Goods. If it functions in theory but not in practice then the theory is wrong. That’s why Communists put a large emphasis on actually touching grass and developing theory through practice.

Lol neither system has ever produced a practical , implemented system that is good for the average worker.

So you say, yet you’re admitting that the most fringe of Hexbear is the issue in your opinion, not the entire instance, so then why defederate? Why not federate and block bad-faith users? Because Lemmy.ca itself is anticommunist and anti-anarchist, as I said.

The argument being that Hexbear has a larger than average number of shit posters, meaning that the benefit gained from seeing their communities is not offset by the increased cost to all the lemmy.ca moderators who have to clean up after those users.

The fact that Capitalism exists and makes use of readily available tools does not mean actively choosing to support and develop FOSS

But they do. Most successful FOSS projects are actively supported by capitalist companies, from Linux, to git, to web standards, etc.

Capitalism is an awful choice of resource distribution in general, not just information.

It is fundamentally ill suited to information in a way that it is not with material goods though. With material goods, it can function in theory, though always tends towards corruption and fucking the poor and working class in practice. With information, it is simply a cruel system design from a theoretical basis that imposes scarcity where there is no need for it.

deleted by creator

Hexbear wasn’t defederated from for its too comments. It was defederated from for its bottom ones, in which people repeatedly call people Nazis and the KKK.

I restate, Lemmy is built on Communist principles. FOSS is anticapitalist in nature, hardcore libertarians prefer Reddit. Anarchists are also Leftists.

Given that the largest and most successful open source projects are all openly supported by capitalist companies, that is evidently not true. There is nothing inherently anti-capitalist about FOSS. Capitalism is a poor choice of resource distribution system for information because unlike material things, information can be copied and replicated freely, so there is no need for scarcity. FOSS exposes that,l flaw with capitalism but it is no inherently communist.

I read their comment too, no need to worry. Anticommunist instances like Lemmy.world and, relevantly Lemmy.ca, still can’t get rid of Communists even by defederating from Communist instances.

Assuming that whole instances are anti-anything is a great way to judge a whole swath of people quickly and look childish, it’s less useful to do anything else.

My point is more that Lemmy itself is structured along Communist principles, while Reddit remains the right-wing Lemmy. Choosing Lemmy over Reddit is ideological in nature, which means there is going to be a steady influx of Communists and other Leftists, less so Liberals.

No, Lemmy is just decentralized in nature, while that’s attractive to fringe left groups like hardcore communists, it’s also attractive to anarchists and fringe right groups like hardcore libertarians.

They never said anything about getting rid of communists, they said it’s no longer a communist echo chamber.

Working link: https://chinamediaproject.org/2024/08/27/chinas-ai-hallucination-challenge/