Ask Lemmy

American cars having their brake lights and turn signals be the same light is stupid and dangerous.

When changing lanes or turning you are supposed to use the turning signal before doing the manouver. The turning signal is supposed to warn other drivers that you are going to do something. It doesn't make any sense to use the turning signal when already mid-turning or while already changing lanes. Many drivers don't seem to know that.

Not voting doesn’t stop an election.

Things you will need to operate while driving your car shouldn't have touch screen controls.

That we'd all be better off if we accepted our own fallibility. That we are not perfect little robots, and as a result more tolerance and forgiveness in the world is necessary.

That documentation is supposed to explain how a thing works to people who don't know how it works. I know, sounds extremely obvious, but you'd be surprised how much documentation out there is written in a way, expecting you to already know what it's talking about. No. I do not. It is the documentation's job to explain ME what IT is talking about...

That other than a niche we specialize in, we're pretty fucking dumb at everything else.

Here's one that's not as consequential as other posts here. It's not going to change the world, but would make things slightly better.

Split lock washers are worse than useless. They're supposed to be a spring against the bolt to help resist it turning back out over time. They don't. If anything, they make it worse.

Here's a NASA publication on fastener design (because of course there's a NASA publication on fastener design): https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19900009424

The lockwasher serves as a spring while the bolt is being tightened. However, the washer is normally flat by the time the bolt is fully torqued. At this time it is equivalent to a solid flat washer, and its locking ability is nonexistent. In summary, a Iockwasher of this type is useless for locking.

This was published in 1990, but we're still using this shit. Stop. There are many other kinds of fastener locking that work, like nylon locking nuts or threadlock, and we don't need these.

"Homeopathic" does not mean organic, or good for you, natural, wholesome, effective, or inherently safe to consume.

It is, in fact, a code word for no active ingredient.

8% of 50 is 50% of 8

How corporations use advertisements to influence how the media reports on their activities. Prime example is how BP ran all those "We're Sorry" ads when they poisoned the Gulf of Mexico. They weren't apologizing to the public. They were using the ads to pass bribes to the news agencies to make sure to give them soft coverage when they should have been ranking them over the coals.

The spices at the grocery store I've been going to for the past 25 years has had the spices alphabetized this entire time.

Edit, I misread the question but I'm not fixing my response

Perpetual growth in a finite system is impossible, and anything that relies on perpetual growth to function is doomed to eventually fail.

For instance: social services that rely on perpetual population growth (especially youth population; e.g. Japan/South Korea), companies that rely on perpetual increase in users (most publicly-owned companies; e g. basically every social media company ATM), industries that rely on perpetual advancements in technology (e.g. industrialized agriculture, which constantly needs new ways to fight self-induced problems like soil depletion and erosion), housing as wealth generation (to be a wealth generator it has to outpace inflation, but at a certain point no one will be able to afford to purchase houses at their inflated prices no matter how over-leveraged they get; e.g. Canada). [Note that these are merely examples where these issues are currently coming to a head; they are by no means special cases, they're just in a more advanced state of "finding out."]

In other words, a lot of the modern world, in both public and private sectors, is built around a series of ponzi schemes.

stronger products need less advertising, so an over-advertised product is likely inferior.

When you're done with the microwave and took your food out early to avoid the alarm, clear the fucking time that's remaining.

Russia will not stop warring if Ukraine surrenders. Russia's war will stretch to every corner of the earth.

LLMs are not general AI. They are not intelligent. They aren't sentient. They don't even really understand what they're spitting out. They can't even reliably do the 1 thing computers are typically very good at (computational math) because they are just putting sequences of nonsense (to them) characters together in the most likely order based on their training model.

When LLMs feel sentient or intelligent, that's your brain playing a trick on you. We're hard-wired to look for patterns and group things together based on those patterns. LLMs are human-speech prediction engines, so it's tempting and natural to group them with the thing they're emulating.

God isn't real. No deities exist. Stop being delusional.

Conspiracies that require absolute lock tight secrecy to function at a basic level aren't generally tenable to be sustained for longer than a handful of years at a time at most. Somebody always fucks up or basically was just lucky nobody checked for awhile. The nessesity of any large scale collaboration creates inefficiencies and potential error points in the system. Even the best of the best spy agencies fuck up and get caught rather routinely, particularly when operating on their home soil. A lot of investigative journalists accidentally trip over stuff all the time but have good faith arrangements (or in some places laws) to not disclose the active manoeuvres of the state to the public.

It's just really hard for humans in general to accept that events that effected them or things they care about very deeply personally weren't somehow also grand in design. Grocking sometimes it really is just random chance or stupid mishandling is not something we're well wired to handle. Stories of all powerful conspiracies masterminding the world scratch that itch... But logistically speaking the conspiracy aspect is completely unnecessary. If someone is trying to blame a nebulous bogeymen who exists as nameless, numberless ultimately wealthy but also totally off the books super spies.... chances are they are just trying to capitalize on making you feel flattered, smart and empowered by something "only you are smart enough to believe" - while feeding you bullshit they can personally profit from in some way with you none the wiser.

Related to the current election, that OG conservatives, or Reagan and Bush conservatives (referring to George H. W. Bush) are the same thing as MAGA conservatives.

The difference is, the old guard blithely preserved the kind of policies that shredded social safety nets and business regulations in favor of tax cuts, leading to precarity and the rise of paranoia that led to the Trump takeover in 2015.

The OGs just wish they had another mile or two of altitude to plummet, and are freaked out about the ground looming so close and rushing so fast. But they will still keep the same policies, and will still lay a ground of Ayn Randian, Reagan-worshiping Mitt Romney / Jeb Bush / Ted Cruz candidates until some other charismatic narcissist Mussolini-wanabe rushes in and plucks the whole party from their hands again. And they'll get all butt-smoochy with the new guy like Lindsey Graham did with Trump (after predicting how this loose cannon will end the Republican party).

They didn't just buy the ticket to ride. They bought stocks in the railroad line, and insisted that fascism-backed one-party autocracy was the destination. They knew it since Reagan. By George W. Bush it was showing serious signs even before the PATRIOT act.

So when people freak out today because we're on the brink of losing our democracy, I have to wonder where they've been the last two decades. How is it after George W. Bush, and torture and Iraq and the pig lagoons and Abstinence-Only sex ed, did you think another Republican president was a good thing? I know Clinton was scary, but did you take even one look at Trump?

That you should never use the same password for more than one site, especially some random Chinese eshop. I don't get why people refuse to use password managers, ffs...

I refer to us as Lemmings

Humans are not descended from apes. They have the same ancestors.

Why is that so hard to understand?

We have figured out how to run everything, absolutely everything, in the 1950s.

The original computer "AI" craze was started by "cybernetic systems" and for good reason. You probably only know of the bastardizations of "cyber-" that don't have anything in common with the original concept.

The original concept goes like this:

1. set a goal
2. perform an action
3. measure how much impact that had, did it get you closer to your goal or not?
4. If you are at your goal, you're done,
5. otherwise adjust your actions, got to 2. (This is "feedback" and the reason that word is now so common. People at the time knew)

The faster you go through the loop, the faster you will figure out what works.

You can measure anything you want, as vague is you want. Happiness, money, productivity. It's the way democracy is designed to work, in which case the feedback is vague and the cycle time is measured in years. It runs your thermostats, in your home, big national power grid power plants. It's how autopilots autopilot.

The idea that "nobody could have predicted..." or "nobody responsible" is a myth. We have the science. We know how it works.

Every failure we still experience is a failure we allow to happen. Because of profit, politics, or whatever.

Didn't catch something "going on for years", maybe someone should check more often. "Crazy single individual causing a tragedy"? No, that's a person at risk, probably with social or mental problems you didn't take care of before, didn't flag, and didn't stop in time.

"Nobody wants to work on our open source project" Really, how is your onboarding? Do people take a look at the docs/culture and run away screaming? Yeah?

Humans aren't mostly rational. Lots of people aren't rational at all.

*lemmings

Probably people who yell at cyclists for following traffic laws, bonus points for them also violating said laws without repercussion.

We aren't better than most of the people in the past, we just have better systems thanks to the insane amount of hardwork people put in to make it better and easier to act more ethically (in large).

Like it never made sense that people can just imagine people in the past being inexplicably worse then ourselves today.

Spelling, punctuation, and the use of contractions. The part that really sells the irritation factor is when they try to say they’re correct by making up some definition for what they said or claiming “common usage”. I guess it’s because people don’t really read much anymore. Reading someone else’s words that have been carefully edited, corrected into good sentence structure, and spellchecked can really help get it your own head.

They place the burden on the reader to decipher their made-up vocabulary. It really isn’t too awful, it’s just that people have to have read the correct way something is used yet insist on not changing.

Chrome is a browser. Google is a website. They are not the same. It flabbergasts me anytime I find out that someone I know doesn't know what a browser is.

Lemmy exist.

Cannabis is fun and has some medical benefits, like if you're a cancer patient trying to stimulate your appetite, but it also genuinely does lower your IQ.

That it's actually totally possible for most people to live without a car.

That Israel is committing a genocide, and seemingly the majority of people don’t care or worse believe propaganda or dehumanise a whole population of people.

Also, when people defend massive corporations and don’t see the negative impact they have on industries.