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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 26th, 2023

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  • This article is 2/3 fluff. The majority is about convenience features, not safety.

    That said, I recently moved from a ~15 year old car to a modern one, and have driven several newer models with the features described.

    Adaptive cruise: it‘s often poorly designed. It brakes far too rapidly and abruptly should traffic or a car ahead slow, and there‘s absolutely no reason to apply as much throttle as it does should it decide acceleration is appropriate. Also for uphill driving the cruise control often drops into far too low a gear in order to maintain speed. It‘s more of a nuisance than an aid, and it‘s even worse if traffic increases or you‘re in a lane with jackasses that can‘t maintain a steady speed. Adaptive cruise attracts idiots, too. The new versions will stay engaged and slow to a complete stop. If the driver has set the following distance to maximum the car will stop with a 4-5 car distance from the car ahead. They‘re treating it like some kind of autopilot that will run the car for them.

    Lanekeeping: there‘s a huge span of quality here. Some are shit, some are far too aggressive, some are “jerky” following a segmented plotted line rather than a smoother curve. They can overcorrect and really make for an unstable drive attempting to counter intentional driver input. Some “give up” and disengage with little warning, the audible alerts are often weak. Some briefly follow merge, exit, or widening lines for an additional lane pointing you off the road before they get confused and disengage with the car pointed in an unsafe direction.

    Auto braking: in my experience it has engaged every time when I was already braking, or engaged when there was no need to brake. The few times I thought it should have engaged, it didn’t. It’s a nuisance at best, ineffective at worst.

    Reverse cameras don’t provide a full picture and are awful in developing driver proprioception about the dimensions of their car. They’re fine for what’s immediately behind you, but use of mirrors and looking around is far better for backing out and looking for approaching people or cars. That said, I love the “360°” view ones. Those are great for centering oneself in a parking space.

    So I completely understand why drivers don’t use them. They’re often low-quality, inappropriate overcorrections for the situation, and make for a worse ride and potentially even detrimental to safety. That’s saying a lot considering the quality of a lot drivers on the road today.

    I run 80% of the time with adaptive cruise and lanekeeping off. I can’t disable the autobrake, if I could I would.


  • 20 years ago was 2006.

    I do not recall any tech resistance by the masses. In fact a couple years later there were people camping out overnight waiting for the release of the latest gadgets like the iphone.

    Ffw to today…those same masses dgaf about their lives being tracked and monetized today; in fact, many are active and willing sycophants pushing being social media personalities as careers while using that personality to shit on higher education and intelligence.

    I do agree that the limited tech community capable of independent thought and action are against the surveillance corporate state we’re headed into, but the rest are doing their best to hurry and profit off it while the dumpster fire flames get closer and closer to them.






  • All this is correct. But I’ll also add the following:

    Most people probably DGAF if their password for work is compromised. They have no skin in the game for whatever their data entry or email is for BigCorp, they’re treated like “monkey push button, monkey get banana,” forced to jump through password hoops and they’re sick of doing it every few weeks or months. So they use the simplest they can get away with and the easiest to remember so they don’t have to call some corpo IT help desk that will roll their eyes at yet another password reset.







  • Completely missing overhead costs. We had a couple trees removed and it cost a fortune, or so I thought. But a crew of 6 showed up with 3 big trucks that probably cost 6-figures give or take. A chipper, a lift, and a tractor-trailer combo to haul off the trunks. All that has to be paid for, plus insurance, licensing, bonding, health care, payroll taxes, etc etc.

    Everyone gets paid, of course, so they’re making money. But putting big bucks in the bank for the owner? Not likely.



  • It’s right there, friend.

    25,000lb. Reading the article it says “more than 25,000 lb”.

    We should assume they used a highly efficient airfoil that can maintain the most efficient possible cruise for the demonstration aircraft probably at L/D max if they’e looking for time aloft, so I doubt it’s even worth considering top speed or ceiling. It would be interesting to know what NACA profile they used and what the top speed characteristics would be.

    Edit: looks like a Vne of 140 Kias. This is not a fast aircraft. Also a minimal useful load. If you make a couple clicks through to the site of the test it’ll give you more info.