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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • That’s what high beams are for… Cars don’t need to light the dark side of the moon, drivers only need to see the roadway in front of them. Both provide ample illumination, it’s just one allows you to see the color of a zit on a mouse 3 miles away, which is entirely not necessary for safe night driving.

    And I was saying that some higher end incandescent lamps are equivalent to some LEDs. I know there are LEDs that far exceed the lumens of traditional lamps.


  • It seems to me like we didn’t have this problem twenty years ago. If blinding LEDs are the problem, why not just not allow them anymore for headlights? It takes 5 seconds to pop in a new incandescent headlight on cars that have them, and well made ones can last 20+ years depending on the construction. Visibility is good and equivalent to some LEDs with higher end lamps, and it doesn’t create a superbly unnatural light that impairs the other drivers, pedestrians, or nature. It would also reduce light pollution.

    On very rare occasion, the progressive step forward, actually looks a lot like the road backwards. It would take a long time to implement, but anything worth doing is worth taking the time to do it right.

    Auto sensing technology is going to be more of a glaring headache in 20 years, when you have half of the cars with failing sensors and everyone getting blinded even worse. Adaptive Driving Beams (ADB) are not a solution, it does not properly address the issues of glare, and it will likely only make the problem worse by further removing human interaction from headlight controls.







  • The answer is obviously as everyone has pointed out already is enshittification.

    Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification. (Cory Doctorow)

    Profit = enshittification. It’s guaranteed as long as profit is a motive.

    An interesting concept is the idea of a distributed social web. It was the concept me, and probably a LOT of other redditors, were looking at last year, but it seems no such thing really exists. The idea that everyone’s home computer (or mobile device nowadays) could act as the client and the server. Perhaps using a firefox addon of some sort.

    Do any software devs (ok that’s like 90% of lemmy, lol) know if any existing projects are trying to do this? It does not seem like an unfeasible thing, and it wouldn’t have to grow overnight, it could possibly just be a feature in an existing addon that allows communication directly between users. No centralized servers of any sort. Distributed communication without central control. Is this possible?

    The existing social media companies own the world (literally), and they can maintain this control because they can buy out competitors. You can’t buy out 5 billion people though, so if people had the tools available to host their own web; and it was as easy as installing a firefox browser addon, a true democracy could exist like the world has never seen.


  • What happens when foreign actors intent on influencing public policy decide to harass everyone critical of their issue? People will just stop being critical of the foreign narrative to stop the harassment, and you’ll wind up with posts that are completely against the public interest and for the foreign narrative.

    You can already see this effect to some degree in comments, it’ll only get worse if everything is made public in the UI.

    As counterintuitive as it is, regulated secrecy is necessary in all democratic processes, and I would argue that includes online forum debates.

    It would actually be nice if community mods had the capability to turn the community to anonymous for comments and posts as well. Is knowing who posts the information more important than the information itself? If it’s worthwhile to share from one person, it’s worthwhile to share from everyone else so identity isn’t all that important.


  • The source code for Lemmy is free for all to view and modify, there will be no authoritarianism… And if it were to happen all of Lemmy administrators would either refuse the upgrade and stay retrograde, or quickly fork. The devs don’t really have total control of thousands of servers to have free reign to do stuff like reddit corp does.

    I’m all for vote privacy in the UI. There are just too many downsides to public votes, and not as much weight to the positives in my opinion. People should not be afraid of backlash from down voting if a post does not contribute, it’ll only create echo chambers/ unchallenged groupthink.