Comment by goosejuice

Comment by goosejuice 5 days ago

11 replies

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I suspect machine readable practices will become standard as AI is incorporated more into society.

A good example is autonomous driving and local laws / context. "No turn on red. School days 7am-9am".

So you need: where am I, when are school days for this specific school, and what datetime it is. You could attempt to gather that through search. Though more realistically I think the municipality will make the laws require less context, or some machine readable (e.g. qrcode) transfer of information will be on the sign. If they don't there's going to be a lot of rule breaking.

username223 5 days ago

Very strong "reverse centaur" vibes here, in the sense of humans becoming servants to machines, instead of vice versa. Not that I think making things more machine-readable is a waste of time, but you have to keep in mind the amount of human time sacrificed.

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  • oblio 4 days ago

    Well, it wouldn't even be the first time.

    We've completely redesigned society around cars - making the most human populated environments largely worse for humans along the way.

    Universal sidewalks (not really needed with slow moving traffic like horses and carts - though nice even back then), traffic lights, stop signs, street crossing, interchanges, etc.

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    • username223 4 days ago

      As a cyclist, I’m with you 100%. Unfortunately we’re probably going to do it again with self-driving cars, with segregated lanes, special markers, etc.

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      • oblio 4 days ago

        A pessimistic look at self driving cars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0&t=3148s

        If we end up where the video presents, humans don't deserve technology of any kind.

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        • achierius 4 days ago

          Why is it always "humans don't deserve"? The vast, vast majority of people have nothing to do with the capital flows and political structures that result in outcomes like this. What choice does a worker, priced out of the city where he works and forced to commute an hour each way, have in this? Yes, they can "vote" for better transit, but as we can see in California that's not enough to actually get said transit. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The poor, the homeless, hell the vast majority of the world population that doesn't live in the 'garden': in what way do the choices of Silicon Valley, a handful of billionaires, and a small clique of DC politicians have any bearing on what they do or do not deserve?

          Not to be too harsh, but this sentiment -- that the successes of the ruling class are theirs to boast, but their failures are all humanity's shame -- is so pervasive and so effective at shielding rightful blame from said ruling class that I just cannot help but push back when I see it/

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iknowstuff 5 days ago

Those particular signs are just stupid. The street should be redesigned with traffic calming, narrowing and chicanes so that speeding is not possible.

Slapping on a sign is ineffective

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  • lsaferite 4 days ago

    Maybe for new schools. Old schools don't have the luxury of being able to force adjacent road design changes in most cases. Also. I've frequently seen the school zones extended out in several directions away from the school to make heavily trafficked intersections feeding towards the school safer. Safer for pedestrian and motorist alike. The real world is generally never so black and white. We have to deal with that gray nuance all the time.

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    • iknowstuff 4 days ago

      Of course they can. Streets get redesigned all the time. They get repaved every couple decades at worst.

      I’m saying this because it seemed silly to me to be dreaming up some weird system of QR codes or LLM readable speed limits instead of simply making the street follow best practices which change how humans drive for the better _today_.

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deadbabe 4 days ago

That seems anachronistic, form over function. Machines should be able to access an API that returns “signs” for their given location. These signs don’t need any real world presence and can be updated instantly.

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monkeydust 4 days ago

Also see this happening, what does that mean for business specifications? Does it become close to code syntax itself?

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