mattclarkdotnet (u/mattclarkdotnet)

mattclarkdotnet commented on Modern cars are spying on you. Here's what you can do about it apnews.com/article/auto-c... · Posted by u/MilnerRoute

maest · 20 days ago

> the air pumps needed quarters

I landed at JFK and was looking for a stroller to stack my suitcases on. The kind of stroller that is free in every single airport I've been to.

I was shocked to see it costs $7. The guy who (I presume) worked there sardonically exclaimed "Welcome to America."

mattclarkdotnet · 20 days ago

Presumably you mean a “trolley” not a “stroller”, because strollers are for moving children not luggage

But yeah, free airport trolleys are are an easy marker of evolved civilisations, and the USA fails this test.

Countries that have passed this test for me that I can recall: Australia, Greece, Singapore, China, UK, Thailand, Italy, Spain…

mattclarkdotnet commented on Modern cars are spying on you. Here's what you can do about it apnews.com/article/auto-c... · Posted by u/MilnerRoute

rconti · 20 days ago

The ADAS systems mandated in Europe are insanely intrusive. I had a few rental cars in Europe this summer and wanted to send them off a cliff. (and I'm not an auto tech luddite, I've had modern cars in the US with autopilot type systems, lane keep, blind spot warning, rear traffic assist radar, forward collision warning, etc. IMO rear traffic assist/FCW/AEB tend to work really well, autopilot pretty well, and lane keep and blind spot silly gimmicks at best).

Bring on the full self-driving cars, or let me drive my own car. This human-in-the-loop middle state is maddening. We're either supervising our "self-driving, but not really" cars, where the car does all of the work but we still have to be 100% aware and ready to "take over" the instant anything gets hard (which we know from studies is something humans are TERRIBLE at)... Or, we're actively _driving_ the car, but you're not really. The steering feel is going in and out as the car subtly corrects for you, so you can't trust your own human senses. Typically 40% brake pedal pressure gets you 40% brake pressure, unless you lift off the throttle and hop to the brakes quickly, in which case it decides when you apply 40% pedal pressure you actually want 80% brake pressure. Again, you can't trust your human senses. The same input gets different outputs depending on the foggy decisions of some computer. Add to that the beeping and ping-ponging and flashing lights in the cluster.

It's like clippy all over again. They've decided that, if one warning is good and helpful, constant alerts are MORE good and MORE helpful. Not a thought has been given to alert fatigue or the consequences of this mixed human-in-the-loop mode.

mattclarkdotnet · 20 days ago

So much this. We had a rental BYD in Greece this summer, and while it was actually great car in general the mandated “assistance” was awful.

It constantly got the speed limits wrong, constantly tried to tug me out of the correct lane, and was generally awful. It could be disabled but was re-enabled on each restart of the ignition because it’s mandated by EU regulation.

I appreciate a Greek island perimeter road may be a worst case scenario, but it did the same with roadworks on the freeway and many other situations.

Actively dangerous in my experience…

mattclarkdotnet commented on Solarpunk is happening in Africa climatedrift.substack.com... · Posted by u/JoiDegn

rmunn · a month ago

Are you saying that being ordered by a judge to perform work, without pay, and which you would not have done absent those orders, does not fit the definition of involuntary servitude?

Because while the precise definitions of servitude do vary from dictionary to dictionary, and some define it more harshly than others, in general it fits. One definition I found online (with no reference to which dictionary it came from) defines servitude as "A condition in which an individual is bound to work for another person or organization, typically without pay." Another one (Cambridge dictionary) says it's "the state of being under the control of someone else and of having no freedom". I couldn't check the Oxford English Dictionary as it requires a subscription to look up even one word. Merriam-Webster lists two meanings, one of which applies to land. the one that applies to people is "a condition in which one lacks liberty especially to determine one's course of action or way of life".

Now, being sentenced to community service is only a temporary condition of servitude, which ends as soon as a given number of hours have been served. And it might not fit the strict definition if the person being sentenced is allowed to choose the form their community service will take; I lack knowledge of what kinds of community-servitude sentences are commonly handed out. But if the person being sentenced does not get to choose the form his community service will take, but instead is told "Your community service will be served in the city clerk's office. Show up at 9:00 AM on Monday ready to make photocopies and run errands," then that counts as being under the control of another and lacking freedom during the period of community service. It's not a permanent state of servitude, but even a temporary state of servitude is forbidden by the 13th amendment (other than as a sentence for a crime), because otherwise people at the time would have argued "Oh, fifty years of involuntary servitude still counts as 'temporary', so I'm allowed to carry on with imposing debt peonage on my debtors."

(I should also mention that I am not a lawyer, so perhaps US lawyers have already reached broad consensus on whether community service counts as involuntary servitude under US law; if someone knows whether that's true, I welcome being corrected on my point).

mattclarkdotnet · a month ago

The context for the 13th amendment was that slavery was legal in the US then. It mostly wasn’t in other countries, so they never had to try to find the language to allow judicial punishments while disallowing private slavery. If you are given a community service orders without labelling in the UK for example, nobody thinks it’s slavery or servitude, they just think it’s a valid sentence under the law. The grey area is probably around profiting off such work?

mattclarkdotnet commented on I was right about dishwasher pods and now I can prove it [video] youtube.com/watch?v=DAX2_... · Posted by u/hnaccount_rng

suprjami · 2 months ago

Thanks for the summary.

American dishwashers don't have their own heater? All dishwashers I've seen in Australia only have cold water supply.

mattclarkdotnet · a month ago

Quite, another thing to add to the list of USAian weird exceptions.

mattclarkdotnet commented on Carice TC2 – A non-digital electric car caricecars.com/... · Posted by u/RubenvanE

mulmen · a month ago

I don’t understand. Vinyl wrapping cars is a normal thing for car people. What’s the difference?

mattclarkdotnet · a month ago

Normal in the USA maybe? It’s very unusual here in Australia to see a wrapped car.

mattclarkdotnet commented on Solarpunk is happening in Africa climatedrift.substack.com... · Posted by u/JoiDegn

rmunn · a month ago

> Here in the US, the thirteenth amendment seems to think that a little slavery is cool.

For anyone not familiar with the US Constitution, the 13th Amendment forbids slavery and involuntary servitude "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."

Without that "except as a punishment for [a] crime" clause, being sentenced to N hours of community service would be forbidden by the Constitution, and the second-lowest penalty judges could impose (the lowest being a fine) would be prison time. So that clause was actually necessary to include in order to allow for more lenient sentences for crimes that deserve something more severe than a fine: lowest level of sentencing is a fine, after that comes being sentenced to community service (which most people agree is less severe than prison, even though it does count as involuntary servitude), and then after that come the more severe sentences like prison.

mattclarkdotnet · a month ago

Most other countries seem to be able to have community service orders without labelling it “servitude”. Do you have a reference for why community service is defined as servitude in the US?

mattclarkdotnet commented on NoLongerEvil-Thermostat – Nest Generation 1 and 2 Firmware github.com/codykociemba/N... · Posted by u/mukti

mattclarkdotnet · 2 months ago

Missed opportunity to call it Thermostat-ForGood

mattclarkdotnet commented on Things you can do with diodes lcamtuf.substack.com/p/th... · Posted by u/zdw

mattclarkdotnet · 2 months ago

This is excellent but in typical low voltage scenarios (5V or lower) the 600mV diode voltage drop becomes very significant. Simple diode half wave rectification works fine at 100V, but at 3.3V it breaks down.

mattclarkdotnet commented on Oxy is Cloudflare's Rust-based next generation proxy framework (2023) blog.cloudflare.com/intro... · Posted by u/Garbage

mxxx · 2 months ago

unfortunate name

mattclarkdotnet · 2 months ago

Only in America

mattclarkdotnet commented on Why does Swiss cheese have holes? usdairy.com/news-articles... · Posted by u/QueensGambit

bryanrasmussen · 2 months ago

I have heard that Denmark exports their best pigs and leaves the second best for home. Not sure why that should be any truer than what you heard regarding Switzerland and their strategy, but they seem to represent two differing strategies about how to best profit from strong points, it would be nice to figure if either is the dominant one.

Perhaps we can ask Italy what they do with tomatoes and parmigiano.

mattclarkdotnet · 2 months ago

In two minds as to your sarcasm level. Anyone who has eaten bacon in Denmark or Raclette in Switzerland or a fresh pasta sauce in Italy could testify that the best stays home