Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
Last week's thread
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this - this one was a bit late, I got distracted)
If I mathed right that'd be one waymo every 350 feet of road on average. Is that a lot? It sounds like it might be a lot. Especially since self-driving cars greatest weakness appears to be driving in the vicinity of other self-driving cars.
I think the idea is to solve that by networking all the self-driving cars together. I'm sure the long history of trying to get vendors to agree on a standard when they all benefit individually from the lock-in of proprietary systems has nothing to teach us about this prospect.
Complexity theoretical, security and latency wise this sounds like a great plan. Can wait for people being stuck in cars for days because the freeway offramps are causing livelocks. (Like the example of the waymo cars all honking at each other at the parking lots).
Wonder if they are going to use the routing solutions used in tcp and then discover that cars are heavier and slower than data and suddenly waste a lot of peoples time and money.
E: small little detail which I don't know if other countries also have it, but in the dutch traffic system, emergency services and busses (and perhaps a few hackers who really want to be in trouble with the law (but I always heard this described as a 'this exist, but we don't mess with it' system)) have a system where you can get priority at traffic lights, so they turn green faster. Wonder if other countries have this, and how much they realize this will not work for waymo systems.
the US has this too (you can watch the stoplights suddenly reprioritize as an ambulance or cop car with their lightbars and sirens running approaches) and I’m honestly not sure why I haven’t ever seen it abused by some shithead with a HackRF or similar. maybe the penalties make it safer to just willingly run a red light?
That kind of reminds me of medical implant hacks. I think they're in a similar spot where we're just hoping no one is enough of an asshole to try it in public.
Like pacemaker vulnerabilities: https://www.engadget.com/2017-04-21-pacemaker-security-is-terrifying.html
There recently was a bit of a 'hackers can/are abusing this scare here' and well, I think most people don't want to abuse the system like this and understand the risks/and consequences of this. And there is also a factor of, how would you get caught? So I assume a few people who know how this would work don't actually advertise it. They might have also updated it to actually use some form of encryption. However it used to (from what I heard) not be encrypted (no idea about logging either). There is also the whole thing that messing with traffic lights vs messing with speed traps feels like a very different thing.