If you were alive (and online) during the 90s, you may remember the banter between Microsoft and General Motors:
From https://crysa.fzu.cz/ondra/documents/cars_like_windows.html (the only online copy I could find)
Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, “If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five-dollar cars that get 1,000 miles to the gallon.”
In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
[…]
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The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single “general car error” warning light.
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New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.
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The airbag system would ask “Are You Sure?” before going off.
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Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grabbed a hold of the radio antenna.
30 years later, some of those jokes are finally becoming reality, thanks to Tesla.
The Macintosh one is wild
“6. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would only run on 5 percent of the roads."
Love the scene from the Steve Jobs movie where Woz asks Steve if in order to send an email on the NEXT computer the recipient would also need to have an NEXT computer.
Of course!
Basically iMessaging and FaceTime.
Blows my mind that literally every other brand of phone has settled on a standard for rich messaging and video calls, but Apple had to make a big stink about it and pinky-promise it’ll be out this year.
And all the Apple users act like everybody else is inferior…while they’re the only ones that are incompatible.
I bought an iPhone 12 specifically because I was tired of potato-grams between my wife and I. I switched back to Android a couple weeks ago on that pinky-promise.
Among several other Apple-isms, this one blows my mind then most.
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Elon Musk went against the establishment.
Now we hate him.
Gotta protect the establishment at all costs (those in power)
Let’s attack Elon Musk!
Yeah, people tend to dislike deranged narcissistic transphobes that parrot racist dogwhistles all day while also driving multiple companies into the ground and endangering people’s lives with his vehicles
Agreed on everything, just want to make sure it’s clear he’s endangering people’s lives by artificially restricting access to FSD. Supervised automated driving (that is, the car drives often drives itself point to point with no interventions) is statistically safer than the national average.
The fact that access to this is behind a $12,000 paywall (outside of the currently running free trial) is limiting access to a software safety feature. This should be illegal.
Sorry, have to disagree. Tesla’s special blend of vision-only driving and software built seemingly with generative ai leads to unsafe situations.
On top of that, self driving is a solution that keeps cars on the roads… Yucky. Make the driving tests stricter to weed out idiots and build much more robust transit infrastructure for everyone else.
You want Tesla to create transit infrastructure? I hard disagree, that should be something the government does, not a private company. Tesla should stay in the business of making cars, and the government should move to make that obsolete in cities with good public infrastructure.
Self-driving has pushed probably 0 people in the world from using public infrastructure to using cars. I’ve never met anyone that has said “yeah, I was using trains daily, but I decided to buy a $50,000 car with a $12,000 software upgrade to have it autonomously drive me”. You honestly think there’s a person that exists that has done this?
Leads to unsafe situations
Absolutely, it’s just human drivers lead to unsafe situations more often. I understand it might not feel that way, but it’s the actual truth, we have massive amounts of data on this, and your feelings don’t outweigh that.
Sorry perhaps I was unclear. (Or perhaps you willfully misinterpreted me)
You want Tesla to create transit infrastructure?
I don’t think Tesla should be making anything as long as the current figurehead is in charge. Transit should always be public infrastructure… Not sure how you would have thought I was advocating for privatized public transit.
You honestly think there’s a person that exists that has done this?
I also never intended to suggest that self driving is pushing individuals from adopting transit… Moreso that the proverbial carrot of “fewer road accidents thanks to self driving” is likely to prevent regulators from taking the note effective steps of:
- reducing the number of drivers on the road with stricter testing and enforcement of road laws
- providing an alternative for those who can no longer drive via larger investment in public transit infrastructure
I understand it might not feel that way, but it’s the actual truth, we have massive amounts of data on this, and your feelings don’t outweigh that.
Yep. And fewer cars overall makes pedestrians safer as well. You dont want human drivers, I dont want cars
you don’t want human drivers, I don’t want cars
I’m the one misinterpreting you, yet when I explicitly advocate for public infrastructure to lessen the amount of cars, I’m somehow in favor of cars? You’re definitely projecting.
not sure how you would have thought I was advocating for privatized public transit
Go back and read your comment. You never said the word public, I did. We were in a conversation about Tesla and its failings, and you randomly brought up “transit”. So either you were making a completely off-topic point about something the government should do, or you were making an on-topic point about something Tesla should do. I read it as an on-topic comment.
the proverbial carrot of “fewer road accidents” is likely to prevent regulators from taking effective steps
Actually stop for a moment, take off your argument hat, and think about what you’re advocating for. The government has had 100 years of non-self driving cars to implement the changes you’ve wanted. They’ve failed, miserably. They’ve actually taken a ton of steps to do exactly the opposite, and have built the largest car-centric society the world has ever seen.
Now that we have something that is statistically reducing the number of accidents on the road (autonomous vehicles, which will only get better, but already statistically outperform humans), you want private companies to revert these safety features in the hopes that the uptick in human deaths will lead to regulation that the U.S hasn’t implemented in the 100 years of sole human driving?
Please tell me you’re just miscommunicating your position again, and that you’re actually not against the development of safety features to reduce human deaths in cars just to encourage the government to do something it hasn’t done in the past 100 years.
Alright, let me walk back and apologize for my performative argumentation and be extremely clear about my opinion in the shortest, most sincere way I can do this.
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Fewer human drivers is good
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Fewer cars on the road at all is better
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Self driving does significantly increase the safety of roads, however increasing transit and reducing cars on the road increases safety for everyone by a larger margin
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While selfdriving is good to reduce the number of human caused accidents, telsa’s implementation is has no secondary sensors, and no map correlation for it’s vision results
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Even with self driving, car centric infrastructure steals valuable space that could be used for housing, transit or pedestrians
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Ultimately, I think our disconnect is that my argumentation made it seem like I dont support both (I was really unclear, I apologize) self driving is really awesome for road safety, but on it’s own, it still means there’s generally the same amount of cars on the road. Implementation of (reliable) self driving in combination with other regulatory changes such as larger public transit investment, stricter testing regulations, stronger punishments for breaking driving laws, and more regulation on where cars are allowed will do more than self driving on its own could ever do.
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deranged
The only thing deranged is this post.
narcissistic
Anyone that uses the word “narcissist” unironically is a chud.
