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This is so delightful! I'll be deploying this and sharing a link on the issue.

One issue I see: If I get you to include a link to my console but I don't link to any others, I can trap wanderers within my recommendations until they refresh.

If that's not desirable, it could be avoided by having the client keep a running list of all the consoles it has discovered this session and choosing from that list at random.


> If that's not desirable, it could be avoided by having the client keep a running list of all the consoles it has discovered this session and choosing from that list at random.

Implemented in <https://codeberg.org/susam/wander/commit/f4d95fa>. Thanks again for the discussion!


Glad you like it. Yes, you are right. This is something I realised too initially as a natural consequence of being the only participant in the console network at the beginning. Keeping a list of discovered consoles is exactly what I was thinking too. I built this tool rather quickly as a proof-of-concept while taking a break from another activity, so I couldn't quite find the time to implement this solution. But I might implement it in the next update. Thank you for taking a close look at this project!

I'm a Kagi search/assistant user and advocate but the "small web" product is a frustrating misnomer.

To me the small web is any little website that was created to be interesting rather than to sell me something. That includes stuff like neocities, "shrine" type sites, single purpose sites, fandom portals, web experiments, etc.

Unfortunately Kagi's definition of "small web" is: blog or webcomic. You must have an RSS feed and it must have recent posts. That rules out so much interesting stuff I don't understand the point.


Same feeling here

Heavy Kagi user and the idea behind small web was appealing; but how its implemented don't click with me

Their rules excludes an absolute gem like https://www.sheldonbrown.com/ which is, to me, the essence of what we could call the "small web".

Each times the topic pops up, I try a few random ones and never found anything interesting.


Expert/auteur websites like Sheldon Brown's (or, one of my favorites, Ask Aaron https://runamok.tech/AskAaron/FAQ.html) are the pinnacle of what's possible with the small web. Today this kind of info ends up in an ad-ridden hosted wiki or locked away in an unsearchable discord.

There's also novelties like https://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/, this probably hasn't been updated in a decade but that makes it no less interesting.

Then there's exceptionally cool demos like https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/. This sort of thing just doesn't fit in a "blog" format unless you're writing a blog about how you built it and linking out to it.

If anyone knows of a directory of sites like these (preferably with a shuffle option) I'd love to hear about it (and contribute)!


Sheldon Brown's content is great, but is it ironic that the first thing you see on his site is a Google banner ad?

Understandably, he'd like to earn money on his content and I see no problem with that. But for me to visit his site and have Google add yet another tracking event to their "interest pile" about me (I guess i'm in the market for bikes now?) is a bit off putting.

He can't be making more than a few bucks a month through that single ad, right?


I truly had no idea, I guess I've always had an ad blocker.

He's been dead since 2008, so I assume the banner ad keeps the lights on in the absence of his income and input.


He died about ten years ago.

As the author is dead, I'm sure the money goes towards site hosting fees.

I assume nobody removed it and the revenue is just added to some Google Adsense balance sheet, and reports go to some Gmail account that will expire one day.

> are the pinnacle of what's possible with the small web

if this is the pinnacle then I want nothing to do with it.


This website is the small web - self contained. It's a really good example of the Internet we had and apparently some still want. I think of it like computer graphics where you're definition of space can get bigger as you add a bunch of resources each with their own model space into the relative context of world space. The small web should define how we do that and discover things, not what or how we build within each specific model space.

Well, thanks. That small web just taught me in a very concise way a thing or two about bicicle braking technique!

I am looking for something that would filter for sites that rarely post but have good content. The number one problem with most of these systems is that everything favours frequent posting. Even if I do it manually, I cannot keep the tabs over many rarely posting sites - this is an obvious example of a problem that we delegate to computers. Favouring frequent posters creates incentives to do that even if quality worsens.

The perverse thing here is that's exactly the opposite of how we've traditionally valued resources!

because we don't value them at all, literally. It's a tragedy of the commons, internet pollution is like air pollution, the polluters don't pay and there's no cost associated with overusing other people's attention.

I'd be fascinated on the economics of this from Google's perspective: specifically the unit economics on generating updated-once-a-year results to queried-once-in-a-million searches.

Tl;dr: I feel like the long-tail web (90s) was better, but economics pushed high-update-frequency more-centralized results.


Not only that, I just clicked "Next Post" more than a hundred times, and over 90% of posts I got were about LLMs and coding agents.

This is a fairly recent phenomenon: I'm a longtime Small Web user and even I struggle with this massive influx of AI posts. I'm hopeful it will be addressed.

You'd probably like the small web search on Marginalia then: https://marginalia-search.com/

I could definitely see value in filters for "has RSS" and "has recent posts"—maybe even as the default view—but I absolutely agree that this is much less interesting to me without the wider world of interesting, small sites.

yeah i agree. the crux of it is no corporations / no ads / no astroturfing.

Well, it's much harder for them to add content from websites that don't have a feed.

This is just a blog ring.

I would also love to go back to Geocities style web interaction, but the medium is the message, and the way the Internet has evolved as a medium means that people don't naturally interact with it in a way that supports regression to that era. Attempts to force it like neocities have a hyperreal quality to them.


I consider each time I need to pull out my phone and "do it myself" to be a failure of my smart home system.

If a light cannot be automatically on when I need it (like a motion sensor) or controlled with a dedicated button within arms reach (like a remote on my desk) then the third best option is one that lets me control it without interrupting what I'm doing, moving from where I am, using my hands, or possessing anything (a voice assistant).


Do you not just turn the light on when you go in a room, and turn it off again when you go out? All the rooms in my flat have switches next to the door

My lights adjust their brightness and color spectrum automatically throughout the day while also understanding the time of year and sun position. This alone is next level. All are voice/tablet controlled. When I start a movie at night, lights will adjust automatically in my open floor plan first level. All of this operates without me ever having to give any mental energy beyond the initial setup.

This is not just flip a switch territory.


How the hell are you managing that. On a simple micro level I can figure it out, but as a whole over the entire house? o.0

Home Assistant with adaptive lighting.

https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting


Many homes have a bunch of lights with their own switches, like lamps. Also there are rooms with multiple entrances, like a living room with a bedroom on the other side from the from the front door entrance, which would involve walking to the side of the room with the switch then walking back through a dark room after you turn it off. Being able to just get into bed and say "Alexa, turn off all of the lights" is way more convenient than checking 14 light switches around my home.

Yes, that would be a button within arms reach, something I explicitly prefer over the voice assistant. I use them frequently.

I don't have just one light per room though, some spaces like my workshop or living room have a lot of lighting options, and flitting around the room flipping a bunch of switches is clumsy and unnecessary. The preference is always towards automation (e.g. when I play a movie in Jellyfin, the lights dim) but there are situations where I just need to ask for the workbench light.


The Sun moves around, while I am in a room. It might be high up when I enter a room, but after a while there may be clouds or it may have set.

When watching a movie one may dimthe light. Once finished one may need more lights.

When going to bed I may want to switch all lights off. When getting up it may need some extra light.

A switch on the door is nice. More switches is better. Being able to control from anywhere may be even nicer.


So I grab my phone, open the homeassistant app, and mess with the settings on my light, or use homeassistant through my browser on my desktop. No yelling at a computer needed

I think you missed the top post "If I have to pull my phone out = failure" part.

Do you have a wife / kids? If so how do you "teach" them this?

My point being that it might be a failure to you but not them, some people don't want it.

This is my struggle, how to get the automation to do what I want without affecting everyone else equally. (And vise versa)


If you're less concerned about privacy, I use Gemini 2.5 Flash for this and it's exceptionally good and fast as a HA assistant while being much cheaper than the electricity that would be needed to keep a 3090 awake.

The thing that kills this for me (and they even mentioned it) is wake word detection. I have both the HA voice preview and FPH Satellite1 devices, plus have experimented with a few other options like a Raspberry Pi with a conference mic.

Somehow nothing is even 50% good as my Echo devices at picking up the wake word. The assistant itself is far better, but that doesn't matter if it takes 2-3 tries to get it to listen to you. If someone solves this problem with open hardware I'll be immediately buying several.


On the plus side, mine misdetected a wake word during a funny conversation and said "Sorry, I can't find any area called _____[60 second repeat of funny conversation]___" and it made my family laugh harder than we've laughed in a really long time. I even went into the tts cache and saved the wav b/c it was sooo funny.

Ha, I had something similar happen as well that had us rolling. I think the hilarity was a result of the conversation snippet being taken completely out of context by the recording. Wish I'd saved the wav, I didn't even think of that :-(

How about a button?

I'd prefer to physically press a button on an intercom box than having something churning away constantly processing sound.


If I have to go to a thing and push a button, I'd rather the button do the thing I wanted in the first place. Voice assistants are for when my hands are full or I don't want to get up. (I wrote more about my home automation philosophy in another comment[1]).

Also I have all my voice assistant devices mounted to the ceiling

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47399909


What if you have two things? You'd then need two buttons.

The push button is a perfectly viable option, it just needs to be in a form factor that's works. Could be as simple as a tiny low-energy Bluetooth board with a coin battery that will last several months.


Yeah, a touch-sensitive com-badge mounted on your chest would work.

Actually, I would think a small coin-sized button & transmitter that did nothing but emit a signal that your assistant (or phone) interprets as 'start listening' would be pretty useful. In your pocket, on a watch band, etc.


Luckily I carry around a device with infinite reconfigurable buttons!

The pebble index seems like the optimal form for this.

https://repebble.com/index

Could be pressed even if your hands were busy.


Most of what I (and in my experience many people) want a voice assistant for, is setting+ending timers... which for me happens mostly in the kitchen, while I'm simultaneously holding a hot pan or hand-tossing a salad or paper-towelling off some raw chicken. In none of those cases would I want a ring anywhere near my hands, let alone a smart ring. (And nor, in half of those cases, is it convenient/hygenic to use my oven timer.)

That being said, we could solve for fully 50% of in-home voice-assistant use-cases just by developing an extremely domain-specific voice assistant that has an extremely small (ideally burned-into-a-DSP) voice model that only knows how to recognize commands to manage kitchen timers. If such a device existed, and was cheap enough that you could assume anyone who wanted this functionality would just buy one, then this would make truly hands-free activation of a "real" voice-assistant much less necessary, as there'd be far fewer user-stories that would really "need" that. The rest of those user-stories really mostly could work with some kind of ring / belt buckle / shirt comm badge / etc.


If you want to relax some constraints, I made something similar for $10: https://www.stavros.io/posts/i-made-a-voice-note-taker/

Did you have any luck with the power issues on the new board?

The new board hasn't come yet, but a friend gave me a great idea, to power the mic from a GPIO, which powers it off completely when the ESP is off.

Hopefully the new boards will be here soon, but another issue is that I don't really have anything that can measure microamp consumption, so any testing takes days of waiting for the battery to run down :(

I do think these clones are the issue, though. They had a LED I couldn't turn off, so they'd literally shine forever. They don't seem engineered for low quiescent current, so fingers crossed with the new ones.


Is it worth removing the led from the board? Wont help with any other decisions by the designer that draw excess current, but maybe that's the only or largest one?

I did remove it :( It's still pretty bad. I ordered some Xiaos that do explicitly say 14 uA sleep current, but they seem to have gotten lost in the mail!

Makes a lot of sense :) thanks for the update.

I'll try to remember to creepy stalk you for updates as the device sounds great!


You can sign up to my mailing list to get emails if you want! It's at the end of each post.

Thank you for the blog/updates.

Since you're deep into this space, Do you use wall mount dashboards? There seems to be two camps now: Dashboards everywhere or none at all.


Like a light switch?

Or do you mean a button that activates chunked recording, passes it to a speech-to-text model, forwards to an LLM to infer intent, which triggers HA to issue a command, over a wireless network, to the computer with the light attached, to tell the light to turn on.


Rules out a bunch of cases where your hands are busy handling ingredients in the kitchen, etc

Put it at foot level and kick it.

Time for a real life Star Trek comm badge


For real, if I had a fully self-hosted and private system, I'd love a real life Star Trek comm badge. Being able to say, "where is Jeff?" and have it tell me alone would be quite an awesome feature

I'm in if I can embed it into my forearm

In the mid 2000s I had a setup where some children's walkie talkie "spy watches" could be used to issue commands to a completely DIY, relay based smart home system.

I'm looking forward to whenever my Pebble ships so I can recreate that experience with this: https://github.com/skylord123/pebble-home-assistant-ws


apple watch gets you close.

I have a feeling beamforming microphone arrays might help here, something like this could improve the audio being processed substantially - https://www.minidsp.com/products/usb-audio-interface/uma-8-m....

That's a good call. I have a PS3(?) mic/camera that I was using when I was running the original Mycroft project on a Pi. I wonder if that would help with the inbuilt HA mic not waking for most of my family, most of the time. I will have to look at my VA Preview device and its specs later because I'm not sure if you can connect an external mic to it out-of-the-box.

Alexa devices have these (or used to at least), but Google Home's never did. So it shouldn't be necessary.

Yeah a small (ideally personalized) wakeword model would probably outperform just about any audio wizardry.

What's been surprising in my experience regarding the wake word is that it recognizes me (adult male) saying the wake word ~95% of the time. However, it only registers the rest of my family (women and children) ~30% of the time.

I have no firsthand knowledge, but I’d strongly bet that the home-assistant effort to donate training data is mostly get adult males, and nearly zero children.

This was 2021 (so pre-llm), but I used to work for a company that gathered data for training voice commands (Alexa, Toyota, Sonos, were some clients). Basically, we paid people to read digital assistant scripts at scale.

Your assumptions about training data do not match the demographics of data I collected. The majority of what our work revolved around was getting diversity into the training data. We specifically recruited kids, older folks, women, people with accented/dialected English and just about every variety of speech that we could get our hands on. The companies we worked with were insanely methodical about ensuring that different people were included.


You are reporting on a deliberately curated effort vs. what I understand is effectively voluntary data donation without incentives. It's not surprising to me that the later dataset ends up biased due to the differences in sourcing.

Your understanding of the datasets I helped create seems at odds with my experience actually creating the datasets. Do you have some insider experience or knowledge with dataset curation and creation for voice assistants that contradicts my own.

The guideline is that the newer your model, the more likely it is to have diverse voice recognition datasets since it solves the earlier problems caused by non representative data. The trend is moving towards better recognition for outliers. The training models are fed data that is very specific and not at all just whatever recordings they have collected in an S3 bucket. Given the amount of post recording work diarization, and QA we had to do on every single recording, I can’t imagine wanting to YOLO in bulk data.


I remember when those systems first started collecting data they were worried kids wouldn't be handled - but they didn't know how to handle the privacy issuses with recording kids so discouraged it. Women being missed is not a surprise - but not anticipated.

Oh, I'm sure you're right. I've had people in my personal life (non-technical; "AI enthusiasts") laugh at me over concerns about training bias but this is likely a real world example of it.

I think you can train your own wake word with microWakeWord but I've never done it.

I thought all people's voice had to be trained, and if you didn't go through it the match % was much smaller.

With Siri this is true. I'm not positive on the others.

What about your wifi APs sensing which room you are in, with your choice of hilarious dance moves as the trigger ?

Funky chicken for Gemini

Penguin dance for OpenAI

Claude?


> Claude?

The Zoidberg Shuffle?


Why not use an easier to detect wake “word”, like two claps in quick succession? Or a couple of notes of a melody?

Can't clap if your hands are full and I would not subject my family to my attempts at delivering a melody.

I haven't tried training my own wake word though, I'm tempted to see if it improves things.


Personally I'd pick "Cthulhu"

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

What about whistling?

Wake word detection in low power DSP is a not-quite-COTS product but definitely exists. I believe PC manufacturers are looking at adding it to laptops soon, precisely to use with AI assistants.


or if you have an Apple Silicon Mac, this: https://github.com/TaterTotterson/microWakeWord-Trainer-Appl...

I used it personally, did a lot of research (including asking questions to the creator of microWakeWord), and submitted an upstream PR (I think it's already merged), which improved the resulting model slightly. I imagine the Nvidia version is similar, but I don't have experience with it. I also noticed that the model is so small (~25000 parameters), the actual training part doesn't even noticably improve with the GPU, only the TTS voice generation really only uses it.

if you are using this, I strongly recommend you create lots of personal samples with the recorder. I personally used 400, 200 from myself and 200 from my partner, with varying moods and in all the rooms we plan on using the assistant. I am considering re-training with more samples. it takes effort, but the resulting model seems to be well worth it.


Oh wow, 200 each? I just deployed it to the device, but I trained with 10. I'll need to redo it if it doesn't work well, but so far so good.

Why do you even need a wake word? Have a model look at full transcript and decide when to engage.

How are you using Gemini in HA?

> Has anyone examined its use as an OS volume, compared to today's leading SSD's?

Late last year I switched from a 1.5tb Optane 905P to a 4tb WD Blue SN5000 NVMe drive in a gaming machine and saw improved load times, which makes sense given the read and write speeds are ~double. No observable difference otherwise.

I'm sure that's not the use case you were looking for. I could probably tease out the difference in latency with benchmarks but that's not how I use the computer.

The 905P is now in service as an SSD cache for a large media server and that came with a big performance boost but the baseline I'm comparing to is just spinning drives.


Unfortunately a gaming machine workload is so read-heavy that I wouldn't expect Optane to square up well. Gaming is all about read speed and overall capacity. You need that heavy I/O mix, especially with low latency deadlines, to see gains from Optane. That limited target use case, coupled with ignorant benchmarking, always limited them.

Thanks, that's helpful real-world feedback (not that I wouldn't also be interested in some synthetic benchmark comparisons from someone else).

We benchmarked three of the popular Optane NVMe SSDs about three years ago. There was a short window when they were on clearance and a popular choice as a cache SSD in TrueNAS.

https://pcpartpicker.com/forums/topic/425127-benchmarking-op...

You can compare their benchmarks with the other almost 400 SSDs we've benchmarked. Most impressive is that three years later they are still the top random read QD1 performers, with no traditional flash SSD coming anywhere close:

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/benchm...

They are amazing for how consistent and boring their performance is. Bit level access means no need for TRIM or garbage collection, performance doesn't degrade over time, latency is great, and random IO is not problematic.


Going cheap is the problem here, good earbuds and headphones have replaceable cables.

I'm the same way as your oldest, if I'm up and moving around while wearing earbuds/IEMs I run the cable through my shirt.


> Just ask Disney.

Disney saw which way the wind is blowing and invested over a billion into OpenAI


If they saw the wind they wouldn't have chosen OpenAI

The initial mislead comes from the bill[1] where it's described as "verification" in the name and digest but nowhere in the law itself.

1. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...


Many sites including Google offer reverse image search. You give it an image and it gives you a list of places it appears, sometimes in higher resolution or with more context (or different context, which can be interesting).

This unwritten distinction exists only to allow targeted enforcement in service of harassment and oppression. There is no upside (even if getting away with speeding feels good). We should strive to enforce all laws 100% of the time as that is the only fair option.

If a law being enforced 100% of the time causes problems then rethink the law (i.e. raise the speed limit, or design the road slower).


> If a law being enforced 100% of the time causes problems then rethink the law (i.e. raise the speed limit, or design the road slower).

Isn't this the point of the whole conversation we are having here?

Laws on copyright were not created for current AI usage on open source project replication.

They need to change, because if they are perfectly enforced by the letter, they result in actions that are clearly against the intent of the law itself.

The underlying problem is that the world changes too fast for the laws so be fair immediately


What would really help is for people to understand that that's the "spirit of the law" and the "letter of the law".

People don't want the letter of the law enforced, they want the spirit. Using the example from above, speed limits were made for safety. They were set at a time and surprise, cars got safer. So people feel safer driving faster. They're breaking the letter of the law but not the spirit.

I actually like to use law as an example of the limitations of natural languages. Because legalese is an attempt to formalize natural language, yet everyone seems to understand how hard it is to write good rules and how easy it is to find loopholes. But those are only possible if you enforce the letter of the law. Loopholes still exist but are much harder to circumvent with the spirit of the law. But it's also more ambiguous, so not without faults. You have to use some balance.


>cars have gotten safer

For their inhabitants, maybe not pedestrians though. Speeding laws are in part for protecting pedestrians


In general cars have also gotten safer for pedestrians[0]. Modern cars are lighter and made of plastic. There's better visibility, sensors, and for most vehicles the shape of the car has improved things.

American trucks are an interesting counter example but that's a more complicated issue. (The source has a comment that you can infer this being a concern with trucks but there's also a lot of sources on this that you can easily find)

[0] https://www.fox7austin.com/news/data-40-year-high-auto-ped-d...


^This. A large % of jurisprudence is in just trying to keep up with how tech disrupts society.

The reason that has to be done is precisely that the law has no common, well-architected rationale. The vast majority of law in common-law jurisdictions is ad hoc precedent from decades or centuries ago, patchwork laws that match current, ephemeral intuition about what the law should be, etc. Perfect and inevitable enforcement makes this situation a nightmare, given the expectation that the average US citizen commits multiple felonies per day. Something will have to give.

The speed limit example is a great one. Consider a road that has a 35mph limit. Now - which of the following scenarios is SAFER: a) I'm driving on the road in a brand new 4x4 porsche on a sunny day with great visibility and brand new tyres. Doing 40mph. b) I'm driving on the same road in a 70s car with legal but somewhat worn out tyres, in the dark, while it's raining heavily. Doing 35mph.

Of course technically option a is violating the law but no sane police officer will give you a fine in this case. Nor should they! A robot will, however. This is stupid.


The Cayenne would be safer going 35 instead of 40 regardless of all other variables. It's a trivial physics question, kinetic energy is a function of mass and velocity.

The Cayenne would not be safer going 35 instead of 40 "regardless of all other variables": it's statistically safer to go closer to the flow of traffic because you're then "at rest" with respect to other drivers (assuming a controlled access road without pedestrian traffic). If the speed limit is 55 and the flow of traffic is 70–80 (as is the case with the Beltway around DC, despite automated enforcement), then going 55 is more dangerous than "speeding". The issue with 100% enforcement is every law assumes certain circumstances or variables and the real world is infinitely more complex than any set of variables that can reasonably be foreseen by law (and laws that attempt to foresee as many variables as possible are more complicated and, consequently, harder for normal people to apply, which is another reason for latitude in enforcement).

safer for whom? Remember cars are not the only ones participating in traffic.

“assuming a controlled access road without pedestrian traffic”

such roads barely need speed limits. In some places they do not have them

The problem with your DC beltway example wouldn’t be automated enforcement then, but with the speed limit itself.

A road without pedestrians and intersections in it should have a speed limit that reflects the reality of its use (70-80)


I meant a 911 but thank you for answering a completely different point than what I was making.

The reason we have speed limits isnt due to vehciles being unable to 'handle' certain speeds though, it's to minimise the damage of an incident at that speed, which is entirely a matter of physics.

No, that is not true. I used to work on road signage systems, where we would use test vehicles, sensors, and math to figure out what the correct signage should be for various sections of road. The standards are primarily concerned with maintain a margin of error for the "worst" cars on the road, i.e. the ones that meet only the minimum inspection requirements. What happens once that margin of error is exceeded was anyone's guess, but practically could be wildly different for specific scenarios that had more to do with the off-road environment than the exact parameters of the road. Two roads with identical bends would receive the same signage regardless of whether under steering through the curve would land you on a sidewalk or in a field or over a cliff.

AFAICT at least 2 people in this thread don't seem to think that visibility -- a function of, among other things, weather and time of day -- influences driving safety. I find this amazing.

The point of terryf's example was to point out that for practical reasons, existing laws don't capture every relevant variable. I (but not everyone, it seems) think that visibility obviously influences safety. The point I want to make is that in practice the "precision gap" can't be perfectly rectified by making legality a function of more factors than just speed. There will always be some additional factor that influences the probability of a crash by some small amount -- and some of the largest factors, like individual driving ability, would be objected to on other grounds.


"Regardless of all other variables"

Variable 1: The Cayenne is on a train track

Variable 2: The train behind the Cayenne is going 35mph.

You painted with too broad of a brush with that statement.


If there was an accident an officer might give you a fine in both cases where I live. In the Porsche case they can say you broke the law and were speeding that led to the accident. But also in the case of old car for failing to adjust your speed to your skills, the state of your vehicle and conditions of the road and weather regardless of the speed limit.

The classic. In Bulgaria they used to do that (and maybe still do). Every time there was an accident they'd often write up everyone for "speed not matching the conditions" with the idea that all accidents are avoidable, you just weren't going fast/slow enough so git gud and don't forget to pay in the next 2 weeks to get a discount.

Yes! This is exactly the point - machinistic enforcement makes no sense in case of speed limits. All laws about driving explicitly say that at the end of the day it's the driver's responsibility to drive safely and if they cause an accident, then they are at fault in some cases even if they followed the speed limit.

The point is that whether you drove dangerously is not a strict, machinistic "if-then" assessment. Automatic enforcement of speeding is ridiculous when viewed in this context.

And the people saying "yes but there is more energy in a faster vehicle" have clearly not felt the difference between driving a car with drum brakes vs modern brakes.


A system that solves for absolute compliance in every individual case does not result in the emergence of a fairer society.

There are numerous cases, both in history and in fiction, that demonstrate as much.


exactly what it ends up with is a surveillance state. Looking at you China.

What, do you expect techbros to have media literacy? We wouldn’t be in any of this mess if they did.

If speed limits were automated rigidly enforced 100% of the time, it would be impossible to drive.

>only to allow targeted enforcement in service of harassment and oppression

That's absurd hyperbole. A competent policeman will recognise the difference between me driving 90 km/h on a 80 km/h road because I didn't notice the sign. And me driving 120 km/h out of complete disregard for human life. Should I get a fine for driving 90? Yea, probably. Is it a first time offence? Was anyone else on the road? Did the sign get knocked down? Is it day or night? Have I done this 15 times before? Is my wife in labour in the passenger seat? None of those are excuses, but could be grounds for a warning instead.


> If speed limits were automated rigidly enforced 100% of the time, it would be impossible to drive.

Why? Plenty of people drive in areas with speed cameras, isn't that exactly how they work?

> That's absurd hyperbole. A competent policeman will recognise the difference between me driving 90 km/h on a 80 km/h road because I didn't notice the sign.

I'm not sure it is hyperbole or that we should assume competence/good faith. Multiple studies have shown that traffic laws, specifically, are enforced in an inconsistent matter that best correlates with the driver's race.

[0] https://www.aclu-il.org/press-releases/black-and-latino-moto...

[1] https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/may/bl...


> If speed limits were automated rigidly enforced 100% of the time, it would be impossible to drive.

If you find it impossible to follow a simple speed limit, then getting you off the road is the ideal outcome.


Please shred your drivers license immediately, if you at any point in your life have exceeded the speed limit by any amount, or otherwise violated the traffic regulations in any way whatsoever.

Why? 1) If grandparent commenter got a moving violation, shouldn't they just face the corresponding - why posit a made-up penalty for the violation? 2) And if people know there is perfect enforcement, wouldn't they be expected to adjust their behavior going forward, such as driving enough below the limit that they won't accidentally exceed it?

>driving enough below the limit that they won't accidentally exceed it

That is precisely why traffic would effectively grind to a halt. Because going even 0,0001 over the limit is so easy, you would have to turtle through traffic to get anywhere while making certain you never go above the limit. 50km zone is now 30km, and you didn't decelerate quickly enough and were going 32km at the threshold. 60km zone, but you accelerated too quickly and hit 61km for a moment. And sometimes, rarely, but sometimes you have to accelerate yourself out of a dangerous situation.

Honestly if you are arguing for this idea, I strongly suspect you have no experience driving. I've driven for about 25 years. I've received two speeding tickets. One in Germany (I'm danish), where I got confused due to unfamiliar signage and got dinged for going 112km in a 100km zone. And once here I got a ticket for going 54 in a 50 - my mom was at the hospital, possibly about to die (she didn't). Both of those were speed traps.


How close to your desired speed are you able to maintain?

> 50km zone is now 30km, and you didn't decelerate quickly enough and were going 32km at the threshold.

Is the argument that you and others would be unable to safely achieve the posted speed within the speed limited area? For example, if you feel you can't drive more precisely than 40-50 when you are aiming for 45, in the above scenario, you could start with your goal being 45, then in the 30 zone aim for 25, knowing that you'd be going no faster than 30 when your intend to drive 25.

> 60km zone, but you accelerated too quickly and hit 61km for a moment.

Should you aim for 55, if for example the most precise you can do is +/- 5? Or adjust correspondingly for how precise you are able to keep within a desired range.

And of course:

* In a world where enforcement was more consistent, we might expect speed limits to eventually be adjusted - i.e. are speed limits currently set lower than what is technically safe because we assume that some portion of people will currently break the law?

* With self-driving, or at least automated speed-keeping (but not steering) there will no longer be the issue of someone having the problem of being unable to stay within x km/h of the speed they're targeting.


I know how to drive a car. I usually set speed limiter to the posted speed +3km. Measured with GPS, this hits the desired speed accurately. The point in this absurd scenario is that perfect enforcement of the speed limits is asinine, because if you make any mistake at all, no matter how insignificant, you get fined.

>automated speed-keeping

My car displays what it thinks is the speed limit on the dashboard, and it gets it wrong all the time. If I relied on that in this hypothetical, I would be broke and homeless - possibly in prison, after it once said the limit was 110km on a narrow residential street.


Are the scenarios you laid what you honestly expect the world would turn out to be like if the world changed in the coming years so that speed laws are consistently applied? It seems like you believe that if the law was consistently applied, nothing else would change -- not the laws, speed limits, conservative behavior, etc (whether based on lawmakers' actions nor voters' demands) (other than the enforcement/penalty frequency going up to match how often people break the law)?

Isn't that like saying "What would the effects be if time travel existed" but assuming that doesn't then prompt any changes in human behavior, laws, other technologies, etc. from what people were doing everyday and what existed before it? When discussing "What if x changed", I think we need to also take into account the other changes in laws, behaviors, etc. that one expects that to then prompt - whether big or small.

> perfect enforcement

Isn't consistent enforcement of the law far better than the current inconsistent and unequal enforcement, where people already face unequal enforcement for 'driving while black', where if an officer is having a bad day or doesn't like you they can already cite you strictly, and where other people are regularly able to get away with 20 mph over a limit, where every driver and officer guesses/decides for themselves about whether the current limit should be strictly enforced vs allow 5 over, 15 over, etc etc?

> I usually set speed limiter to the posted speed +3km. Measured with GPS, this hits the desired speed accurately.

So instead of aiming for 33 in a 30 km zone, couldn't you aim for a slightly lower number in order to avoid the scenario you expect for yourself where if the law was consistently applied you would be "would be broke and homeless - possibly in prison"?


Everybody going 30km/h does not constitute “halt”

In a literal sense, no. In a practical sense, yes.

Exaggeration is the right of a poetic soul.

That is completely different argument. Yes, I exceeded speed limit here and there. I am not deluded enough to think it was "unavoidable" or "impossible to drive slower".

It is perfectly possible to drive and obey all speed limits. It is even technically easy. Us people choosing not to do so, because we are impatient, feeling competitive against other drivers or because we just think we can get away with it now does not make it impossible.


Laws can't be enforced 100% of the time because many laws require intent, which is unknowable. You have to make an educated guess behind it. Even if someone tells you their intent, straight up, you still don't know their intent. You just know what they want you to think their intent is, which may or may not be the same thing. It's legitimately unknowable.

Ideally, for a lot of things we want to punish people who knowingly do bad stuff, not people who do bad stuff because they thought it was good.


Very true but not in all cases. In case of speed limit intent does not matter; "I didn't know I was speeding" is no excuse. Same with DUI.

In fact DUI should be a mitigating circumstance, because when you're drunk your ability to make decisions is impaired -- but the opposite happens, DUI is an aggravating circumstance.


What about drunk driving laws?

Same argument applies. Driving slowly for 1km 0.01 under the speed limit, over legal blood alco limit is safer than driving at the speed limit for 10kms just under the alco limit.

It's very easy to come up with thought experiments to show that technically illegal scenarios are not necessarily more dangerous than some legal scenarios.

The law is often made to be easy to apply, not for precision. Hard to see how anyone could see otherwise.

That's not say that the laws are necessarily problematic. You have to draw the line somewhere.


There is an upside: oppressing people who consistently engage in antisocial behavior is good and necessary.

The whole point is that only some of those engaging in anti-social behaviour recieve punishment.

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