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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I usually can’t tell the difference in a single oncoming car if they’re auto or manual high beams. So, given how often I know they’re older cars with the manual high beams locked on, maybe I’m not noticing slow autos. Sometimes I can see high beams flicking on and off more frequently than the average driver would, so I assume they auto and have seemed OK. Maybe I’m just too pessimistic about the average driver though and give autos a pass. The few times I’ve driven a Ford with them, they were OK. I beleive I’m very conscientious about high beam use so they were a little delayed for my liking, but I wouldn’t say 3 seconds. Like I’ll watch for light coming over hills and predict the car is coming and be prepared to drop as soon as they appear


  • Exactly this. If you need more light, fog lights (a wide but flat beam) do wonders in neighborhoods, especially around corners. Sure, I can see some benefit of illuminating the whole body of a person, but their lower half should be sufficient. Quite frankly, if someone can’t see them with low beams, they weren’t going to meaningfully react any faster with high beams. They’re either driving too fast, the pedestrian is stepping out too fast, or the road is too narrow.

    It’s wild how this whole post is about the good of other people but my opinion of respecting non-driving people at the same time isn’t as well-received.



  • A driving factor is the US requirement to place low beams above (and outward) of high beams. Couple that with traditional design goals of “my eyes are up here” faces (see: not the juke), you get normal low beams blinding every car with lows higher than mirrors. Then couple that with the factory aiming the lights to the max heigh with an empty tank and no cargo and sending that off to the gen pop, which is clueless about the ability to aim them.

    Ironically, the low/hi arrangement requirement went against the original RX350 headlight design. It caused the creation of one of the greatest dual-beam xenon projectors of all time because the original high beam location was noncompliant. It got used as a big DRL I believe. Those “rx350” projectors were very popular in the retrofit headlight community, a hobbyist group dedicated to improving lighting without blinding others



  • I don’t buy that this is the last market. The current major one, yes, but calling it the last one is, not to be rude, short-sighted and unimaginative. AI/LLMs/advance algorithms will continue and some advanced technology will be built off of those. We didn’t stop with plain electricity, we didn’t stop with physical memory, we didn’t stop with plain programs, so why would we stop now?

    There are plenty of markets outside this one niche of “tech”. And I get it, I’m the outsider in the fediverse as I don’t work in IT, don’t code, and don’t even use Linux.

    I work in American rail transportation (a notably hot topic here!) and it’s incredibly outdated. Freight has such unimaginable interchangeability of individual cars between trains (consists) and rail lines that any kind of change has to overcome massive, disconnected lethargy of multiple groups. Aside from the shear volume of cars, it has to pass through multiple parties to operate on “interchange”: all involved railroads, the car owners, the car leasees, sometimes the good owner, and the locomotive owner (not always the rail owner). Freight cars have no mandatory/universal electronics on board. Brakes are applied via manual air pressure logic from a single signal hose and can take several minutes to reach the end of the train. Certainly, wireless electronic communication would improve this but imagine trying to pair 250 cars to the locomotive. We can say just add a plug like a truck trailer plug, but changing a 100 year old hookup procedure is a task, so say the least. Improvement is coming, but adoption must be rolled out and it must be free of tamper risk. There’s also essentially no tracking on rail cars. Services offered are atrocious. For maintenance, the latest thing is massive photobooths capturing every single car passing through. They’re pretty effective. And, despite all this sounding ancient, hostile takeovers, planted execs, pleasing shareholders, and running logistics into the ground for a short profit return to shares is just as present.

    Side note: the only “unit trains” around, the only ones that stay as one single consist and don’t exchange between locomotives or rail lines, are coal trains. And they’re on their way out.

    Passenger trains leave much to be desired and while there’s plenty of tech left to import from other continents, there’s not much incentive. The USA is huge and the populations centers are far apart. We like to look at Germany, the UK, France, and the like as examples but their physical size is comparable to the US regions already served by transit. The US population is much more coastal than Europe (Atlantic, pacific, golf of Mexico, great lakes) and, on many topics really, Americans tend to forget about eastern Europe. That’s our Midwest/rust belt/flyover states.

    Road vehicles are ever-Improving but all I see here on lemmy is treating the privacy element as a crisis. I agree, and I can see why it’s important, but the physical advances are blatantly ignored. Hybrid and bev have large hurdles ahead of them to continue mass adoption. Aerodynamics and other rolling resistance elements are always improved. Who knows what the next paradigm shift in cars will be.

    Similar things apply to planes.

    Building infrastructure is always advancing. Better insulation, faster construction techniques, stronger materials, longer spans, less foundation intrusion, and greater durability.

    And yes, we can talk about the continuous enshittification of all these industries, but, just like tech, that’s enshittification of the final product, not of the actual tech behind it. The tech has always been improving.




  • Modifying the dam isn’t the issue, you need to make sure the upstream area can be flooded. Not all rivers are in a canyon. You need a sizeable lake and consider how catastrophic an overflow would be. Then you also have to consider the effect downstream because you will likely cause a minor drought persistently since not all dams will dump into the ocean. So yes, I understand that “hydro” is both a source and a battery, but they are really 2 entirely different systems based on your other categorizations.

    Same thing with the biomass. One system makes trees, one system burns wood.

    The graphic isn’t particularly wrong, it’s just splitting some items and combining others inconsistently.


  • I think you’re reading into it correctly. It’s an inaccurate depiction. The hydro line is what makes it fuzzy. A dam is a source but has no storage. A reservoir is not a source but has storage. They are separate devices meaning this needs two separate lines for hydro.

    I imagine biomass is exactly the same situation, but I have no idea what OP is trying to use. Maybe I’m just uneducated, but it doesn’t sound like common knowledge. Still my assumption would be that there’s a source system to grow/maintain biomass and a separate system to extract that energy.

    If those two items stayed as-is, then I can strap a battery directly to wind or solar and give them green check marks in both categories.