This is fucking ridiculous. This AI is the worst of them all. I don’t mind it when they subtly try to insert some diversity where it makes sense but this is just nonsense.
I don’t know who “them” is here. I thought from the context it was obvious that I meant whoever is managing these AIs. I guess I could’ve been clearer.
But what, do you think they’re behind the scenes to insert the word woke in every search by default or something?
I mean they literally are inserting stuff in the prompts to make the results more diverse? It’s not some hidden thing but rather a solution to issues with the undiverse training data. But obviously here they’ve “overcorrected” to beyond all sense.
No idea. I don’t fully understand why any of these dog whistles are pulled out I just know what they are. Another big one is triple () meaning the same thing.
They are experimenting and tuning. Apparently without any correction there is significant racist bias. Basically the AI reflects the long term racial bias in the training data. According to this BBC article it was an attempt to correct this bias but went a bit overboard.
PS: I find it hilarious. If anything it elevates the AI system to art, since it now provides an emotionally provoking mirror about white identity.
To the machine, the query is “draw the founding fathers but diversely” it’s not the data that is corrupt, the usage is, clearly the system prompt in this case
I asked a generator to make me a “queen monkey in a purple gown sitting on a throne” and I got maybe two pictures of actual monkeys. I even tried rewording it several times to be a real monkey, described the hair and everything.
Stable diffusion online version, several weeks ago. Might not be the same situation anymore, idk how often that stuff gets updated, and I’m not able to test it at the moment.
It’s also possible that some sort of “sticky idea” got into its head and made it start generating it that way after it did one like that. I’ve heard that sort of thing isn’t uncommon.
To be clear, stable diffusion isn’t one model, it’s the generation platform. From there, you have models that sit on top of it. Online generators can use any model, depending on how they’re set up. Each model includes different training data, meaning different results from the same prompts, sometimes vastly.
It’s a bit like driving somewhere, having someone ask how you found the place, and saying your phone. Technically a correct answer, but they’re probably looking for more specific answers, like GPS, or a map. Not trying to nit-pick, just giving a bit of information.
Apparently without any correction there is significant racist bias.
This doesn’t make it any less ridiculous. This is a central pillar of this kind of AI tech, and they’re trying to shove a band aid over the most obvious example of it. Clearly, that doesn’t work. It’s also only even attempting to fix one of the “problems” - they’re never going to be able to “band aid” every single place where the AI exhibits this problem, so it’s going to leave thousands of others un-fixed. Even if their band aid works, it only continues to mask the shortcomings of this tech and makes it less obvious to people that it’s horrendously inacurrate with the other things it does.
Basically the AI reflects the long term racial bias in the training data. According to this BBC article it was an attempt to correct this bias but went a bit overboard.
Exactly. This is a core failing of LLM tech. It’s just going to repeat all the shit it was fed to it. You’re never going to fix that. You can attempt to steer it in different directions, but the reason this tech was used was because it is otherwise impossible for us to trudge through all the info that was fed to it. This was the only way to get it to “understand” everything. But all of it’s understandings are going to have these biases, and it’s going to be just as impossible to run through and fix all of these. It’s like you didn’t have enough metal to build the titanic so you just built it out of Swiss cheese and are trying to duct tape one hole closed so it doesn’t sink. It’s just never going to work.
This being pushed as some artificial INTELLIGENCE is the problem here. This shit doesn’t understand what it’s doing, it’s just regurgitating the things it’s consumed. It’s going to be exactly as flawed as whatever was put into it, and you can’t change that. The internet media it was trained on is racist, biased, full of undeniably false information, and massively swayed by propaganda on all sides of the fence. You can’t expect LLMs to do anything different when trained on that data. They’re going to have all the same problems. Asking these things to give you any information is like asking the average internet user what the answer is. And the average internet user is not very intelligent.
These are just amped up chat bots with data being sourced from random bits of the internet. Calling them artificial INTELLIGENCE misleads people into thinking these bots are smart of have some sort of understanding of what they’re doing. They don’t. They’re just fucking internet parrots, and they don’t have the architecture to be “fixed” from having these problems. Trying to patch these problems out is a fools errand and only masks their underlying failings.
Would it be possible to create a kind of “formula” to express the abstract relationship of ethical makeup, location, year and field? Like convert a table of population, country, ethnicity mix per year and then train the model on that. It’s clear that it doesn’t understand the meaning or abstract concept, but it can associate and extrapolate things. So it could “interpret” what the image description says while training and then use the prompt better. So if you’d prompt “english queen 1700” it would output white queen, if you input year 2087 it would be ever so slightly less pasty.
I don’t know, maybe that would work, for this one particular problem. My point is it’s more than that. Even if you go through the trouble of fixing this one particular issue with LLMs, there are literally thousands of other problems to solve before it’s all “fixed”. At some point, when you’ve built and maintained thousands of workarounds, they start conflicting with each other and making a giant spider web of issues to juggle.
And so you’re right back at the problem that you were trying to solve by building the LLM in the first place. This approach is just futile and nonsensical.
Yeah. But maybe this is how you teach an AI a broader understanding of the real world. Or really a slightly less narrow view. Human brains also have to learn and reconcile all these conflicting data points and then create a kind of understanding from it. For any machine learning it would only be an intuitive instinct.
Like you would have a bunch of these “tables” that show relationships between various tokens and embody concepts. Maybe you need to combine different kind of models that are organized and trained differently to resolve such things. I only have a very surface level understanding of how machine learning works so I know this is very speculative. Maybe you’re right and it can only ever reflect the training data. Then maybe you’d need to edit the training data, but you could also maybe use other AIs to “reinterpret” training data based on other models.
Like all the data on reddit, could you train a model to detect sarcasm or lies or to differentiate between liberal, leftist and fascist type of arguments? Not just recognizing the tokens or talking points, but the semantic of an argument? Like detecting a non sequitur. You probably need need “general knowledge” understanding for that. But any kind of AI like that would be incredibly interesting for social media so you client can tag certain posts, or root out bot / shill networks that work for special interests (fossil fuel, usa, china, russia).
So all the stuff “conflicting with each other and making a giant spider web of issues to juggle” might be what you can train an AI to pull apart into “appeal emotion” and “materialistic view” or “belief in inequality” or “preemptive bias counteractor”. Maybe it actually could extract and help us communicate better.
Eh I really need to learn more about AI to understand the limits.
The broad answer is, I’m pretty sure everything you’ve mentioned is possible, and you’re right in that this is similar to how humans integrate new data. Everything we learn competes with and bolsters every bit of knowledge we already have, so our web of understanding is this ever shifting net of relationships between concepts.
I don’t see any reason these kinds of relationships can’t be integrated into generative AI, they just HAVEN’T yet, and each time you increase how the relationships interact, you’re also drastically increasing the size and complexity of the algorithm and model. I think we’re just realizing that what we have now is OK, but needs to be significantly better before it’s really mind blowing.
Yeah, I imagine generative AI as like one small part of a human mind, so we’d need to create a whole lot more for AGI. But it’s shocking (at least for me) that it works at all just through more data and compute power. That you can make qualitative leaps with just increasing the quantity. Maybe we’ll see more progress now.
I don’t see any reason these kinds of relationships can’t be integrated into generative AI, they just HAVEN’T yet
No, it’s just fucking pointless. You’re talking about adding sand to a beach. These things are way more complicated and trying to shovel these things in just makes a mess. See literally the OP.
each time you increase how the relationships interact, you’re also drastically increasing the size and complexity of the algorithm and model.
No youre not. Not even fucking close. You clearly don’t understand this at all.
The ALGORITHM will always be the same. Except for new generations of these bots. Claiming adding things like racial bias is going to alter the algorithm is just nonsensical.
The MODEL is the huge fucking corpus of internet data. Anything you tack onto it is a drop in an ocean. It’s not steering anything.
Whats changing is they’re editing inputs because that’s all you can really do to shift where these things go. Other changes would turn this into a very different beast, and can’t be done at the fine grained level like “race”.
Claiming this has any significant impact on the size or complexity of any of this is just total hog wash and you must not understand how these work or how big they are.
In what world does changing the algorithm used in order to generate anything, something that would be NECESSARY to make the model incorporate a new dimension of data, not change the algorithm used to generate?
I’m not just talking adding more prompts, keying more specific terms to specific patterns of pixels, I’m talking building in entirely new ways for the AI to understand.
You seem to think I’m just talking about linearly expanding the vocabulary of the model, I’m talking about giving it an entirely new paradigm through which to work.
Anyway, this is why no one likes pedants. If you want to actually engage in conversation, sure. If you want to just keep being a vitriolic ass, go back to your cave, yeah?
You seem to think I’m just talking about linearly expanding the vocabulary of the model, I’m talking about giving it an entirely new paradigm through which to work.
No, I don’t. I know exactly what you’re trying to say. But you’re basically talking about trying to make a car fly. That’s not how it was built and it’s goals and foundations are entirely different. You’re better off starting over and building a plane. Your proposal just doesn’t fit within the paradigms of what was built and makes no sense.
I’m talking building in entirely new ways for the AI to understand.
Exactly. But the AI doesn’t “understand” anything. In order to achieve this, you need to build something that “understands” things. LLMs don’t understand anything.
Anyway, this is why no one likes pedants. If you want to actually engage in conversation, sure.
It’s easy to label me as a pendant, but I’m explaining how this stuff works. You clearly have no idea, admitted yourself that you don’t understand, and then keep going. You just keep spewing the same shit, but the shit you’re spewing makes no sense. But you refuse to budge or engage in conversation here.
You’re just talking out of your ass. You’re admittedly uneducated but want to be treated like you’re educated and make any sense. You don’t. This is why people hate people pretending to be experts and talking about things they don’t understand. It’s a waste of time.
If you want to keep living in some imaginary world where this can be done, be my guest, but it’s fake. That’s not how this shit works. Enjoy your imaginary quest though.
You’re just rephrasing the same approach, over, and over, and over. It’s like you’re not even reading what I’m saying.
The answer is no. This is not a feasible approach. LLMs are just parrots and they don’t understand anything. They were essentially a “shortcut” that gets something that acts intelligent without actually having to build something intelligent. You’re not going to convince it to be intelligent. You’re not going to solve all it’s short comings by shoe horning something in. It’s just more work than building actual intelligence.
It’s like if a costal town got overrun by flooding from a hurricane. And some guy shows up and is like “hey, I’ve got a bucket, I’ll just pull all the water to the sea”. And I’m like “that’s infeasible, we need a different solution, your bucket even has fucking holes in it”. And you’re over here saying “well, what if we got some duct tape? And then we can patch the holes. And then we can call our friends, and we can all bucket the water”.
It’s just not happening.
Eh I really need to learn more about AI to understand the limits
Yeah. This. You just keep repeating the same approach over and over without understanding or listening to the basic failings of these chat bots. It’s just not happening. Your just perpetuating nonsense.
These things are basically slightly more complicated versions of the auto complete in your phone keyboard. Except that they’re fed hug amounts of the internet. They get really good at parroting sentences, but they have no sense of “intelligence” or what they’re actually doing. You’re better off trying to convince your auto correct to sound like Shakespeare than you are to remove the failings like racial bias from things like Gemini and ChatGPT. You can chip at small corners here and there but this is just not the path forward.
You’re just rephrasing the same approach, over, and over, and over. It’s like you’re not even reading what I’m saying.
No I read what you are saying. I just think that you are something that “acts intelligent without actually being intelligent”. Here is why: All that you’ve written is based on very simple primitive brain cells and synapses and synaptic connections. It’s self evident that this is not really something that is designed to be intelligent. You’re just “really good at parroting sentences”. And you clearly agree that I’m doing the same 😄
Clearly LLMs are not intelligent and don’t understand, and it would need many other systems to make them so. But what they do show is that the “creative spark” even though they are very mediocre in their quality, can be created by using a critical mass of quantity. It’s like it’s just one small part of our mind, the “creative writing center” without intelligence. But it’s there, just because we added more data and processing.
Quality through quantity, that is what we seem to be and what is so shocking. And it’s obvious that there is a kind of disgust or bias against such a notion. A kind of embarrassment of the brain to just be thinking meat.
Now you might be absolutely right that my specific suggestion for an approach is bullshit, I don’t know enough about it. But I am pretty sure we’ll get there without understanding exactly how it works.
None of this has been pushed, by any researcher, by any company, by any open source group even, as “intelligence” In fact, it was unanimously disliked as a term by everyone working with the models and transformers, but media circus combined with techbros laymen hard on hype have won. Since then everyone has given up trying to be semantically correct on this front.
I didn’t say any researcher or anything had named it intelligence. Nor am I trying to be semantically correct.
Read the guys comments. He’s trying to push the idea that we can “change” it’s “understanding” about the things it’s discussing. He is one of the people who has fallen for the tech bros etc convincing people it is intelligent. I’m not fighting semantics, I’m trying to explain to him that it’s not intelligent. Because he himself clearly doesn’t understand that.
Why do you seem to think it’s impossible to change how AI understands things? It’s just an algorithm. It’s just a fancy set of math functions that gets you from noise to something that looks like something. Of COURSE we can change how this process works, have it weigh other things, and get something that generates based on a different paradigm than we currently have. All you seem to try to do is be semantically correct.
That’s just silly, as if there is no nuance whatsoever. You can ofc change its understanding. Depending on your definition, different types of models could be interpreted as intelligent in certain areas. You can be rational, you know, not everything needs to be black and white. It’s also possible that since even the experts in the field don’t fully grasp it, maybe you don’t either.
I use connect too but I think you misunderstood me. It’s only inferior because of the size of the community, but as I said that also makes it better. It’s like Reddit a whole bunch of years ago.
That’s more commonly a US thing and it’s like, “Americans saved from America.” whether health, education, or some basic social service that’s being used for profiteering.
Suzy Citygirl has to plan the perfect Christmas pageant or Bernard Bigbiz will fire her from her job at the Joyless Inc. Little does she know when she gets sent to Tinytown, Vermont on business she’ll meet Matty McSmall town. He owns the struggling local tinsel factory and needs to sell enough tinsel by Christmas or else his grandma won’t be allowed to have the surgery she needs to remove the tumor from her holiday spirt gland. Matty is also single dad that was widowed by a freak tinsel lathing accident and the little girl loves Sally Citygirl from the beginning and secretly helps her dad see past his pain.
With minutes to spare in the Christmas pageant/tumor deadline Suzy convinces Mr. Bigbiz to buy enough tinsel to save the Christmas pageant AND remove grandma’s tumor! But after throwing the perfect pageant she realizes Mr. Bigbiz is a terrible boss, and moves to Tinytown permanently. She falls in love with Matty, and gets a job at his tinsel factory. With her big business skills the struggling tinsel factory grows three sizes that day.
Mr. Bigbiz is ruined. He realizes the error of his ways and comes to Vermont to apologize. Now he too works at the tinsel factory, and loves life now. But don’t forget, throughout the movie the cast interacts with lovable bearded old man who may or may not be Santa, because wtf, why not?
Whenever I have that thought, usually when I see my cat rolling around on the floor just loving life, I always end up with the follow-up thought that I would have to lick my own butthole to clean it.
KFC uses commercial pressure cookers. You can blow up a kitchen if you aren’t careful around those things. Fast food doesn’t look like it requires skills because they have managed to bring an assembly line to the kitchen. It does require a certain amount of spatial awareness, and the ability to switch tasks rapidly.
A quote from Dean Rusk, former US Secretary of State:
I was never satisfied with the Israeli explanation. Their sustained attack to disable and sink Liberty precluded an assault by accident or some trigger-happy local commander. Through diplomatic channels we refused to accept their explanations. I didn’t believe them then, and I don’t believe them to this day. The attack was outrageous.
They also tried to say that they asked the US to keep their ships away or at least tell them where the ships were. However, they didn’t ask this until after the boat was sunk.
I wonder how many fuck cars people will buy a car when they finally graduate and get a job and realise they want 1 hr 30 commuting every day instead of 3 hours?
You are allowed hate something you own and depend on. What I find fuck cars people are about is how much cars are catered for and it’s still horrible to use in a lot of places.
Normally I live in a, relatively speaking, new city - and everything is so bloody far away, sure some things are more centralised but plenty of things are getting built in places with no public transport connections or an easy way to walk to.
For 3 years at uni I lived in a very old town, and everything, just everything, was in the town centre, you could walk everywhere with no issues.
The difference is one place was built for people, and the other was built for cars.
I live in a third world country and have to usually have to take taxis to get anywhere without being a sweaty mess and I’d love to the point where public transportation can get you anywhere in the metro, similar to how Hong Kong (where income taxes are pretty low as far as I know) does it.
A lot. Because our infrastructure and zoning basically demand you buy a car. That’s not the point. The point is to advocate change through local government.
What comes first the cars or the infrastructure? It’s a bit of a chicken/egg scenario. People aren’t going to lobby to inconvenience their lives whe it doesn’t make sense.
Ah, well thank neoliberal privatization for that. Thatcher and Reagan fucked their respective countries so damn hard to the benefit of their wealthy friends.
We were literally the first industrial nation. We already have infrastructure, which is why development is so expensive.
We are currently in a political situation with high speed rail. The costs are soaring and it’s nothing to do with neoliberalism, it’s because to build additional infrastructure in Britain you have to bulldoze through existing shit that is owned by people already.
Nationalising the railways did raise costs by about 1/5 in real terms, but we also have some the safest rails in Europe. They also became more reliable and investment increased 9 fold.
Look up the Beecher report (hopefully I got the name right) to find out what happened to your trains. It was politicians getting bought by car manufacturers.
I’m in Germany. That’s how long it takes with the trains to get to my Workplace. And I still rather work from Home because I don’t have to travel 3 to 4 hours a day.
Holy shit you guys have bad infrastructure. Even worse than ours.
I also generally rather use the train despite its problems. Especially when I’m not sure if I will be drinking or taking other drugs.
Not really, the images and travel descriptions you’re reading here are the exception, not the rule. The US has great infrastructure, just not for public transportation as there isn’t enough centralized usage and the locations are far apart. It would take me 4 hours to go to work by bus, but it takes me 25 min by car.
That sounds like it’s a vicious cycle. There isn’t any public transport so there are no people using the public transport which causes public transports to be bad, so there isn’t anybody using it
It is to a point, but when you reach that point it’s just not feasible to have public transportation. The city I work in has a light rail train, it has a robust busing system, but people also travel from 20+ different small towns around this one and at a certain point that system breaks down. If I were to take the bus I would still need a car to get to the next small town where the bus stop into the large town is.
The fact is that the most of the US isn’t designed like old world cities which were built with public transportation and foot traffic in mind.
Infrastructure can apply to different things, you can have great infrastructure for cars, but not trains. You can have well maintained power lines, but poor internet connectivity. You can have a robust water utility, but a mixed storm and sewer system.
If you’re gonna point out one bad part of infrastructure and say all of it’s bad then idk what to say for you.
You can go from London to Edinburgh by car (412 miles) in 7.5 hrs or by train in 5.5 hrs.
You can go from Richmond to Charleston by car (432 miles) in 6 hours or by train in 13.25 hrs.
I wonder how many people will be forced to buy a car to be able to function in society even though they hate the idea owning a car and in any other developed nation they could go car free in an equivalent city because they have better public transport and/or bike infrastructure
Lol sure you were, and that’s why you were talking to me and not OP 😆
I know you think asking people if they want a Royale with Cheese on a shitty burning microphone is a decent career, but it’s not. Now get me my McFlurry and don’t you dare try to pull that “the machine’s broken” crap on me. You just don’t want to clean it.
I wonder how many fuck cars people will buy a car when they finally graduate and get a job and realise they want 1 hr 30 commuting every day instead of 3 hours?
My wife and I own two cars and live outside the most urban parts of our city. I actually love cars, especially when I get to drive a standard transmission. But we both are firmly in the FuckCars camp.
We walk, bike, and use public transit when we can, and we vote to improve the pedestrian infrastructure in our area whenever we can. We love vacationing in places with good public transit, and would live in such places if circumstances allowed.
Part of the frustration in the FuckCars community is the very thing you said in your post. Cities are built around cars, which means every other form of commuting is secondary and therefore worse than it could be. This is what we want to change. Build cities around people. Get rid of massive parking lots, dangerous stroads, etc. If people need cars to get from city to city, or outside of cities, totally fine. But they shouldn’t be necessary for day-to-day in populated areas.
Cities could be so much better, and we know this because there ARE cities that are better. It just takes effort and time.
Nah it’s typical online leftism. Good at defining problems and not so good at working up solutions that don’t just bubble down to “everyone should think like me”.
There are plenty of good solutions. Just because you’re only hearing the very valid complaints doesn’t mean solutions don’t exist. They just aren’t going to be easy or immediate. Life doesn’t work that way.
Cars are indeed here to stay. But we can make cities much better over time.
Well yeah of course. But I think what you’re not factoring in is that people will always choose the convenience of cars. People don’t just drive to and from places in the same city.
I believe I did mention cars as valuable for use outside of cities. I live in the US, cars are an absolute necessity outside of major population centers.
Even so, cities are better when cars are unnecessary within them. CAPABLE, but unnecessary.
Yup, I’ve been there. The story is the same with Paris and NYC. I still prefer those cities over, say, Los Angeles. Cities that have made an effort to be livable without cars are better than cities that haven’t.
Well yeah of course they cater to everyone. But a lot of people around here are pro designing cities to be deliberately annoying to drive in which is just the other extreme to LA.
There’s a city near me (so-called, but realistically a subset of the greater metro area) which has made changes to attempt to slow down cars. Curvier roads, curbs that cut out the shoulder near intersections (which still allow for parking but make the road seem narrower, psychologically, so people subconsciously slow down), strict enforcement of speed limits, cutting four-lane roads down to two-lane with a turn lane between them and bike lanes on the sides, etc.
Arguably these changes make it “deliberately annoying to drive in,” but this area is still perfectly drivable, and is still often the fastest way to get from one place to another if they’re nearby. And yet it has made that area much more pedestrian and bike friendly. I am far more likely to see people on foot there than in other parts of the city (barring the downtown area, which is of course most densely populated and therefore full of people).
It also makes it a delight to bike through.
This is the kind of change I want to see. I want cars to share the road. (To this end, I don’t hesitate to bike in the road. If people are annoyed because I top out around 28mph with my eBike, then they should vote for more bike lanes. 😁) I don’t want cities to be places where cars are the primary mode of transit and the others are afterthoughts, I want cars to be one of many viable options. I want to see parking lots reduced in favor of housing and businesses, and centralized parking garages emphasized.
As stated previously, these aren’t going to be immediate changes. They will take time, but they’re worth working toward for better and healthier cities (and a healthier planet).
You don’t have to give up personal transportation to build public transportation. Are you high? And no, it does not take infinite money. How the fuck do you think that they’re are cities who have already implemented decent public transportation got them? They certainly did not have infinite money.
Cities could be so much better, and we know this because there ARE cities that are better. It just takes effort and time.
And eminent domain, to take the land to build that infrastructure. And money. Lots and lots of money. And way more time than you think. Effectively having to level homes for miles, grade the surface and then, finally getting to build this utopian vision of public transportation, which will then need to be fed, sorry, maintained, by taxes that will shoot through the roof. Then, the displaced will need a place to stay, so enter yet more eminent domain to take more property to build vertical, because there is a finite amount of land. And this would be jn just one small to mid sized US city.
Look, I’m happy for anyone who’s happy in how they do their daily. You chose it, and it works for you. Some people don’t chose that life, and it doesn’t work for them. I respect your way of life, it should only be fair that you respect mine. I’m not driving a 3500 turbo diesel that gets 12 gallons to the mile, stomping on the gas “just because I like the sound” and throwing cheeseburger wrappers out the window.
Difference is, I’m not trying to force my way of life on others…
Nope. I’m touching on the student politics that infest sites like this. Opinions that are easy to hold when your only destination is your university campus.
Cool. I’ve been working for 8 years, commuting in the range of 10-15 km to my various places of work throughout that period, with the exception of the pandemic period during which I worked remotely.
Not once have I driven a car to any of my jobs. A mix of public transportation and cycling has covered all of my needs, and I wouldn’t have saved any time by opting to drive.
This invalidates this terrible comment, so let’s not keep repeating.
Hi, im 26 years old and i have the money to get a car and make enough money to Use the car. But i dont have one, i use every day the train to get to work. 5 min with bike to the trainstation 31 min with the train, 5 min on foot to my work place, 5 min back to the trainstation, 22 min back with train and 10-15 min with my bike home. With a car I would need 38 min (gmaps). I pay 49€ in month and can use bus or trai In whole Germany. With a car it would be 66km per day. The car of our family uses 6,5 L/ 100km 66km = 4,29L × 20 (workdays) =85,8L * 1,82 (price per liter fuel)= 155,61€ and that is only the fuel with out the tax for the car insurance and not the wear out and without the 2 year controll checkup. And with that I can say train is faster and cheaper for me so I don’t need a car.
Tried that. If you want to rent for the weekend you waste a bunch of time picking up and dropping off the vehicle. And say you are using it for camping, you have to pack all your stuff that same day then unload everything before drop off. There are also restrictions as to where you can take rentals, like gravel roads are off limits. Just some examples
Of course I own a car, you need to own one to get anywhere where I live. That doesn't mean I have to support car infrastructure or be against public transit. I advocate for making public transit services more common and easier to use, and I would use public transit if my supported policies were implemented.
I’m not against public transit either. I was just wondering aloud how many are so vocally against cars due to not never really needing one anyway so far in their lives.
I used to visit fuck cars, back when I was on Reddit. I own two cars, and I look forward to a time when I only need them to tow a trailer and/or go on holiday
I honestly don’t get their argument. Yes, the current situation is bad and will necessitate using cars, but isn’t that the point of the post? That things could be better? That getting to the reality where cars are not as needed would be great? It’s such a strange attack against people who want better public transportation infrastructure.
Most of us aren’t arguing that a decrease in dependence on vehicles isn’t beneficial or worth the time. We’re tired of being implicitly blamed for just trying to exist in an established system. The very first words in this post are “STOP DRIVING CARS” like we have a choice or that would fix anything or that it’s our responsibility to upend how we live our life for “the cause”.
Yeah, no. I have a car and I hate driving it. I hate others having cars and driving them. I hate public transport being ignored over car infrastructure leaving them completely impractical. I hate our cities being ruined in order to work around cars, when metros are underground, and trains are overground but take way less space since they can take in way more people and transfer them way faster. I hate car accidents being one of the leading causes of death in my country. Fuck cars
I didn’t. Even when I lived an hour away from my job, it was about as fast by train as driving, and I could spend that time productively or relaxing instead of concentrating on.
If it takes twice as long without a car, that’s a problem that should be solved!
I’m 46, the parts of my life where I haven’t needed to use a car every day have been great for my physical and mental health … now I live too far from work I use a little 125 motorbike to commute, and it’s still much nicer than having to take a car. When I am forced to take a car, the one I have is small and economical.
I didn’t start figuring this out until I was 30, maybe you need a few more years to mature enough to throw off the consumerist mindset?
These people are ridiculous. They want to gaslight people who have to drive into thinking we’re bad people and when we call them out on the fact that there is no public transit infrastructure built they’re just like “well all people have to do is build the infrastructure!” Bitch where? And who? And how do we make them? And with what money? I’m so sick of hearing “you should drive a smart car because it makes sense for my DINK ass and I know what’s best”. My home is in an ocean of suburbia. They gonna just bulldoze a whole swath of homes to install a rail? They’ve been talking about installing a rail from DFW to Austin/Houston for the past 40 years and there was even room for it once upon a time. You can’t just say the magical solution is to just “build trains”. We don’t love our cars, these fuckcars people are just lunatics. As you point out the vast majority of them are almost certainly children. The rest are fortunate enough to have never experienced a place with poor public transit.
Absolutely, unfortunately those fuckers have dogpiled the shit out of me like I haven’t heard their shitty argument 100 times and as though they have something original and interesting to say. Puts you off saying anything that doesn’t exactly follow the hive mind.
To add on to other's stories- my cat will come and hop into my lap 100% of the times I call him, even on another floor, and I didn't even train him to do this, he just really likes my lap.
Sometimes he does cute stretches on the way to me, or makes mrrps and other sounds to tell me he's coming (and I assume ask if there might be treats, because one time he mrrp'd and I somehow remembered that there were treats that exact moment like two years ago) but yeah. Cats can come when you call them.
That’s really cute, especially the verbal communication. My dog would hop up onto the couch and just stare at me until I said “well, come on then”, and then he would throw his whole body down against my chest and cuddle. Pets are adorable.
In public places, my late father had assigned a specific short whistle tune to each child to identify our location (he'd whistle and each of us would answer via specific tune in turn). It also worked as a "distress" or "attention needed" sound if we did it without prompting.
This post has made me spend the last 20 minutes sounding out the word “genetically” in my head to see if it should have four or five syllables. I think I might even pronounce it differently in different contexts.
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