I don’t understand why you’re bringing up Obama. Nobody is defending him, and I think you might be inferring some sort of tribalistic defensiveness without any evidence. I see that sort of thing a lot, and I’ve never understood it.
Please correct me if I misunderstood the point you were trying to make.
The point I'm trying to make is that highly respected and even lauded individuals kill American citizens and people aren't generally afraid of them, so the fact that "they've shot and killed american citizens" on its own doesn't explain any fear. But I had misread the original question so my point was not quite relevant because the question was stated with justified fear already implied.
No longer interacting with your peers but an LLM instead? The knowledge centralized via telemetry and spying on every user’s every interaction and only available thru a enshitified subscription to a model that’s been trained on this stolen data?
Asking questions on SO was an exercise in frustration, not "interacting with peers". I've never once had a productive interaction there, everything I've ever asked was either closed for dumb reasons or not answered at all. The library of past answers was more useful, but fell off hard for more recent tech, I assume because people all were having the same frustrations as I was and just stopped going there to ask anything.
I have plenty of real peers I interact with, I do not need that noise when I just need a quick answer to a technical question. LLMs are fantastic for this use case.
this right here, not just overmoderated but the mods were wrong-headed from the start believing that it was more important to protect some sacred archive than for users to have good experiences.
SO was so elite it basically committed suicide rather than let the influx of noobs and their noob questions and noob answers kill the site
It's funny, because I had a similar question but wanted to be able to materialize a view in Microsoft SQL Server, and ChatGPT went around in circles suggesting invalid solutions.
There were about 4 possibilities that I had tried before going to ChatGPT, it went through all 4, then when the fourth one failed it gave me the first one again.
You can't use the free chat client for questions like that in my experience. Almost guaranteed to waste your time. Try the big-3 thinking models (ChatGPT 5.2 Pro, Gemini 3 Pro, and Claude Opus 4.5).
I had the opposite experience. I learned so much from the helpful people on StackExchange sites, in computer science, programming, geology, and biology.
Replying to my own comment surprised that everyone is latching on to just poor moderation on a single site and ignoring the wealth of other options for communication and problem solving like slack communities, Reddit, blog posts, running a site like SO but with a better/different moderation policy, the list goes on and on.
I’ve seen this trend a number of times on HN that feels strawman-y. Taking the worst possible example of the status quo but also yada-yadaing or outright ignoring the massive risks of the tech du jour.
The comment I’m replying to hand waves over “legal issues” and totally ignores the fact that this hypothetical (and idealized) version of AI fundamentally destroys core aspects of community problem solving and centralizes the existing knowledge into a black box subscription all for the benefit of a clunky UX and underlying product that has yet to be proven effective enough to justify all the negative externalities.
No; remarks like that have been vanishingly rare. The less-rare uses of "you fucking moron" or equivalent generally come from the person who asked the question, who is upset generally about imagined reasons why the question was closed (ignoring the reason presented by the system dialog). In reality, questions are closed for reasons described in https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 , which have been carefully considered and revisited over many years and have clear logic behind them, considering the goals of the site.
It's just that those goals (i.e. "we want people to be able to search for information and find high-quality answers to well-scoped, clear questions that a reasonably broad audience can be interested in, and avoid duplicating effort") don't align with those of the average person asking a question (i.e. "I want my code to work").
I have heard so many times about how people get insulted for asking questions on SO. I have never been shown it actually happening. But I have seen many examples (and been subjected to one or two myself) of crash-outs resulting from learning that the site is, by design, much more like Wikipedia than like Quora.
Quite a large fraction of questions that get closed boil down to "here's my code that doesn't work; what's wrong"? (Another large fraction doesn't even show that much effort.) The one thing that helped a lot with this was the Staging Ground, which provided a place for explicit workshopping of questions and explanation of the site's standards and purpose, without the temptation to answer. But the site staff didn't understand what they had, not at all.
> It's just that those goals (i.e. "we want people to be able to search for information and find high-quality answers to well-scoped, clear questions that a reasonably broad audience can be interested in, and avoid duplicating effort") don't align with those of the average person asking a question (i.e. "I want my code to work").
This explains the graph in question: Stackoverflow's goals were misaligned to humans. Pretty ironic that AI bots goals are more aligned :-/
Well, yes. Most people want to be given a fish, rather than learning how to fish.
That is not a reason for fishing instructors to give up. And it is not a reason why the facility should hand out fish; and when the instructors go to town and hear gossip about how stingy they are, it really just isn't going to ring true to them.
> Well, yes. Most people want to be given a fish, rather than learning how to fish.
Understood, but that is not what SO represented itself as. They called themselves a Q and A site, not a wiki of fact-checked information.
From what you are saying, they pretended to give fish when in reality only teaching fishing. Users went their because they were told that they could get fish, and only found out once there that there was no fish, only fishing lessons.
Blame lies squarely on SO, not on users. If SO clarified their marketing as "Not a Q and A site" then we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Right now, the only description of the SO site is on stack-exchange, and this is what it says on the landing page, front and center:
> Understood, but that is not what SO represented itself as. They called themselves a Q and A site, not a wiki of fact-checked information.
At the beginning, even Atwood and Spolsky didn't really know what "a Q&A site" is. They didn't have a precedent for what they were making; that was the point of making it. Even Quora came later, and it's useless now because they didn't get it.
It turns out that a Q and A site actually fundamentally is pretty close to "a wiki of fact-checked information", just with Qs as a prompting and labeling mechanism. (Which really isn't that surprising; if you've seen e.g. science books for children in Q&A format, you'll notice the Qs are generally unrealistic for children to ask. I remember one that was along the lines of "is it true you can get electricity from a lemon?", used to introduce a description of a basic copper-zinc battery cell.)
By 2011 or so, at least Atwood had figured this out, and was publicly blogging to explain it. By 2014, a core group of users clearly grasped the idea, but was still struggling to figure out what kinds of close reasons actually keep questions on target (and were also struggling with a ton of social issues in general).
> Right now, the only description of the SO site is on stack-exchange
Would you mind linking me to an example or two? I've seen this type of complaint often on HN, but never really observed that behavior on SO, despite being active on there for 15 years. I guess maybe I was part of the problem...?
The person taking offense was member of C# language design team mind you.
There are several such cases. This was particular question I stumbled upon because I wondered the same question and wanted to know what were the reasons. This was perfect Lucky Ten Thousand [2] moment for him if he wanted.
You're right - those comments are unacceptable. Honestly, it's out of character for that person. I've deleted them but will preserve them here:
> "Why not?" questions are vague and hard to answer satisfactorily. The unsatisfactory answer is: did you personally do the work to add this feature to the language? The language is open-source, you want the feature, so why have you not done it yet? Seriously, why not? You've asked a why not question, and you should be able to answer it yourself. Now ask every other person in the world why they did not add the feature either, and then you will know why the feature was not added. Features do not appear magically and then need a reason to remove them!
> Moreover, you say that the feature is simple and fits well, so it should be straightforward and simple for you do to the work, right? Send the team a PR!
I think PP means it's more in the tone and passive-aggressive behavior ("closed as duplicate") than somebody explicitly articulating that.
It's a paradox of poor communication that you cannot prove with certainty that there is an intent behind it. There is always the argument that the receiver should have known better (and bother checking local news at Alpha Centauri).
The person best qualified to assess the relevance of any previous answers is often the OP. Far too often, the already-existing answer is years old and either no longer the best answer, or doesn't actually address a major part of the question. Or it simply was never a very good answer to begin with.
What would be the harm in pointing out previous answers but leaving the question open to further contributions? If the previous answer really is adequate, it won't attract further responses. If it's not, well, now its shortcomings can be addressed.
Closing duplicates makes as much sense as aggressive deletionism on Wikipedia. It generally means that somebody missed their true calling on an HOA board somewhere.
> The person best qualified to assess the relevance of any previous answers is often the OP.
The purpose of having the answer there is not to solve the OP's problem. It is to have a question answered that contributes to the canon of work. This way, everyone can benefit from it.
> What would be the harm in pointing out previous answers but leaving the question open to further contributions?
Scattering the answers to functionally the same question across the site. This harms everyone else who wants an answer to that question, and is then subject to luck of the draw as to whether they find the actual consensus high-quality answer.
You might as well ask: what would be the harm in putting a comment in your code mentioning the existence of a function that serves your purpose, but then rewriting the code in-line instead of trying to figure out what the parameters should be for the function call?
> Closing duplicates makes as much sense as aggressive deletionism on Wikipedia.
This analogy makes no sense. The Wikipedia analogue is making page synonyms or redirects or merges, and those are generally useful. "Deletionism" is mainly about what meets the standard for notability.
Scattering the answers to functionally the same question across the site. This harms everyone else who wants an answer to that question, and is then subject to luck of the draw as to whether they find the actual consensus high-quality answer.
So instead, it's considered preferable that the best possible answer never be allowed to emerge, unless by sheer coincidence the best answer just happened to be the one that was accepted the first time the question was asked, several years ago.
There's really no need for us to rehash SO rules/policy debates that have raged since day one. The verdict seems to have more-or-less delivered itself.
> So instead, it's considered preferable that the best possible answer never be allowed to emerge, unless by sheer coincidence the best answer just happened to be the one that was accepted the first time the question was asked, several years ago.
What? No. The canonical target isn't closed. So go write the new answer there. The answer acceptance mark is basically irrelevant, and the feature ill-conceived.
Except usually there are dozens of answers already; the best possible answer has emerged; and people keep writing redundant nonsense for the street cred of having an answer on a popular Stack Overflow question.
> The verdict seems to have more-or-less delivered itself.
We do not care that people don't want to come and ask new questions. There are already way, way too many questions for the site's purpose. The policy is aimed at something that you don't care about. The result is a "verdict" we don't care about.
I will say that I had questions erroneously closed as duplicates several times, but I always understood this as an honest mistake. I can see how the asker could find that frustrating and might feel attacked... but that's just normal friction of human interaction.
The part where you don't talk to anyone else, just a robot intermediary which is simulating the way humans talk, is part of UX. Sounds like pretty horrifying UX.
How is it much different than trading say a bar for livestream? For any org if you can remove the human meatware you should otherwise you are just making a bunch of busywork to exlude people from using your service.
Just through the act of existing meatware prevents other humans from joining. The reasons may be shallow or well thought out. 95+% of answers on stack overflow are written by men so for most women stack overflow is already a hellscape.
If companies did more work on bias (or at least not be so offensive to various identities) that benefit, of distributing knowledge/advice/RTFM, could be even greater.
Uh, livestreams are awful for developing shared communities relative to bars and other physical social spaces. Much of human communication is sub-verbal, and that kind of communication is necessary for forming trusted long term bonds.
Also, excluding people is nowhere near the worst sin in social spaces. Excluding people who don’t share common interests or cultural context often improves the quality of socializing. Hanging out with my friends that I’ve known for 20 years produces much more fruitful conversations than hanging out with my friends plus a dozen strangers competing for my attention.
The replies to this comment are very telling. Everyone is highlighting various desires and issues with cars:
- Cars are dangerous to people not in cars
- Cars require your undivided attention (and even that isn't fool-proof)
- Cars are inaccessible: age, eyesight, control operation, etc.
- There's a lot of traffic (iow there's a lot of cars)
What people are expressing a desire for is more robust public transit and transportation facilities that protect everyone: peds, drivers, cyclists, etc.
The best way to solve all of these problems, totally ignoring self-driving for a moment, is to reduce the total number of vehicle miles traveled. Reduce the number of car trips. Reduce the length of car trips. If there are less cars, there is less danger from cars. If there are less cars, there is less traffic. The only way to have less cars is to provide alternatives: street cars, bike trails, pedestrian facilities, sub-regional buses and trains, inter-regional trains (or buses).
Literally all of these problems get significantly better when there are less drivers on the road. Trains can provide the inter-regional travel that allows you to work, read, hangout, sleep, etc. without the constant danger of having to watch the road the entire time.
Self-driving cars will certainly be useful, but I think people are really missing the point that the root of the problem is cars specifically. They can (and will!) still be available for people that truly want or need them, but harm reduction is the name of the game. Even changing a portion of your trip from car to something else can make a huge difference! It doesn't have to be door-to-door, it could be that you drive to a park-n-ride. Or you stop driving to the local downtown in the spring, summer, and fall.
Most of the people in this comment section want better public transit. It can be made to work even if the goal is to go skiing or mountain biking once you arrive. Cars need to stop being the default and become the exception. It's cheaper, more efficient, safer, and healthier.
> What people are expressing a desire for is more robust public transit and transportation facilities that protect everyone: peds, drivers, cyclists, etc.
I'm going to take a guess here that you're in a bubble. Most people don't give more than a passing thought to protecting anybody else on the road but themselves and their own loved ones. You could say enlightened self interest means this should extend to random strangers, but I bet that as a practical matter it does not. I'd even go farther and suggest that the largest plurality of people who support public transit want it so that it will take other people off the road, not them.
There’s plenty of evidence that traffic is almost exclusively induced demand and that as you build other facilities and expand existing ones that more people use them. “Just one more lane bro”, etc.
America tends to be car-centric because that’s the only perceived option.
People that want more public transit probably never did public transit. It took me a few horrible interactions on a public transit and some disgusting experience in car share to never support anything “communist”. Specially when you get kids.
If you don't like sharing space with other people, you want a private room on a train.
These cars and their supporting infrastructure should cost more than a private room on a train because they are less efficient and have more negative externalities than a private room on a train.
A train can't take me to the beach. It can't take me camping away from civilization. It can't haul lumber from a hardware store so I can build a treehouse.
I love trains, but let's not pretend there is a perfect Venn diagram of overlap between what their use cases are.
Trains can take you to the beach and away from civilization. Build a station where you want to go. At one point trains were the most practical way to get to national parks.
How often are you building treehouses that you need to pay hundreds of dollars extra a month to justify the cost, versus a one-time delivery fee?
You must be an American, because plenty of trains exist to bring people to nature elsewhere. You know, when you drive a car to a nature place, you put it into a parking lot, then you are no longer in the car, right? Same works for trains.
Man I love this silly debate. The original comment just wanted to travel 500 miles to "somewhere" and most instances of "somewhere" that people travel to could be accessed by train.
Also no one has said that no one is allowed to drive ever again anywhere. I'm trying to be generous but the victim complex is crazy.
> but let's not pretend there is a perfect Venn diagram of overlap between what their use cases are.
I never said anything of the sort and I'm not pretending that at all. You're creating a strawman. The comment I was responding to said this:
> I'd love to get in my car and go to sleep for a couple of hours or read a book whilst it drives me somewhere. Imagine if it could even pull over and charge up without any kind of intervention too. You could get in your car, and get a full nights sleep whilst it drive you somewhere 500 miles away.
That's a train. Most instances of "somewhere" can be accessed by train. Or by a train to do the long miles and then other modes of transit once you're closer.
My overall stance is that there's a lot more overlap between why folks want a super expensive self-driving car and more robust public transit and better support for multi-modal transit. I've not pretended anything like you've claimed.
> Or by a train to do the long miles and then other modes of transit once you're closer
Of your many points in various posts, this is maybe the only point I'm really on board with. Amtrak already supports this, even. My car can drive me to the train and then the train can do the long haul, and at the other end my car will drive me off the train and to the destination.
Still need waaaay more rail routes than we have now, though, so this is a dream for a century from now, not something in my lifetime.
This isn’t strictly directed at you, but I’m saddened that HN is immediately ready to dream big when it comes to solving hard problems and making the world a better place in spaces like AI, crypto, and technology in general. But suddenly shuts down over things as simple as trains, buses, and bike lanes.
There’s plenty of examples of guerrilla urbanism that I think align closely to the hacker ethos. Even more these problems are very solvable and can net huge gains in metrics without having to “dream for a century”.
> waaaaay more rail routes
It’s actually much simpler, Amtrak just needs right of way along with some other straight forward regulations to help balance freight and transit on America’s railroads.
Amtrak has also been doing great at incremental expansion and brining back (or increasing!) ridership just in the 5 years since the pandemic in a number of areas like Chicago to Milwaukee, and in the PNW.
The defeatist attitude isn’t what I expect from HN. You already found the best piece of actionable advice which is to look for incremental ways you can adjust your life to be different. My wife and I hardly drive anymore. Most of our trips: her work, groceries, restaurants, most leisure activities, etc are now by bike. We live in the suburbs too, a full 10 miles (20-30min drive and across an interstate) from the city’s downtown.
Cars are only perceived as necessary in America bc it is assumed that they are. There are many small and safe ways to shed the car dependence and they’ve all been huge positives to my life. We’re happier, healthier, building more community, spending less money on gas and maintenance. It’s nice.
I live in Manhattan, and don't own a car, so I get where you're coming from. The reality here is that America doesn't like trains and isn't going to build trains in any kind of a timeframe that's helpful to me. I'm about to move to Westchester, but I need to get to the Upper West Side every day. Yes, I can take the train from Westchester, but it goes into Grand Central, so then I need to take another train from there. And I'll have my kid with me.
So my options are:
1. Drive, walk, or bike with my kid to the train station in Westchester, ride to grand central, switch to subway, drop her off at school, then take the subway to my office. Total time about 90 mins.
or
2. Drive 35-45 mins.
I'll be driving.
There's talk of having one of the train lines go into Penn instead of Grand Central, with stops on the Upper West Side! But that'll be a decade or more, if it ever happens, and it won't be relevant to me anymore at that point.
This is better solved by leveraging more traditional forms of transportation. Making biking, walking, and various forms of transit easier, safer, and more effective. Cars, whether self-driving or not, are in direct opposition to this.
I'm sure they could be useful to folks that have the specific use-case for it, but the vast vast majority of trips in a person's day-to-day are better solved by robust multi-modal options and public transit. The benefit there is that less drivers means that traffic is actually better for everyone.
I actually see this as a benefit! Cars take up a lot of space and so now there exists massive right of ways that can be used and modified for other transit modes. Take a lane away from personal cars and dedicate it to buses so they can run faster and avoid traffic. Remove some street parking spots and create a protected bike lane or a street market or something else. The extra space can be a huge boon. It’s pavement, basically a blank canvas imo.
This would be an absolute energy and efficiency nightmare. I hope to god this never ever happens.
> No sharing space with people on public transit.
If people really want their own private suites they should be paying thru the nose and ears for it. Cars are a worse version of this and the car-centric lifestyle is heavily subsidized by everything from taxes to people's lives (air pollution from ICEs yes, but tire pollution is actually worse in many ways and is made worse with heavier EVs).
This will not fix food deserts, it will make them worse. If your car isn't packed to capacity on every single trip, it is less efficient and worse than public transit.
Roads are awful. We should be trying to minimize them, not expand them.
Whatever ungodly sum you are prepared to pay, I'm certain the actual cost is yet higher.
cars are barely efficient in terms of time. In cost terms, cars are incredibly expensive once you add in infrastructure costs, insurance, fuel, the cost of land use, etc.
Public transit is efficient even outside areas of high density - see suburban Europe or India. Why are so many people here utterly car-brained?
Have you ever actually been to Europe? Public transit is pretty good in first-tier cities like Vienna / Stockholm / London where tourists spend most of their time. But out in the smaller cities and rural areas where regular people live there's very little public transit except for slow and inconvenient buses. So everyone drives. Or if they're too poor to afford a car then they just don't go anywhere.
This is my observation as well, it's also true in the USA. Places like Chicago and NYC have good public transit. You can easily live there without a car, in fact it's easier and certainly cheaper to not have to deal with owning a car. If you visted NYC and formed your impression of public transit in the USA based on that, it would be very wrong. Likewise you cannot assume that because Copenhagen has great public transit and bicycle infrastructure that all of Europe is like that. Get out to the smaller cities and towns and you'll find that many more people own cars and drive everywhere.
I get that most people just want short trips around a major city, but given we, I'm sure it's shocking, don't all live in places like that, or want to spend our time in places like that, it might behoove y'all to solve for other use cases if you want widespread adoption (or at least accept that it's ok to solve for those use cases).
Or, I guess, you can hope that everyone will suddenly decide that all they want is to live in modern Kowloon City because "roads are awful" or whatever memetic nonsense is trending on TikTok.
Public transit is a dream turned nightmare consistently for seventy-five years. Autonomy will be less efficient -- but not that much less efficient given closer car spacing, speed, and remote parking -- but it will be spectacularly more convenient and comfortable. I'm all for it. You'll survive the tire pollution.
That's one opinion. My opinion is public transport is phenomenal. It's relatively reliable (very in some places), generally clean and safe, low cost, encourages urban/high efficiency development, protects greenspace, and employees people.
I'm not sure where you live, but that doesn't match my experience at all. And I think most people agree given the overwhelming majority of people who choose to drive, notwithstanding traffic and parking. The declining public transit ridership in most metropolitan areas over time is well documented.[1] It's because in most places -- but evidently not where you live -- public transit sucks relative to private transportation and ride-hailing services. As discussed above, EV autonomy will only increase the difference.
Speak for yourself. I love my cars. For a relatively modest expense they allow me to go wherever, whenever I want and bring all my stuff with me. This is a miracle of modern civilization.
In most places it is not, which is a big drawback. Every week I hear on the news how the train shut down some stations or got massively delayed for random reasons. I couldn't possibly rely on that if I need to be at work at a specific time.
What are you talking about? In most cities public transport sucks, hardly goes anywhere, gets more expensive year after year, makes housing prices go up, and is slow and inflexible enough that people still end up needing cars to go around
The United States is freaking huge. By the time modern transportation arrived, people were already living all over the country in pockets every which where. We opted for cars and planes to cover the vast distances. And as it turns out, we have some of the best in the world of both of these - and in vast quantities.
We do have dense pockets. NYC, in particular, has a nice metro (it just needs to be cleaner and more modernized - but it's great otherwise).
Most countries are small. Their dense cities are well-served by public transit. America is just too spread out. Insanely spread out.
China is an exception in that, while a huge landmass, its large cities emerged as the country was wholesale industrializing. It was easy for them to allocate lots of points to infrastructure. And given their unmatched population size and density, it makes a lot of sense.
As much as I envy China's infrastructure (I've been on their metros - they're amazing!), it would be a supreme malinvestment here in the United States to try to follow in their footsteps. The situation we have here is optimal for our density and the preferences of our citizens. (As much as people love to complain about cars, even more people than those that complain really love their cars.)
Public transit in the US is probably going to wind down as autonomous driving picks up the slack. Our road infrastructure is the very best in the world - it's more expansive, comprehensive, and well-maintained than any nation on the planet. We'd be wise to double down. It can turn into a super power once the machines take over driving for us.
The fact that we have this extent of totally unmatched road infrastructure might actually turn out to be hugely advantageous over countries that opted for static, expensive heavy rail. Our system is flexible, last mile, to every address in the country. With multiple routes, re-routes, detours. Roads are America's central nervous system.
Our interstate system is flexible, and when cars turn into IP packets, we'll have the thickest and most flexible infrastructure in the world.
We've shit on cars for the last 15 years under the guise that "strong towns" are correct and that cars are bad. But as it may turn out, these sleeping pieces of infrastructure might actually be the best investment we've ever made.
Going to call this now: in 20 years' time, cars will make America OP.
Those things everything complains about - they'll be America's superpower.
The rest of the world with their heavy rail trains and public transit will be jealous. Our highways will turn into smart logistics corridors that get people and goods P2P at high speed and low cost to every inch of the country.
Roads are truly America's circulatory and nervous system.
I'm so stoked for this. I once fell for the "we need more trains meme" - that was a suboptima anachronism, and our peak will be 100x higher than expensive, inflexible heavy rail.
> The United States is freaking huge. By the time modern transportation arrived, people were already living all over the country in pockets every which where. We opted for cars and planes to cover the vast distances. And as it turns out, we have some of the best in the world of both of these - and in vast quantities.
You have this narrative precisely backwards.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious: the great sprawl that made us dependent on cars happened after cars got popularized.
Yes, the cities were already spread out relative to each other, but that distance can be covered with trains well enough. What made us need cars, and what cars encouraged, was a huge amount of spread within a city or metro area. If you sprawl out over a city such that population density is constantly low, then public transit and walking can't work effectively anymore, and everyone needs to own a car.
US cities that were already large and well populated before the advent of cars tend to be densely built. Their cores, at least, are walkable as a result. This is true even for non-major cities -- just google "streetcar suburbs" as an example.
Completely irrelevant. I'm not interested in public transport across vast areas from city to city, I can drive or fly for those (very rare) occasions.
Public transport is most useful for the hyper-local day-to-day movement. I'd just want good reliable public transport within my town and neighboring areas.
(Actually I'd prefer to just bike, which requires secure bike parking in all destinations. I can already bike anywhere in town, but my bike will get stolen if I stop anywhere to shop or eat, so I can't do that.)
Autonomous cars that move largely along the same route could form temporary "trains", or rather convoys, moving in a coordinated fashion. That would simplify navigation, reduce chances of accidents, reduce energy consumption, and definitely give the passengers more peace of mind during the commute.
Such convoys would split when needed, join together when needed, notify other convoys and drivers about their route and timing. This would alleviate traffic jams considerably even under heavy load.
At the same time, they would consist of cars and trucks that would be capable of moving completely separately outside highways.
This, of course, will require some kind of centralized control over entire convoys, and a way to coordinate them. Railways and airways definitely can offer examples of how to handle that.
> This, of course, will require some kind of centralized control over entire convoys, and a way to coordinate them. Railways and airways definitely can offer examples of how to handle that.
Not at all. A simple peer to peer protocol based on proximity and mixing in traffic data distributed like the national weather service will do just fine.
These convoys seem like a perfect example of swarm algorithms fitting well where you don’t need a central coordinator.
Within a convoy, yes. Between convoys, a dispatcher service could be beneficial, distributed and federated, again, like air traffic controllers and railway dispatchers. The same self-driving car companies that produce the software and require subscription could offer it.
> Roads are truly America's circulatory and nervous system.
Thanks to massive lobbying by car manufacturers that did their best to destroy all traces of public transit infrastructure that existed in the US before the country moved to car dependency.
It is true. The US has great car infrastructure. The US has a lot of airplanes. For longer distances both work very well.
We have terrible transit though, and there are many short trips where transit should work better than it doesn't work at all. However the subject here is vast distances and the US has those and does well.
Rubber ppm over some threshold safety level is a negative externality worth maybe a few billion in remediation, healthcare costs, etc. (As a society, we're still not convinced pulmonary health as impacted by particulate inhalation is important - which is a mistake. It absolutely is a big deal and negative externality driving a whole host of bad health outcomes.)
Malinvestment into public transit in a way that serves only a limited few of the population and that costs 10x the already high initial estimates is a negative drain on the balance sheet worth 500 billion or more. And this infra is woefully inflexible and static.
California HSR alone is already suboptimal vs. flights, and once we have long distance autonomous self-driving, that'll meet the same demand with 1/100,0000,000th the cost (if you average out the costs and benefits of self driving over all other routes).
I tend to expect better from HN commenters. I don't have an interest in having a discussion with such a callous and dismissive comment. I hope your day gets better.
Tire pollution is worse than tailpipe emissions and the full effects aren't known. You're dismissive of other people's and the environment's health and you're wrong.
Hell yeah man screw all of those people breathing the outside air from the car brakes. What losers. We'll just dump the pollution everywhere all the time instead of in specific areas where mitigation for everyone is easier and cheaper.
Screw the people in the nyc subway that don’t want to breathe in brake dust and also don’t wanna spend 100b+ digging up every single legacy station to accommodate full height platform doors
> Tire pollution is worse than tailpipe emissions and the full effects aren't known. You're dismissive of other people's and the environment's health and you're wrong.
Tire pollution is now as large or larger than tailpipe particulate pollution, but it’s not a complete apples-to-apples comparison.
Tail pipe pollution includes CO₂, NOx, SO₂, CO, and fine particulates (PM2.5 + PM10) and is strongly linked to asthma, heart disease, climate change.
Tire pollution on the other hand is microplastics, synthetic rubber particles, zinc, and volatile organic compounds. Toxic to aquatic life; long-term human health effects still being studied.
A typical ICE car will consume at least 500 gallons of petrol (gasoline) per 1 gallon of tire tread worn. The environmental impact per volume of tire is certainly greater, but it's not remotely five hundred times greater.
I'm not saying we should disregard the issue of tire pollution. But if it was as serious as you suggest, it would be making more headlines than it is.
Why wouldn’t it be 500 times greater? Gasoline is combusted for energy, converting most of it into mostly harmless byproducts; tire tread is just released as is.
The best evidence that tyre tread is significantly less consequential than gasoline consumption is that such criticisms overwhelmingly arise in discussions of electric cars.
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