I thought I'd say something meaningful. Instead, it is more of a rant:
This is hard to discuss without context: country, big city, town/village, and freeway.
Big city driving: in a well-lit city, one could almost get by with just the position lights on. I say almost because of 1. driving in unusually dark areas and 2. regular headlights project light at a good angle to catch reflection off of cyclists. My point is that not much light is needed. Also, anyone driving in the city with their high-beams or fog lights on should be ticketed at an increasing rate.
town/village is roughly the same as a big city, but with less public lighting and fewer marked crossings. So, basically, this is just a reasonable low bean scenario. I'd argue that setting up for this situation and accepting it for the big city is good enough.
Country driving: bright and wide. Doing 80-100 km/h+ in the country and I want to see far and wide. Great use of high beams. Auto high beams do not function well enough to respect other drivers and drivers seems to have forgotten what it means when someone flashes their high beams. I attribute that to ignorant/lazy/entitled drivers
freeway: Need to be able see directly ahead and be visible to other drivers. Low beams when other are around, high beams when no one is in front of me and the road isn't lit.
Trucks vs cars: As we all know, headlights on trucks are too high compared to small cars. While this can be mitigated by not looking directly at the lights. A problem with this: If I'm at an intersection and there is a truck with bright lights that I am trying not to look at, I miss the immediate area near the truck with a possible pedestrian. Plus the contrast of the bright lights hides dark pedestrians. My quick Chat GPT'ing says that physically lowering the lights would not decrease the effectiveness of retroreflectors, so mounting the lights lower seems like a good option. There could even be separate high beams that are mounted physically higher when needed.
We all know this is bad and we just can't work together to get something done. Not to mention that even if there are new standards, it would take 10+ years for them to really matter because of the existing cars on the roads.
> Also, anyone driving in the city with their high-beams or fog lights on should be ticketed at an increasing rate.
At least in my neck of the woods, it seems like lighting enforcement has gone from slim to none. I regularly see vehicles with only one of three brake lights functioning... and sometimes I've seen the same vehicle with the same lighting issue for several months.
If there's no enforcement on vehicle lighting from behind, there's definitely not going to be much on the front lighting, because an officer would need to see the lighting, turn around and give chase. Well, that or inspections, but the vast majority doesn't want inspections because they cost money.
All that said, what's the problem with fog lights? They're not actually useful, but they don't present a safety hazard and it's always fun to wonder how long a car has had one fog light out, and if they'll figure out how to turn the fog lights off before the other one burns out.
I'm in the big city. I've experimented with using my running/position lights only on slower, congested streets at night when the street is well illuminated. I know I have a car with annoyingly bright LED headlights, so it feels like I'm being courteous. The LED position lights are surprisingly bright too, but at least it' s diffuse. When the street is less illuminated or traffic is more sparse my regular headlights go on.
This does not influence the behavior of oncoming traffic with high-beams on, whether due to ignorance, entitlement, or because their low-beams are burnt out and they can't be bothered, or afford to replace them.
It's also not legal to do what I do, so it's ironic that I'm probably at higher risk for ticketing for not driving with headlights than people with high-beams or broken lights (to be fair not a lot of people get ticketed for basic violations in STL city).
I do wish I could have them angled down on demand, or follow a set level point regardless of vehicle tilt (like on hills, speedbumps, etc). They do have a feature where the lights steer into the direction of travel, if only they did that vertically too.
I like the honesty aspect of it so that I can choose to (possibly) ignore the response. If they were forbidden and people posted the same $AI response without the disclaimer, I'd be more easily deceived.
In other Start Menu pain, I like to press WIN and then type to open an app. There is a small delay and it commonly misses the first character, which triggers an Edge Internet search. I have to use a 3rd party app to open apps because of that stupid start menu.
While I find Bluey fun and so does my child, in many of the episodes the children are loud and frantic. I've also noticed my kid whining in the same way Bluey and Bingo do.
In trying to find calmer shows, two I like are Tumble Leaf and Guess How Much I Love You. Tumble Leaf has a stop-motion look and every episodes involves finding and object and using it to solve a problem. Guess How Much I Love You has a watercolor look and is about a rabbit family and pretty calm. I don't enjoy those as much as Bluey, but I enjoy how my kid behaves after watching them.
I'd like to find more like those two if anybody knows any.
Low-e windows coatings have been around since the 70's. They have gotten better over the decades, but I can't say how much they've changed. When buying new windows, this is a very common and cheap option.
I got a new house recently. The default windows were pretty good already. My wife still did not like the amount of light coming in. I still wanted some. So we compromised. We bought reflective window tinting. About 500 bucks to do the front of the house. Will do the back next. Easily reduced the temp in house by quite a bit.
The other thing the builder did foam insulation of the garage doors and walls. Easily 20F difference from my previous house in the same area. Reflective ridged insulation in the attic too. My old house 110 easily, in the summer. It is basically the same temp as the outside now. Cost for the AC is basically half what my pervious house was. I would go for awnings at this point as it is basically one of the few things left I could realistically do. But HOA...
On my Windows 11 laptop, there's a short delay from when I press Win and when it accepts keystrokes. It commonly misses the first letter I type, making Win + fire (for Firefox) do an internet search in Edge for "ire".
That's the Win key ad auction delay, they're just getting you used to it. Every time you press that key an auction is held for your eyes, to be sold to the highest bidder.
Normally something like this should be ended with a </sarcasm> tag but I'm fairly sure this is soon to be - if not already - more fact than fiction.
The solution? Ditch Windows. The pot is boiling, the frog has long since passed so bury it and move to greener pastures (no, not those used in the XP background). There is a Linux waiting for you, somewhere - take your pick and run with it.
I’ve recently installed Win11 on my new computer, and immediately discovered Microsoft decided to implement keyboard lag in that version. Luckily, that “animation effects” checkbox did the trick for me.
This is hard to discuss without context: country, big city, town/village, and freeway.
Big city driving: in a well-lit city, one could almost get by with just the position lights on. I say almost because of 1. driving in unusually dark areas and 2. regular headlights project light at a good angle to catch reflection off of cyclists. My point is that not much light is needed. Also, anyone driving in the city with their high-beams or fog lights on should be ticketed at an increasing rate.
town/village is roughly the same as a big city, but with less public lighting and fewer marked crossings. So, basically, this is just a reasonable low bean scenario. I'd argue that setting up for this situation and accepting it for the big city is good enough.
Country driving: bright and wide. Doing 80-100 km/h+ in the country and I want to see far and wide. Great use of high beams. Auto high beams do not function well enough to respect other drivers and drivers seems to have forgotten what it means when someone flashes their high beams. I attribute that to ignorant/lazy/entitled drivers
freeway: Need to be able see directly ahead and be visible to other drivers. Low beams when other are around, high beams when no one is in front of me and the road isn't lit.
Trucks vs cars: As we all know, headlights on trucks are too high compared to small cars. While this can be mitigated by not looking directly at the lights. A problem with this: If I'm at an intersection and there is a truck with bright lights that I am trying not to look at, I miss the immediate area near the truck with a possible pedestrian. Plus the contrast of the bright lights hides dark pedestrians. My quick Chat GPT'ing says that physically lowering the lights would not decrease the effectiveness of retroreflectors, so mounting the lights lower seems like a good option. There could even be separate high beams that are mounted physically higher when needed.
We all know this is bad and we just can't work together to get something done. Not to mention that even if there are new standards, it would take 10+ years for them to really matter because of the existing cars on the roads.
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