To all the folks replying that someone will fill the gap in front of you: that’s the point. It isn’t about reaction time. It’s about letting traffic flow easier, not fighting with each other.
It removes the need for your fellow drivers to feel a tension when it is time to switch lanes, to not have to make a risky maneuver. You get to relax when driving because now you aren’t competing to get to your destination, and you can feel more confident others are not going to accidentally hit you in a desperate attempt to go where they are going.
That impatient driver behind you? They will get around you and play the rat race. Let them. Most drivers don’t do that unless you are much obviously slower than traffic flow. Let people win the game they are playing. You are making it generally safer, and your consistency on the road helps them make decisions easier.
I’ve been doing this for about 10 years. No accidents, no cause of accidents, no angry honkers, none of that nonsense. Try it for a week! Give others space to move. Watch traffic jams ease up a little around you. It’s very neat. My space clears spaces so I can move easier after people get in front of me. I’ve seen others follow my example (or be their own example).
You beautiful zen traffic wave surfer you. This, a thousand times this. Somewhere on the web there is a great video of a guy doing this pretty effectively. I guess it's maybe five years old now but worth a watch.
If everyone could just relax out there, some of those traffic standing waves would diffuse away to nothing. Ahhh...
When I get in bad traffic and struggle against the urge to tailgate I play a game where I try and give enough space to where I just roll up to the car in front of me as it is starting to move again. This gives me a time-local goal to aim at instead of fixating on supposed "bad actors" I might want to judge instead.
At least in my city in my commute this morning (~30 minutes), I was forced to hard brake 3 times to avoid having an accident with someone wedging themself in at the end of an exit lane.
I find the problem isn't people merging into your lane in front of you, but doing so badly (ie not leaving a safe amount of space behind their rear bumper and your front bumper).
Are you allowing enough space in front of you for cars to merge in without wedging themselves in front of you?
That's the worst problem I see around here -- cars in the freeway running bumper to bumper, and then a block of 3 or 5 cars also running bumper to bumper trying to force their way in, but none of the cars really leave enough room for a smooth merge, so the cars on the freeway end up hitting the brakes when the merging cars force their way in.
There are some advantages to driving a semi in traffic:
- Lots of gears to choose from and massive torque in order to find that perfect 'idle forward' speed.
- Far more comfortable ride then a car, it's not even close.
- Radio communication with trucks ahead, so you know what's happening ahead and which lane to be in long before the cars figure this out.
- Visibility over the top of vehicles in front (except another truck, obviously).
I think the only thing better than a semi for heavy traffic might be a luxury car with adaptive cruise and a little roof-mounted drone-cam that you could launch to check out the view ahead (though this sounds like something Homer Simpson would dream up). Your own little personal traffic copter/R2D2, with a recharging dock on the roof. Someone please tell Elon Musk to make this a priority for new Teslas. It could even check out side streets in cities and find quicker routes.
I was thinking stop-and-go traffic, which is murder.
Heavy load = longer stop distance = lengthier minimum safe following distance
Minimum safe following distance > 1 car length = motorists darting in front of semis
Rinse and repeat. Assuming a heavy load and ignorant motorists, there's no way to avoid constant unsafe situations. As soon as you create a new safe gap, someone slides in.
So, no. It's terrible. (And I'm not even mentioning the additional gear shifts)
This comes up often, but you gotta think about what would happen if everyone suddenly tripled the gap they leave in front of them. The same road surface would suddenly have 1/3 the throughput. I shudder to think what kind of traffic jam / commute time that would lead to at the edges of the road network.
I do appreaciate when people drive densely packed and I try to do the same (up to a safety limit). For merging there are turn signals.
> The same road surface would suddenly have 1/3 the throughput
At the same velocity. It's quite possible that with the increased gap and increased flow (less stop & go), you could get higher velocity out of it to compensate. Maybe not 3x the velocity, but 2x gap and 2x velocity seems within the realm of possibility (a 60mph road that slows down to 30mph because people are driving stupidly).
Edit: on the low end, this seems quite possible. Increased gaps raising the mean velocity from 5mph to 15 or 20mph.
This is super interesting! As kind of expected, there's a middle zone that balances out density and velocity. In the context of what we were talking about, the fourth "Basic Statement" jumps out at me: "If one of the vehicles brakes in unstable flow regime the flow will collapse."
The problem is people trying to maintain ANY fixed gap. If they learned to treat the gap as a spring and then use their mind as a damper while still maintaining safety, they can cancel out many of the pathological oscillations and standing waves that disrupt traffic flow. This task is also much easier when people learn to monitor the road further ahead than just the bumper and taillights they are following.
Following too closely removes any margin for error and so requires you to either mimic every change in speed or create dangerous conditions.
I am disappointed in this challenge on two levels: (1) A great many solutions fail to actually produce proper CSV: what would you do if any of the names or arbitrary credit card number inputs had quotes or commas in them? Big waste of time to roll your own, and you would have failed to prevent fraud likely without even realizing it. (2) Our JSON-dumping hackers didn't put quotes or commas in the strings to foil do-gooders.
Looks like you completely missed the point of the "challenge". This is reproducing a real-world situation to figure out what solutions different devs will think of first.
Though I guess "complain about the situation" is a valid answer to that question.
In 2015, we continue to develop incorrect CSV parsing and production when there are ready solutions in the wild for the spec (http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4180.txt - 2005), such as Ruby's csv package, Perl's Text::CSV, CL's CL-CSV, and so forth. It's a solved problem. I quite understand this challenge, but this issue is important to me because this same print "%s,%s\n" stuff shows up in the wild from professional developers who have the time on their hands to use the right tool, some of which I have personally worked with. Perhaps, like in this challenge, they are under pressure to get their feature finished, and this is the first thing they think of because, after all, it's just "comma-separated values".
This challenge is especially amusing in that it, were it a real-world situation, involves people's financial welfare, and developers in a rush could very well have screwed it up. Isn't that cause for worry?
That did cross my mind - my solution used a full json parser (jq), and I did a quick grep for commas in name or creditcard fields before using a "%s,%s"-style solution to generate the CSV - if there had been any present, I would have fallen back to a slightly longer form of python -c 'import csv...'
Perhaps something like a Talk page on a MediaWiki platform? It would be out of the way but directly connected to the page you are on, a second set of comments accessible by a MetaTalk filter.
I can't speak for the other two systems compared, but to be clear, OP's examples involve more than "dictation and simple searches"; Siri also controls the device. Without entering the text messaging or email apps, one can tell the virtual secretary to read and write messages and emails. Assuming Siri understands your voice well enough.
Fun specific example at the lock screen after holding down the iPhone's button for a couple seconds: "Read the latest message from my wife to me." Then, still at the lock screen, "Reply to my wife I love you".
Maybe it's just my experience, but I did not care much for Siri until she allowed me greater control over my device. When she first came out, you could not ask her to read the screen; later, the program was able to toggle assisting configuration like VoiceOver by command.
Siri was essentially a curiosity for me until they allowed me greater control over the device, but I use my iPhone in exactly the way you've just described.
Along with "am I meeting with my physiotherapist today?", and "arrange an appointment with my doctor, physiotherapist and partner" at which point Siri creates the appointment in the calendar and sends an email invite to the parties mentioned. Assuming those people are in your contacts obviously.
This sentence really clued me into my problem with the essay. As I read it, I found myself tripping over the sentences, especially this one. I had to reread it in order to understand what the author was saying.
Today's punctuation rules may have awkward beginnings, but the rules are standard, familiar, and subconsciously expected. This actually improves the speed at which I can read. The author's style had several places that were difficult for me because I have been mentally trained on one set of road signs and meanings.
1. I think we should challenge the definition of "global variable". In what context is the variable global? The traditional definition is that the context is the whole program. However, in imperative OOP [1] code, I find that people just learned to hide their global variables in class instances. The whole program cannot access them, right? but every method in the class can and does, and all those mutations and side effects can lead to the kind of spaghetti code we all hated when there was no OOP. It's just global variables with extra sugar. And we can make copies of them, so the code is maybe one step better.
Imperative OOP often feels like one is pivoting behavior around the data.
FP feels like the data is flowing from one transformation to the next.
There is the "functional" part of it, too... where functions are highly composable. One creates new functions by combining old functions, and these may carry along with them important context (closures).
2. From what I've learned of Haskell -- and I'm a Haskell noob -- it lets you work with the side effecty real world. You can alter your hardware state. The key is that it specifically flags such side effects and encourages separation between more "pure" code and code that is "tainted" with the side effects.
[1] OOP is an abstraction and compatible with pure FP. You can model your class instances such that they are immutable and get all the benefits of OOP. FP contrasts better with imperative programming.
Brief rant whenever I read this tripe, and reading it afterward reminds me of psychobabble, but I am ranting against psychobabble anyway...
I thought the notion of willpower being a finite resource was debunked (http://lifehacker.com/5967249/your-willpower-is-only-a-finit...). If you believe your willpower is finite, then it is finite; if you believe it is infinite and powerful, then it is infinite and powerful. This "finite resource" notion is a feel-good easy path out, a way to comfort yourself that it is okay that your will failed you because, after all, you only had so much.
I see this article confuses willpower with motivation. Willpower is what you use when your motivation has waned. Willpower is a tool to help you rekindle the fires of motivation or to press forward regardless because of an oath you made to yourself.
It comes down to what you believe, what mental constructs you have put into place, to inhibit or strengthen your willpower. You have the power to choose, every moment.
A theory I call demands theory is a little more nuanced. Willpower is a limited resource that gets exercised whenever we are overcoming psychological resistance to fulfill demands. What Carol Dweck demonstrated in my view is that its quite easy to frame context differently so that there is less psychological resistance toward doing a task. This means you won't have to exert your limited willpower resources.
To give an example, if you believe something will be fun, you will have less mental resistance toward the activities, so you will last longer. If you feel like something will be hard and unpleasurable, most people won't last as long as they use up more willpower to continue. The trick then is how can people adjust their mental orientation toward their day to day activities in such a way that their will power is maximized.
Now that is fascinating. It explains a lot of the really depressing studies about how we perceive shows like The Biggest Loser and how it makes us both less sympathetic to overweight people as well as makes us perceive that exercise and health are not fun http://health.usnews.com/health-news/blogs/eat-run/2013/01/2...
Thanks. Hmm. So you are saying that the Baumeister study doesn't apply because if we believe we power through we can? I feel awfully tinker bell about the issue now :-)
"Some of his further studies have suggested that willpower is fueled by glucose—which helps explain why our determination crumbles when we try to lose weight. When we don’t eat, our glucose drops, and our willpower along with it. “We call it the dieter’s catch-22: In order to not eat, you need willpower. But in order to have willpower you need to eat,” says John Tierney, coauthor with Baumeister of Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength."
I believe you may be saying that if your goal is to make somebody say "Yes", then the toolset adequate for the job is one based around manipulation. One may manipulate through direct force, emotional means, whatever it takes. It is a waste of time and irritating -- perhaps condescending in that it is an obvious manipulation? -- to say things like, "Let me first say I've learnt a lot from you, I really appreciated your view on this that and that. I think you are smart person blablabla" before getting to the point. Like you said, it distracts from the actual important points of the argument. In fact, such an approach towards discussion is, as you point out, counter-productive.
You're right. It's manipulation. Building consensus, too, is a form of manipulation. Some of it is irritating, especially if it is delivered in the form you quoted. My hackles rise, too!
From your comment, I am seeing that the real issue is when the manipulation is overt, when someone expresses something in a way that is clearly intended to push you in a direction rather than actually respect and accept your buy-in.
But that leads me to seeing that this really just another form of pathos. In a conversation, the average person wants to feel respected, that their opinion has merit. This is part of rhetoric. In fact, where action and tone are lacking, some people may genuinely need the additional words of appreciation that set you and me off. My point is that logos is not the only valid appeal, and I would propose that nobody is absolutely rational, meaning that degrees of the other forms of persuasion are acceptable and useful means.
To address your first point, all persuasion is manipulation. Somewhere I read that all speech is a form of persuasion, though the reasoning behind this assertion may be a bit contrived. Instead of elaborating on that point, I want to suggest instead that even if it is not "all", even if it is just "most", we could see instead that manipulation is not an evil in itself. Clearly there is nothing wrong with asking somebody where they would like to eat as your means to coerce them into joining you for dinner. Obtaining consensus or bringing someone to agree with you is not, itself, an evil or even irritating.
Armed with all the appeals of rhetoric and following these steps with respect to the audience's needs, I think the four steps listed at the top of the thread are acceptable means in polite society of persuasion, or, if you prefer, manipulation.
Addendum: I just tried the four steps. Was this post a successful example? Did I overdo it?
It removes the need for your fellow drivers to feel a tension when it is time to switch lanes, to not have to make a risky maneuver. You get to relax when driving because now you aren’t competing to get to your destination, and you can feel more confident others are not going to accidentally hit you in a desperate attempt to go where they are going.
That impatient driver behind you? They will get around you and play the rat race. Let them. Most drivers don’t do that unless you are much obviously slower than traffic flow. Let people win the game they are playing. You are making it generally safer, and your consistency on the road helps them make decisions easier.
I’ve been doing this for about 10 years. No accidents, no cause of accidents, no angry honkers, none of that nonsense. Try it for a week! Give others space to move. Watch traffic jams ease up a little around you. It’s very neat. My space clears spaces so I can move easier after people get in front of me. I’ve seen others follow my example (or be their own example).