"Before car usage approached 100% it would have been a tremendous gain to be one of the early car owners. The environment would have been built for a smaller scale and you would have been able to traverse it rapidly. For day to day life in well-populated areas that advantage has substantially eroded."
Actually, no. The early car owners had it terrible, not only were they expensive and broke down often, the roads were often little more than mud-drenched dirt tracks, with impassable bridges and cities choked with animal and pedestrian traffic. No stoplights or traffic laws, extreme chaos and very slow going. You can read some of the early coast-to-coast stories for how challenging it was.
The excellent vehicular infrastructure we have in the USA today is due precisely to the car usage being 80%+. With the mass adoption came freeways, stoplights, graded roads, drainage, bridges, all of it.
The problem with your argument is why would people buy cars if they were so terrible? While the infrastructure was obviously worse than today clearly they afforded tremendous advantages which motivated their adoption!
In the early days that advantage was the ability to rapidly traverse relatively developed areas with more convenience. Over time infrastructure and adoption chased each other, but now the most populated parts of the US are developed to the point that there's little way to ease congestion with more road infrastructure. The only way to grow is to sprawl into new cities.
For a long time in population centers the pattern was new car infra. -> more driving convenience -> more cars -> repeat. In cities that's running into bottlenecks.
Today people primarily buy cars out of necessity, but in areas where most people live congestion and a more sprawling environment has diminished much of the time saving advantage.
It was terrible. People bought cars anyway because it was still better than walking.
In 1919, the US Army ran a truck convoy from Washington DC to San Francisco. It took them 56 (!) travel days, driving 10 1/4 hours per day. The roads were lousy in 1919. But even then, it was better than a mule train.
People bought into cars early because they could get around quickly to more destinations, not because walking was uniquely awful.
In Philadelphia's paper in the early 1900s there was a daily column about "pleasure drive" routes and constant advertisements appealing to new drivers with destinations near the city.
That advantage of being able to "get out of the city" is still there, but it's further and further away. For day to day life the experience of walking / transit / biking in a pre-car US city or a modern US city is somewhat comparable in terms of time and enjoyment.
However US cities and suburbs, due to car-centric scale, allow more people to live on larger plots of land.
Walking was uniquely awful in many situations as soon as the alternative of cars were available. Peoples' options were "get a car", "suffer what you now realize is awful", or "don't do those things". Unsurprisingly, many people chose the first option.
You think they - we - chose wrong. To put it charitably, we who disagree with you do not feel the need of your opinion on what we should want and should choose.
If you have a better way, show us the better way, and make us want it. Don't tell us the advantages we experience from having cars don't exist. We live them. Don't tell us the parts we enjoy don't exist. We experience them. Don't lecture us, entice us with something we perceive as more valuable.
Cars were better than horses, not walking, and you conveniently forgot the "use the streetcar/bus" option. Why is that?
I lived in the suburbs from West Mass, I lived in downtown Boston, I lived in Manhattan. Guess where I was the most miserable?
> Don't tell us the advantages we experience from having cars don't exist.
The point is less about "cars vs no cars", but car-centric suburbia development vs higher density urban planning. Do you live in the suburbs? Have you ever considered how much your lifestyle is subsidized by those who live downtown? Would you be willing to keep your car if it meant having to pay for all its externalities and extra infrastructure costs?
> entice us with something we perceive as more valuable.
Ask anyone in Amsterdam (which was in the 70s on its way to become as car centric as most North American cities) if they would like to go back to their ways.
> Would you be willing to keep your car if it meant having to pay for all its externalities and extra infrastructure costs?
This is such a weird line of inquiry.
Yes! It is the largest single QoL improvement I have after my house.
Almost everyone who can afford it buys a car as soon as they can. Yes, even in the UK, even in Europe. It is such a huge boon.
If cars were made more expensive I would sooner work harder to keep the car than give it up.
I don't know what sort of answer you're expecting? Why would I possibly not want a car? The only reason I can think of is if it became so expensive that just paying a personal driver was cheaper.
First, kind of weird of you to associate the idea of having no car to losing your penis. I'd joke about it, but I learned to avoid making jokes about potential psychological issues.
Second, I don't think you are aware of how much of cities' financial troubles in North America are related to the budget imbalance between suburbs and downtowns.
Third, I'm talking about all the externalities. It's not just gas or street parking. It's also the cost of all those parking lots doing nothing productive. It's the health cost of having an overweight and sedentary population who can't even walk to get groceries. It's the cost of increased air pollution that brings hundreds of thousands of people to the hospital with respiratory issues. It's the cost to a city's economy that wastes a sizeable portion of its GDP to car traffic. Car owners pay only a tiny fraction of that.
It's not weird at all. Both vastly improve my quality of life. I could get by without either, but I'd rather not. I'll edit it out of my reply since you seem averse to analogy.
Cars are everywhere. American choices to have huge multi lane streets everywhere and parking lots the size of cities are optional.
It's a false dichotomy. Across Europe we have cars, even in London, a public transport mecca with tiny roads, >50% of households have cars.
They are great. Properly super useful. I think that people who deny that utility are ideological zealots to be honest.
Your car improves your quality of life. Every other car reduces your quality of life by a small delta: they reduce walkability and bikability, they are deadly, they cause traffic and slow down public transit, they reduce visibility, they are noisy, smelly and hot, they occupy space that is ugly, radiates heat and could be used for other purposes, and so on.
Let me put it this way: if I decide to walk to a restaurant, I would get there faster if there were no cars, and I would enjoy the terrace more if it wasn't for their noise or the ugliness of the parking lot. You can have your convenience, or I can have mine, but it isn't really possible to have both, at least not to the fullest extent.
And that's the problem we have to come to grips with: all the cars you don't drive make your life less pleasant. What is the balance? If the balance is that global quality of life is optimal when 10% of the population of a city has cars, who gets to be in that 10%?
I don't really agree with your premise because you are not incorporating the positive contributions of additional users.
Take the metro as an example. Each additional user is another person in my personal space, they could be smelly, they might mean that I have to stand or scrunch me up in a narrow seat. They make it slower for me to exit the station when there are queues. They could give me airborne diseases like COVID or whatever.
Those are the negatives.
But without that scale the metro isn't viable, you can't have a train system that only one person uses, so the additional people are useful. They fund it, they campaign to have it put in, etc etc.
The same is true of the road network. Yes, cars being parked on my road affect my quality of life, but the fact that other people drive increases my quality of life because we collectively pay for the road network, petrol stations, R&D into new car designs, we agree that street parking is collectively useful even if that blue car across the road is in the way for me personally, etc.
There is a critical point for both systems at which there are just too many people. I would argue that most humans don't actually enjoy huge population density and are just forced into it by economic factors (e.g. all of the best jobs in the UK are in London).
No one is denying the utility of cars. The argument is against (a) car dependency and (b) the fact that its total cost is not fully born by their owners.
Also, you can re-read my original comment. Notice the "the point is less about cars vs no cars, but car-centric suburbia development vs higher density urban planning" part, and please realize that talking about London has nothing to do with the original point.
Holy shit, talk about reading things out of context.
You, dear sir, have absolutely nothing in common with the average North American who lives in the suburbs. The question was not directed at you.
If you want to at least try to understand the context before jumping to give your opinion and share with us your psycho issues, try watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUeqxXwCA0
I am making the case that the advantages once enjoyed by cars have been substantially reduced, for day to day life where most people live, as most people need a car.
The irony of your argument is that very few people who want more car-light or car-free cities are "forcing" anything on anyone, but the inverse is absolutely not the case.
A tremendous amount of taxes are allocated only for highways or car-centric revenue. Federal and state politics prevents cities from putting that money elsewhere. Highways were plowed through US cities and are maintained there over the objection of city residents. States intervene to prevent cities from running bus priority lanes. Cars purchases are subsidized where bikes and transit passes are not. Federal road standards, which are applied in cities, are designed for cars and not pedestrians / bikes.
A prominent example is NYC being forced by NY State to cancel congestion pricing.
The list of ways car-centric decision making is forced on dense cities is very long. Very few people are trying to "ban cars" but are instead trying to let cities too dense for cars guide their fate.
Other common modes of transport that lack fixed schedule, route, or stops:
- biking
- micromobility (scooter-share, etc.)
- walking
- dial-a-ride transit options
But they have other cons as well. You need to have good bike lane infrastructure or to be confident taking the entire lane, whereas most everything is already created around the car or increasingly being created around the car (in the case of the developing world beginning its nascent highway networks). You have to have fair weather or be able to pack around gear like rainpants wherever you are going. You probably make use of the cargo capacity of your car once a week when you buy groceries and goods from stores that tend to size their products around that sort of interval of a trip. I ride my bike plenty but honestly when I go to the grocery store three blocks a way I am usually taking the car, because its easier when I realize oh crap I need milk, I need a gallon of vinegar, I need paper towels, I need toilet paper, I need olive oil, and that alone will overload the panniers and be nigh impossible to get on the bike, especially the paper products and their awkward bulk. I haven't used my panniers for groceries personally since I broke three eggs in a carton with them once. I either walk and grab a small handful of things or just take the car most times.
On first read, I was wondering why on earth did they not use a train? I looked it up and found this from a primary source:
> The principal objectives of the expedition were to servicetest the special-purpose vehicles developed for use in the first
World War, not all gf which were available in time for §uch U§e;
and to determine by actual experience the possibility and the
problems involved in moving an army across the continent, assuming
that railroad facilities, bridges, tunnels, etc. had been damaged
or destroyed by agents of an Asiatic enemy.
Another reason, not stated: The rail system melted down with the traffic load of World War 1. (Or with the government taking control, when they didn't know how to run a rail system.)
> In 1919, the US Army ran a truck convoy from Washington DC to San Francisco. It took them 56 (!) travel days, driving 10 1/4 hours per day.
They used the Lincoln Highway, which wasn't fully paved until the 1930s. In 1919, it was a (bad) dirt road except in cities. In 1919 there was an awful lot of space between cities, especially once you got west of Chicago (that not too far from the truth today, except you might say Omaha instead of Chicago). You can't really compare the convoy experience to walking-vs-driving in cities :)
Many early cars were large terrifying beasts. Huge wheels, engines and very noisy. Extremely expensive too. I totally understand with mud roads and low power densities of the time that is a logical design.
And what's going to happen long term with exploding Berlin rents? The only affordable rents will be out in the suburbs of Berlin, where you'll either have to drive in or spend 2-3x the time on a probably crowded train possibly standing room only. As in the example of Switzerland above, mass transit is a luxury for those able to pay high rents. Previously in Berlin this was subsidized by the rest of Germany and by price controls but the right-wing courts have pretty much gutted Berlin's price protections in favor of billion-euro property developers.
I lived in Germany for years without driving as well, because I could afford to live by the city center. But over half my colleagues drove because that's all they could afford to do, and you should try stepping out of your bubble and understand the pressures that force Germans to drive. They're not all just wanting to spend more time in their Audis.
First, I’m not representing all Germans here, just sharing my own experience which is a good counter-example to “life without a car is impossible”. I’m of course not arguing that car is unnecessary for everyone.
Second, don’t tell me about my “bubble”: you have no idea who I am and what I have experienced in my life. I’m very well aware of many sides of it, maybe more than you are.
Third, do you seriously want to lecture a person who is both a landlord and a tenant in Berlin about local rent controls and price development? We do have some issues here, but it is nowhere close to neither London or NYC where prices are crazy nor Moscow where commuting can be truly exhausting.
>I’m of course not arguing that car is unnecessary for everyone.
Sadly, many are. This topic often does turn into one of lifestyle judgement and it isn't very productive when arguments go from practical to personal. As if any one car-goer or bus-goer determines the fate of a city's urban planning.
Agree. Especially when you add bike-goers to the conversation it can get ugly very quickly. A parent with a stroller is the most neglected person in such talks.
I myself believe that personal cars are mobility edge cases and the world will settle on vendor-managed rental fleets eventually, where most people will occasionally use rental cars with autopilot.
Nevertheless this is not going to happen for the next 50-80 years, so we just need at least to stop promoting car-centric lifestyle and find a real compromise between cars, bikers and pedestrians.
In Switzerland, people in villages use trains to get to and from work. Quite literally, they bike to train, park bike, use train to go to work. Some ride car to train, ride train and then go to work.
It is just not true that mass transit is only for those who pay high rents. It is other way round pretty much all round world and historically - rich people were buying cars more and poor used public transport.
I think this was a bit before 7pm. It surprised me because I didn't expect the character to change that much while the stores were still open. The undesirable elements usually only show up once the legitimate people leave.
You're essentially just raising taxes on the poor. Why? Let's take SF above as an example. The median salary in SF according to Gusto is $104,000 annually, which at the 30% maximum federal recommended housing payment would be $2,600 monthly all-inclusive. Using Zillow to see what I could afford with zero down at this monthly payment (VA loan), I find nothing in SF, and virtually nothing in the Bay Area, except some shacks which are essentially land in Richmond:
Perhaps I could erect a tent and live homeless on my own land, but with Newsom's new alt-right homeless policy, probably not. The closest I could find which was (barely) habitable in Concord, a true fixer-upper but something anyone can do with enough time and effort and watching home repair tutorials:
This is about one to one and a half hours each way, depending on traffic, to my old office in downtown SF (before I was offshored). Currently, the house above is what I could afford and what I would most likely buy if I received a job again and had to go into the office a few days a week (or six days a week as some startups want now). Driving, although long, is the only viable option. Even when mass transit routes can be found, they add 1-2 hours to the already long commute (each way).
People in this thread within the technobubble generally miss what driving is for most Americans: a necessity. It's not an option because we prefer SUVs and huge houses, that's true for some people, but most people don't have many options of where to live or how to live, they are wage and price takers, and we go where we can afford. And that's somewhere we need to drive, nice walkable areas served well by mass transit are luxury items in the USA only for the rich. The rest of us must drive, and hindering that only makes those of us already struggling on the edge of middle class even poorer.
The usual counter argument is that you can take the money raised by making cars expensive and give it to the poor. That’s fairer than subsidizing cars, since rich people tend to have more cars and use them more than poor people.
Let's be real: you've never been poor. I have. When you're poor you don't "choose a job that's nearer". You get whatever you can take. If that's 2 hours commute each way, so be it. You need to eat and pay rent (at least in the US where there's not much in the way of welfare). The rich and poor alike drive, but the rich can live close to work and the poor often can't. The very poor take the bus if it's available and just eat the extra time commuting, which in my city is usually 3x the time driving. The bus is also a safety issue, my friends have been robbed waiting for the bus and after getting off the bus, driving is safer in this regard.
Yes I have been poor, probably more than you, and I have chosen any job that's near to survive. Before starting my career in IT, I once had my car wrecked and consequently lost my job. I had to take another job nearby and commute by bicycle. If you talk about poor people benefiting from car centric cities, then you are delusional either about what "poor" really means, or about the reality of relying on a car when you're poor.
Don't be absurd. If the poor person somehow could find no jobs closer than a 2 hour commute away, they should buy a second home closer to the job. This isn't rocket science.
The Katy Freeway seems idiotic, unless you actually need to drive in Houston, and then it's great. It's great that I have space between me and my neighbors. It's great that I can stay cool in my car and avoid the heat and rain from my garage to my destination (often, an HEB with a parking garage). It's great that I can get anywhere in the city outside of rush hour in 30 min or less. It's great that I can fill up my battery from the comfort of my home at off-peak hours. It's great that Tesla FSD takes me the whole way and only tries to kill me once or twice.
I've lived in a tiny apartment in a super-dense European city with Japanese levels of extent and service, and yet now for less money I live in my house like the European upper class, in a house bigger than theirs and with the same car they drive. I could never have afforded this in Western Europe (or Europe-like SF, NYC, etc). But freeway-loving America makes it possible.
A few videos on why this is (and I apologize for my language) incredibly selfish and idiotic.
tl;dw Owning a car in an American suburb is extremely expensive, and (especially if you disagree) your pleasant commute is likely being heavily subsidized (particularly by less-well-off Texans who you are forcing to live in worse conditions, and to pay proportionally more of their income to cover their own car dependency).
Duolingo doesn't actually do much if anything to help you become fluent. Nor does almost all the language learning apps such as Drops, Rosetta Stone, etc. What you need to move towards fluency is a lot of "comprehensible input" like with "Dreaming Spanish".
Learning about a language is different from acquiring a language, Krashen et. all has a lot of research on how people actually gain fluency. What most people are doing with language learning is like learning "about" chess, not learning to "play" chess. It's why you have people in China, Japan with seven years of English and they can't engage in simple conversation, or likewise people in the US, UK with seven years of Spanish and have trouble asking for anything beyond where is the library.
This is a great read (worth reading it all if you're really interested in acquiring a second language as an adult) about a guy who taught himself French as an adult to a high level of fluency via only watching TV and radio:
My taxi driver in Mexico spoke perfect English. I figured he was either American or had lived here. He said he learned the language watching YouTube videos and had never been.
haha I had a friend in high school, his dad worked at a local store as a clerk, but spoke multiple languages in what appeared to be "fluency", but I was young... anyways, he found this book at a yard sale "Russian by pictures", a year later he is throwing around full Russian sentences...
That's the main place he learned it but he was also interacting with people in Russian constantly which is what people upthread were saying makes the leap from being able to passably read to conversational and then on to fluency.
Agreed, no app, website, methodology or anything else is going to gain you fluency. The sole way of gaining fluency is speaking the language, and all that goes along with that (mostly it's integrating into the culture, because language is an extension of culture and if you don't get the culture, you won't get the language).
You need to know very little of the language to get started. Just find someone who's willing to talk to you in said language, and you'll fill in the gaps as you go.
Speaking frequently absolutely helps a lot, but I’ve found in my on-an-off language studies (as time allows) that vast amounts of input is also effective if finding speakers isn’t practical.
Reading content a bit above your level with a dual-language dictionary in hand as well as watching native content while actively trying to understand what’s being said paired with SRS of vocab you’ve picked up while reading will do vastly more for language acquisition than any app/subscription or textbook.
For more popular languages there’s community-made guides online that make doing this easier but it’s doable for any language.
That's the frustrating stage with learning a language; the part where you don't know enough to pick up the gist of a sentence, but learning more requires you to first pick up the gist of the sentence.
I'm not sure what the solution for this is, other than to tell you that I got over it with no formal study (or even much _in_formal study, now that I think of it) with time. Just hearing the language all around you helps.
I had 4 years of high school French and could read passably, write some, but was never really conversational. Probably if I had lived in France for a summer I'd have gotten a lot better.
I was actually talking with a (French and English-speaking) friend who now lives in Serbia and they were saying they pretty much just picked Serbian up and didn't sweat all the fancy verb conjugations and so forth.
I had four years of high school French and one year at university, and I was pretty conversational. How much did you use the language outside of class? A bunch of us high school French students would speak with each other outside of class, even just to make silly jokes in the language, which helped with retention.
>How much did you use the language outside of class?
Not at all. Which I think was my basic point. It was a class. I had no plans to move to France. Or any particular plan for French to be integral to subsequent education or career objectives.
Honestly, this just made me excited for AI in these apps. Imagine if you could just have a conversation with a personalized language coach constantly to help you learn a language and immerse yourself in it. Heck, this is HN. Who knows, maybe it's already in the works by someone around here. I think the first few iterations will be rough especially while "AI" generations remain close to current. Though I haven't messed with Gemini or Chat-GPT 4+ultra, maybe they've gotten disproportionately better.
That actually sounds great. If it were particularly smart, it could even take apart the bits of the language you were having problems with — and unbeknownst to you — concentrate on developing those with you.
I can't access the thesis either, but I believe it's "‘Picking Up’ a Second Language from Television: an autoethnographic L2 simulation of L1 French learning".
I don't know what the research is, but the best way I know to learn a language is to acquire a lot of data at the edge of your comprehension.
Basically, keep just listen to/read things in the target language, that you barely understand. Don't bother with grammar and rules, that's not how anyone thinks or speaks a language.
None of these I've seen actually works in practice. Having used LLMs for software development the past year or so, even the latest GPT-4/Gemini doesn't produce anything I can drop in and have it work. I've got to go back and forth with the LLM to get anything useful and even then have to substantially modify it. I really hope there are some big advancements soon and this doesn't just collapse into another AI winter, but I can easily see this happening.
Some recent actual uses cases for me where an agent would NOT be able to help me although I really wish it would:
1. An agent to automate generating web pages from design images - Given an image, produce the HTML and CSS. LLMs couldn't do this for my simple page from a web designer. Not even close, even mixing up vertical/horizontal flex arrangement. When I cropped the image to just a small section, it still couldn't do it. Tried a couple LLMs, none even came close. And these are pretty simple basic designs! I had to do it all manually.
2. Story Generator Agent - Write a story from a given outline (for educational purposes). Even at a very detailed outline level, and with a large context window, kept forgetting key points, repetitive language, no plot development. I just have to write the story myself.
3. Illustrator Agent - Image generation for above story. Images end up very "LLM" looking, often miss key elements in the story, but one thing is worst of all: no persistent characters. This is already a big problem with text, but an even bigger problems with images. Every image for the same story has a character who looks different, but I want them to be the same.
4. Publisher Agent - Package things together above so I can get a complete package of illustrated stories on topics available on web/mobile for viewing, tracking progress, at varying levels.
Just some examples of where LLMs are currently not moving the needle much if at all.
>even the latest GPT-4/Gemini doesn't produce anything I can drop in and have it work
This is certainly true for more complex code generation. But there are a lot of "rote" work that I do use GPT to generate, and I feel like those have really improved my productivity.
The other use case for AI-assisted coding is that it _really_ helps me learn certain stuff. Whether it's a new language, or code that someone else wrote. Often times I know what I want done, but I don't know the corresponding utility functions in that language, and AI will not only be able to generate it for me but also through the process teach me about the existence of those things.(some of which are wrong lol, but it's correct enough for me to keep that behavior)
> 2. Story Generator Agent - Write a story from a given outline (for educational purposes). Even at a very detailed outline level, and with a large context window, kept forgetting key points, repetitive language, no plot development. I just have to write the story myself.
You have to break it down into smaller steps and provide way more detail than you think you do in the context. I did an experiment in story generation where I had "authors" that would write only from the perspective of one of the characters that was also completely generated starting first from genre, name, character traits, etc. Then for a given scene, within a given plot and where in the story you are, randomly rotate between authors for each generation, appending it in memory, but not all of the story fits in context. And each generation is only a couple hundred tokens where you ask it to start/continue/end the story. The context contains all of this information in a simple key:value format. And essentially treat the LLM like a loom and spin the story out.
Usually what it produces isn't quite the best, but that's okay, because you can further refine the generation by using different system/user prompts explicitly for editing the content. I found that asking it to suggest one refinement and phrase it as a direct command, then feeding that command with the original generation, works. This meta-prompting tends to produce changes that subjectively improve the text according to whatever dimensions specified in the system prompt.
If you treat the composition as way more mechanical with tightly constrained generation, you get a much better, much more controlled result.
> 1. An agent to automate generating web pages from design images - Given an image, produce the HTML and CSS. LLMs couldn't do this for my simple page from a web designer. Not even close, even mixing up vertical/horizontal flex arrangement. When I cropped the image to just a small section, it still couldn't do it. Tried a couple LLMs, none even came close. And these are pretty simple basic designs! I had to do it all manually.
That’s because none of the models have been trained on this. Create a dataset for this and train a model to do it and it will be able to do it.
Here's the CEO of Builder.io supporting your comment: he says they tried LLMs/agents, and it didn't work. Then, they collected a dataset and developed an in-house model only to assist where they couldn't solve with imperative programming
Not really, he's saying that the solution is to not have the entire process in a single model, it's better to have the model work on specific pieces that you broke down, rather than feeding the whole thing and expecting the model to be able to break it down and generate correctly by itself.
One area that has been useful for me, is writing simple code in languages I am not familiar with, and not willing to learn. For example, I needed to write a small bash script to automate things in Ubuntu, it really saved me time on googling all those commands. Same with Task Scheduler XML language. It knows very well the popular use cases of all the languages.
Why do you want it to generate web pages from images? I'm having trouble understanding the workflow here. You see a component you like on another website and want to obtain the code from it? Or if you have a design already, why not just use a Figma to Code tool?
It's not that uncommon to have a workflow where the webpage design gets built and negotiated with stakeholders/customers as a series of photoshop images, and when they're approved, it's forwarded to developers to make a pixel-perfect implementation of that design in HTML/CSS.
Actually, no. The early car owners had it terrible, not only were they expensive and broke down often, the roads were often little more than mud-drenched dirt tracks, with impassable bridges and cities choked with animal and pedestrian traffic. No stoplights or traffic laws, extreme chaos and very slow going. You can read some of the early coast-to-coast stories for how challenging it was.
The excellent vehicular infrastructure we have in the USA today is due precisely to the car usage being 80%+. With the mass adoption came freeways, stoplights, graded roads, drainage, bridges, all of it.