I see your point, but these are civil tickets rather than criminal charges. And since there’s already many laws and regulations around owning a car, such as registration… isn’t it trivial to say “you are responsible for a car that you register by default”
In the same way, if your car fails emissions tests, you can’t register it and it’s the responsibility of the owner to ensure that their car meets emissions standards.
If you read the article, you would see that issue addressed. The claim was that it wasn't civil, it was quasi-criminal which is why they had to follow due process.
But the risks that running a red light pose aren’t civil in nature, so it feels like a perversion to use civil infractions as an excuse to get sloppy with enforcement.
If the yellows are set correctly there should be very little of misjudging. You see yellow, if you can reasonably stop you do so. Judging only is an issue when you're going below the speed limit.
Sort of. Basically you can fine the owner of the car and revoke the privileges of driving that car in a given state. Where it gets to be a problem is if the charge is against the 'driver' of the car and the state's not able to prove that. Normally, in courts we can face our adversary and cross-examine, etc. We hit this problem in NJ during the red light camera pilot program, I can remember a guy I worked with getting a ticket because his roommate borrowed a car and the front was hanging out a bit into the intersection.
Some other thoughts: An illegally parked car can be fined, impounded, booted. Car with outstanding parking tickets can also have all of the above. But typically the driver wouldn't see points or a moving violation for any of these offenses. For example: NYC you can get blocking the box tickets written by parking enforcement but they don't carry the weight of a moving violation like a police officer's ticket would. (and if you don't pay it, it's not the driving privilege that's suspended in the state, it's the car itself that would be targeted for booting/impounding, etc)
>I see your point, but these are civil tickets rather than criminal charges.
Yeah that's what they said when ICE was unilaterally kicking in doors.
The way I see it anything that would prompt the government to use violence upon you without you taking action to escalate deserves the same level of protection for the accused as a "real" criminal matter.
Yes I'm aware this includes just about everything beyond library late fines and would break the system at least for awhile. Worth it. The government shouldn't be able to assess the same penalties (fines) and threaten the same enforcement actions (forfeiture of property, arrest for nonpayment, etc, etc) as they do in criminal matters and side step people's rights simply because they say it's civil. The rights and procedural protections are what they are not to prevent the application of a label, but to prevent abuse at the hands of the government.
>Criminal offenses are punishable by incarceration.
And what happens if you don't pay civil (or criminal) fines? A bench warrant gets issued and you get arrested. And if you get a contempt charge in all this guess where you can go?
The only "real difference" between a criminal offense where they "can" jail you but usually just fine you is procedural.
I would rather catch a bullshit DUI than have a local building commissioner coming after me for some violation. They're both $10k problems, but with one of them you have "real rights"
>Unauthorized immigration to the US is NOT punishable by incarceration.
The problem wasn't what the statutory punishment is or isn't.
The problem was the unilateral nature of it. Hence all the hoopla over warrant types, sloppy behavior, etc.
No more lending your car to a friend in need, no more letting your children learn to drive on your car or borrow it ever. Families must now own and insure a car for every individual driver because we can't be bothered to find robust solutions for traffic enforcement
Shift the problem onto individuals, make it a burden for the public. Typical HN attitude
Driving cars is a dangerous activity that deserves higher levels of accountability and responsibility.
It is commonplace to drive, but has high potential for danger and death. It seems ok to me to have a level of care required for owning a vehicle, and that includes being mindful of who you share your vehicle with.
Same thing with guns - if you blindly lend a gun to an acquaintance and they shoot a school, you will absolutely be charged with some crimes, either accessory to murder or manslaughter, where you have to prove that you weren’t being negligent by giving it to them. Guns are dangerous and owning them bears a higher level of responsibility to the owner.
Vehicles kill more people, they also deserve responsibility to own. If somebody breaks laws with your vehicle, it’s your responsibility by default unless you prove otherwise.
Or you could ask your friends who borrow your car not to be dipshits who run red lights. If you get a ticket for your teen running a red light, you can have your teen pay for it. Might be a good learning lesson.
Not if the teen takes responsibility. So don't loan out your car to people who aren't willing to take responsibility for their actions. Surely that's not a massive burden?
This is unjust BS and discriminates against poor families.
Using this line of thinking, it will be a short time until you’re responsible for what a criminal does with your stolen vehicle; after all, you failed to secure it.
I hope you get exactly what you’re asking for, and all the implications thereof (but in a state far from me). I feel certain you won’t enjoy it.
Obviously someone stealing a vehicle is different, as long as you’re reasonable about it. Leaving an unlocked car with keys in the ignition outside of a bank being robbed is different from someone breaking the window and spoofing your fob, and both of those are different from willingly giving the vehicle to someone.
Also I mentioned criminal vs civil penalties being treated differently - I don’t believe the same scenarios apply to both. AND if you can prove that you lent a car to someone who got you a speeding ticket, then it’s on them - just that the owner of the car is responsible by default.
I hate these arguments that doing anything to restrict the deadliest machines in history is impossible because it discriminates against the poor. It doesn’t. But having a society where driving is the only option does, so I am all in favor of alternatives. But I also think that we should improve safety for cars when possible as well
And it also doesn’t care about arbitrary country boundaries. But it is affected by total emissions, and per-capita measurements is one fair way to judge how a country is doing
I feel like the possible real estate crash could be really interesting.
Even different parts of a city would likely be affected very differently, where the edges near the fire risks crash, and the even mildly safer areas boom with high demand
To steel-man their sentence, it’s a large number to extract from US citizens, nearly $500/person. But it’s a small number in terms of government deficit and current spending
But it’s worth being careful - you could’ve said the same thing 3 years ago about NFTs. They were taking off and people made very convincing arguments about how it was the future of concert tickets, and eventually commerce in general.
If we started writing lots of laws around NFTs, it would just be a bunch of pointless (at best), or actively harmful laws.
Nobody cares about NFTs today, but there were genuinely good ideas about how they’d change commerce being spouted by a small group of people.
People can say “this is the future” while most people dismiss them, and honestly the people predicting tectonic shifts are usually wrong.
I don’t think that the current LLM craze is headed for the same destiny as NFTs, but I don’t think that the “LLM is the new world order” crowd is necessarily more likely to be correct just because they’re visionaries.
Some of my friends bought a tonne of bitcoin when it was around ~$100 because it was clearly the future. I'm still not sure if I was an idiot or smart to reject that
Regular stonks are incredibly flawed, or whatever you want to call it, and the general public gambles on them as "the next big thing". None of that is unique to BTC, albeit more extreme with BTC. One should look at a potential investment as both its real world usage _and_ increased speculation.
That’s why I’m hoping the news picks this up more - especially about the intended integration with flock/ICE. That might be the issue that brings awareness mainstream beyond the tech-aware circles
People don’t usually act erratically for no reason. Maybe they suddenly stop because they see a deer sprinting towards the road off in the distance, and the person behind them didn’t see it. There are tons of reasons that look like they “erratically stop”, which are actually genuine safe behavior that the other may not know about.
I looked pretty hard - I specifically don’t want an android OS called an mp3 player. I want a dedicated media player that has physical button controls (not touch screen), is very snappy, has a good UI, and has a purpose-built OS specific to only playing songs and podcasts, and maybe movies, which I can sync with my computer (maybe with rsync or whatever else). No apps.
The only option that I could find was an iPod classic, modded with an SD card and better battery.
If something else exists, especially brand new, I’d love to know! But I couldn’t find hardly anything that wasn’t just an Android phone with no cell service.
> I looked pretty hard - I specifically don’t want an android OS called an mp3 player. I want a dedicated media player that has physical button controls (not touch screen), is very snappy, has a good UI, and has a purpose-built OS
There are a lot of DAPs in this style. They're just not popular because the Android-based units are perfectly fine and don't feel like Android phones with an MP3 player app installed. Most buyers don't have arbitrary OS requirements, they just want a device that works well.
I think Fiio and Hiby are the closest that exist today. They have dedicated hardware and physical buttons for the things listed in your comment. However, they do still ship with a custom Android OS and you need the touch screen to navigate your library and such. On the upside, this lets you choose your media library app. On the downside, it still isn't as good as the touch wheel on old iPods. I, too, am waiting for something like this to return. The Hiby is good enough until then for me.
Shanling uses a custom OS although it feels very primitive compared to iPods (e.g. the iPod Nano had VoiceOver for touch navigation). So I'm not really a fan of these dedicated single-function players; modern media player apps can be fast and convenient (more so than a clickwheel, honestly), and Android devices can still have dedicated control buttons. If only these devices weren't so bulky...
Fair argument, these devices (the Hiby R4, in particular, which is the one I have) are absolute tanks. Way too heavy and big to throw in your pocket for any reason, especially if you use a case. Still, it's nice to be able to (sort of) carry my own library around and never need internet to listen to it.
Hold on. You wear headphones while at the dentist? How are you supposed to carry on a conversation where they ask you question and you respond HOAYRA AH OT AH HA AH
For me it's not arbitrary. An android device is a general purpose handheld touchscreen computer that happens to be used for music. That means a bunch of things to me:
1. "Touchscreen first" UX
2. Heavier than it needs to be
3. Worse battery life compared to a non-Android device
Using a touchscreen in the rain is impossible. Running out of battery sucks. Going for a run with a 240g brick is no fun, it'll pull your pants down to your knees and trip you.
Compare the specs:
Hiby R1
Dimensions: 86.9 x 60.6 x 14.5 mm
Weight: 118g
OS: HibyOS
Battery: 19 hour play time
Price: $159.00
Hiby R4
Dimensions: 129.6 x 68.3 x 18.5 mm
Weight: 231g
OS: Android 12
Battery: 11 hour play time
Price: $249
These are the things matter to me, in addition to the UX, sound quality, Bluetooth support, expandable / removable storage and sane file-based playlists.
> For me it's not arbitrary. An android device is a general purpose handheld touchscreen computer that happens to be used for music
Android is just an operating system. I’ve developed and shipped Android based devices that have no screen at all.
Android and Linux are both used for a wide variety of embedded systems. Saying they’re all general purpose computing devices isn’t true.
> Going for a run with a 240g brick is no fun, it'll pull your pants down to your knees and trip you.
Then don’t pick the largest device with a big screen? There are many smaller DAPs and phones that run Android. The reason that device is so large isn’t because it runs Android.
Generally, across most DAP manufacturers, the android devices are all of those things that I don't want, and the non-android devices tend to be cheaper, lighter, with better battery life. I don't specifically choose non-android, I specifically chose those other parameters and have simply noticed a pattern. I don't doubt you, but you haven't given any examples and I'm not going to spend my life searching for the exception that proves the rule.
My first Android phone was a Samsung Galaxy S2. It weighted two grams less than that Hiby R1. Of course it was much larger, but tiny by today's standards.
Now that I think about it, going no-buttons might have been a driver towards larger screens. Having at least a few buttons seemed to make it much less necessary.
Though I stand by my implied argument that older devices were not as heavy as we might remember them to be. And it is okay to consider 240g a bit too heavy in the context of a digital music player with no need for cassettes or mechanical parts.
Battery: 1AA gets 30h
Dimensions: 111.4 x 29.1 x 80.7 mm
Weight: 132g
Ok, so you were limited to 90 minute tapes with slow seek. But aside from that compare it to the specs I posted for the android vs non-android mp3 players. Remember, this cassette player has some seriously impressive clockwork inside that case and it's still smaller and much lighter than the android.
Also remember you can just buy another AA battery, and keep a few spares in your bag.
I've got the Hiby R1 and have been pretty pleased with it. The R1 doesn't actually run android but just straight linux. It boots up in about 6-8 seconds and returns to the place you previously were. As for physical controls it's got easy to identify buttons for volume, pause (double click for previous track) and
next track that are pretty easy to find in a pocket.
No experience with the R4 but seems to have good reviews with the hifi crowd.
Whats wrong with some Nokia brick? Has bluetooth, probably 3.5mm jack too, lasts a week, has more physical buttons than you need for playing mp3s. Costs little
I have a few, and for managing and playing music the UX is absolute ass. Fine for dialing a number and occasionally switching to silent mode, but that's about it.
I can't vouch for it personally since I don't own one, but I saw a video on YouTube mentioning the Innioasis Y1[0], which supposedly does a decent job of replicating the iPod experience with some modern features like USB-C and Bluetooth at a decent price. Can be flashed with RockBox. No external SD slot, but it can be opened to swap out the SD card it comes with. Reportedly doesn't feel nearly as nice in hand as a real iPod does but that's pretty standard at this price point.
Damn this looks great. I'd guess the main difference in feel is the weight. iPod classic was about 2-3x heavier, which seems to be the main factor in premium feel.
This is a problem with "single-purpose" devices for kids, too. Drawing tablets, music players. They're all actually full Android phones (sans cell modem) and tablets. It sucks.
It represents a general purpose computer on your network which will accumulate vulnerabilities and never be patched or otherwise secured, making it a persistent insider threat as a launchpad for attacks on your network
The issue isn't really Android, it's the touchscreen and the way the UX is a regression from many analog single-purpose devices.
If you gonna have a single-purpose device - make it analog (or close to analog)!
Don't give it a perceptible boot-time and all the other flaws that come with general-purpose computing. Don't make the user have to "wake up the device", let alone have to visually confirm that it is woken-up, before they can switch to the next song.
Yes, I want these for my kids so very badly. They have Yotos (similar to Tonie) for bedtime, and iPads for school work, but those are not ideal for a number of reasons. I want them to be able to experience music like I was able to with an FM+cassette walkman clone in the '80s and early '90s, or with my Nomads and iPods in the late '90s and early aughts. Hopefully someone here can suggest something!
ETA: OK, there are quite a few highly-rated options on Amazon, so I just need to solve the "putting music on there" problem and the "dropping it and immediately destroying it problem".
For what it’s worth I love mine. I have app pinning enabled in android so it’s completely locked to just my music app. Feels like a great compromise of customizability while also feeling like an all in one device
Not sure if this would fit the bill for you, but I really like it:
96GB Mp3 Player with Bluetooth 5.0 - Aiworth Portable Digital Lossless Music MP3 MP4 Player for Kids with FM Radio HD Speaker for Sports Running Super Light Metal Shell Touch Buttons (Actual Amazon description)
The "touch screen" is only for moving around the menu. The menu is easy to remember. Sound quality is really good and it takes a mini SD card. Right now, $40.
Have you looked at Cowon? These are somewhat premium end players, but they are absolutely great. Their Cowon J3 was legendary, was declared the best mp3 player of all time by some outlets. I'm currently using a Cowon Plenue D2, which is also really good.
How hard did you look? You can type "MP3 Player" into an Amazon search box (and I'm sure Aliexpress and other competitors) and find many devices that are exactly what you say you want.
So i may install "Rockbox" again (yes - that was an upgrade), on an Kinese express-device? But, but, but...that may sound offending -sry, just for a moment i thought, "you were missing the topic completly" so... my 2 cents OT....
Platforms, globally synchronized making the Uniform, and bland?
"A Timex ad went viral this year: 'Know the time without seeing you have 1249 unanswered emails.'"
An Opinon-Refusal-Portal; the 'Wise people Of Gotham"-Citizen-Advice-Agency, the 120%-Normality, the Blue-Milk-Canal-Logic (Kishon)
I like watches cos, there once was a time, machines got that big and heavy, that wind-like waterpowered-energy couldn't make them start, nor keep them go, and therefore a 'need' of steam-engines...
"Cos nostalgia revealed a massive, underserved Service-economy-demand."
That brought back memories... Used to daily drive Rockbox on my old 80 GB iPod decades ago. Got a lot of use out of the FLAC support.
Latest project updates are dated 2025. Blows my mind that this project is still alive. Feels oddly out of place in today's computer industry where chips are locked down to prevent projects like these from existing.
I have a Fiio M3K with Rockbox, it's great. My demands are not high though; I just want something light that I can put in my pocket, which shuffles a bunch of lofi music. It helps me tune my monkey brain out.
This is my time to shine. I never stopped using dedicated mp3-players. After my trusty Philips Gogears died and became unavailable for purchase, I settled on Ruizu branded mp3-players. The Ruizu X02[1] is an absolute baller, cheap as hell, trustworthy and limited to the basic functionality you would expect from an mp3-player (music, movies, radio, pictures). You put stuff on it via USB + drag-and-drop just like the ol' days. Damn trustworthy too I had one soaked in water for 15 minutes - flinging it was like using a water pistol. Did it die? Pfft, this is a Ruizu we're talking about. Only thing that can destroy these are weights in the gym and even then they still play music: 'I have no light but I must play' style. No biggie, new one is 20-30 euro's it's like I'm robbing them
Not sure why you want to have purpose-built OS as the hill to die on since many of those Android-based mp3 players absolutely outclass the old iPod classics in snappiness and compatibility and output quality.
Plenty of choices that meet your other criteria once you're OK with it being Android powered.
Like a SnowSky is very obviously stripped down Android that can only run the music app it's shipped with, but it's otherwise everything you want.
Only speaking for myself, but the problem with Android is that it and the hardware needed to make it run acceptably are absurd overkill for the use case, which drives up cost, cuts down on battery life, and adds a layer of unnecessary complexity (suddenly you need to think about what player app to use, for example).
Basically part of the charm of a single-purpose device is that it can be built to serve it purpose ridiculously well and do nothing else, and the second general purpose software enters the picture much of that is lost.
The endless amount of Chinese Android-based single purpose mp3 player devices that are obviously iPod Nano/Classic clones basically cost ~$30 and have 50hr+ of battery life. You don't have to think about what player app to use, they ship with the only one that runs. The rest of the Androidness is stripped out.
Then yes, there's obviously the other end of the extreme where the mp3 player is very obviously a phone without a radio with a price tag to match. And everything in-between.
I'd say there's actually too many choices cause the silicon and battery cost required to simply play music has gotten so cheap that it doesn't make sense to optimize the OS further than Android. I'm sure the economics of scale means the actual hardware wouldn't be cheaper by any noticeable amount either.
> Only speaking for myself, but the problem with Android is that it and the hardware needed to make it run acceptably are absurd overkill for the use case, which drives up cost, cuts down on battery life, and adds a layer of unnecessary complexity (suddenly you need to think about what player app to use, for example).
The battery life is fine on modern DAPs. Excellent, even.
I understand why an engineer would want a completely application specific, built-from-scratch OS that does one thing perfectly, but that's a pipe dream for a niche market.
A powerful and efficient SoC that runs Android is ultra-cheap these days. Less than $1. Hiring an engineering team to write and maintain a custom OS for a niche product would incur so much R&D cost that it would wipe out any money you'd save by using a smaller microcontroller and drive the final cost up.
Just think: How much salary would you have to pay a team of engineers to write the custom OS and maintain it? If you could optimistically sell 500,000 of these devices (good luck) then how much would you have to save in order to pay for the R&D?
You don't need "OS" to play some music, drive display and talk via USB/BLE. It's trivial task and could be done with a few event loops. A lot of firmwares is being written without OS. May be FreeRTOS/Zephyr to somewhat simplify the programming, but that's definitely not "OS" in a commonly accepted sense. You don't need team of engineers, one hobbyist could easily do that. I wrote firmware for a device of similar complexity (work with ADC, implements USB, BLE, some UI with buttons and leds) and I'm not even a professional.
There's no way to win in these threads. It's a very common pattern on HN that somebody will say, "X doesn't exist!" And then people will proceed to point out that in fact does exist. And then you'll find out that the original poster has a bunch of non-functional requirements that were baked into their original request that they didn't state, and I usually don't agree with (typically because they are either not practical or only of theoretical concern).
They'll typically defend them using highly charged language, like claiming that having to carry a 200 gram device will pull their pants down because it's so heavy, or that managing a Bluetooth stack and USB doesn't require an OS, but rather just a couple of event loops that a non-professional could code directly in firmware.
I've simply stopped participating because in my efforts to try to help people, I find that I just get into silly arguments.
In the same way, if your car fails emissions tests, you can’t register it and it’s the responsibility of the owner to ensure that their car meets emissions standards.
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