deweydecibel

Driving behavior analysis, or telematics, as the insurance industry calls it, could be better for consumers, leading to personalized rates that are more fair. Plus, if people have to pay more for their risky driving, they may drive more cautiously, leading to safer roads. But this will happen only if drivers are aware that their behavior is being monitored.

I’m so sick of this shit.

Just like the stop sign cameras, this only increases safety by penalizing and then monetizing minor mistakes that humans make. This is not about safety, it’s about maximizing income through technological micromanaging of drivers who have not caused an accident and were not in danger of causing one.

You’d also have to be a damn fool not to realize that all the data they’re collecting may not apply to their rate structure today, but in the future that rate structure will change, and suddenly a history of driver data you let them gather about you goes from being unremarkable to indicative of a problem.

The shareholders are demanding a blood sacrifice, so rates suddenly go up for people that have a driver score beneath a certain threshold where previously that threshold was higher.

Or some new bullshit study comes out claiming people that listen to podcasts while driving are infinitesimally more likely to cause an accident than people that listen to music, and whoops, Michael Barbaro has been your constant companion on every morning commute for the last 4 years. That’s a pattern of risky behavior.

PS for those unaware:

If you use Firefox, you can add a custom Search engine with the Search URL string:

https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=%25s

Then set that new custom Search engine as default.

The point is the entire concept of AI training off people’s work to make profit for others is wrong without the permission of and compensation for the creator regardless if it’s corporate or open source.

Reasoning is based on knowledge. There have to be things you accept as truths first before you can start reasoning, and those truths are not universally shared, nor do they have the same weight for everyone. That includes you and me.

There are things we don’t “know”, and things we don’t know that we don’t know, but we nevertheless think of ourselves as informed and capable of reasoning. To someone who knows more than us, they’d consider us stupid. It’s not about objectivity, it’s about looking down on those that don’t know things you know and declaring them less-than.

The basic point is there are countless factors big and small that influence any individual’s thoughts and ideas at any given moment. Our minds are very complex things, and our lives are messy, absorbing all kinds of information and stimuli that affect it in ways we don’t properly understand or even realize.

When we talk about people being stupid or smart, we’re just reducing that complexity so we can make simplistic insults that make us feel better about ourselves, but ultimately aren’t saying anything meaningful about the human condition.

And there’s a lot of dark history behind this, too. The history of psychology is riffe with falsehoods about quantifying intelligence, and often it was simply about prejudice.

You want to call people stupid for doing stupid things, sure, I get that. I do that. We all do. But the more you try to create these general arguments about human stupidity, the more it unravels, and the more it reveals about you.

Should also be said that for various edge cases where a extension doesn’t exist, uBlock’s element selector function lets you get very granular with filtering things. If you know a bit of html/css, you can get creative with it and consistently hide just about any element you like across many different sites.

For example, recently I’ve been on a quest to de-rating all my favorite media sites and Google results, etc. No more wayward rotten tomatoes, metacritic, or imbd scores when I want to look up info on media unless I go looking for them on those websites. No addon that I’m aware of exists solely for this purpose, so I’m basically using uBlock to do it by using the element selector any time I see them. Some sites make this tricky, and any adjustment to the design of the page could break it, but the joy I get from being able to curate my web experience to exactly what I want to it to be can’t be understated.

Overaction or not, putting distance between your platform and Meta is just the better choice, on principle alone. They have proved their intent time and time again, there’s no reason to willingly associate with them.

Some of these are good, some are just needlessly assertive nonsense. Especially the two where it’s actively refusing to acknowledge fault or apologize for it, which is standard PR crap. Refusing to apologize and instead saying “thanks for your patience” is what I expect to hear from my ISP when they miss their scheduled install, not from a coworker.

There’s nothing wrong with being a normal human being that is capable of admitting their own shortcomings. If never saying sorry means “being a boss” then that explains why there’s so many sociopaths as CEOs.

“Hope that make sense?” Vs “Let me know if you have any questions.”

The latter is saying “here’s the explanation, figure it out, bother me again if you can’t”. The fromer, while poorly worded, is being helpful, actively attempting to make sure the person understands before leaving them to it. It’s both a kindness and doing your due diligence.