The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here? • Hacker News Board

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#181

Post by sofixa » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 3:56 PM UTC

1234letshaveatw wrote: post #143

Earw0rm wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fine if people choose it. It's not fine if that choice denies other people the choice not to. And there seems to be a lot of the latter. For example, when shopping facilities or hospitals are built so as to be, de-facto, only accessible by automobile, that locks people out of the choice to say no thanks.

I don't follow, are people then not able to choose to live somewhere that has shopping facilities or hospitals that are built so as not to be only accessible by automobile?

> re people then not able to choose to live somewhere

No, because no such somewhere has been built in the country in question (US) in the past ~60 years, because the default is car-centric. So you're left with a few uber dense, old, predating automobiles, places. Which are extremely expensive, because they simply do not have the capacity for everyone who wants to live in them.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#182

Post by bilegeek » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 3:57 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #121

alnwlsn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's most obvious in hindsight, probably it was a long time (some decades) before cars were understood to have much of a negative effect at all. Nobody* thought much about air pollution (even adding lead to the gasoline) or climate effects, or what would happen when cities were built enough that they were then dependent on cars, or what happens when gas or cars gets expensive. All they saw was that trips taki…

If you read the period news, pretty much everything except lead poisoning and climate change was well known by the 1920s. Rich people wanted cars but a ton of places had resistance from everyone else to what they correctly recognized as removing the public spaces they used and shifting externalities to, for example, the people being hit by cars. What’s really interesting is that you can find newspaper columns in the…

That's also part of the problem. People back then had other systems to make those critiques (or their job didn't require the travel it does now), and now they don't. If alternatives don't exist, and most US people today have never experienced them, there's no demand for them, and you realistically can't expect that demand to come without a massive, grinding slog.

Lack of alternatives + political unwillingness to provide them + lack of political pressure to provide them + the massive effort that would be needed to build a system from scratch that has already been dismantled, and infrastructure is in the way because it wasn't a factor + corruption, democratic decline, etc. = most problems around cars in the USA.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#183

Post by yubblegum » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

chungusamongus wrote: post #40

gdulli wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Frank Herbert: "Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

I mean, people are talking about the butlerian jihad without any sense of irony or subtext. Dune is literally a feudal hellscape that takes place in the wake of that event. It didn’t make things better. Lmao

I agree that many people miss the subtle irony of Frank Herbert's books. He seems to be debating himself to a certain extent in that series.

That said, there is no obvious reason to posit that the intergalactic feudal system, CHOAM, or the empire, came to be because of the butlerian jihad. The concrete side effects of the jihad were in fact hyper specialization of cognitive faculties in humans: mentats, guild navigators, and soldiers all possess super human specialized abilities.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#184

Post by OgsyedIE » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

plumbees wrote: post #135

nfornowledge wrote: post #49

Rudolph built his engine, Henry built his car, Popular Mechanics published it. 2000 biofueling stations across the nation. All made illegal by special interests months before the article was published. Information didn't move fast enough to let the editors know that innovation was illegal.

I'm genuinely trying to understand this comment. Can you /explain

It's an oblique reference to the career outcomes of Rudolf Diesel, the 19th-century inventor after whom several things are named.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#185

Post by mynameisbilly » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

spprashant wrote: post #140

baal80spam wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society. You say it in a way that it sounds like automobiles don't have a positive effect. I don't agree - they have some negative effects but overall they have a vast net positive effect for everyone.

The positive effects were immediate, and measurable. The negative effects are delayed, and hard to quantify without all the advancement in climate research since then. If everyone in 1920 knew a 100 years from now there would be climate crisis to reckon with, perhaps a few things would have changed along the way. Today we have a much better understanding of the world, so we have the means to think down the line of wh…

We did know in the 20s. We knew in the 30s. We knew in the 40s. We absolutely knew in the 50s (oil industry funded their own studies on this). We knew before we decided to direct billions into a federal interstate highway system that bulldozed countless communities of color and killed many cities' downtowns and sense of connectedness.

I don't see anything positive about being forced to participate in this car-ownership game where 99% of North American cities are designed around car ownership, and if you don't own a car you're screwed. I don't WANT to own a car, I don't want to direct countless thousands of dollars to a car note, car maintenance, gas, etc. I want the freedom to exist without needing to own an absurdly expensive vehicle to get myself around. There's nothing freeing or positive about that unless all you've ever known and all you can imagine is a world in which cities are designed around cars and not people.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#186

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 4:00 PM UTC

lamasery wrote: post #158

1234letshaveatw wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess, if you feel that freedom of movement is insignificant

Exactly, that's why fostering an environment where most people can walk out their front door and get to most of what they need day-to-day pretty fast without having to own a car is so important. Freedom of movement. Increased car ownership & use, and increased design of environments to cater to cars, greatly harms that freedom. Ever checked into a hotel somewhere in city-sprawl, looked at your map to find a local sho…

> Ever checked into a hotel somewhere in city-sprawl, looked at your map to find a local shop to pick up some cable you forgot or a toothbrush or to get some dinner, and realized that despite those things being within half a mile you can't realistically walk to them because there's a highway between you and them, so you're stuck unless you pay someone with a car to drive you? Doesn't feel very free.

I've never had this happen, no. The closest I've ever gotten was in Tokyo, when I had the store I needed in eyesight across the street but had to go very far out of my way to a pedestrian bridge to get there.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#187

Post by nradov » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 4:01 PM UTC

mwigdahl wrote: post #164

nradov wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is very little connection between ownership and who does the driving. I still want to own my own cars even if a computer does most of the driving. That way it's always available, and more importantly I can keep my own stuff in it.

And you should be able to. But people who don't want that or don't have the means to afford it can have the benefits of automobile transport without the capital expense.

Consumers can already rent or lease automobiles. This is an operating expense, not a capital expense.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#188

Post by Planktonne » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 4:02 PM UTC

snackerblues wrote: post #155

viciousvoxel wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term "toxic individualism" doesn't mean that individualism is inherently toxic, like "toxic masculinity" doesn't mean that about masculinity in the general case. These terms mean the over-expression of their worst aspects.

[flagged]

That's simply untrue; you're deliberately misinterpreting terms to grind a tired axe.

It is perfectly possible to be both masculine and non-toxic without being feminine. Refusing to allow that is toxic in itself.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#189

Post by lossyalgo » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 4:04 PM UTC

eloisius wrote: post #97

TaupeRanger wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Troll post? No, they do not "unequivocally" make your life worse. "Other people's cars" facilitate thousands of aspects of modern living and society that you apparently take for granted. You can choose to ONLY look at the negative impacts, but the comment as stated is ridiculous. The only way you receive food (except from your backyard inner-city garden?) is through people DRIVING. The way you receive packages is by…

There's a difference between personal vehicles and special purpose vehicles like ambulances and delivery trucks. I don't think anyone in this thread is saying all automobiles are bad, but car-centric development is definitely bad. You don't have to theorize from first principles about this. There are many places around the world that aren't as locked into the personal car as the US is, and they are still functioning…

In fact, the cities which are repeatedly rated as having the highest quality of life are almost all not car-centric.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#190

Post by nradov » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 4:05 PM UTC

MarcelOlsz wrote: post #152

ernst_klim wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to eliminate "useless eaters" It can't. It can't even deal with emails without randomly deleting your email folder [1]. Saying that it can make decisions and replace humans is akin of saying that random number generator can make decisions and can replace people. It's just an automation tool, and just like all automation tools before it it will create more jobs than destroy. All the CEOs' talks about labor replaceme…

People have this misconception that first it was one way, and then , and they'll wake up and suddenly it is another. It's a slow creep. 10 years ago there were 5 of us on a team each responsible for something specific. Now I can do all of that. Teams and companies will downsize. How do you see AI creating more jobs? (I need some hope right now lol).

A few hundred years ago it took a team of 5 plus draft animals plough a field. Now one guy with a tractor can do it. Some teams and companies will downsize. New companies will appear doing things that we can't even imagine yet.