101–109 of 109 posts
This strikes me as one of those great and terrible ideas. It has a tremendous potential for good, but it is one opt-out checkbox (Share the data you collect with the police to help catch criminals!) away from convincing the surveilled to create their own big brother. http://asofterworld.com/index.php?id=346
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds like you drive like an idiot. And so you should be marked as one, and are grumpy about it. Well, tough. Basically what you're doing is playing Russian roulette, and you keep "winning", well yeah, that happens, right up until it doesn't. Drive like a Google car. Stop being an idiot. Get a smiley face score.
Honestly, I bathe in idiocy because it works. One of the "tricks" I've picked up is that if I'm being tailgated in town or someone is otherwise driving next to me and won't stop I'll turn off traction control and "light up" the rear end of my car. Everyone 'scatters' at that point. A lot of people don't understand this driving style. I look like a complete idiot, but people pay attention to the idiots. They watch the…
This app and the related one about insurance liability (posted here maybe a week or two ago) would unfairly rate me, because I go against the risk model and win consistently. I also agree that there are MANY "safe" drivers whose indecision and timid driving leads to bad situations; merging at 45mph, slowing way down for ramps, stoping at yield signs, driving under the speed of traffic, braking unnecessarily in traffic, etc. However, since in my situation, the insurance company gets to charge me a lot more, they're incentivized against modeling drivers like me as less risky than someone who is involved in more accidents than me but drives well within the limits and doesn't understand what happens when they approach or exceed them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This debate happens on HN again and again, but still: what privacy are you talking about in public space? Nobody has a problem with one person with a dashcam — why suddenly connecting these dashcams to a network that shares information is a problem?
> This debate happens on HN again and again, but still: what privacy are you talking about in public space? Nobody has a problem with one person with a dashcam If I'm not that one person I'd have a problem with that. > why suddenly connecting these dashcams to a network that shares information is a problem? Switching from dash cams to police helps a bit. I think most people would be okay with one (or a handful) of po…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely, since it would amount to trial by media, where a person is found guilty / slandered as an asshole with no avenue to defend his position / state his case. What if he was driving like an asshole because he was speeding to the hospital or similar reasons?
Exactly. The crux of prejudice is that it makes people form an opinion before they have facts a.k.a. context. A lot of things are not what they seem at first and because people respond to well to "Occam's Razor," they choose the laziest explanation and penalize people they don't know. A real-life example: my friend was dating a woman whose brother got in an accident. After receiving painkillers, he became addicted to…
I wonder how well this will scale with time. I've certainly done things while driving that were reckless to varying degrees, I suspect most drivers have as well. How long until 50% of cars on the road have been tagged doing something reckless? Of course I can imagine a number of ways to handle this. On a more broad note, I wonder how useful it really is to know that a specific vehicle acted recklessly sometime in the…
I presume that the system would simply indicate the proportion of times that a vehicle is seen driving and performing a dodgy manoeuvre. If I'm seen on the roads 1,000 times and seen performing a dodgy lane change once (and I would like to apologise to the Mondeo driver on the A21 yesterday), that's the fact that should be recorded.
This strikes me as one of those great and terrible ideas. It has a tremendous potential for good, but it is one opt-out checkbox (Share the data you collect with the police to help catch criminals!) away from convincing the surveilled to create their own big brother. http://asofterworld.com/index.php?id=346
I highly doubt there will be such a checkbox. The "permission" to share will be buried in a EULA no one will ever read.
These kinds of apps are inevitable. We will see apps that rate drivers, workers, and just people. I'm not as worried about the apps, but rather with someone gaming the rankings. Both Yelp and Travelocity turned from awesome to pretty much useless within a few years. Reviews and ratings can be bought. Employees are forced to leave positive reviews.
It's also true with credit cards. If you don't understand merchant fees and maximizing your rewards from purchases you'd otherwise make while simultaneously bolstering your credit score, you're leaving money on the table.
Humans will hopefully look back in a few hundred years and realize how futile and terrible of an idea it was to attempt to gamify every aspect of our lives so some company or another can extract a profit from the unsavvy, but since there is so much "value" to be "created" right now, I doubt that it'll happen any time soon under our current system of governance and beliefs about property, taxes, "free" markets, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe there'll be an opportunity to drill down in the data. There's a huge wide spectrum of people who suck at driving (senile old people, oblivious soccer mom, boy-racer, etc) and I would be very surprised if they're all roughly equivalent.
Minor nit: I think your comment would be greatly enhanced if you changed some stereotypes, e.g. "soccer-mom" for "soccer-parent", "senile old" for "old" or "people with less reflexes" and "boy-racer" for just "racer". None of those relate 100% to the gender or age of the driver, IMHO :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, I bathe in idiocy because it works. One of the "tricks" I've picked up is that if I'm being tailgated in town or someone is otherwise driving next to me and won't stop I'll turn off traction control and "light up" the rear end of my car. Everyone 'scatters' at that point. A lot of people don't understand this driving style. I look like a complete idiot, but people pay attention to the idiots. They watch the…
I agree to an extent. I also drive "like an idiot" and haven't been in an accident aside from being t-boned in traffic when a very old person didn't stop for a red light. I'm also very engaged while driving and pay lots of attention to everything going on around me. I don't listen to music or eat or have children or do phone calls while driving. I also consider driving a hobby / sport and value continual life-long im…