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Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

bbc.com

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Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

#771

Post by AngryData »

xp84 wrote: post #633
cogman10 wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that compact trucks should be the only trucks that can be driven without special licensing. It's insane to me that I as a 16 year old was allowed to drive an F350 pulling a 40ft trailer on a standard license.

Another one of those quirks of law that appears to be there to help avoid burdening the legendary smallholding farmer whose teenagers are hardworking farmhands towing around 8 head of cattle in the work truck, but which mostly just enables a bunch of idiots driving around surburbs in gleaming-clean four-door pickups that have never carried anything in the bed but a couple bikes or a little camping gear. I'd be all fo…

Farmer's kids are already exempt from 99% of road and licensing requirements if they are on farm business. I was 12 years old driving around in an old truck without a license plate or license, sometimes hauling massive loads, and it was 100% legal because it was for the farm and my parents were farmers. And honestly there were far more dangerous tasks done on the farm than that so I don't see a real problem with it.

Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

#772

Post by wizzwizz4 »

exmadscientist wrote: post #706
MichaelBurjack wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That page has existed in one form or another for quite some time. I don't believe there's any AI slop in the substance of the content or arguments, and the rationale is presented in a balanced way. In fact, the section "Are you going to wear a mask forever?" speaks directly to the OP's asking why I wear masks, and their short answer, that "masks are a tool we can use when and where it makes sense—especially indoors,…

I don't know what to tell you, man. It's classic ChatGPT output, with its weird italics, sometimes-bolded bullet point headers, oddly placed and oddly frequent em dashes, and generally really distinct voice. I didn't recognize it until I started to use ChatGPT myself, and now I see it everywhere. I also distrust it immediately , because I know how often ChatGPT bullshits me , so I can't help but assume it's bullshitt…

This is an FAQ where each entry has a TL;DR. For question 9 in particular, the list consists of items and explanation, where the author chose to use / instead of / / . This is one of the situations where the "sometimes-bolded bullet point headers" formatting is appropriate. (The most semantically-correct formatting would be paragraph headings, as seen in LaTeX; but HTML doesn't have these.)

The tag is used to indicate stress emphasis. This is the intended purpose for which the tag was added to HTML, not "weird italics". (I type by transcribing my speech, so I tend to overuse this: one of my editing passes is removing unnecessary s.) This article only contains 9 s in 10 questions: of these, I'd remove the emphasis from two of three "well-fitted masks", and reduce the other to just "well-fitted".

Unspaced em-dashes are often used to offset parentheticals – though I prefer spaced en-dashes myself – and these are both long-standing conventions (see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E2%80%94). Parenthetical dashes are common in formal writing, and this is formal writing.

As someone who frequently wrote in more-or-less this style (where appropriate) before GPT-1 was even made, who's also fairly decent at spotting ChatGPT output, I don't think this is ChatGPT at all. Apart from superficial formatting considerations, it's not the distinctive ChatGPT voice; and the most distinctive part of ChatGPT output is its inappropriate use of voice and formatting, whereas all of these stylistic choices are easily-justified. Perhaps most importantly, it actually says something.

Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

#773

Post by teamonkey »

verbify wrote: post #732
ponector wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think UK drivers test is better than foreign one?

I've done a brief Google, and the UK does have one of the hardest driving tests in the world. This matches with anecdotal comparisons with international friends. https://www.zuto.com/blog/driving-tests-around-the-world/ In the UK, driving is on the left, while in much of the world people drive on the right. Arguably it's not so much that the UK is better, but that people should take a test to validate that they can h…

It’s not especially difficult to swap the side of the road you’re driving on, your brain adjusts very quickly. Millions of truck drivers and tourists do it each year when visiting the UK from mainland Europe and Europe from the UK.

Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

#774

Post by duskdozer »

everdrive wrote: post #10

I understand that currently this is sort of a collective action problem, but I'm a bit baffled why people ever thought they needed brighter headlights in the first place. In the city, it's so bright that you don't even need headlights to see whatsoever. When cars started automatically dimming the dash via a light sensor, there was actually a period of time where I totally forgot to turn on my headlights because thing…

I think everything is just way brighter now. We improved LEDs and stuck them in everything and amped them way up. Just going outside at night in a residential area gets your eyes blasted out with unshielded 8000K streetlights and spotlights people put up on the outside of their houses. I have to keep my computer monitors' brightness levels almost all the way down just to be able to use them, and they're not even the ones marketed as ultra-bright.

Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

#775

Post by alphager »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #754
jackvalentine wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve noticed the same, and also people’s behaviour generally everywhere has bottomed out and not recovered. I was speaking to an ED nurse who said people have just forgotten how to relate and violence is through the roof every night in the hospital. Did we all get subtle brain damage?

I have legitimately been wondering for quite some time if we are not in a leaded gas kind of situation where something is adversely affecting the global population as a whole and we are left in the dark. Plenty of contenders between industrially processed food, social media, mobile phones. It might just be me getting paranoid however.

Covid does long-term brain damage.

Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

#776

Post by lan321 »

everdrive wrote: post #116
lan321 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slow down is kind of the general tip, but I find it kinda BS. I can drive slowly focusing on the bushes on the way to/from work in bumfuck nowhere, or I can get some beacon of god aux LEDs for cheap and turn night into day.

> or I can get some beacon of god aux LEDs for cheap and turn night into day. But only if you don't care about other drivers on the road. And of course, how many of those other drivers on the road care about who they're impacting? A lot of them have your attitude.

My point is about bumfuck nowhere. Places where at night you may or may not see another car for the X km it takes you to get home. That with time people tend to forget they have their high beam bound to the beacon of god, with or without an extra switch, is a separate issue. The light itself makes sense.

If there's a constant stream of vehicles I'm not really worried about visibility all that much. The suicidal wildlife is mostly culled, for potholes you can track the person in front...

Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

#777

Post by robertlagrant »

switchbak wrote: post #589
robertlagrant wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but then looking ahead it didn't look like they had their high beams on, I was just in a short car. You were in a normal car, and the SUV manufacturer has mounted the lights higher just for aesthetic reasons.

You were in a normal car ... for 2004. Now you're in a car that the US car industry doesn't want to sell, and thus you don't exist. Do we need self-darkening HUDs? Like an LCD overlay that specifically mutes the intensity of these improperly engineered cars? Seems dumb, but it might happen. I wonder if we'll just move to using IR for the really high beams? That probably doesn't do anything good to the human eye at hi…

Some high-end cars use banks of lights all pointing in slightly different directions, and they autodim the lights pointing directly at headlights coming the other way.

EDIT - also:

> Now you're in a car that the US car industry doesn't want to sell, and thus you don't exist.

To be fair, this is related to the cars people want to buy. Everyone's making SUVs because they sell like hot cakes.

Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

#778

Post by watwut »

avidiax wrote: post #758
paradox460 wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite is that if you try to follow a safe distance, some jerk will immediately move to fill the space

Just realize that the sort of people that move to fill the space are not the sort to leave even 2 seconds of following distance. So once you restore your following distance, that person has cost you less than 2 seconds. Is it a bit annoying? Sure. But it's not a reason to start tailgating (not that you were necessarily claiming that).

No, because once you to restore the distance, you have to go slower. The cars behind you then fill the restored space the moment they feel they can, because they perceive you as the slower car. If this happen with multiple cars and in practice it does, you are suddenly going very slow.

The fact is, you can have only so much space in front of you as other cars allow. I had to reduce the distance literally because of this. It then stopped happening.

Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

#779

Post by elric »

crazygringo wrote: post #654
jandrese wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blinding and dazzling oncoming traffic in the name of safety is outright stupid. If you are riding a bike and you're lighting up the heads of oncoming riders or pedestrians you are being dangerous and obnoxious. Never shine a flashlight above someone's shoulders at night if you can help it.

What are you talking about? Did you mean to reply to a different comment? Bicycle lights aren't blinding anybody. At least none I've ever seen. They're powered by little batteries usually. The subject at hand was whether they flash or not. Not their brightness, which I've never heard anybody complain about.

> Bicycle lights aren't blinding anybody.

They absolutely are. They suffer from the same phenomenon as car headlights. They're often poorly aimed (at an upwards angle instead of downwards) and have adopted an insanely bright white colour. I frequently yell at other cyclists when they blind me.

Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

#780

Post by lycopodiopsida »

My car (a VW) has adaptive light with zoning, which seems to work well - at least no one is flashing me! But in general, modern cars are a black box - the light is always on, everything runs on automatics, there is no height adjustment anymore. I mostly have to rely on it working as intended.
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