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Electric cars are required by law to emit sound via a speaker for safety. Usually the sound is unique and somewhat electronic in nature.

Some electric sports cars, and I'm not sure but Porsche may be one of them, have a loud deep bassy faux-sports engine sound emitting from the speaker. "VROOOOM VROOOOOM VROOOM!" - on an electric car.

Does anyone else find this *extremely* weird?

It's like a petrol car having a speaker playing the coconuts (as it's replaced the horse).


> Electric cars are required by law to emit sound via a speaker for safety. Usually the sound is unique and somewhat electronic in nature.

And this is absolutely… bad. I mean requiring is good, but almost all of the execution of it is awfully bad.

It can be personal - but Hz of that sounds just makes me boil inside. That's how badly I'm receiving it. Almost no other sounds I hear on daily basis makes me uncomfortable.

And another issue - when somebody is parking the sound goes on, off, on, off, and that all the time until person is happy how car is parked. Couldn't it just make that sound all the time? Would be easier to get used to it. Same way it works with PC fans - there is no benefit to keep it as lowest as possible at all times, the trick is to keep it spinning fast enough to avoid as many changes of speed as possible - keeping the noise constant and easier to live with.


More weird is, that the electric harley davidson is by intention more loud than the gas powered ones.

But the law requires a artificial sound only for low speeds. Electric cars are indeed silent and it can be dangerous not expecting one approaching, when one is used to loud explosion engines. But I would prefer to just have no noise and people adopting.


It is very obnoxious, the sound should just be enough for pedestrians to notice there's a car behind them (happened to me a few times now that there was an electric van one meter behind me that I hadn't heard at all). Tangentially related, but I came across a startup selling EV noises as NFTs once, and it still holds the palm of "most ridiculous business" in my head.

My last ICE car (a VW GTI) did this. I could turn the engine noise up or down in the settings on the touch screen.

I think I’d prefer it sound like an ICE car vs the weird electric noises. I don’t notice when most cars drive by my house, unless they are obnoxiously loud. But someone on my street got an electric SUV about 6 months ago and I can hear it every single time; it drives me crazy.

I was hoping electric cars would cut down on noise pollution, but no such luck. I understand the sounds is there for blind people, but the sound some of these companies have picked cuts right through the walls of my house like few other things do. I’m wondering what it will sound like when we have a whole city full of them.


Totally agreed. It is beyond understanding why you would even pay extra to get these sounds. The heavenly silence is one of the great advantages of an EV in my opinion.

Yes.

Is there a difference in EU vs US regulation?


Yes, it's embarrassing

Points vs comments. If there's lots of points on a story but only a few comments, it won't stick around. Or maybe its the other way around? (see below)

There is an automated flame detection mechanism. Don't know how it works. probably some kind of count of downvoting of comments?

Users manually flag.

Most political stories are flame bait; the discussions are low quality.

Most politics is off topic, but if a story has been discussed and this one has for almost a year, posting more about the same story with little change won't add much to the conversation.

E.g. I commented about this story 10 (ten!) months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43212206 and do not feel the need to share my thoughts each and every time the story comes up again, although I did 5 months ago. Maybe in 5 months time I will do so again but not every day!

Users do not want to see the same story permanently on show for discussion - they want novelty.

Users tend to not like: Emotions. Propaganda. Accusations of conspiracy. Less thoughtful and more thought terminating comments.

----

You can find better and more answers by the site moderator @dang on why things slip off the front page by using the search box at the bottom of the page.


Thank you! That cleared it up for me

for now.

Even this submission is out of date as images no longer have the mangled hand issues.

We are actually blessed right now in that it's easy to spot AI posts. In 6 months or so, things will be much harder. We are cooked.


AI being harder to spot still won't make dead internet crackpottery true. As for us being cooked ... in so many ways, including literally due to AGW, exacerbated by LLM compute and by the orange demento's policies.

How about this question: Can generating an anti-racist video be justified as a good thing?

I think many here would say "yes!" to this question, so can saying "no" be justified by an anti-racist?

Generally I prefer questions that do not lead to thoughts being terminated. Seek to keep a discussion not stop it.

On the subject of this thread, these questions are quite old and are related to propaganda: is it okay to use propaganda if we are the Good Guys, if, by doing so, it weakens our people to be more susceptible to propaganda from the Bad Guys. Every single one of our nations and governments think yes, it's good to use propaganda.

Because that's explicitly what happened during the rise of Nazi Germany; the USA had an official national programme of propaganda awareness and manipulation resistance which had to be shut down because the country needed to use propaganda on their own citizens and the enemy during WW2.

So back to the first question, its not the content (whether it's racist or not) it's the effect: would producing fake content reach a desired policy goal?

Philosophically it's truth vs lie, can we lie to do good? Theologically in the majority of religions, this has been answered: lying can never do good.


Game theory tells us that we should lie if someone else is lying, for some time. Then we should try trusting again. But we should generally tell the truth at the beginning; we sometimes lose to those who lie all the time, but we can gain more than the eternal liar if we encounter someone who behaves just like us. Assuming our strategy is in the majority, this works.

But this is game theory, a dead and amoral mechanism that is mostly used by the animal kingdom. I'm sure humanity is better than that?

Propaganda is war, and each time we use war measures, we're getting closer to it.


Job security via code obscurity.

More careers to maintain and unentangle and rewrite such code bases.


Does the tree have a Wikipedia article about it? If not you can add it. If it does, you can add it to the list.

Wikipedia allows anyone to edit and contribute! (although many users don't know that and a smaller than miniscule amount of users actually do.)


Note that the quote was "involves doing evil". This is important and different than a declaration of a career as evil.

The meaningless thing is more of an absolute statement however.

A career can do (and even mostly do) good and sometimes unavoidably do evil.

Likewise a career can be (and even mostly be) meaningful and sometimes unavoidably be meaningless at times!


The counterexamples given above were caregivers, health workers, and those are ones which I think are easy to see as mostly doing good.

But given that we're on a tech forum, I think most people should reflect deeply on the companies they work for and the systems they exist in. If those companies are not already mostly doing evil (as the companies which employ a majority or near-majority of tech workers are), then they're probably venture-capital funded or owned by investors, which means their goal is to maximize profitability over any real metric of doing good. So they will be doing evil in the future, if they're not already, because doing evil is necessary for competing with other companies also doing evil.

Reflecting on a top-level comment from another user about OP using the basic technologies to do things people would often use other tools for, I noticed wild.gr doesn't even use google fonts or other tracking scripts. Its fancy text effects in the hero ("Wild & alive" "& raw" etc) are done entirely with SVG!

Most would certainly provide more data to Google for convenience


We do need art but do people need to choose that as their career path? Traditionally perhaps, was an artist part time, was art made communally as leisure?

Some had rich patrons and there were travelling bands of entertainers...


True, I'm thinking of it more like, these are some things that are positive and will benefit yourself and the world. Certainly you can mix multiple.

Alcohol prohibition did actually work.

It reduced the amount of people who drank and it increased health. It increased safety for women and children and reduced violent crime on the streets and in the home. It reduced alcohol related diseases and death. People missed less work. Like with passive smoking, a ban on alcohol positively affects non-drinkers too.

It was the organised crime side effects and societal unpopularity which lead to it's "failure". Alcohol prohibition continues to work in some countries today but I wouldn't want to live there.

Ultimately it's a bio-ethics and freedom issue, issues that continue to raise their head from time to time here and there, e.g. coronavirus responses.

Control of vaping could also be classed in this category.


I'm struggling to get a handle on this idea. Is the idea that today's data will be the data of the past, in the future?

So if it can work with whats now past, it will be able to work with the past in the future?


Essentially, yes.

If the prediction is that AI will be able to invent the future. If we give it data from our past without knowledge of the present... what type of future will it invent, what progress will it make, if any at all? And not just having the idea, but how to implement the idea in a way that actually works with the technology of the day, and can build on those things over time.

For example, would AI with 1850 data have figured out the idea of lift to make an airplane and taught us how to make working flying machines and progress them to the jets we have today, or something better? It wouldn't even be starting from 0, so this would be a generous example, as da Vinci way playing with these ideas in the 15th century.

If it can't do it, or what it produces is worse than what humans have done, we shouldn't leave it to AI alone to invent our actual future. Which would mean reevaluating the role these "thought leaders" say it will play, and how we're educating and communicating about AI to the younger generations.


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