Yeah but a car build with bicycle parts. Drastically less energy, recyclable and environmentally sustainable. Build a state owned factory to build a million of these micro cars for the big cities and ban all cars. It’s technologically feasible right now and it would be more luxurious for people. You need to add a little bit of honey to your environmentalism lol.

Look at something like the podbike and imagine that as a self driving micro taxi that goes 50 kmh max. Little embedded energy, material and only needs small batteries and incredibly energy efficient because of aerodynamics (slimmer). Energy efficient even compared to trains or busses, especially in areas or times with lower utilization.

If you want to eliminate cars and make mass transit work as energy efficient as possible, you NEED self driving single seater cars (or double seaters with face to face).

I was thinking of the Gemini (protocol) - Wikipedia but a bit more elaborate, and yeah I’m not sure how far text compression can be pushed. But I think LLMs could be useful and help reach a critical mass of being able to download and store tons of articles.

Torrent V2 and other official extensions Updating Torrents Via DHT Mutable Items allow some ways to do this. Like hosting a youtube channel and updating it with new videos, without any new network protocol. Well theoretically since this isn’t yet supported well in torrent clients or lib.

I’ve been thinking how this would work for a while but it’s kind of frying my brain haha. Like a “P2P version control database” that is truly open source. For articles and blog posts, but also for metadata for manhwa, movies, tv, anime, books etc. Like anybody can download and use it and share, edit, fork it without needing to set up some complex server. Something that can’t be taken down, sold or if abandoned someone else can just pick it up and you can merge different curated versions and additions easily.

You’d basically want a “most popular items of the past X time” that almost everybody downloads, and then the whole database split into more and more exotic or obscure items. So everybody has the popular stuff but also has to host some exotic items so they don’t get lost. And it has to be easy to use and install.

But the whole database has to be small and compact and compressed enough that you can still easily host it on a normal HDD. It the current times with economic and political dangers lurking this would be a crucial bit of IT infrastructure.

I believe everyone can, it just takes practice and is only relevant for 120hz games. Or VR.

That is just stupid. How about a slighly more complex markdown.

What I really want is a P2P archive of all the relevant news articles of the last decades in markdown like in firefox “reader view”. And some super advanced LLM powered text compression so you can easily store a copy of 20% of them on your PC to share P2P.

Much of the information on the internet could vanish within months if we face some global economic crisis.

I bought an oled phone for 200€ a few years back. What I’d really want is that every smartphone sold in the EU is open, with open drivers and OS with root access if you want to. And some investments by the EU to support open smartphone OS.

What a shithole civilization.

I couldn’t remember it either. I described it to deepseek in order to find it. Ironically it mistakenly thought

the short story you’re thinking of is almost certainly “Nanny” by Cory Doctorow. It’s part of his collection Radicalized (published in 2019)".

If you find it, let me know. I think I might have been conned by deepseek.

They would generate strategies that maximize their objective function based on the training data. Obviously garbage in garbage out, but my point is they would not be prone to certain irrationalities like humans.

It might be possible to regulate how AI CEOs are optimized and trained though. You can tell a human CEO a thousand times “we only have one earth, if you all externalize your cost we will all die and have zero profits” but an AI might actually get it. AI might also be connected to a kind of crowdsourced democratic economic global forum, where people can discuss, complain and make suggestions.

AI also has a much higher bandwidth and might catch institutional problems much easier because it doesn’t have to rely on summaries of subordinates to understand how things are going.

More broadly, it might be theoretically impossible for humans to act according to our shared values - no matter what rules, institutions, education or culture we create. Like “theoretically impossible, the system always degenerates” because individual humans will always follow their own greed and lust for power while pretending to comply, and then using that power to slowly pervert the system and it’s rules. I believe that is the root of our current malaise. But even non-sentient AI might be able to help us just enough to make it work. It’s much more likely that those in power will use it for the opposite, but that shouldn’t stop us from thinking about if it can be used for good.

People are a resource that keeps regenerating after all.

That’s what the AI would call “sustainable business practices”?

I’ve been wondering why they don’t blow up more regularly. I imagine a few long range sniper shots would make them explode easily. They should be relatively easy to hit, seeing how big they are.

I suspect an AI CEO would be more rational and science driven, instead of believing in some ideology that says workers have to feel desperate to be most productive or something. It’s possible they’d look at science and then raise the minimum vacation time so people are more productive and generate more profit.

Huh I read a dystopian short story about AI micro-managing workers, constantly telling them what to do next to optimize productivity. It ends with near “perfect” dystopian wealth concentration. While in another part of the world they used AI to create a utopia.

Oh it was called Manna by Marshall Brain

The gradual takeover of jobs by AI (starting with fast food), The warehousing of the unemployed in state-controlled facilities, A techno-utopian alternative (Australia) where AI liberates rather than enslaves.

When “the others” do that, it’s called a terrorist attack.

It really comes around back home. How the USAns treated the people from the “shithole” countries, they now treat their own.

40.000 deaths by traffic accident by year (in the US). Only 20 deaths would be a major improvement. Obviously “cars” is a highly irrational discussion though.

And it’s not just the victims who could be spared their lives, it’s also the mental toll on those who kill people on accident. Blaming it on a flaw in the software that can be improved and flaws permanently fixed is great.

I say let the mechanized reduced slaughter begin!

I’ve always wondered why people driving a car do not wear a helmet. Or just walking around in the city. There is no question that it would save lives!

Embrace, extend, and extinguish

Once we have proper self driving cars none of these recent “innovations” like that or the speed limiting would matter.

Ideally self driving cars would also be without a steering wheel and just be half width with a single seat or two seats facing each other to reduce energy requirements. You could just develop this with a manhattan style project and test it in a single city banning all other private cars except delivery vehicles.