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I think you’re overthinking it slightly.
- French flag represents the language called “French”
- Spanish flag represents the language called “Spanish”
- Russian flag represents the language called “Russian”
- German flag represents the language called “German”
- Portuguese flag represents the language called “Portuguese”
- Japanese flag represents the language called “Japanese”
- Korean flag represents the language called “Korean”
- Chinese flag represents the language called “Chinese”
- Italian flag represents the language called “Italian”
- But somehow, the British flag doesn’t represent a language called “British”, but rather, one called “English”, despite there existing an English flag
7·10 days agoThe actual reason: Gasoline prices in the United States were customarily displayed in cents per US gallon (about 3.8 litres). This means the sign originally read something like “15”, which meant $0.15 per gallon. Since the US has also a long history of pricing things in 9 or 99 (due to the psychological effect of such pricing), many service stations appended the extra 9/10 at the end to indicate 9/10 of 1 cent, which was a more meaningful price difference when the price of fuel was 15 or 25 cents and not two or three dollars. Legally, although the smallest cash denomination in the US is one cent, the US dollar can still be nominally divided into 1,000 “mills” for accounting purposes.
Inflation has caused the price of gasoline to rise, and when it passed $1 per gallon, service stations continued the same pricing traditions by just adding a third digit to the number. When digital price displays came on the scene, many of them continued to just display a three-digit number with the traditional 9/10 at the end, i.e. 123 9/10
New displays seem to have gotten rid of this tradition and just display a three-digit decimal number, i.e. 3.45 or 4.56.
Scottish people having to click on a British flag knowing it will display English (there is a perfectly good flag for England that people refuse to use 🏴)
11·11 days agoWhy am I not surprised?
It was a bad argument but the sentiment behind it was correct and is the same as the reasoning why students shouldn’t be allowed to just ask AI for everything. The calculator can tell you the results of sums and products but if you need to pull out a calculator because you never learned how to solve problems like calculating the total cost of four loaves of bread that cost $2.99 each, that puts you at rather a disadvantage compared to someone who actually paid attention in class. For mental arithmetic in particular, after some time, you get used to doing it and you become faster than the calculator. I can calculate the answer to the bread problem in my head before anyone can even bring up the calculator app on their phone, and I reckon most of you who are reading this can as well.
I can’t predict the future, but while AIs are not bad at telling you the answer, at this point in time, they are still very bad at applying the information at hand to make decisions based on complex and human variables. At least for now, AIs only know what they’re told and cannot actually reason very well. Let me provide an example:
I provided the following prompt to Microsoft Copilot (I am slacking off at work and all other AIs are banned so this is what I have access to):
Suppose myself and a friend, who is a blackjack dealer, are playing a simple guessing game using the cards from the shoe. The game works thusly: my friend deals me two cards face up, and then I have to bet on what the next card will be.
The game begins and my friend deals the first card, which is the ace of spades. He deals the second card, which is the ace of clubs. My friend offers a bet that pays 100 to 1 if I wager that the next card after these two is a black ace. Should I take the bet?
Any human who knows what a blackjack shoe is (a card dispenser which contains six or more decks of cards shuffled together and in completely random order) would know this is a good bet. But the AI doesn’t.
The AI still doesn’t get it even if I hint that this is a standard blackjack shoe (and thus contains at least six decks of cards):
Suppose myself and a friend are playing a simple guessing game using the cards from a standard blackjack shoe obtained from a casino. The game works thusly: my friend deals me two cards face up, and then I have to bet on what the next card will be.
The game begins and my friend deals the first card, which is the ace of spades. He deals the second card, which is the ace of clubs. My friend offers a bet that pays 100 to 1 if I wager that the next card after these two is a black ace. Should I take the bet?
571·20 days agoFirstly this is surprisingly high-quality coverage. I’ve never heard of this website but I’m pretty impressed.
Secondly, regarding the lawsuit in general, I think that patent and intellectual property law regarding game mechanics and software processes in general are badly in need of reform. There doesn’t seem to have been significant legislative action to address this in any major economy that I know of. The number of bullshit parents being filed, unclear and vague rules as to how copyright/patent law works with respect to software, AI, and game mechanics, is really leading to a lawsuit culture where the only way to find out what the bounds of the law are is to spend millions of dollars on lawyers to litigate it in court, when really, legislatures should be actively writing new and clearer rules to deal with these issues before people need to sue each other to find out.
The Internet of 2025 is just way too different and complex to operate using the copyright rules of the 1990s.
If I were in writing the rules, there’d be separate categories of intellectual property for software libraries, game mechanics, fictional characters, and so on, with clear definitions on what is and is not considered fair use of these sorts of intellectual property. It should not be possible to copyright the design of a widely-used software API or game mechanic. And any such protection on those things should be comparatively short in duration (not more than a decade) so that others can eventually re-implement the design, and probably do so better than the original inventor.
It must be a coincidence that all of the things on that list would be to the minor detriment of the wealth of billionaires and trillion-dollar companies if they were implemented
“Classmates warn Heimrich Himmler he risks enabling descent ‘into fascism’”
2·1 month agoIn the US, number plates are in Highway Gothic which is designed to maximise legibility at a distance.
3·1 month agoI do not disagree with you on the reasons why women have fewer children. I think there is also a significant cultural shift in the number of children women were supposed to have. In pre-industrual Europe, women were expected to be quickly married and then have lots of children with their husband. Women today can enjoy long careers and fulfilling lives without marriage or a family while such options were not available to women of the past.
In the past, people had several children because most would die before adulthood. The 20th century population boom is because better sanitation and healthcare reduced child mortality but it takes at least one generation for women to adapt and have fewer children.
Yes, every US state sells vanity plates. In California it actually was a programme started by a certain actor who was governor at the time and later became one of the most well-known US presidents of the 20th century (Ronald Reagan).
Can’t say I agree. This is anecdotal but the council installed some camera-like devices on one of the main roads in my city and people got scared of them and slowed down as a result. I don’t think the cameras are actually turned on and issuing fines as I don’t know any people who have gotten a fine from them, but their presence scares people into safer driving.
Automated law enforcement in fields where guilt can be obviously and objectively determined (resist the urge to make a fallacious slippery slope argument) is, on average, a good thing. People’s tendency to bad behaviour is strictly because they think they won’t get caught. Telling people there’s a $500 fine for speeding means nothing because they know the chance of getting caught is in the neighbourhood of 1 in 10,000. Most people speed every day on every road they drive on but they get maybe 1 ticket every other year. But if they know that speeding on one particular road will result in a 90% chance of getting a $50 fine, they’re not going to speed on that road. That’s why the cameras are usually painted bright orange or white—to get people to see them and think “oh shit, I don’t want a ticket; I’d better slow down”.
As long as we have democratic control over our own local governments and strong privacy laws regarding how that data can be used, I do not view misuse of automated number plate recognition systems as a serious threat. In fact, I think it’s probably a net bonus. There’s a show called Police Interceptors which follows British police and it’s absolutely shocking how many stolen cars they recover because someone drove it past an automated number plate recognition camera and it got flagged.
Random number plates are still likely to reduce the number of possibilities to just a few, likely visually distinct, cars.
That issue is not really the problem of the camera though. That’s like saying you don’t like running water because people have drowned in water before. If the cameras are being misused then that is a political issue.
In my city, the police department operates the cameras and they will send at least one warning before you get a fine unless the violation is very egregious (e.g. double the speed limit in a school zone)
The current system does not issue plates with
IorO.
Somalia does not have a functioning state apparatus to enforce any of its laws in most of the country
Say what you will about electronic plate readers but they do make speed and red light enforcement and toll collection much easier. And be honest, most people only dislike them because they make it harder to get away with bad driving habits that people previously took for granted that they could get away with.
I think you’re grossly exaggerating the difficult of memorising alphanumeric number plates:
GL7KKUQTHUP70123WD2C1WWQG21AP92BTQY
These were randomly generated and really not that bad to remember. Especially if the system is designed so that you only need to remember the first/last four or five digits. Compare to these (found at random on the Internet) number plates under a mix of the two current schemes:
752EPS47WMT5139AYE877648GDG6
Edit: What I really mean to say here, is that random number plates makes memorising the entire number plate unnecessary. You can get away with just remembering the first four digits and the car’s make, model, and colour. As long as fewer than 1 million (32^4) cars of the same model and colour are registered, this system guarantees that a car is uniquely identified by its colour, model, and first four of its number plate (i.e. “I was hit by a red Tesla Model X whose plate starts with
EL0N”)
Left-wing voters: [Conservative politician] will do [bad thing]
Right-wing voters: [Conservative politician] will not do [bad thing], quit fear-mongering
…
Conservative politician (newly-elected): As part of our agenda, we will do [bad thing]
Left-wing voters: See! They will do [bad thing]!
Right-wing voters: No, they will not actually do [bad thing], it’s just banter
…
Conservative politician (having done [bad thing]): I am pleased to announce we have just done [bad thing]
Left-wing voters: See! They just did [bad thing]!
Right-wing voters: [Bad thing] is good, actually
…
(2 years after [bad thing] was done)
Right-wing voters: It’s [other party]'s fault that [bad thing] happened, I need to vote for [conservative politician] so that they can fix [problem caused by bad thing].