ate all the Oreos posted:

the google keyboard has the comma right next to the spacebar for me

flakeloaf posted:

my sgs6 does not

i also cannot take a screenshot with its default keyboard open because the palm-swipe gesture isn't recognized while they keyboard is open

so i say again, android lol

flakeloaf posted:

my sgs6 does not

i also cannot take a screenshot with its default keyboard open because the palm-swipe gesture isn't recognized while they keyboard is open

so i say again, android lol

graph posted:

thank you

Mr. Nice! posted:

flakeloaf posted:

nope, that makes a soft "volume down" boop sound and then locks the phone

ate all the Oreos posted:

it's fickle as hell

chestnut santabag posted:

does holding down volume down and the power button not take a screenshot on ur shitphone?
gently caress uuuuuu ate all the oreos

graph posted:

people getting fishmechd in 2018

flakeloaf posted:

do you have insulated stairs in your house

flakeloaf posted:

website, official instructions: push the power and volume down buttosn together

video on the same website: here's me pushing the power and home buttons together and tada a screenshot

and that method works reliably

quote:

For nearly a decade, the advent of self-driving cars has been increasingly central to discussions of transportation and urban planning. As of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, however, it’s safe to say that driverless cars have arrived. In place of the tech demonstrations of years past, CES 2018 was focused on where, how, and why self-driving cars will first hit the roads.

Change, of course, takes time; we won’t just wake up one day to discover our roads have been completely colonized by driverless vehicles. Still, between Google subsidiary Waymo’s already running “Early Riders” program in Phoenix, AZ, and the announcements at this year’s CES, it looks likely that we’ll be sharing the road with autonomous vehicles (AVs) before 2020.

It may be a full generation before the human driver goes the way of the Model T, however; the plan seems to be for AVs to start out offering services such as taxi rides or pizza delivery. This adoption period gives us a crucial window to begin preparing our cities and towns for an AV-driven future. Our task now is to sort through the visions of utopian prognosticators and dystopian doomsayers and decide what kind of future we’re planning for.

The optimistic view envisions a fleet of AV ride-shares moving fluidly through the city on narrow streets, dropping passengers at expansive curbs or pedestrian walkways before zipping off to grab their next patron. This is possible, of course, due to the superior reaction time and awareness of the AV, an ability that would also allow for narrower roads.

In the ideal scenario, the widespread adoption of ride-sharing would free up vast tracts of land currently devoted to parking. Even if half the currently driving population insists on owning their own AV, a huge amount of that land could be converted from automotive to human use. Between that and the reduction of street size, we could build homes, parks, schools, restaurants—all the urban features that make our cities and towns such lovely places to live. This is, like most idealized visions, a pretty picture.

But it’s important to consider an alternate perspective. From a more skeptical vantage point, AVs don’t facilitate more walkable metropolises, but instead contribute to ever-expanding sprawl. After all, if you’re not stuck behind the wheel, why does it matter how long your drive is? Driving six hours every day could seem less of a problem if commuters could spend the trip working, reading, or snagging a few more hours of sleep.

While that vision may hold a certain appeal to some, the environmental implications are staggering. Even if we assume that all AVs are electric, we’re still looking at a massive increase in energy consumption by cars. And that’s not to mention the natural and agricultural lands that would devoured by sprawling subdivisions, the watersheds drying up beneath oceans of pavement, or the wildlife corridors severed by a highway network that snakes ever outwards.

Ideally, we would face neither of these two scenarios. We don’t need to hypothesize about a future designed with automobiles in mind; we’ve spent our whole lives living it, and we’re still learning—and not learning—the same lessons again and again.

For example, the promise of ride-hail services such as Uber and Lyft was that they would take cars off the road——just like AVs. But that proved to be a pretty, idealistic, unrealistic picture. According to a recent UC Davis study, ride-hailing has actually increased the number of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the cities where it is available—the opposite of what we were promised. It turns out that in somewhere between 49 and 61 percent of cases, people used a ride-hail service instead of walking, biking, taking public transportation, or not going anywhere at all—not to substitute for driving. The parallels with AVs aren’t hard to see. And we can’t pretend we didn’t see it coming; experts have been warning us for years about the VMT increase ride-hailing would most likely cause.

So yeah, we’re familiar with a car-centric planning model. We’re familiar with sprawl development that reserves thirty percent of the land in residential neighborhoods for cars, not people; we’ve seen that number climb to seventy percent in the commercial parts of our cities and towns. We drive on roads with so many lanes and such complicated traffic patterns that only the most adventurous bicyclists dare to pedal down them, and crossing them is a long slog for people on foot. We expect pedestrians to stay out of the way of cars, stick to the sidewalks, and only cross streets at certain points, which can make walking a chore. We put the responsibility for their own safety on pedestrians, expecting them to check for cars, but don’t design our streets, or enforce laws, that encourage car drivers to yield to people walking.

We don’t know exactly what AV-centric planning might look like, but we already have myriad examples of communities built with a “vehicle-first” mindset.

Instead of planning for cars, with or without drivers, we should be planning for people, for the environment, for the future. Let’s create cities and towns surrounded by a vibrant and healthy greenbelt, and celebrate the ways those lands enrich our lives. Let’s encourage local agriculture, protect our water supply, and support the green infrastructure that can help defend us from flooding and wildfires. Let’s build out our public transportation network so everyone can get to work, to dinner with friends, or out of the city to play outside. And let’s supplement our trains and buses with protected bike paths and sidewalks, and with AVs.

AVs will undoubtedly have a huge impact on our lives in the years to come, and it would be foolhardy to ignore them as we plan our future. Even Lyft, as it announced plans for AV service, acknowledged this reality. In calling itself “a collaborator” with cities, Lyft acknowledges its role as one small part of the urban ecosystem, rather than the driver of its creation. So as we build the cities of the future, let’s remember that most important lesson from science-fiction. The robots should work in service of people and the landscapes we so cherish—not the other way around.

Kieffer Katz works at Greenbelt Alliance, an organization that advocates for smart growth and land conservation in the Bay Area.

Sagebrush posted:

Google understood the word septuagenarian on the first try, by the way

quote:

For nearly a decade, the advent of self-driving cars has been increasingly central to discussions of transportation and urban planning. As of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, however, it’s safe to say that driverless cars have arrived. In place of the tech demonstrations of years past, CES 2018 was focused on where, how, and why self-driving cars will first hit the roads.

Captain Foo posted:

bad dragon naturally leaking

lancemantis posted:

So as we build the cities of the future, let’s remember that most important lesson from science-fiction. The robots should work in service of people and the landscapes we so cherish—not the other way around.

Bhodi posted:

gonna be hilarious when companies realize they'll have to staff an entire secondary fleet of vehicles to rescue the first fleet when they get stuck, also without a driver those cars and expensive sensors are gonna start taking hits from tire irons from pissed off people when the thing gets confused and blocks intersections

the only company that I think might be successful is that retirement city in florida because they have a captive market, laser scanned the roads, good weather, a very limited area for their auto-driving, and perfectly maintained wide suburban roads

that one convergence in the entire usa of all those factors is gonna bring an avalanche of secondary money and positive press so expect driverless cars to fail spectacularly in your city soon

infernal machines posted:

waymo got the go-ahead to launch their autonomous taxi service somewhere near phoenix. so that's a thing

Bhodi posted:

expect driverless cars to fail spectacularly in your city soon

infernal machines posted:

waymo got the go-ahead to launch their autonomous taxi service somewhere near phoenix. so that's a thing

lancemantis posted:

https://cal.streetsblog.org/2018/02/13/guest-commentary-our-future-of-self-driving-cars/

ate all the Oreos posted:

"the most important lesson from science fiction"

flakeloaf posted:

seriously though why does the default keyboard lack a comma

is that just anroid lol or samsung being fucky

ate all the Oreos posted:

i'm home for lunch and literally the only one in my apartment besides my cat right now and i still said "im gay" real quiet on instinct because dictating poo poo is so fuckin' obnoxious

also i don't want my cat to think i'm an idiot

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

ate all the Oreos posted:

i sure am glad mother's little helper pills have been replaced by the somehow socially acceptable "day-drinking an entire bottle of wine"