Charles :trans: , fuck all GenAI (@celesteh@hachyderm.io)
hachyderm.io
"Cars replaced horses" This is what people say about LLMs, but it's based on a myth. Los Angeles used to have an excellent tram system, with its suburbs laid out along the tram line. It was bought by General Motors and scrapped to get people into cars. The Key System, which went from San Francisco to Fresno, was scrapped by a tyre company. Cars did not replace horses in cities. They replaced effective mass transit by leveraging capital to destroy a common good. If cars were actually better, this destruction would have been expensive and unnecessary. In more rural areas, bicycles were extremely common. They were most associated with liberating women, who were more able to commute and meet with neighbours. Bicycles became a symbol of feminism - for sexists. When male students at Cambridge wanted to protest women's admission, the built an effigy of a woman student and burned it. The effigy was on a bicycle. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-45096690 This notion of women cyclists overstepping their place in society and being a menace to the social order appears in the 'Wizard of Oz'. In Kansas, a woman neighbour demands that the family give up Toto because he's been causing extremely minor mischief. Auntie Em tells the neighbour that she wishes to say what what she thinks of her, but can't as she is "a Christian woman". This places her in binary opposition with the neighbour who leaves on a bicycle. Toto escapes and as Dorothy goes to Oz, the woman transforms into a witch and the bicycle into a broomstick. Bicycles fell out of fashion in the US until mountain bikes, which are loaded with male gender baggage and unsuitable to riding while wearing a dress or for commuting. Households switched to cars which are expensive, so they tended to only have one, which men took to work and women were placed back in the home. Cars are a malign presence. Their use was not the advance of technology, but deliberate concerted efforts to harm the public sphere and especially to disempower women. They only became practical because of massive subsidies for highways and roads. They are an inherently wasteful technology, ill-suited to a majority of their current use cases.
  • Communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyzEnglish
    0·
    1 个月前

    Yo combustion engines did in fact replace horses though… This is like just denial. Name a case where someone actually prefers a horse for actual work that isn’t just about the novelty of having a horse do it…

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      3·
      1 个月前

      The point is that horses got replaced by trains, trams and bicycles for most people long before cars became widely used.

        • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
          21·
          1 个月前

          You are also arguing in bad faith, because cars are not the same as internal combustion engines. You might be able to argue correctly that tractors replaced farm animals for productive use, but tractors are not cars.

            • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
              11·
              1 个月前

              And boats are a variety of car if they have an ICE, right? 🤡

              • Communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyzEnglish
                1·
                1 个月前

                boats are not a variety of car, but also boats didn’t replace horses? tractors are in no way meaningfully different from a car.

                both four wheeled vehicles attached to an ICE. Cars.

                • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
                  01·
                  1 个月前

                  You are making up arbitrary definitions to suit your silly argument. A boat is a form of personalized transport with an ICE engine, a steering wheel and seats, even a windshield etc. so it is clearly a “car” 🤡

    • PuddleOfKittens@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      28 天前

      Name a case where someone actually prefers a horse for actual work that isn’t just about the novelty of having a horse do it…

      All sorts of rough terrain stuff, where hooves work great but wheels don’t. For example, hilly terrain on a ranch.

      Anywhere where you have plenty of pasture to feed a horse for cheaper than the oil cost of a car/motorbike. Or just needed to be more off-grid than an early automobile would easily provide.

      Anytime you want a self-driving vehicle. If you were blackout drunk in the 1900s you could stagger to your horse and your horse could carry you home by itself.

      Basically anytime you didn’t need the extra horsepower/speed - my mother would talk about a veggie seller when she was growing up, who had a horsecart in the 1950s/60s that went up and down High Street every day kind of like an ice cream van would today. The horse would walk along and stop when someone came out, and then when someone bought some veggies the horse would tend to cheekily start walking right around the end of the purchase instead of waiting for the veggie seller to tell him first. Could he have bought a truck? Maybe, but trucks were expensive so maybe he just couldn’t afford it. Either way, why bother? The better specs aren’t even useful for the task. Nowadays this would be impossible as it’s now illegal to go that slowly down High Street, due to all the cars.