Linked List: August 11, 2023

Friday, 11 August 2023

Liz Lindqwister, writing for The San Francisco Standard:

Ever thought about getting down and dirty in a robotaxi? Want to light up a cig or a joint on the drive home from the club? You’re not alone.

As autonomous vehicles become increasingly popular in San Francisco, some riders are wondering just how far they can push the vehicles’ limits — especially with no front-seat driver or chaperone to discourage them from questionable behavior.

For some, that’s a welcome invitation to test the autonomous vehicles’ limits. Megan, a woman in her 20s, took her first robotaxi ride on a recent late-night excursion. It was also her first time having sex in a driverless vehicle. The Standard is not providing exact dates of the riders’ debauchery to protect their privacy but has verified the rides took place through documentation. Names have been changed because of the riders’ privacy concerns.

Setting aside questions regarding their driving ability, autonomous taxis will prove to be an interesting behavioral playground. How clean will they remain? What’s to keep people from smoking, littering, pissing, puking, and, yes, screwing inside? If 95 percent of passengers can behave as they would in a human-driven taxi or ride share, but the other 5 don’t, they could turn putrid quickly. Like I wrote last night, you need to design for how people do behave, not how they should.

These robotaxis are all equipped with cameras, and the paying passenger is known through their account with the service, but the more you surveil their behavior while riding, the more you encroach on their privacy.

‘X Marks the Verb’ ★

A few weeks ago when Twitter was renamed to X, and we learned that Elon Musk somehow thinks people are going to use “x” as both a verb and noun, I recalled having once stumbled upon this 1983 “On Language” column from the late great William Safire:

“The Federal bureaucracy has invented a new verb,” says Charles DeLaFuente of Kew Gardens, N.Y., who had just sent in his 1040 income-tax return to the Internal Revenue Service. He attached an addressed envelope that he had received from the I.R.S.; in the upper left-hand corner, where the return address of the taxpayer belongs, is the heavy black outline of a box. Next to the box are the words “X box if refund.”

“Never mind the unanswered question, ‘If refund what?’,” the irate taxpayer observed. “We all know they mean to x the box if you have a refund coming. Maybe the ink they saved on those instructions will pay for the next round of tax cuts.”

Mr. DeLaFuente — his name means “of the fountain” — is blowing his geyser for the wrong reason. The verb to x is not new. In 1849, Edgar Allan Poe wrote in one of his tales: “‘I shell have to x this ere paragrab,’ said he to himself, as he read it over.” In 1935, Jonas Bayer carried that crossing-out metaphor into the mechanical age in Startling Detective magazine: “An imported hatchet man with a .45-caliber typewriter can x out the dangerous canary.” Merriam-Webster’s first citation in the one-letter verb’s literal sense is from Henry Cassidy’s 1943 book “Moscow Dateline”: “I x’d out the word ‘west’ in the third question, changing it to ‘east.’”

The whole column is a goldmine, including a section on the Philly accent (Eagles = “Iggles”) and another referencing perhaps the coolest-named American who ever lived, Pussyfoot Johnson. (NYT subscribers can read the scans of the original Sunday magazine issue.)

‘The Famous F40’ Vector Illustration by David Rumfelt ★

Matt Sephton:

I was looking through some old Macintosh CD-ROMs, searching for my usual things that I do whenever I add new discs to my collection: hanafuda, specific artists, favourite software, plugins for said favourite software, and so on. Whilst I was deep in the filesystem I stumbled across some old sample files from Deneba Canvas and noticed how they were all credited to the artist.

Intrigue got the better of me so I did a quick google and came up with a post on the Canvas GFX website (yes, the software still exists!) about David Rumfelt and his most famous work: a cutaway illustration of a Ferrari F40. [...]

Maybe this will transport you back through time to when you were young!?

Indeed, this took me back in time so clearly that it might as well have been a DeLorean, not a Ferrari.