I don't want to celebrate UK roads too much. The majority of roundabout users in the UK are not indicating properly. Too many people are stopping at them when they have priority. Lanes are just a suggestion and using the correct lane is an invitation for someone to drive into the left of you.
In other areas: enough people don't know how to use a slip road that it becomes a problem to those who do. Likewise the flashing ambers of a pelican crossing. Lane discipline is much worse than on the continent, to the point you can see it creating traffic jams. Lots of people are driving big cars without the confidence needed to remain in their own lane.
There are millions of drivers who've never passed a theory test. We could do with more ruthlessness.
It may be user error, but that doesn't mean roundabouts aren't a footgun. It only takes one driver who doesn't do everything correctly to cause problems. It's not much fun driving around in the correct lane, only for someone to pull alongside you to the left (equivalent of "right" in the US, of course!). I failed a driving test because someone cut across me on a roundabout.
"I failed a driving test because someone cut across me on a roundabout." That driver may have cut across you on that roundabout but that doesn't mean roundabouts are a footgun.
When comparing two interfaces and one allows a larger amount of user error that interface is inferior.
The point is roundabouts require more work to navigate correctly than a four way intersection with traffic lights. Thus drivers are more likely to navigate incorrectly.
> When comparing two interfaces and one allows a larger amount of user error that interface is inferior.
Seeing a safety issue and ignoring all other considerations is an excellent example of the ‘overarching theory and imposed order’ I argued that Britain rejects in my first comment.
I mean, what you're trying to minimise is (frequency of misuse x consequences of misuse). signalised intersections target the frequency element, roundabouts target the consequences.
I feel like you're singling out UK drivers without much evidence here, I've driven lots across continental Europe, although mostly Spain<>France<>Germany<>Nordics, but in all countries people tend to not indicate properly, inside of roundabouts or outside of them. I'll admit to people in the Nordics being slightly better at signaling, but they make up by being so scared and non-confident in their driving that their hesitation causes near-accidents, rather than the opposite.
Still, all across the world the average driver seems to below what I imagined the average driver to be, before I started driving myself.
Not gonna lie, I know about the flashing ambers of the pelican crossing, but they are uncommon enough, whenever I see one, I spend several seconds wondering what is happening, until it clicks it's one of these crossings.
Smartphones are worse computing devices than laptops or desktops. Smartphones are also the most widely-used computing devices in the world, even by people sat at home with a better computing device on the other side of the room. History suggests worse just doesn't matter in the face of convenience.
While I'm still catastrophically worried about what AI means for my career, I've noticed that my current employer - very AI forward, and growing the team - is still facing an ever expanding backlog.
High productivity is generally good for the employee, unless you're productive enough you run out of work to do. So how much code is needed?
Yes I’ve seen very little change over the past 3 years in my role (platform engineering) except mostly JIRA tickets are more unreadable because people just have Claude vomit a novel into it.
I mean I use it every day of course, but the velocity of work doesn’t really seem to be budging lol. And frankly a lot of time wasted on AI made gadgets, and meetings about those gadgets (look at this dashboard Claude made! etc)
Short version is that what you, I, and other responses to you are seeing is backed up by the numbers: AI code generation leads to significant bottlenecks, burnout, increased bugs, insane code churn (rewrites), and decreased feature deployment (presumably due to dealing with the bugs and bottlenecks). And as of when this was done, increased AI did not improve the situation, it generally made it worse.
The code churn stat is what bothers me the most: People keep portraying the whole "quickly rewrite/re-generate code with AI" thing as a feature, but looking at it over time, it actually means you lose your battle-tested code and no longer have a stable foundation to build on top of. That's where I think the major problems will show up as code needs to be maintained - and, seemingly, already has been.
So much of this yes, colleagues who think doing AI work is asking Claude to, as you so eloquently wrote "vomit a novel", and allow themselves to disengage their brains.
The joke is at the level of developers, the constant sharpening of AI merge-requests reviewing (sometimes too much) has made the new job of AI speedriding & reviewsfighting a serious brain squeeze.
The value of conscienciousness has skyrocketed, and the value of openness is still the same as it ever was.
I don't want to celebrate UK roads too much. The majority of roundabout users in the UK are not indicating properly. Too many people are stopping at them when they have priority. Lanes are just a suggestion and using the correct lane is an invitation for someone to drive into the left of you.
In other areas: enough people don't know how to use a slip road that it becomes a problem to those who do. Likewise the flashing ambers of a pelican crossing. Lane discipline is much worse than on the continent, to the point you can see it creating traffic jams. Lots of people are driving big cars without the confidence needed to remain in their own lane.
There are millions of drivers who've never passed a theory test. We could do with more ruthlessness.
reply