Urban planning that separates pedestrians and vehicles.

Roads that are narrow in places where a lower speed is desirable.

Heavy taxation on vehicles with more mass and lower visibility.

Actual licensing standards other than driving down a couple of city streets and parking.

More crossings, with lights or bridges, instead of long four-lane arterial roads with nowhere to safely cross.

We have most of that in <pick some European city/country>, and the statistics show it makes a big difference compared to the USA, but drivers still exceed the speed limit, run through red lights etc and cause injuries and death to pedestrians and cyclists.

Removing automatic enforcement of speed limits would not improve the situation.

All 50 states have dog licensing in some form, but it seems that it's more a case of the state allowing municipalities to do so or not. Some states also require veterinarians to report unlicensed dogs. Larger cities almost certainly require it (NYC and Chicago definitely do).

https://www.rover.com/blog/dog-license/

Usually it's an animal welfare and control thing: you pay a lot more if you don't spay/neuter, rabies vaccination is required, etc.. Otherwise it's too easy for a city to be overrun by strays.

Also, if your pet gets lost and ends up being picked up by animal control, it's considered a stray if it's not registered.

They're used heavily for the companies to harass and dehumanize the workers, too.

"You didn't try hard enough to sell the customer something else when they called with a major problem."

"How dare you deviate from the script and talk to the caller."

"Why did this take ten minutes? Get those call times down."

That's not even enough for doctors to consider "drinking coffee" on a chart lol.

I'm increasingly convinced of the need for professional licensing for software engineering. You get a degree, and sit through that ethics course, and take an exam to get a license, or you don't get to practice. Do unethical things, enjoy major liability.

Software engineers can do just as much damage as civil engineers, automotive engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc...but the industry overall has a disgustingly casual attitude.

I think software engineers in the right place can actually do far more damage than most doctors and lawyers

the scale is simply humongous

just look at what facebook has done to our democracies

Agree, but replace the ethics course with a legal course.

Ethics are just someone else’s biased opinion, legal is put in place by elected officials and has actual consequences.

The law is just someones else encoded ethics for a moment. You don't want your moral to change with the current administration. An ethics course is about thinking about ethics, it is not a mind-altering propaganda action.

Or any country the US has a reciprocal copyright treaty with, which is all but a vanishingly small set of countries.

A work is protected by copyright the moment it's authored, and all rights are reserved unless it's explicitly licensed otherwise.

Tin Pan Alley is the historical industry from before recording: composers sold sheet music and piano rolls to publishers, who sold them to working musicians. The ASCAP/BMI mafia would shake down venues and make sure they were paying licensing fees.

Recorded music and radio obviously reduced the demand for performers, which reduced demand for sheets.

We've had Yamaha Vocaloid for over two decades now, and Synthesizer V is probably coming up on a decade too now. They're like any other synth: MIDI (plus phonemes) in, sound out. It's a tool of musical expression, like any other instrument.

Hatsune Miku (Fujita Saki) is arguably the most prolific singer in the world, if you consider every Vocaloid user and the millions of songs that have come out of it.

So I don't think there's any uncharted territory...we still have singers, and sampled VST instruments didn't stop instrumentalists from existing; if anything, most of these newcomer generative AI tools are far less flexible or creatively useful than the vast array of synthesis tools musicians already use.

Miku is neat but not a replacement for a human by any stretch of the imagination. In practice most amateur usage of that lands somewhere in a cringey uncanny valley.

No one was going to replace voice actors for TV and movie dubs with Miku whereas the cutting edge TTS tools seem to be nearing that point. Presumably human vocal performances will follow that in short order.

"You're so right, that nice catch lines up perfectly!"

It's not just a coincidence, it's the emergence of spurious statistical correlations when observations happen across sessions rather than within sessions.

You can add an M-dash, and we completed the bs-bingo. :)

Staring at a bright light makes floaters visible, so dark is a must for me. Plus, code should never be dark-on-light, that's disgusting.

Astigmatism can cause eye strain headaches. I don't know if LASIK corrects that or not, or if you have it, but getting glasses with cylindrical correction helped reduce some of my headaches. Apparently most people don't see a big starburst around lights at night, or have a faint/fuzzy halo around text at any distance.