I’m thinking bigger than that. There are companies right now operating robotic taxis on American roads with no human operators on board. A car that may or may not even have a steering wheel arrives, a human passenger climbs into the back seat, and the car drives off with them. Who is legally responsible for the operation of that car? If it hurts someone, who do they sue? If it commits a crime, who do we punish?

Unhealthily watching = scrolling shorts for too long.

The concept absolutely exists in law but it’s just called… “the driver.”

There’s another aviation term, “The Pilot Flying.” The Pilot In Command bears the authority and responsibility. The Pilot Flying is doing the work of steering. If present, a Pilot Not Flying might help with checklists, system monitoring, navigation, radio communication, handling secondary controls like flaps and landing gear, but the Pilot Flying is in immediate control of the aircraft.

The PIC is very often not the pilot flying. I used to be a flight instructor, when teaching students who aren’t yet qualified to command, I acted as Pilot In Command, but the student was the Pilot Flying as much as possible.

Autopilots have been a thing for most of aviation history. It doesn’t count as a crewman. It’s a piece of equipment like any radio or gauge. It is a tool at the PICs disposal. It is the PIC’s job - sometimes delegated to the Pilot Flying - to monitor the autopilot and take over if it begins doing something wrong.

That’s the concept that is missing with self-driving or driverless cars. Tesla drivers will sit in the driver’s seat and abdicate command of the vehicle to the autopilot, or worse, cars are operating as taxis with passengers in the back seat and no one in the front seat, or with no onboard controls at all. Fully autonomously, or remotely operated by Southeast Asians who…totally have a valid American driver’s license. Definitely.

Corporations love it. “Legally, the driver is responsible for the vehicle. Our car has no driver, so legally no one is responsible for the vehicle. Responsibility averted.”

You know, I bet you could hate yourself and others on Truth Social just as much as you do here, so why don’t you head back there where you can give everything you own to some prosperity gospel scammer or gold smartphone bullshit or whatever else you “too straight to fuck women” assholes do.

So, earlier today I was being unhealthy on youtube, and someone half my age made a HUGE point to tell his audience including me that even if a self-driving Tesla runs a red light, it’s the human driver that gets the ticket.

Now…I’m a pilot. I have been since I came in that guy’s mom. In the aviation community, we have this concept called Pilot In Command. In the US, this is set into law in 14 CFR 91.3. The pilot in command of an aircraft is fully responsible for, and is the final authority as to, the operation of that aircraft. Not the administrator, not your instructor, not air traffic control, not the President of the United States, not god, the PIC. That concept doesn’t exist in driver’s ed, but it needs to. We need to teach student drivers about the Driver In Command responsibility.

Too long, didn’t process the metaphor: Nobody thinks about anything they do unless the law requires it.

I don’t fucking know man. Choose your own damnation: Go with a commercial package like LastPass and have your data sold exfiltrated by elite dark-web h4xx0rz, or go with an open source package like KeePass that has been forked by 40 different communists who cannot be made to agree to what extent Stalin and/or Maos shit didn’t stink. I’m running KeePassGY because random fucking letters I guess.

The more alcohol I drink, the less mildly I’m infuriated.

I have a bigger yet more basic problem:

I haven’t seen software documentation aimed at users since Windows 3.1.

Early 90’s Microsoft software came with a softcover tome about how it worked. Those white books with the blue banners? If you’re over 35 you know what I mean, the ones nobody read so the entire fucking industry culture stopped trying to write that kind of thing at all.

Linux Mint’s documentation is almost entirely a teen’s livejournal entry about how it’s totally not a phase and how daddy Ubuntu just doesn’t understand our vibe, man. Seriously, go to linuxmint.com and look at their Documentation session, it’s 80% grievance airing.

Do you know what I did today? I physically gave up on Meshcore. I put every LoRa node I owned in a box, complete with the batteries and antennas and shit I owned in a cardboard box, and hauled them to a Ford dealership to give to a fellow Ham, because Meshcore’s website documents the message packet protocol, but not what a room server is.

So KeePass is one of those things that exists as a system of forks, I use two different forks on x86 Linux and ARM-Android. They assume I’m going to access one cloud-based file from everywhere, when I sync files locally, which…

Okay, interrupting one drunken inappropriately misogynistic rant for another drunken inappropriately misogynistic rant: It is for all intents and purposes fucking impossible to use Android. I’ve got a Pixel 10, the dirtfucking may-god-force-him-to-watch-the-murder-rape-of-his-family-especially-his-kids salesman sold me a vendor locked phone, and, modern Android is a total woman of an operating system. It doesn’t do things you want it to do and won’t explain why. Like browse it’s own fucking file system. If you’ve got a database file and it’s associated keyfile stored in ~/Documents/Passwords that you want to open with KeePass…Go back to your bedroom at your mom’s house and pull your dick there, perv! I’m not doing that because my mama didn’t raise no hussy!

In conclusion, may everyone who knows a programming language including me have their genitals repeatedly burned out eternally in hell for our crimes against our fellow human. Amen.

Yeah but you didn’t waste the allotted time on it which is the main purpose of college.

I’m running KeePass2 Android on my phone. It didn’t allow me to take a screenshot. Good for it.

Reminds me of how Will Smith’s character in I, Robot eats pie.

So by the logic of about half the English teachers I know, you didn’t read it hard enough. I’ll let you try again to improve your grade.

Yeah. He lived to the ripe old age of 18. Had a long, happy life playing in all the boxes he could ever want.

Rip Maru.

Reminds me of a picture I saw of an owl that was missing a lot of feathers on its head, captioned “…bless you.”

Xhamster isn’t American.

The Northrop-Grumman B-2 Doomerang.

I thought it was a horse with some weird hair going on.

Of course it would, but then it wouldn’t be a useful illustrative example when teaching noobs what a distro is.