Full-size cars, yes, but I wish we the people now stopped the fossil-lobbied lawfare against microcars.

Renault Twizy, top speed 80km/h

Kyburz Plus, top speed 30km/h

• Gross weight ~10% of a typical electric car, so probably ~10% tyre dust too.
• For bikeways. If the plastic surface were designed to yield in a crash, a pedestrian could be safer hit by this than by a bare biker on a bare metal bike.
• Takes less space than a biker because a 4-wheeler can be steered more accurately than a naturally unstable bike needing wobble margins.
• Banned in many places through lawfare: https://xfwnofqagsnmdxuf.quora.com/Lawfare-against-tiny-cars-velomobiles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile_(transportation)

1. Make normal life illegal.
2. Attack political opponents breaking the laws.
3. Fascism.

WWW was crap right from the start - it works like a paper pile, chaotic, needs search engines to work. It was made for publishing only. It doesn’t work for anything else except through ugly hacks added on top of it.

The much earlier invention, Memex, was designed for crowd work on all human knowledge. It remembers knowledge and its creation process to be immediately learned from and built upon. It self-organises, integrating added information to the common knowledge tree.

Other earlier inventions superior to WWW are Xanadu Web by Ted Nelson, and Dynabook/Smalltalk by Alan Kay.

The sick sad history of computer-aided collaboration
https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen

He says “co-dependent”, not “interdependent”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codependency

… imbalanced relationships where one person enables another person’s self-destructive behavior, such as addiction, poor mental health, immaturity, irresponsibility, or under-achievement.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/interdependent

Mutually dependent; reliant on one another.

That’s Quora now, after 2018.

Quora 2013:
https://www.quora.com/How-does-monoamine-oxidase-MAO-cleave-monoamines/answer/Alex-Siegel

2016:
https://www.quora.com/Which-theory-best-explains-why-humanity-screws-up/answer/Rob-Ennals

Quora used to have a fantastic crowd-edited question topic ontology/taxonomy for precise feed shaping with thousands of disambiguated topics interlinked in a graph/tree structure, but they enshittified the system away 2023, and now it’s all LLM misunderstandings of what the question topics should be. The bot thinks a question is about apples when the question is a mathematics word puzzle; “How many apples…”. The excuse for AI tagging was “tags can be abused” when in reality the crowd corrected the abuses quickly and reported the offenders. With the new AI tagger, my feed turned from a valuable place for learning into viral trash from Quora-celebrities, mostly about current news.

They never made the obviously needed features of:

• being able to topic tag answers, not just questions (for when the question is general and the answer is specific, like “What do you think everyone needs to know in 2026?”).
• the ability to follow a topic from a user, because most people write about many topics, so a follow-a-user brings uninteresting topics to my feed, but not all people write well about that topic I want to follow, so I’d need to follow that topic from good writers only.

I wish the downvoters commented to explain why.

My (upvoter’s) problem with this is the structurelessness, “prose-pizza” where the meat is sprinkled all over the story, so you have to read it all to get it all. I would appreciate a simple, skimmable “problems, solutions” structure with clear hierarchy under short subtitles. The first line or two should be a summary for non-followers for deciding whether to click on this when previewed in a feed.

This post didn’t need to include an ad for x-dot-com.

Artificial scarcity is a crime against humanity that should be banned. Trade secrets, forbidding others from producing an invention, and patent trolling should be illegal, not built into law. All information should be public (anonymised). Every computer should have everything digital ever made.

Capitalism is a problem that should be replaced by a retroactively-estimating value-production reward system. The system should pay for the value produced anywhere in society, including to the drug inventor when a patient is healed, or to the producer when a copy of something is used to have fun, or when a product or service that was made with the help of it, produces value. Movie makers would get paid more if they received good ratings from consumers. Software makers would get paid more when their applications are used, but causing addiction would be fined. News Corp and cigarette makers would be fined for destroying value.

The expected result of commercial dating sites not showing the best matches to keep the paying customers hooked forever.

When I try to swipe on OkCupid (now destroyed by Match Group), it says “This Stack is currently empty. Come back later for more people or update your preferences”, but when I open a browser bookmark of a person I superliked and messaged before, the person is still there, and my superlike and message have been deleted. I don’t know if the person ever saw my profile.

That title tells nothing about the content. Please edit so that feed scrollers can decide whether to click or not.

Loading up weight does make the ride smoother because suspension stiffness stays the same, unlike when a heavier car is designed.

The newer sedan was likely designed to tolerate spirited driving. When designing a car, they’re aiming for an appropriate resonant frequency for body up-down bounce, under 1 Hz for good comfort, more for sportier ride. Featherweight Citroën 2CV gives a very soft ride.

Thought experiment: weld two cars together side by side - double weight, double suspension stiffness carrying the weight. Why would there be any difference in vibration when they drive together over a double-wide speed bump?

It’s the same as with dropping objects of different weights (in vacuum) - the feather falls as fast the hammer, because weight and inertia cancel each other out.

Nitpicks:

2 - Inertia doesn’t help. It cancels out because the suspension must be equally stiffer to carry the added weight. There’s a correlation, which is more because bigger cars are more expensive, which have better suspensions and stiffer bodies.

4 - Unsprung mass helps and hurts comfort. It filters out high frequency vibration, forcing the tyre to flex more, but the mass bounces higher up from bigger bumps, hitting the suspension harder.

• accelerating and braking between each bump causes engine and tyre noise, and tyre and brake dust, which are toxic.

London is unsafe for rightwingers: it hurts their feelings.

They let AI into the curriculum immediately, while actual life skills have been excluded for the benefit of work skills since Prussian schooling became popular. Dumbing down the livestock.

https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-things-schools-should-teach-but-dont/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen

Maybe he’s allergic to what the placebo was made of.

My right-out-of-warranty Logitech M590 mouse lost its pairing to its USB-receiver upon booting up Windows after using the mouse in Linux for weeks out-of-warranty. I bought another one, and that too did the same the first time I booted up Windows after the warranty had expired.

Finally I searched the issue, and it’s normal. I had to install a non-default Logitech software in Windows and re-pair the apparently broken mice to their receivers. Both mice work again, except the older one’s left button is acting up a bit.

A non-asshole company would have notified me “Your mouse receiver needs an update that requires re-pairing the connection manually. Do you want to continue the update?”. And why the hell would a mouse receiver need an update when the warranty ends?

Obviously the purpose is to make the mouse appear broken with plausible deniability and bluff the customer into buying a new mouse.