Endless Wellspring of Misguided Hope

[JM]: I don't know about you, Dan, but I have always been a big fan of movie posters.

[JM]: When I was a kid, I had multiple movie posters on my wall, including one of the Karate Kid that I had signed by Karate Kid villain Billy Zabka.

[JM]: And that love of movie posters that I have had for most of my life was recently intrigued to find a site called Realizer, which apparently started around 2011 and then went dormant and then has been recently revived.

[JM]: And it is a collection of movie related art, which I didn't quite understand what I was looking at at first.

[JM]: Because I'm looking at these movie posters thinking, okay, well, these don't look like any of the movie posters for these actual movies that I've ever seen.

[JM]: I thought maybe they were posters that ran in other countries.

[JM]: And what I think a lot of them are, are movie posters that someone decided needed to exist.

[JM]: Someone who is a fan of a particular movie and decided, I'm going to create my own version...

[JM]: of a movie poster for this movie that I love.

[JM]: And you can check this out at realizer.com.

[JM]: I'm not going to spell it out for you.

[JM]: I think you can guess if not take a look at the show notes.

[JM]: And the about page rather poignantly mentions that one of the reasons for bringing it back was that the author's mentor and mother died back to back...

[JM]: last year and that gave this person the urgency and the escape to put their head in something else and rebuild this version of the site and i had a lot of fun scrolling through and looking at some of these if you get a chance to check it out for yourself make sure you tap on them occasionally.

[JM]: Because sometimes there are variants that you don't see if you're just scrolling through the default list of posters.

[JM]: And also you might see related works down below that might have been a bit more challenging to unearth otherwise.

[JM]: I'm going to highlight just two of my favorites.

[JM]: One of them is titled All About the Benjamins, One Last Score Painting.

[JM]: And the subject is the 1995...

[JM]: Michael Mann movie, Heat, with Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Val Kilmer.

[JM]: And in this one, Val Kilmer is holding his assault rifle in this iconic shootout scene in this movie.

[JM]: But his image takes the place of the president on a $100 bill that has fallen onto the pavement on which this shootout occurs.

[JM]: And I thought this was really creative.

[JM]: Loved it.

[JM]: And another one of these that I'll highlight is, of course, a

[JM]: Blade Runner fan image that has some really spectacular color and detail and elements down below where Blade Runner and other

[JM]: textual portions of the poster are all written in Japanese.

[JM]: So if you are a movie fan of any kind, I highly recommend checking the site out.

[JM]: It's awesome.

[JM]: Well done, sir.

[JM]: All right, moving on to some follow-up.

[JM]: Last time we talked about Apple OSes 27.

[JM]: And I wanted to mention an article written by Brent Simmons called that about wraps it up for stock Mac UI.

[JM]: And I found this interesting for a number of reasons. One,

[JM]: as I mentioned last time, I've had opportunity to use MacOS 27 and it's not on any of my machines personally, but I've messed around with it.

[JM]: And by and large, it seems like a small improvement over...

[JM]: MacOS 26, but still very much full of Liquid Glass elements and other user interface changes that I don't really care for.

[JM]: And apparently Brent feels the same saying, "I am in particular not a fan of how Mac toolbars look.

[JM]: I don't like the full height sidebars.

[JM]: And I especially don't like the Liquid Glass buttons."

[JM]: And Brent goes on to talk about what does it mean to make a Mac application that has stock Mac UI?

[JM]: What does it look like to diverge from that?

[JM]: And to summarize some of these concepts, there are two historical stated reasons for using stock interfaces.

[JM]: The first is user familiarity.

[JM]: The second is hoping to be able to expend less developer effort.

[JM]: And Brent mentions a secret third reason when it comes to designing for Apple platforms specifically.

[JM]: And that is the stock UI is designed by Apple, the best designers in the world.

[JM]: And do you really think you can do better than them?

[JM]: Taking the first one user familiarity, the idea that user interfaces should have some kind of internal consistency is, on its surface, a sound one.

[JM]: If you look at the original Mac operating systems interface, the idea that every document-centric application should have a file menu seems like a good one.

[JM]: You know that

[JM]: if you're in one of those kinds of applications, if you go to the File menu, you're going to find things like Open, Save... other common operations that you expect to be under a File menu, and you expect to see that File menu.

[JM]: Same for the Edit window menu item...

[JM]: things you usually see in Mac applications.

[JM]: But this is an idea that made sense decades ago and makes less sense today, in my opinion, because of how far a lot of user interface designers seem to be pushing for conformity, saying, okay, we need to unify the experience across platforms, for example.

[JM]: But the reality is users don't really have trouble understanding

[JM]: figuring these things out.

[JM]: To highlight one of my favorite examples, I remember a software developer from the 1990s, who I think was named Kai Krause.

[JM]: And this person developed a suite of photo editing and manipulation software called Kai's Power Tools.

[JM]: And if you have a moment and you're near a computer, by all means, do an images search for Kai's power tools just so you can get a glimpse of what these user interfaces look like because they look like the psychedelic outcome of some UI designer's acid trip.

[JM]: They just had these really colorful, bizarre, very un-Mac-like, very un-*anything*-like user interfaces.

[JM]: But people didn't have trouble navigating them.

[JM]: People didn't look at them and say, oh no, this doesn't look like any Mac application I've ever used.

[JM]: I have no idea what to do.

[JM]: The application was made in a discoverable enough way that you could figure out how to use it, even if it wasn't familiar to you.

[JM]: Brent highlights another more recent example, which is the excellent to-do application called Things.

[JM]: And Things rather famously has its own user interface style that looks markedly different than a stock Mac application.

[JM]: And yet people have no difficulty figuring out how to use it,

[JM]: how to be productive with it.

[JM]: And this whole general concept just reminds me of the Emerson quote, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

[JM]: And that's, to me, what this emphasis on creating homogenous user interfaces in the name of user familiarity is.

[JM]: That quote is what I think of when people talk about this idea.

[JM]: I think it's just been effectively disproven.

[JM]: The second concept, this idea of if you use stock interfaces, you will expend less development effort.

[JM]: And historically, that's probably been true.

[JM]: And in the world of SwiftUI, it probably continues to be true.

[JM]: It probably is less effort than previous Mac development APIs.

[JM]: But by every account I've ever heard, using SwiftUI on MacOS results in user interfaces that look like trash compared to the APIs that came before it -- without doing a lot of customization that sort of defeats the purpose of using SwiftUI in the first place.

[JM]: And moreover...

[JM]: It seems like folks who have had to make this Liquid Glass transition, the amount of development effort expended for stock Mac apps has actually been higher.

[JM]: It's actually been *more* work than Mac application developers that had custom user interfaces.

[JM]: So this second concept of one reason to do a stock user interface is to expend less development effort.

[JM]: Well, that also seems to have gone out the window.

[JM]: And then the third,

[JM]: which is, do you really think you can do better than Apple when it comes to user interface design?

[JM]: And to me, that answer is so clearly "Yes".

[JM]: I think that Things, for example, the developers of that application are doing a better job than Apple is doing these days.

[JM]: So as far as I'm concerned, the three arguments for adhering to stock Mac application

[JM]: user interfaces have herein been totally refuted on all three counts.

[JM]: And as a little footnote to this, Brent goes on to say, with this in mind, "I wondered how far I could get in removing the parts of Liquid Glass I don't like in NetNewsWire.

[JM]: NetNewsWire is an application that Brent has made for years.

[JM]: It is how I consume my RSS feeds.

[JM]: It's excellent.

[JM]: And Brent goes on to show screenshots of the resulting changes that he made as an experiment.

[JM]: And then below these screenshots that he posted, he says, "Of course, you might look at this and think this looks so old spare me.

[JM]: Well, totally fair, but it felt cute might delete later." To which my response is: definitely don't delete the work that you did on this.

[JM]: I'm still using an older version of NetNewsWire on a non-glassified OS.

[JM]: So I have no idea what NetNewsWire looks like in its Liquid Glass incarnation.

[JM]: But having seen what other glassy-eyed applications look like now, I can say that the screenshots that Brent posted are a site for very sore eyes.

[JM]: They look very clean.

[JM]: And I hope that someday if and when I'm running OS 27, or beyond that, Brent ships changes like these in a future version of NetNewsWire, so that some of the rougher edges of Liquid Glass will have been shorn from this particular application.

[JM]: All right, moving on to another bit of follow-up regarding Apple Intelligence.

[JM]: In OS 26, there was an option to turn off Apple Intelligence, but that option has been removed in OS 27.

[JM]: And a lot of folks are not so happy about this change.

[JM]: And after a couple of weeks of consternation, it seems that someone figured out how to not only turn off some of these features, but to remove the gigabytes of models that are installed, they would otherwise take up valuable disk space on someone's machine who may not have any intention of using Apple Intelligence.

[JM]: So in the show notes, you will find a link to a project on GitHub called RemoveMacAI.

[JM]: Where if you so choose, you can remove these large models from your Mac and reclaim that disk space.

[JM]: But unfortunately, there does not seem to be any way to disable this or reclaim the space for Apple Intelligence on iOS, iPhones, iPads, etc.

[JM]: And if I'm not mistaken, Dan, you ran into this yourself after having upgraded your iPhone mini to iOS 27.

[DJ]: Yeah, in sort of an indirect way.

[DJ]: So I have an iPhone 12 mini, which is from, I think, 2020.

[DJ]: And I got the base model of storage.

[DJ]: I've always gotten the base model of storage on these devices because I've never needed more than that.

[DJ]: So I believe that's 64 gigabytes.

[DJ]: And after installing OS 27, I found I kept getting these alerts when using various apps on my iPhone that said, like, you're running out of storage.

[DJ]: And it finally reached a head when these apps started refusing to run at all.

[DJ]: So I opened Mail to check my email, and it was like, no, you can't even look at your email until you free up storage on your device.

[DJ]: I tried to open up Signal to communicate with people.

[DJ]: No, you can't even run Signal until you...

[DJ]: These apps were crashing, erroring out because of no storage.

[DJ]: So I opened the iPhone storage settings of my phone and noticed that iOS and its system software, which are just two opaque gray bars on a bar chart on that screen...

[DJ]: Now take up 33 gigabytes in total.

[DJ]: So half the storage on my phone is just the operating system.

[DJ]: And I have to assume because of course, I can get no insight into what actual like files make up iOS on my phone.

[DJ]: I have to assume that a lot of that space is the large language models that power Apple Intelligence, a feature which I haven't even tried, which is, by the way, a whole story in and of itself where Apple has spent what feels like decades training us to ignore Siri because it's not very good.

[DJ]: And I couldn't help thinking that if Siri had never come out,

[DJ]: And now this year, Apple was launching Apple Intelligence and it was like, you can just talk to your phone and it does stuff for you.

[DJ]: It's amazing.

[DJ]: People, including me, probably would be like trampling all over each other to, I don't know why, because we all have our own iPhones, but nonetheless, like we would just be like clamoring to try out this exciting new tool.

[DJ]: And instead I upgraded, I upgraded my phone to OS 27 automatically.

[DJ]: I'm not sure I even understand why I did that, Justin, and I regret it in retrospect.

[DJ]: But I upgraded it, and it didn't even occur to me to try the flagship feature of that operating system.

[DJ]: But oh boy, did the flagship ever ram into me anyway by making my phone unusable.

[DJ]: So in the meantime, since there is, as you say, like there's no way to do anything to iOS on your phone.

[DJ]: MacOS for now, and I guess, you know, we've been saying that for a long time, like MacOS is still mutable.

[DJ]: like as a user of your Mac, you can still do things to your operating system.

[DJ]: You haven't ever been able to do that on iOS.

[DJ]: And maybe they'll let you do that in iOS 28.

[DJ]: Probably not.

[DJ]: So like, I have no recourse.

[DJ]: Like for now, what I've had to do is just delete my podcast app, because appropriately enough, podcasts are probably the thing that uses up the most space on my phone.

[DJ]: I just had to delete that app just to get my phone working again.

[DJ]: And now I can figure out...

[JM]: But Dan, how are you going to listen to Abstractions if you don't have an app that plays podcasts on your phone?

[DJ]: Well, yeah, I didn't want to tell you this, but I can also listen to podcasts on my iPad, which has, I think, slightly more storage than my phone does.

[DJ]: So it's not vulnerable to this problem.

[DJ]: But all of this is to say that thus far my experience with iOS 27 has been largely negative.

[DJ]: And I would probably just roll back to the previous operating system, except you can't do that on Apple's devices.

[DJ]: So I guess I'll just buy a new one.

[JM]: You can't do that on Apple's curated computing devices, otherwise known as anything that's not a Mac, right?

[JM]: So you could, if you decided that you were no longer happy with OS 27, you could roll back to a previous operating system release on MacOS.

[JM]: But you are quite right that on iPhones and iPads, you don't get that choice because...

[JM]: when Apple rolled out its original iPhone, they made this design decision that upgrades to the operating system, to any of the apps, to really any software on your phone -- and then eventually your iPad -- is a one-way ticket, you don't get to go backwards.

[JM]: And as we've talked about before,

[JM]: that does create this rather uncomfortable situation where you have to decide, okay, well, there's no going back.

[JM]: So do I want to make this change?

[JM]: Which is, generally speaking, something you don't have to worry about as much on MacOS.

[JM]: And then in addition to the one-way-street nature of it, the curated computing experience on an iPhone and an iPad means that the mechanisms that this enterprising individual

[JM]: invented to remove Apple Intelligence and its multi-gigabyte model files is just something that can't be done on an iPhone or iPad, or at least no one's figured out how to do it yet.

[JM]: And I sincerely doubt anyone ever will figure out how to do it.

[JM]: And as a side note, the fact that Apple created this user experience for you, where you update to this operating system and then you're told, "OK, you got to start deleting some stuff because we installed all these gigantic models."

[JM]: "And now that's your problem," to me, is just not a great user experience.

[DJ]: No, I mean, if you elect to move into a smaller apartment, that's a choice you made and you knew you were making it.

[DJ]: This is like Apple moving you into a smaller apartment.

[DJ]: I don't know what it's like.

[DJ]: It's like you get Apple to renovate your kitchen and they replace your kitchen with just solid walls so you don't have a kitchen anymore.

[DJ]: And you're like, well, what happened?

[DJ]: They're like, well, you have less space now.

[DJ]: Where am I supposed to put my things?

[DJ]: But they've already left.

[JM]: I love this metaphor.

[DJ]: Yeah, because it's a metaphor about being, like, punished and mistreated by someone you hired to like do something for you.

[DJ]: You know, like, I'm Apple's customer, but it feels in many ways it feels a lot like I'm Apple's supplicant.

[DJ]: Apple's like, well, it's your phone's going to work like this now.

[DJ]: It's like, OK, I don't really want it to.

[DJ]: Is there any?

[DJ]: But they've already left.

[JM]: It just doesn't seem that hard to me, in what I understand from Apple's perspective is an edge case, because they're thinking, OK, well, if you still have a device that only has 64 gigabytes of storage on it, then we're going to just allow this to be a lever that tries to convince you to upgrade.

[JM]: And one of the ways we're going to...

[JM]: all collectively jump on that lever up and down is to make it so that you have to delete apps to even use your phone after upgrading to this new version of the operating system.

[JM]: Anyway, I think it's absurd.

[JM]: And I hope that they recant and offer people a button to turn this feature off for those that want such a button.

[DJ]: Hope is nice, I guess.

[DJ]: I find it very hard to imagine why they would do that.

[JM]: I agree with you that they probably won't and that this hope is misguided.

[DJ]: But, you know, that's just what makes you the person you are, Justin, is that you're willing to back a lost cause.

[DJ]: Endless wellspring of misguided hope.

[DJ]: The endless wellspring of misguided hope.

[DJ]: Maybe I'll write a memoir with that title.

[DJ]: You know what else we had misguided hope in?

[DJ]: The European Union.

[JM]: Indeed, let's talk a little bit about government regulation and our hopes for it.

[JM]: Coming from the United States, I remember the not-too-distant past when we had a functioning regulatory system.

[JM]: And that is not the era in which we live in today.

[JM]: And therefore, I often look at the regulatory system

[JM]: in the European Union and think, gee, wouldn't that be nice?

[JM]: Wouldn't it be nice if the United States also had a functioning regulatory system?

[JM]: And I think my feeling about that was probably originally sparked by the GDPR, an initialism that I say frequently enough and yet still can't quite remember exactly what it stands for.

[DJ]: General Data Protection Regulation, I think.

[JM]: Sounds about right.

[DJ]: I think the P might actually stand for pop-ups, though, which is the principal outcome of the GDPR as far as I can tell.

[JM]: Yeah, probably.

[JM]: As I understand it, the GDPR was originally intended to require that a company...

[JM]: or really I think any organization that handles personal data discloses in advance what they're going to do with it and how they're going to treat it.

[JM]: And I think it's probably one of the better pieces of legislation that I've seen come out of the European Union.

[JM]: And so for the most part, I've had this very positive opinion of the European regulatory framework.

[JM]: But in recent years, the introduction of the Digital Markets Act or the DMA and other legislation has given me a bit of pause in terms of my assessment of this regulatory system.

[JM]: And one of the things I'd like to highlight related to that topic is that as of this year, every new car that's sold in the European Union

[JM]: must include a driver monitoring camera that's aimed at your face.

[JM]: And the funny thing about this, if you can call it funny, is that I experienced this before I learned about this legislation.

[JM]: I was traveling with a friend of mine, and this friend had rented a car.

[JM]: My friend is driving this rented car.

[JM]: I'm in the passenger seat.

[JM]: And we are driving from one place to another when this car starts flashing lights on the dash and making beeping noises.

[JM]: And my friend has at first no idea what's going on before eventually looking at the dash and seeing something having to do with it being related to

[JM]: detection of driver distraction, which was really frustrating for my friend because my friend was not distracted.

[JM]: My friend was paying attention to the road.

[DJ]: So it was letting him know that it was about to distract him.

[DJ]: Is that the deal?

[DJ]: Alert, alert.

[DJ]: I'm distracting you right now.

[DJ]: You're currently distracted by me.

[DJ]: The alert about you being distracted.

[DJ]: Return your attention to the road if you can.

[JM]: And that is precisely what happened.

[JM]: And that's what we were talking about while driving and while going through these ridiculous alerts.

[JM]: Like, wait a minute, this is more distracting than if my friend were actually being distracted by, I don't know, a squirrel or something else.

[DJ]: Their phone.

[DJ]: I mean, that's the typical driver distraction that is probably being addressed by this.

[JM]: For sure.

[JM]: And one of, I think, many problems that I have with this whole piece of legislation is that that assumes that it actually does the job well.

[JM]: And here we are talking about a scenario where it definitely was not doing the job well.

[JM]: So much so...

[JM]: that my friend asks me, like, hey, can you poke around in the settings and see if there's anything related to this?

[JM]: And so I poked around and sure enough, there's a button to turn it off.

[JM]: And I immediately turned it off because it was, as you pointed out, Dan, completely counterproductive and creating distraction where there wasn't any.

[JM]: And as we unfortunately learned throughout this journey, you have to do that every time you turn the car on.

[DJ]: I'm surprised you didn't learn that you had just broken the law and are now in a EU prison situation.

[JM]: So you're allowed as a car manufacturer, from what I understand, to put in the setting to disable it.

[JM]: But you are not allowed to put in a setting that persistently disables it.

[JM]: You can only, as a car manufacturer, put in a setting that allows you to disable it for that session.

[JM]: And when the car is turned off and then turned back on again, it must be reactivated.

[DJ]: This just reads as the most designed-by-committee nonsense.

[DJ]: Like, I haven't looked into this at all.

[DJ]: So it's possible that there's already, like, a body of research that suggests strongly that watching people's faces and ringing alarms at them when you think they're distracted has a very high likelihood to reduce deaths on the road.

[DJ]: Which is what this is about, right?

[DJ]: I assume.

[DJ]: It's not just, like, some face recognition camera manufacturer, like...

[DJ]: lobbied the government to put their cameras in every single car that like this has something to do with driver safety but just that whole notion that it's like well you have to do this now you have to put these creepy face watching cameras in every car you sell it's like yeah people are going to want to turn that off though.

[DJ]: Well, they really shouldn't be allowed to turn it off, but all right, okay, you've convinced us.

[DJ]: We'll let you turn it off, but you can't leave it turned off.

[DJ]: You have to always turn it back on.

[DJ]: It's like, right, sure.

[DJ]: None of that makes any sense.

[DJ]: Either this thing has to be watching your face every minute while you're driving and screaming at you, and that's just the way it has to be because we've definitely proven that this will make people into safer drivers.

[DJ]: We've proven that, right?

[DJ]: Or this is a total waste of everyone's time.

[DJ]: There isn't a middle ground.

[DJ]: There isn't a middle ground where it's like, well, you can just turn this off if it gets on your nerves, but you have to do that every time you start your car.

[DJ]: So you probably won't bother, right?

[DJ]: You'll probably just mostly leave it turned on.

[DJ]: Like, what?

[DJ]: What's going on here, Justin?

[JM]: You are correct that the intention is to save lives from accidents caused by distracted driving.

[JM]: And EU-funded research estimates that driver distraction plays a role in 5 to 25% of car crashes.

[JM]: And the broader set of safety rules that this camera belongs to is projected to save more than 25,000 lives by 2038.

[JM]: So that is indeed the intention,

[JM]: which, as we all know, is the asphalt with which the road to hell is paved.

[DJ]: Good point, and also an extremely functional metaphor in the driving context.

[DJ]: This is why Justin is such a good podcaster.

[DJ]: Something that I noticed was missing from everything you just said was that the EU has funded research indicating that driver distraction is a big contributor to deaths on the road, which doesn't surprise me.

[DJ]: And then all of this, whatever they're doing, has been projected to something, something.

[DJ]: It's like, okay, but where did the projections come from?

[DJ]: I get what I'm skeptical about is it's just like this research indicates that people get distracted on the road and they get in crashes.

[DJ]: Okay, well, then let's put cameras in their cars and yell at them every time we think they're distracted.

[DJ]: It's like, well, wait, hold on.

[DJ]: Did you do research?

[DJ]: Why do you think that will solve the problem?

[DJ]: I guess that's what I'm skeptical about.

[DJ]: Like, do we have any good reason to believe that what has been suggested for these regulations is actually likely to have the desired effect?

[JM]: You're totally right that saying driver distraction is a significant risk factor in automotive collisions does not prove that the legislation and the solutions that it mandates solve those problems.

[JM]: And this has been a rolling requirement.

[JM]: I think this legislation was introduced in 2019.

[JM]: And so the idea is that this has been rolled out gradually.

[JM]: So that for example, any new vehicle types since July of 2024, have had to have this feature, which is presumably why I encountered it earlier this year.

[JM]: And then more recently in July of this year, it's now mandatory for every newly registered vehicle on the road.

[JM]: So I am saying this because maybe

[JM]: there is some data as they have been gradually rolling this out to support the efficacy of these face detecting cameras.

[JM]: But if so, I haven't seen it yet.

[DJ]: Well, and I would hope there would be because that's the point of gradually rolling it out,

[DJ]: right, is that you start doing something a little, and if it's effective, you do it more. Hopefully you don't just start doing it a little ... dot dot dot ... and then start doing it a lot more without any regard for whether it was actually effective.

[DJ]: So, you know, I'm reacting to this off the spur of the moment and my reaction might be unfair because it really might be the case that it's like, no, we've spent the last like six years testing this out and it seems to really reduce driver distraction.

[DJ]: So now we're going to put it in every car.

[DJ]: Well, okay.

[DJ]: I still don't like it, but at least the data points in the right direction.

[DJ]: I think the reason I harp on this so much is

[DJ]: because it seems like a really common pattern to demonstrate that there's a problem:

[DJ]: Distraction causes deaths on the road.

[DJ]: And then use the intensity of that problem to kind of short-circuit evidence-based reasoning.

[DJ]: I mean, you see that in the political sphere all the time.

[DJ]: All people have to do is gesture in the direction of something being like a threat to children or a way to protect them.

[DJ]: And whether or not something would make a good law...

[DJ]: kind of goes out the window or maybe doesn't get the scrutiny that it deserves because it's like, you know, the thought-terminating cliche.

[DJ]: The problem with the rhetoric is like these laws will protect against deaths on the road.

[DJ]: And it's like, well, hold on.

[DJ]: Is the thing you're suggesting actually effective?

[DJ]: Because it does have negative connotations,

[DJ]: second-order consequences.

[DJ]: You think more people should die on the road?

[DJ]: You don't care about the thousands of people, the families that lose their... And it's like, no, I think you should try not to surveil everyone at all times.

[DJ]: So maybe don't, unless there's a really good reason to.

[DJ]: Are we sure there's a really good reason to?

[DJ]: And if we are sure, then all right.

[DJ]: Like I said, I still don't like it, but...

[DJ]: But if it's effective, great.

[DJ]: Like there are lots of other things that we mandate about cars to try to make it so fewer people die from using them.

[DJ]: And fair enough.

[DJ]: But I guess I'm hoping that like the listener can see why I'm skeptical about stuff like this.

[JM]: Yeah, and while I don't have any data at my fingertips regarding how effective these are in saving lives, an online automotive platform in Belgium did some testing with this system.

[JM]: And they found that just like in the experience with me and my friend, they found that this system often fires on ordinary driving, not just distracted driving.

[JM]: And one user explained their experience like this:

[JM]: "10 minutes into driving, the distraction warning kicks in and tells you to take a break with an amber light on the instrument panel and a loud bong.

[JM]: A big pop-up message suggests you take a break.

[JM]: 10 minutes later, it does it again with a red light and a louder bong.

[JM]: I found this incredibly distracting," they said.

[JM]: So I guess what we do have evidence for, so far, is that these systems sometimes don't work very well, A, and B, could potentially create more distraction than the distraction they are trying to prevent.

[JM]: Another thing that I think we both really dislike about this whole general trend is what happens to any data that

[JM]: that these systems are recording, because the legislation talks about how this has to be a closed loop system.

[JM]: And you can't use biometric data.

[JM]: So you're not allowed to recognize who you are, these systems are only allowed to determine whether you are distracted.

[JM]: And the data has to be processed entirely within the vehicle itself and not be

[JM]: transmitted some server and then processed and then returned.

[JM]: So those things are good.

[JM]: But my understanding is that these regulations don't impose any type of independent audit or assurance mechanism to make sure that these systems actually function in this closed loop design that the law mandates.

[JM]: And there's not a whole lot of clarity around how this data is handled, how long this data is retained, if and when it's ever deleted.

[DJ]: It seems like the same organization responsible for the GDPR would want to provide some clarity around things like that.

[DJ]: I mean, really, the data shouldn't have to be retained at all.

[DJ]: Like, you know, you should get a series of frames, go through a processor that determines if the image it's looking at represents a distracted driver and then discards the frames.

[DJ]: Like, there's no reason to retain anything.

[DJ]: Or to your point, yeah, and there's certainly no reason to send it to a data center somewhere.

[DJ]: But exactly, like, okay, so who's going to make sure that that isn't happening?

[JM]: Right.

[JM]: And the law does say that the system should be designed in such a way that it's not continuously recording or retaining data other than what's necessary for its intended purpose.

[JM]: But it doesn't define those terms, right?

[JM]: Like who decides what's necessary?

[JM]: Who decides what the retention period is for the data?

[DJ]: Well, and also, again, it's good that the law says that, but there's this concept that I guess some citizens might be vaguely familiar with from the presence of armed, uniformed people driving around their cities called "law enforcement", which is if you come up with a law, how do you make sure that people, in this case car companies, follow it?

[DJ]: So yeah, I am curious about that because you see this all the time.

[DJ]: There's this other set of

[DJ]: regulations that we we might talk about in in a different context about like trying to require age verification from everyone that uses the Internet. This is a terrible idea for a bunch of material reasons, but of course the legislation is going through because it -- get ready for it -- protects children, I guess, or at least it's supposed to, and like there's already been tons of stories about how the third-party data processors who are responsible for verifying people's ages are...

[DJ]: You would assume those data processors are held to like very stringent standards about how they handle that data under things like all of this existing regulation we've been alluding to.

[DJ]: And yet there have already been all these stories about how, oh, someone hacked them and it turns out

[DJ]: that they're just storing JPEGs of your driver's license in an S3 bucket somewhere.

[DJ]: And now someone stole 300 million of those.

[DJ]: And it's like, this is the most basic stuff about this, about these sorts of regulations possible.

[DJ]: And so it just, yeah, like again, when, if you want to know, well, why, why am I so hostile about this, this sort of thing being introduced?

[DJ]: It's because we have a very durable legacy of doing stuff like this badly and

[DJ]: my next trip to Europe will be entirely on bicycles.

[DJ]: The regulatory body hasn't gotten to bicycles yet, have they, Justin?

[JM]: Not that I'm aware of, thankfully.

[DJ]: I'm sure it's coming, though.

[JM]: You are right to point out the problems with any kind of data collection.

[JM]: Because when you collect data, there's going to be the inevitable risk of it leaking, of it being hacked into, breached, and disseminated.

[JM]: And that is assuming that everyone is operating with good intentions, that

[JM]: the regulatory framework is done in good faith, that the auto manufacturers are taking care to protect your data as best they can.

[JM]: But sometimes software systems have flaws.

[JM]: And as we have seen, there will be cases where this data is exfiltrated.

[JM]: But then there's also the intentional abuse of the data.

[JM]: For example, in 2024, the New York Times reported that several large car manufacturers had been sharing driver behavior data, including distance traveled, speed, how hard they braked, how quickly they accelerated... with multiple data brokers.

[JM]: These data brokers then turn this raw data into risk scores

[JM]: and then sold those scores to insurance companies.

[JM]: One driver, for example, saw his premium jump over 20% and then requested his data report on which this was based.

[JM]: This data report was over 250 pages long and logged almost every trip he and his wife had taken over a six-month period.

[JM]: Which is so profoundly creepy and invasive, I barely have words to describe the rage that it produces.

[JM]: And this is the kind of thing that is just ripe for abuse.

[JM]: It also sets this precedent, right?

[JM]: We've talked about this before.

[JM]: We just talked about an Apple Watch that's continuously recording.

[JM]: Putting more cameras and things that are always on, always surveilling, it just doesn't seem like a good idea.

[JM]: Here we have it happening in the European Union where

[JM]: I think that they're trying to do a good job with the legislation that they produce.

[JM]: But this is just going to set this precedent for other governments to do this, and to do this in a way that's probably worse.

[JM]: So it's just going to cause this type of behavior to spread.

[JM]: And I don't know.

[JM]: My end reaction to all of it is... I've never been a fan of classic cars.

[JM]: I've never thought to myself, you know, I really want like a 1965

[JM]: Corvette, because there's just too many features of modern cars that I would miss.

[JM]: I'm starting to change my tune.

[JM]: I'm starting to think classic cars sound awesome right around now.

[DJ]: Yeah, I know what you mean.

[DJ]: It started with the, "What do you mean that I'm paying five figures for a car and now you want to charge me a subscription so the seat warmers work?"

[DJ]: And now it's, oh, and by the way, the law mandates that you...

[DJ]: have a camera watching your every move.

[DJ]: I mean, incidentally, Justin, based on something you said earlier, the classic car won't save you because it sounds like if you want to register a car in the EU at all, it has to have this feature.

[JM]: I think it's...

[JM]: I'm not sure, but I think it's *newly* registered.

[JM]: So it's not like you can't sell your car to someone else and then when they go to register it's, "Oh, sorry, you can't."

[JM]: "You need to retrofit it with face-watching cameras."

[JM]: I don't think that's how it works.

[JM]: I think the idea is...

[JM]: It's when a car is registered for the first time, I think, is what they mean when they say newly registered.

[DJ]: I guess we'll see.

[DJ]: We'll see if your Corvette dreams can come true.

[JM]: Well, if these kinds of developments continue, I have a feeling that dream might be coming my way.

[DJ]: People will blame you.

[DJ]: They'll be like, Justin, are you going through a midlife crisis?

[DJ]: Why are you tooling around in this cherry convertible all the time?

[DJ]: And you'll say, no, you don't understand.

[DJ]: I'm just trying to avoid government surveillance.

[JM]: That's not going to sound nearly as cool.

[JM]: All right, everyone, that's all for this episode.

[JM]: Thanks a lot for listening.

[JM]: You can find me on the web at justinmayer.com and you can find Dan at danj.ca.

[JM]: Reach out with your thoughts about this episode via the Fediverse at justin.ramble.space.