When they invented cars (and cars became popular and affordable), people did stop walking everywhere. Jogging wasn’t popularized until the 1970s, when we all realized we needed to be intentional with fitness in our car-based society.

This is a US-centric take, in Europe, particularly in cities, we walk everywhere.

There is perhaps some relevance to the analogy however, because the US is designed in such a way that makes walking difficult to impossible. I am already seeing this pattern in vibe-coded areas where engineers will just use AI because it's too difficult to parse and edit by hand.

> people did stop walking everywhere.

I didn't. Yesterday I walked 11 km for errands. Today I took a detour when walking to work, a more scenic route with less traffic.

For me walking is not much slower than using public transport (you need to get to it, then from it to the point of your destination), and not much slower than a car (stuck in traffic, finding parking, not to mention the road rage). I'd be faster on a bicycle but I'm not in a hurry and enjoy my walks.

Have you been walking since you were a child? Or were you raised in a car-centric culture, and discovered as an adult that you prefer walking?

My father loves cars, but he also walks everywhere, so the former.

They did make it very hard for people to do anything else but use a car in many, many places though...

In the US, perhaps, which has had perhaps the bulk of its growth post-automobiles.

> Just because they invented cars doesn't mean you stop jogging.

They literally made it a crime to walk down the street.

across the street, no?

It's also a crime to jog on the railroad tracks.

Prior to cars walking anywhere in any street was completely normal. You can watch movies filmed before the 1920s and city streets are full of people walking around or congregating.

If a wagon or trolley hit someone that was considered the fault of the driver, every time.

When cars started arriving and being driven around by people who were wreckless and bad at it, you started getting manufacturers and "motorists" lobbying for the concept and laws around jay-walking. Even the word was a way to delegitimize what used to be normal. "Jay" was negative slang for country-person (think red-neck). The idea was "modern city people stay out of the streets!"

Down the street also.

"Fighting Traffic" by Peter D. Norton talks about this at length.

The suburbs didn't exist when automobiles hit the market. Most people lived in cities because that's where the jobs were and transportation (outside of whatever public transportation options the cities provided) was limited. Kids and adults used the streets freely (which were for horses, though they were widened as automobiles started growing in popularity).

This changed as cars killed kids (and adults) who didn't know that cars were much faster than cars and didn't react in time. Traffic deaths were so numerous, cities invested lots of money in "safety parades" that were kind of gruesome, actually (like showing tombstones of the future deceased). [^0] Jaywalking was a crime that was invented to deal with exactly this phenomenon.

People fought HARD to keep the streets free (where else are kids going to play). People lost that battle, as we know.

[^0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-06-10/how-citie...

If it's a crime to jog on railroad tracks, and the avalibility of rail makes it so that everything you need is only accessible by rail, I conclude that rail prevents you from jogging.

I'm sorry for all the people who lived in my original SimCity towns. They must have been nearly spherical.

No but everyone has gotten real fat since then.

The one I like better is: software is great at playing chess, doesn't mean you cannot play too

Read the post, it's a gotcha ;P I was scared too

I really like the sentiment and will quote this in the future! My own thoughts line up a bit closer to the article though, with this quote being a good summary of it:

> The 1% utility AI has is overshadowed by the overwhelming mediocracy it regurgitates.