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harrisonjackson

The Ring app notification summaries still scare me.

> "A bunch of people right outside your house!!!"

because it aggregates multiple single person walking by notifications that way...

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That is a fantastic example of blind application of AI making things worse.

Hopefully we'll get examples of smart applications of AI making things better

the advertising of those spy doorbells is entirely based on paranoia

so ramping it up the rhetoric doesn't really hurt them...

Unrelated, but am I the only person who finds the concept of “getting notifications for somebody walking by a house” to be really creepy?

it isn't creepy, it's super annoying if you don't live in the woods. got a ring doorbell and turned them off a few hours after installation, it was driving me nuts.

Well yeah, but that's in part a problem with always-on doorbell cameras. On paper they're illegal in many countries (privacy laws, you can't just put up a camera and record anyone out in public), in practice the police asks people to put their doorbell cameras in a registry so they can request footage if needs be.

Anyway, I get wanting to see who's ringing your doorbell in e.g. apartment buildings, and that extending to a house, especially if you have a bigger one. But is there a reason those cameras need to be on all the time?

At least in the USA it’s legal to record public spaces. So recording the street and things that can be seen from it is legal, but pointing a camera over your neighbors fence is not.

And a lot of people don't share that opinion, so this isn't the law in a lot of countries. When you wanted to suggest that it is a problem, that US companies try to extend the law of there home country to other parts of the world, then I endorse that.

To be fair, I'd rather be scared by false positives than sleep through false negatives

That makes... That makes just enough sense to become nonsense, rather than mere noise.

I mean, I could imagine a person with no common sense almost making the same mistake: "I have a list of 5 notifications of a person standing on the porch, and no notifications about leaving, so there must be a 5 person group still standing outside right now. Whadya mean, 'look at the times'?"

> A biologist, a physicist and a mathematician were sitting in a street cafe watching the crowd. Across the street they saw a man and a woman entering a building. Ten minutes they reappeared together with a third person.

> - They have multiplied, said the biologist.

> - Oh no, an error in measurement, the physicist sighed.

> - If exactly one person enters the building now, it will be empty again, the mathematician concluded.

https://www.math.utah.edu/~cherk/mathjokes.html

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