aftbit

Whoever had money on hand to buy assets at bargain basement prices for people who didn't. Also - rum runners and smugglers.

I dunno about the politics, but personally I don't think there is a generic "correct" value. The rate describes the state of the world, and the "correct" value is whatever accurately describes the state of the world.

There is a separate question though - is that state of the world good or bad for people? Is it better or worse today than it was yesterday? What can we do - collectively - to push it in a direction that best serves our collective interests? These are valid questions to ask, and I think each takes us further in the direction of politics.

This seems like an incredibly unimportant quibble... I would imagine they just used std::endl b/c that's what most random tutorials used in the 2000s and that's how the engineer learned. If you are printing a debug string, you probably don't care that much about perf in the first place.

They revoked permits for all license plate readers currently placed along the state highway rights of way. They did not ban privately owned Flock Safety cameras (e.g. at a housing development or whatever), nor did they ban police from mounting ALPRs on their patrol cars. It sounds like this applies only to the "State Highway System", not to local roads - but maybe I'm misunderstanding the scope of that.

https://fdotwww.blob.core.windows.net/sitefinity/docs/defaul...

>Monday’s order did not affect cameras on private property or on local rights-of-way — which together is 98% of surveillance cameras, DeSantis said — but some localities in Florida said they were following suit.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/florida-bans-flock-and-...

Ironically it is the Republican governors of Texas and Florida who are leading this anti-surveillance push, even as the government of Texas has used Flock cameras in other jurisdictions to harass and intimidate pregnant women seeking out of state abortions.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/texas-deputy-se...

Proof that the AI alignment problem is hard (perhaps even unsolvable). These labs clearly did not mean to send their agents to hack RubyGems as a side-effect of testing a web scraping agent under restrictive conditions. How can we hope to build aligned AI if they consider solving their trivial evaluation task important enough to hack external systems?

Did they switch to Axon?

The big advantage of OpenRouter IMO is that you don't have to manage keys, URLs, and subscriptions with 10+ providers. You definitely should still pick providers and pin them, at least if you care about repeatable results.

-1 for Pedantic, but +1 for cool links to telescopes

Nonsense. 100% nonsense. To the contrary, acting like only one side is bad and thus only one side can be made fun of is a huge reason we're in this situation. The right took the left's cancel culture and weaponized it to the extreme.

South Park's "all sacred cows slaughtered equally" doctrine is a huge part of what kept them interesting, refreshing, and relevant for so long. Their descent into hyper-focus on Trump and his regime are a big step backwards.

I say this as someone who thinks the current situation is catastrophically bad for America, by the way. I'm not minimizing Trump's disaster.

As someone who is very bought into the mindset that all systems of people do stupid, short-sighted, and occasionally outright evil things, and yet thinks that maybe they're better than the alternative of burning everything down, I do not agree that MAGA is the only thing that makes sense.

Nah I don't own that crap :laugh:

I'd assume there would be a popup that says in clear terms "Device XYZ was used to view your location" or whatever, and a button you could click that let you see all linked devices and kick them from your account.

IMO cars shouldn't have parental controls. If you had your kid the keys, you're giving them control. It's one of the first seriously adult things kids are trusted to do, and that trust should not be partial.

Whoever holds the keys owns the car. If it's stolen, that can go through a court. Otherwise, remote control should be subservient to whoever is actually in the driver's seat.

Remotely controlling or even accessing location info from a car should show a little popup on the infotainment system, if not live, at least when you park or next start the car.

Will V4.1 Flash and V4.1 pro be open-weights?

>In keeping with our commitment to user responsibility, following the official launch of V4.1 Flash and prior to the release of V4.1 Pro, all requests to the Pro model will be routed to V4.1 Flash and billed at Flash's price

Please don't do this kind of thing. If a user has validated a workflow on V4 Pro, they might not want to suddenly start testing it in production on V4.1 Flash. Instead, keep V4 Pro around but deprecated for a defined period of time, then remove it.

At least as open weights models, it's possible to use something like Together.ai or OpenRouter to run the V4 Pro model as long as other providers keep it up.

Well, nowadays, Google location history is stored on-device. Google Maps sends your position to their servers, both for geocoding and to power their traffic estimation. Even when location history was in the cloud, you could turn it off. It even asked when you opened Maps for the first time. Most people chose the default blue button to leave it on. You could also just turn off location on your phone entirely when you didn't want Google to know where you were.

The tricky bit is the cell tower location. That cannot be disabled unless you go into Airplane mode or turn your phone off. Broad location (which tower are you associated with) is needed for the network to route your calls, while precise location is used for E911.

1. So what?

2. This sucks but is basically required to protect against phone theft (though phones could be shipped in an unlock-once state, until you set them up)

3. So what? What company has never been shady?

Every single HN post about anything Meta-adjacent starts with a comment like this. Guys, we get it, the hive mind of HN doesn't like Meta/Facebook/Zuck. Fine. But can we actually comment on the technology and tools rather than the company for once?

Not sure - I have never used that flag! I like the idea of managing the profile dir myself, because then I know nothing will leak. For example, HSTS state persists across incognito, allowing fingerprinting. I don't know if --guest handles that differently (probably?) but this way, I can be sure.

I have a handy little script called `chrome-new` which I use whenever I want to browse one of those few sites that struggles with Firefox. It just starts a clean Chromium with a throw-away profile, then deletes it when I close the browser.

    #!/bin/sh
    TMPDIR=$(mktemp -d /dev/shm/chrome-XXXXX)
    chromium --user-data-dir=$TMPDIR --no-first-run --no-default-browser-check --disable-features=DefaultBrowserPrompt "$@"
    rm -rf $TMPDIR

If you want legal advice, ask a lawyer and pay for it. If you want to publish a cool hack, publish a cool hack.

What about the trend of summarizing or eliding reasoning from the visible model response, ostensibly to make distillation by competitors harder?

Broadly speaking, you will only rarely find police properly prosecuted for their misdeeds. Usually, the worst that happens is dismissal, if even that. Of course there are outliers - cops who wrongly kill people have been prosecuted from time to time, but even then, their chances of escaping justice are higher than for an individual citizen in their place.

There are many reasons for this, but in my humble opinion, the worst one is the "thin blue line" - the idea that police are a brotherhood holding back the darkness of crime and evil, which leads to the idea that their misdeeds are somehow excusable by people "on their team", which includes other cops and citizens who are aligned with them.

In my opinion, police should be held to a higher standard by society to match the higher level of trust, protection, and presumption of regularity that we give them. If they commit crimes, they should be prosecuted even more zealously and reliably than laypeople, rather than only rarely.

The originally submitted link is a transcript of a podcast. I really respect the fact that they write these, as I prefer to read over listening. The URL I posted is linked in the original submission as the original story, which is even better for reading IMO.

Here's a link to the audio form of the podcast, also linked in the original submission. It's on Apple Podcasts too, if you prefer.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/32mnc87hQT9uigtMwy3l6j

This is disgusting, and I continue to argue that we should not excuse Flock Safety for this kind of misbehavior. They created the tech and marketed it to police departments without providing good protections against this kind of thing. Making something cheap and automatic changes how people use it. If this cop had to tail the guy around himself, maybe he wouldn't have done it.

But the far worse problem IMO is that this cop is dirty, corrupt, untrustworthy, and should be punished for stalking this man, and yet he surely will not be. Worst case, he might catch some administrative sanction or maybe be fired - he won't go to jail like he should for this misbehavior.

If you have 1 dirty cop and 100 who ignore his bad behavior, you actually have 101 dirty cops. We need a way to deal with this in our society without resorting to the absolutes of "defund the police" or "back the blue".

Nixon

What is the value of this? Clearly the US won't sell me gold for $42/oz or the arbitragers would own the country, and nobody will sell the US gold for that amount ... so what does the $42/oz "peg" actually mean?

There's subscription cost, then there's other factors, like DRM, usability, single source, etc. If you want to find the latest media, you can either hunt for it on one among several subscription services or you can find it on any of the big torrent sites. Once you torrent it, you can watch it on any or every device, without internet, forever.

If first party media companies sold one-off DRM free downloads of movies and TV shows for a reasonable price (not even that cheap, just not requiring bundling with other content you don't want to see), I bet that'd have more of an impact on piracy rates than lowering subscription prices by 10% or whatever.

How big is it? How much does it cost?

Claude and Codex were down too. A 3 month old github issue that was the top result for the error that Codex threw (a 404 of all things) briefly became a live chat for bored and annoyed AI users.

https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/28756