caconym_

Honestly it should probably just be illegal for anyone, private or public, to engage in mass surveillance (or "data gathering", whatever) of anybody who didn't expressly consent to it. As long as the data exist, they will be abused.

Reminds me of the sUAS legislation crushing the R/C flying hobby. Vague allusions to "safety" are constantly being thrown around, but in fact it seems that big companies are lobbying to claim the airspace for drone delivery and similar autonomous BVLOS operations.

"Democratize"? I thought that was when you rent an AI tool built on stolen intellectual property to write, draw, code, etc. for you because you never bothered to learn those skills yourself and convinced yourself they were being gatekept.

> When they say "We don't want to increase inequality" and the response is "We don't believe you". Where do you go from there?

The response is "we don't believe you" because their actions show that they are hellbent on accelerating inequality using AI and they have offered absolutely no concrete plan or halfway convincing explanation of how, if their own predictions of AI's future capabilities are correct, we're supposed to go from here and now to a future that isn't extremely dark for the vast majority of humans on Earth (to the extent that said humans continue to exist).

The work they have done in this direction so far is not serious, so it's not taken seriously. They obviously care much more about enriching themselves than slowing or reversing current trends.

If they want to be taken seriously, maybe they should start acting like they're serious about anything besides their own wealth and power. And I do mean acting---they need to show us through their actions that they are serious.

I understand that everyone has their own needs and Linux still might not be a great fit, but just in case it's helpful, here are some possibly-comparable Linux-friendly alternatives to what you mentioned:

> Fusion360

Depending on your needs, Onshape could be a good portable option since it runs in a browser. I use it for all my 3D printing pursuits and have made some fairly complex parts. And it's free if you don't mind people theoretically being able to search for and see your work. Not a problem for me since I'm not doing anything proprietary or making BDSM gear or whatever---if my shitty projects help somebody else with theirs, I'm all for it.

> OneNote

I don't think Obsidian does synchronous collaboration well (could be wrong) but for asynchronous collaboration it ought to be fine; their sync product works very well and I haven't ever had to fiddle with anything. My non-technical wife could use it with no issue (but in practice we use Apple Notes).

I don't think it's a drop-in replacement for OneNote, but it might serve the purpose.

> zero tolerance for needing to tweak settings to make a game work on Linux

This has gotten a lot better. With a distro like Bazzite (which I just use as my general purpose desktop now), pretty much everything works out of the box unless it has an anticheat that's specifically blocking Linux.

I would not have been willing to say this a year ago (and I know plenty of people have been saying it for a long time, and I generally disagreed with them), but today I really think gaming on Linux is ready for general adoption. In the last few months I've totally abandoned Windows for gaming, which was the last thing I was using it for (in a VM).

Personally I left Twitter less because Musk owns it now, and more because Musk's changes turned my previously tolerable feed into a deluge of far right drivel. Expecting me to keep using it is like expecting me to keep shopping at a grocery store that replaced its bread aisle with a swastika-festooned exhibit glorifying the conquests and exploits of Hitler and his Nazis---even if I am generally apolitical, I will have to start shopping somewhere that sells bread.

Notwithstanding the above, given how powerful network effects are in social media, I think boycotting platforms operated by people like Musk (I struggle to find the words to fully encompass how repulsive he has become) is arguably one of the more effective forms of protest available to people, and I encourage them to exercise it.

It's a trade-off. I love the convenience of ebooks, but not owning my books is just categorically unacceptable to me. I want my daughter and anyone else coming after me to have free access to them, not to have to jump through Amazon's hoops (if such hoops even exist) for access.

I have a Kobo that I use to read the non-DRM ebooks I'm able to acquire. One such source is downloads from the Kobo store, when publishers make the non-DRM file available.

I am talking about "liquid glass", which I understand to refer to the recent design language updates that include the much-bemoaned transparent/translucent design elements. I will repeat that I simply have not experienced myself having a negative reaction to these changes, even if you include corner radius changes and what you call "visual clutter" under the umbrella of "liquid glass"; I hardly noticed the former and didn't notice the latter at all. As for accessibility issues, I explicitly called them out in my comment.

Re: the rest of your comment, it seems like a real stretch to suggest that any of the following (quoting you) are within the scope of "liquid glass":

* Dropping Rosetta.

* Broken keyboard shortcuts in most their newer apps (and System Settings).

* Persistent Airplay compatibility problems.

* Other bugs that haven't been fixed over the years.

* Possible software gains being squandered year after year.

I clearly articulated in my comment that I have other problems with the current state of mac OS, so I'm not sure why you're implying that I'm claiming all the issues mentioned in your post are in the scope of "liquid glass" and therefore mainly narrative-driven.

It suggests to me that you didn't really read my comment before composing your reply.

I generally felt this way about macOS before "liquid glass" launched, so no, I don't think so.

I don't understand the fuss around liquid glass. I've been using Apple stuff since before OS X and this just feels like another redesign; I understand that there are some accessibility issues (that I thought Apple had at least partially addressed) but I don't have any problems using it. In fact, I kinda like it. It feels like many people latched onto an extremely negative narrative early on, and can't let go of it.

I have much more of a problem with the terrible window management on the mac and ipad OSs. Not being able to snap and resize windows to the edges of the screen, like every other standard window manager that exists, is insane (I know they added some version of this recently, but unsurprisingly it sucks). And the entire mac OS is starting to feel slow, bloated, and janky. They completely ruined the cmd-space search in their most recent major release. They need to get their house in order.

It's because it's vapid corpspeak coming from a class of people who have certainly spent time thinking about how they will deal with the rest of humanity in any number of nasty (however far-fetched) eschatological scenarios caused by them and in which they alone wield incredible power over nature and the human mind. And also because we all know the vast, vast, vast majority, possibly the totality of what people made with Sora did not matter at all.

You seem to have missed this part of the comment you replied to:

> This was many years ago and I freely admit today that I was wrong.

Personally I stopped using Windows for gaming because it literally doesn't work anymore. I installed Windows 11 on my gaming VM and DLSS and FSR were just completely broken, didn't work at all. Couldn't figure it out. Switched to Linux (Bazzite for now) and I have no regrets; the only games that don't work are the dangerous time-wasters (live service games with invasive anti-cheat) that I have less and less time for as I age.

> One controller overnight is completely reasonable.

Do you really think it's appropriate to have zero margin for handling unusually high ATC workloads? Because we just saw what happens when you have zero margin for handling unusually high ATC workloads: people start dying.

The man who thinks he's going to be the feudal lord in GGP's scenario.

In GGP's scenario, there isn't much room at the top. :)

In this scenario, where the AI and robots no longer rely on human labor for maintenance and growth, their productive capacity exclusively serves the owning elite (including defending them with violence if necessary) and the rest of us are an inconvenient growth occupying land and consuming resources.

This is a scenario where the AI/capital owners complex has already survived the collapse of the consumer economy.

Legitimately worse uptime than my self-hosted services. That's pretty funny.

> I'm not sure how people say this so confidently.

Say what, exactly?

I honestly don't think I have.

In this case, using a cheap(er) signal or heuristic as an initial filter before spending more resources on cases that pass the filter is a pattern that shows up all over the place, and LLMs are good at picking up on patterns like that and generalizing them. AFAICT.

I don't think Google really "rebranded" in the same kind of way, since Google is still their brand across the vast majority of their product offerings and the signs on Google offices still say Google. Seems like the Alphabet thing is more about letting the "other bets" be under a higher umbrella, and possibly other reasons related to financial engineering etc.

> I'm not sure if anyone in HN has any useful advice in this regard.

Self host. It's still possible to buy computer hardware and install FOSS replacements for most/all of the services you need, and plumb it all through to your mobile devices using wireguard/tailscale. If you're behind a CGNAT you can proxy it through a cheap VPS that won't fuck you on bandwidth costs. Thanks to Proxmox, I probably have better uptime on my services than e.g. Github these days.

When it becomes impossible to get open PC hardware, I don't know. I like to think I will just stop using the internet for anything besides the bare minimum NPC type activities that are required to engage with the institutions of society.

> I never disputed that facial recognition software was used

You, yesterday:

> I honestly don't see what AI had to do with anything here.

???

> You seem to be intentionally ignoring the point I made.

I completely understand your point. You are saying that if a mentally ill high schooler manages to acquire a gun and kills 20 people at their school, we should a) punish the shooter, and b) understand the gun as a neutral object that simply popped into existence and was misused, rather than a machine whose design purpose is to kill humans, and whose manufacturer(s) (and other organizations who profit from the easy availability of guns) are actively engaged in a broad effort to preserve the status quo which allowed a mentally ill high schooler to acquire a gun and massacre 20 of their classmates/teachers.

I think it's a terrible opinion, and I vehemently disagree with it. But if you are willing to engage in the sort of rhetorical contortions highlighted at the top of this comment, there is no point in expressing my disagreements to you, because you will evidently say literally anything in response. I may as well have a debate about toilet tank design with `cat /dev/urandom`.

> If you're unable to rebut my point then perhaps you should consider that you might be in the wrong?

Try looking in the mirror, buddy. Sheesh.

If you don't agree that facial recognition software is involved in a case of a woman being misidentified by facial recognition software then there is no point in me spending any more time/effort in conversation with you. Goodbye.

> How do you arrive at that conclusion?

Because it's beyond obvious? How would this woman have ended up in jail if she hadn't been misidentified by the facial recognition software in use by the Fargo police? She lives 3 states over; would be a hell of a coincidence if some other avenue of investigation led them to her.

> I honestly don't see what AI had to do with anything here.

You honestly don't see what facial recognition software had to do with a woman being misidentified by facial recognition software?

> Suppose ICE busts down someone's door, drags them off, holds them in an internment camp for months, and then finally goes "oh, oops, guess you were a citizen all along sorry about that" and releases them. We don't blame the source of their faulty hit list.

I actually am completely willing to blame any entity that supplies ICE with the names of people it can reasonably assume will be targeted for "enforcement action" due to said entity representing said names as being legitimate targets for said enforcement action, without taking reasonable care to ensure said representation is correct in each and every case.

What you don't seem to understand is that these abuses of law enforcement authority are predicated on at least an appearance of legitimacy, which can be provided by (e.g.) an app with (presumably) a very official looking logo that agents can point at somebody to get a 'CITIZEN' or 'NOT CITIZEN' classification. It is upon this kind of basis that they perform illegal arrests. All parties—the app vendor and ICE, as well as the people who are meant to be overseeing ICE and providing accountability—are complicit enablers in these crimes. To absolve the vendors who provide the software knowing full well what it will be used for, what its limitations are, and how unlikely it is that ICE personnel will understand those limitations and work around them to keep everything legal, is totally absurd.

> someone saying the Chief of Police saying "We are not going to talk about that today?" is not the biggest scandal, but the AI is.

Who is this "someone"? OP's article and the discussion here are absolutely not neglecting the human factors and general institutional failure that made this possible. But it's also true that without these "AI" tools, it would never have happened.

As soon as we start to see a pattern of shitty vibe-coded software actually harming people via defects etc. (see: therac-25), I would hope that the conversation is about structural change to mitigate risk in aggregate rather than just punitive consequences for the individual programmers who are "responsible". The latter would be a fantastically stupid response and would do little or nothing to reduce future harm.

Let me help you out with this comprehension issue. The point of my comment is that I disagree with the apparent premise of the comment I replied to, which is that "AI" is some generic investigative tool that we can neatly snip out of the picture to blame this incident on human factors at the individual level ("the professional human-in-the-loop who shirked all responsibility"). Said comment also implies that people are fixating on the AI aspect of this issue while ignoring the human factors, which IMO is a strawman. To me, the existence of AI in its current incarnations and the ways in which law enforcement will inevitably abuse it are, together, inseparably, the problem. AI (in the most general sense) opens up entire new dimensions for potential abuse.

As a concrete example:

> And the criminal justice system, for reasons that have nothing to do with AI, let this woman sit in jail for 5 months before doing even interviewing her or doing any due diligence.

Let me state what should be obvious: without AI (as in, the facial recognition systems involved in this case), this woman would not have sat in jail for 5 months, or indeed for any length of time at all. So saying that it has "nothing to do with AI" is totally ridiculous.

This particular "AI bogeyman" isn't just AI; it's cops with AI and in particular cops with facial recognition tools, dragnet LPR surveillance tools, and all this other new technology that essentially picks somebody's name out of a hat to have their life temporarily (or [semi-]permanently) ruined by shithead cops who won't ever face any real accountability.

This keeps happening, and the reason it keeps happening is that shithead cops have these tools and are using them. Until we can find a reliable way to prevent this from happening, which may or may not be possible, cops who may or may not be shitheads should not have access to these tools.

This also seems mostly made up. In decades of using the internet, I can't remember ever seeing someone trying to share deep domain knowledge and getting mocked/shouted down just because they had a language gap or otherwise weren't a great communicator. In spaces where substantive discussion happens, people generally seem willing to engage in good faith and help close that particular gap.

I don't have a problem with people using these tools to translate their writing into languages they aren't fluent/literate in. It's a completely different dynamic vs. having them write for you.

Using LLMs for research is completely different from using them to write for you. And if you're using them to write about the results of research, you're almost certainly getting a lot less value out of the whole exercise.