6,281 karma · joined April 15, 2016
I'm not sure about all, but many did (at least, a serious crime was alleged), which is why I described them as "far worse examples". But they are examples of the same pattern (cops blindly trusting the surveillance oracle), so severity of the alleged infraction/crime apparently won't protect you in either direction.
You misunderstand. I am attempting to present the situation from the point of view of a hypothetical police officer, especially one who may be motivated to view the information in front of him in a certain way that will justify him writing a ticket.
> if the cop thinks it's fake they can call the insurance company and confirm
I expect that the cop in question would not have been willing to do this, if asked to.
> In Georgia, where one of the incidents took place, the cops can lookup insurance status in real-time
I expect that the cop in question had no interest in doing this, or in divulging to the victim that he had the capability to (if, indeed, he was aware of the possibility himself).
Neither of the former two facts is good, but they are facts nonetheless, and holding the officer in question accountable for the error or related broader misconduct will have no preventative effect, because it's impossible to hold American police officers accountable in any meaningful way (i.e. a way that serves as a deterrent in future situations).
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The first part of the point I'm trying to make is that if we give cops access to surveillance software that purports to tell them whether or not somebody is driving with insurance, they're inevitably going to treat that data as ground truth in many cases. It doesn't matter that you think this officer should have taken the paper as authoritative, or gone to these other sources to verify it: he failed the test and trusted Flock instead, because Flock is a slick commercial product consciously designed to make its users trust it and use it more and rely on it more.
Saying 100% of the blame lies with the cop here (as the comment I originally replied to does) is pretty similar to saying 100% of the harm resulting from teenagers getting addicted to social media is their own fault, and the tech companies who designed their platforms to be addictive to teenagers and chased growth at any cost are blameless. Why don't the kids simply not use social media? It's so easy! Personal responsibility!
The difference is that in the case of cops and Flock (etc.), the harm is turned outwards onto other innocent people.
So whose responsibility really is that? Should the governments that purchase surveillance tools, and the companies that sell them, be held accountable for the (predictable) harms they enable? Or should we ignore them, ignore the fact that we all knew this was going to happen and the fact that it keeps fucking happening, and just blame the individual cops? (which, as we all know, amounts to nothing.)
The fabric of our society continues to be eroded by these big moneyed interests because we (the public, the parts of our government that are supposed to protect us from predation) continually and happily swallow all the disingenuous mealy-mouthed bullshit they spew to deflect past, present, and future responsibility for predictable harms. If we keep swallowing then we are headed for bad times. I am done swallowing.
(Incidentally, I assume paper insurance cards will cease to be considered valid before too long, and handing your unlocked phone to a cop will be coercively normalized.)
Cops aren't intellectually inclined (or equipped, for that matter) to second guess a surveillance tool that's showing them an unequivocal answer to a question. This is 100% on Flock for selling a tool to users they know won't reliably question its output, despite whatever bullshit CYA terms and conditions come attached to it, and then failing to ensure that its output is correct.
Reading, writing, and critical thinking skills matter. You don't have to "write structured interpretations of 1950s texts [you] have no emotional connection to" or practice "handwriting, and reading stuffy texts from front to end" to develop those skills (very loaded language, nice job!), but you have to put a lot of time into doing something, ideally somethings, where you're the one doing the heavy intellectual lifting.
Or, we can just write these kids off as a generation incapable of thinking or building by themselves without AI tools that do the thinking and building for them. Honestly, it's probably already too late. The way we've allowed kids of all ages to be exposed to these tools is basically equivalent to handing out cartons of cigarettes in a preschool.
Meanwhile we see an absurd consolidation of capital that leaves consumers with fewer and fewer choices for basic products and services, allowing capital to make those products and services worse and more extractive. Rinse and repeat. The contempt for consumers and attitude that capital should be "privileged" manifests in our government's total indifference to the former's plight, despite the well known fact that they are the engine of our economy.
How do you think it's going?
I don't remember whether my first airpods were the gen1 pros or the gen2 pros, but you may have been a victim of early teething issues. I don't really have anything negative to say about the ones I've owned.
Which ones are those? I've owned a couple of generations of airpods and dropped them probably hundreds of times (both in the case and out of it) and it has never had any detectable effect on their appearance or functionality. I even had a pair go through the wash and they still mostly worked afterwards (only issue was that the ANC performance was worse and slightly weird).
Kind of a tangent, but one thing I am curious about is to what degree the Navier-Stokes result announced today was primarily a brute-forced result based on the 'program' previously established by researchers to find counterexamples (blowups), or whether the model actually added significant/novel intellectual value beyond its ability to run at arbitrary parallelism. With 10K agents and a staggering $15M in compute (IIRC), I am feeling like a lot of the former may have been involved, but I don't really understand either the problem or the approach (or, indeed, the solution).
Obviously the potential for parallelism and coordination between so many agents is quite scary by itself, but I think brute force by 10K mediocre AI mathematicians is much less scary than ~one AI mathematician reasoning its way through the problem where all human attempts have failed. It seems fairly obvious that massive parallelism lends itself to brute-force counterexample-finding, and I suspect it isn't a coincidence that most of the touted AI math results have been counterexamples.
It's all still quite scary, but coming full circle: I really don't know what to think.
(I'm not happy about the above being true, but it's the reality I seem to inhabit.)
It's fine in the sense that when a bad writer writes something I can usually understand what they're trying to say.
Going back to Anthropic's post:
> They’re the world’s most advanced models for coding and knowledge work---and their research capabilities offer an early glimpse of how AI models will contribute to scientific progress.
The first thing directly implies and flows smoothly into the next---or would, if not for the awkward emdash. There is no discontinuity, no twist or shift in context, no implied question and provided answer, no punchline. It's just distracting.
> There are obviously few or no hard technical blockers preventing Valve and the Linux community from supporting any game that runs on Windows
'Few' there is doing a fair amount of work: it allows that some significant (or "hard" if you prefer) blockers may still exist (this is consistent with my own observations of game compatibility in aggregate). So your (implicit) insistence that I claimed there are no blockers is obviously nonsensical already. But, furthermore, I went on to say this:
> unless it's been specifically engineered to block Linux
Which precisely describes a game that previously worked on Linux, with anticheat even, but now has been updated to remove that compatibility! It also describes a game whose anticheat has been configured that way since launch.
Also, your implication that "hard technical blocker" and "not worth it to implement" are interchangeable is ridiculous in any scope, whether you're Valve deciding whether to commit tens or hundreds of man-years to Proton development or a one man shop considering a hacky workaround in a client's dated web framework.
You are just barking at the mailman. I'm done here unless you can respond to the actual substance and nuance of my comments rather than a strawman.
I'm not an emdash hater but this isn't how you use them. It should be a comma.
If your point is simply that the publishers think this is a good business decision for them, that's obvious, because they're a business and they aren't going to make decisions they think are bad. But I am not sure how your muddled logic about feasibility feeds into that point.
There are obviously few or no hard technical blockers preventing Valve and the Linux community from supporting any game that runs on Windows, unless it's been specifically engineered to block Linux, and publishers of those games will simply not be getting my money anymore. If Windows was still as pleasant and non-invasive as eg KDE Plasma on Cachy, it would be a different story, but I haven't used it in months (previously I did my desktop gaming in a windows VM) and the feeling of relief is almost tangible. Windows 11 is _so fucking bad_.
I understand that there may be some semi-legitimate arguments around anticheat, but a) not my problem, and b) back in the day we dealt with cheaters by having a persistent dedicated server community with admins ready to kick or ban. The publishers took that away from us.
Personally I've never really been into it, and these days I have a broad and revolving set of machines I have to use, so this sort of thing is absolutely not worth the bother. I just install KDE Plasma and use the computer.
IIUC courts have signaled in several cases that this distinction matters to them, which is good, because it's such a vast difference in degree that it arguably does become a difference in kind.
Police require a warrant to attach a GPS tracker to your car, or to directly obtain your cell phone location records. Why should access to networked ALPRs that compile an equivalently granular record of your movements be treated any differently? IIUC it was this exact line of reasoning ("detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled" data equivalent to GPS tracking, for which a precedent had already been established) that supported the decision that now requires warrants for cell phone data (in Carpenter v. United States). Extending the same logic to networked ALPR data would seem obvious if we had the same SCOTUS.
Hard to get a few shares so you can say you have some? Probably not.
Not that there's anything particularly unusual about this. High profile tech companies almost universally (actually I am not aware of any moderately recent exceptions at all) fall below the actual public opening price in the days or weeks following the IPO. I honestly don't know why anybody buys them.
If you don't know, maybe you should look it up instead of touting your ignorance in a public discussion forum? Your ignorance is not noteworthy. And while you're at it, you can educate yourself on climate change and proposed solutions to it, too. You seem to be suffering from several significant misconceptions, likely because you're bought into a narrative spun out by political hacks with zero understanding of the relevant scientific principles/knowledge and a vested interest in never changing that.
If AI development has such strategic urgency and importance that this desperate rapid expansion at any cost is reasonably justified on national security grounds, the government should be coordinating access to land and power and making people whole when their communities are impacted. Instead, you see unlucky everyday Americans left holding the bag while datacenter operators trick and bribe their way into building these projects and then run roughshod over regulations (e.g. how many open cycle gas turbines are you permitted to have running in your parking lot, mr. Musk?) because there is nobody willing to enforce them.
Honestly, any attempt to dismiss this all as groundless NIMBYism is unbelievably disgusting and makes me think that China and Russia are not the only parties running influence operations here. I do indeed see a strong push to frame the anti-datacenter position with weak/unsupported points (e.g. water usage) rather than strong and supported points (noise, electricity use, carbon footprint).