39,091 karma · joined June 20, 2012
http://www.mjt.me.uk
hn@mjt.me.uk
You do unpopular things, you gotta expect to be an unpopular person.
Sophisticated, educated types might understand that parking wardens are just doing their jobs, and they didn't make the policy they're enforcing. But to 70% of the population, the person putting a ticket on their car is an asshole.
Some people foresee a future where self-driving cars are the norm. The big prize being fewer deaths on the road (about 40k people per year in the USA) which is a pretty big prize.
If today's self-driving cars are heavy on the AI surveillance of passengers, and you foresee self-driving cars doing 90% of journeys within your lifetime, that's a pretty ominous situation.
Especially if you interpret it in light of EU driver-facing-camera mandates.
Paying me $150k to do work that produces $1.5M for your business is great value - but getting the same work done for $15k is even better value.
What you've got to do is become more forgetful.
Ask not what a 17v power supply can do for your friends. Ask if you'll remember it and find it when that moment comes.
Pre-AI fake videos sidestep this sort of issue by lowering the video quality.
Add some motion blur, some camera shake, some poor lighting, the camera being slightly out of focus, and make the video 720p instead of 4k.
It may not be in reach for you and I - but within reach of anyone with the budget to run a 'bot farm'
A 20" viewable area, 1920 x 1440 CRT in the late 1990s? $800 [1] and that was the king of monitors.
A 22", 1920 x 1080 flat screen today? $65 [2] and considered the most basic, mundane screen out there.
And inflation-adjusted? That $800 monitor was $1500 in today's money.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/comparison,497.html [2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CVM2GJCN
Sure, unless you want to do something rare and exotic like, say, have a microphone on your headset. Then you get the HFP/HSP profile, which makes two tin cans linked by a string seem high quality by comparison.
Huge revenue? Or just huge volume?
If I boost the productivity of a $100k employee by 50%, a business will happily pay $1k/month and consider it a great deal.
But from what I've heard, consumer-facing LLMs find most users won't hand over even $20/month (which is a heavily subsidised price anyway).
Speak for yourself, I often accidentally open 50MB JSON files, crashing my text editor as it tries to figure out the syntax highlighting :)
And your average Smart TV buyer is prepared to sign into Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Prime Video, Crunchyroll, Youtube etc - that's the whole point of buying a smart TV. The only returns will be from the minority who are happy to sign up and sign in for streaming services, but who balk at one more account.
Personally, I'm about to return a smart TV (because it sucks) and replace it with a dumb screen. But realistically - I don't imagine these things get returned in sufficient numbers for vendors to change their ways.
If I, a corporation, declare that I only accept security reports carved on clay tablets in ancient greek and hand-delivered to my office in Timbuktu during a total solar eclipse - does that stop responsible security researchers from disclosing their findings publicly?
Of course not.
If the guy sends a clear message to the best public contact address he can find with 15 minutes of searching; and gives them 30 days to patch before publicly disclosing the bug; then he's performed responsible disclosure.
The vendor's corporate policies and release cycles and contact addresses and triage procedures are their problem.
In the most expensive versions, they measure each individual patch, in case printing imperfections make the colours slightly different. And of course because you can’t get the exact same inks when a product is 50 years old!
> How were the colors chosen?
Skin and foliage; primary colours; greyscale; and miscellaneous.
They also make a 140 colour patch version - the “ColorChecker Digital SG” - that provides more coverage; 14 different skin tones instead of 2 for example!
After all, if America’s military thinkers all believe if America fought China it would inevitably result in mutually assured destruction - then American security guarantees for Taiwan lose all credibility.
Often it's straight up the same companies - a Brit's PII is held by Experian, Equifax and Transunion just like an American's is.
And while the rules are strict and complicated enough to be very inconvenient for anyone who tries to follow them to the letter, the fines for even the worst fuck-ups are trivial. We're talking a $5 billion company handing 15 million people's credit reports to hackers, and getting fined $15 million.
Security-wise this comes with obvious downsides - but as protection against cyberattack, it's pretty much the gold standard.
Similar things already exist - although it's used for increasing GPS precision and detecting faulty satellites, moreso than detecting jamming, so the networks might not be dense enough to detect small areas of jamming.
For one state's example, see [1] - choose 'RINEX archives' if you want historical readings.
There's GPS jamming by the military, mostly in war zones. This seldom effects airliners because they steer clear of active war zones.
Then there's GPS jamming by delivery drivers who don't want their boss watching over their shoulder all the time. When the article mentions jammers as small as a cellphone and costing less than $100, those are sold to drivers.
Delivery drivers don't jam LORAN or VOR, though - so it's not jammed by the second type.
Inside of the cover (page 2), ad saying portugal is the smart choice for data centres and ai computing. Page 11, two NGO job ads and an ad for timeshare holiday homes. Page 75, ad for Economist Education Online Courses. Page 75 (back cover) ad for a cruise.
Last week's edition: Rolex, page 2. Page 11, executive recruitment network ad, NGO job ad, teaching job ad. Page 11-12, ad for timeshares. Page 15, barclays bank account ad. Page 20: Ad saying amazon employees' working conditions are good. Page 25: Ad for 'securing identity for the ai enterprise'. Page 32, ad for european cybersecurity investments, page 84 (back page) ad for Oracle.
So there are some ads - not many, but some.
While most companies have elements that are hard to see clearly [1], I would hope 95% of what the company is doing would be transparent to the CEO.
The CEO should easily be able to tell which divisions/projects are profitable, which are on track to hit their goals, how those goals combine into a coherent strategy, which areas are getting the most complaints and refunds, and so on.
[1] intangible concepts like 'innovation' and 'culture' for example
To the 95% of people without the inclination or knowledge to check the figures, this looks great! It's a car with zero fuel costs, it's EV charging for people who don't have off-street parking, it's a fix for EVs sitting in workplace car parks at times of peak solar output, and it's most of the benefits of covering car parks in solar panels.
IMHO the third-party doctrine is an area where legislators ought to be passing laws to broaden constitutional protections, in suitably nuanced way, to keep up with the times. In the modern age, people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks.
The idea that fourth amendment protections apply to physical mail, but not to e-mail [1] doesn't really make much sense.
Unfortunately this is the sort of thing change that really needs to come from legislators, and the legislative process isn't very effective at the moment.
[1] except for the 0.1% of people who self-host their own e-mail server in their own home
Ehhh, seems to me a cloud provider that wants to back up my documents, communications, photos, passkeys etc has a very strong business case for ensuring the data is as safe with them as they would be in my own home.
When I was young, cash was beloved by some as a matter of principle because of the fact you didn't need any authority's permission to accept it; coupled with its anonymity.
If you were running the city's only LGBT bookshop, you didn't want your till full of signed, dated checks - and card processors wouldn't do business with you even if you wanted to accept cards.
Are you perchance paid by number of distinct metaphors used?
If I push to add one to my employer's website, will our security team thank me for doing so?
Superbowl ads, TV ads, radio ads, print ads, billboard ads, public transit ads, youtube ads, podcast ads, search ads, e-mail ads, social media ads, in-app ads, in-store ads, sports team sponsorship, individual athlete sponsorship, stadium naming, product placement ads, elevator ads, cinema ads, bathroom ads.
And Coca-Cola doesn't increase their advertising budget just because someone finds a new place to slap ads on - they just re-allocate their spending.
Sure, Google and Facebook make a good chunk of money from ads. But it's a very, very competitive business.