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I'm amazed you can't see the difference.

Body cam - used to protect the police and people being policed in a potentially hot conflict. Recording is scoped to these specific interactions that rarely occur for most people.

Doorbell cam - highly controversial. See response to dog-finding superbowl ad.

Body cam wore on face - Mass surveillance in potentially every conceivable social context. Data owned by Meta, a company known for building a profile on people that don't even use their products.


Door bells also had a popular movie made that revolved around their use: Weapons.

And that didn’t raise an uproar of suspicion even as one character went door to door asking if he could look at his neighbors recordings.

People are comfortable with the idea of being recorded, so long as accessing many recordings is a drawn out and manual process.


Eh, doorbell cams aren’t that controversial (ad aside). A lot of people have them already, both from ring (with the concomitant privacy issues) or from other providers (with different but similar issues).

They’re controversial on hacker news but I don’t think people in the “real world” care all that much.

How that connects to the meta glasses is certainly up for debate —- the doorbells provide a lot of value to the user (know who is at the door remotely!), the glasses are more of a mixed bag.


I would say that people outside of tech aren't aware of the implications and potential use of the data.

Once people realize, they begin to reject. This is why I mentioned the superbowl ad and it shouldn't be waved away as an outlier.


They are people of very similar mentality, with opposing sensibilities.

The rest navigate quietly, bobbing in the rippling wakes of their passionate fighting.


Technically, I prefer Rust but I understand people who find Go better suited for their work. For example, devops is mostly Go nowadays and that makes more sense than Rust (or Python).

But I've never, ever seen toxic behavior from the Go community. For Rust, it's the norm, sadly.


Shh, don't give them more stupid ideas ;)


Well, that depends on whether the technology requires expertise that is rare and/or hard to acquire.

I'd say that using AI tools effectively to create software systems is in that class currently, but it isn't necessarily always going to be the case.


These types of takes are getting really tiring. The game isn't over, just the metagame.

I'm not saying I have the next metagame figured out, but AI doesn't magically solve all the worlds problems by existing. It likely even creates a new classes of problems. In such an environment there's going to be opportunity.

Are the software shops and devs who were winning at churning out SaaS products going to be the best suited to this new environment? Maybe not, but adaptation wins over non-adaptation, something that has always been the case.


I really liked the show despite Lee Pace's performance.

Pace really nails the intense Jobs vibe, but having seen his other work, it seems like it might not be 100% acting. There's consistency to the off feeling he gives across roles.

Gordon's role was probably the most setting accurate, but I do feel the story would have suffered if the entire cast was realistic to 80s standards rather than translated into late-2010s sensibilities.


Almost no such thing as acting. It's all casting.

It seems fewer than 1 in 20 actors act, the rest are cast.


All you've said here is that you (and many others) have shown in the past that they've valued convenience and rapid feature development over freedom and stability.

That is good to understand, but when that trade starts causing issues, it is important to remember that there was a trade made.

We aren't as stuck as we think we are, unless we decide not to reevaluate our past choices.


Yes, essentially everyone on the planet was willing to trade some freedom for chats that work on mobile or could send images.

Matrix has shown how incredibly difficult it is to make a modern service in a decentralised way. Requirements like preventing spam become immensely difficult.



Preventing spam may not be possible for much longer without verified IDs considering how advanced ai agents are.

Do any fully trustable ID validation services exist? Ones that verifiably never store your ID but just a validity status for a given ID on a blockchain?


Assuming you want ID verification, why would you need a blockchain? Your identity is deeply linked to who you are and we have identity documents and trusted entities to provide them. These entities can absolutely act as a third-party to verify who you are. This can happen with several different parameters: whether your identity is provided to the site you are using, whether the site your are using is known to your identity provider, whether identities across sites are identical or only linkable by the trusted party. But in all those examples (that are currently implemented by some countries), blockchain is not a requirement.

Assuming you don't want actual ID verification, the choices are even larger but with different trade-offs.


In theory yes, in practice it requires lots of different government services to get on the same page. How do you verify a state ID? Usually the DMV. Have they released an API endpoint for that? Almost certainly no. What if instead you're using a passport? Then the federal government needs to do it. What if your passport is from a country with weak government that doesn't have a lot of capacity?

And of course governments attract hackers because they tend to not be up to date on security best practices.

A single abstraction layer on blockchains allows more developers and security experts to contribute and innovate.


Preventing spam is as easy as gatekeeping. We should be bringing it back. Perhaps there should be multiple layers of social media. There’s deeper and deeper level of authenticity as you go deeper into the network


Phone numbers + phone number country + account age + behavior can be used to build a trust score. It might not be bulletproof but it cuts down spam enough for now.

Imagine a messaging app for example, a 1 month old account with a Nigerian phone number cold DMs an account in Australia. The likelihood of this being spam/abuse is extremely high. Vs a 5 year old account that mostly messages mutual contacts cold DMing an account in their own country.

In many countries, phone numbers are a proxy for ID and are difficult to get without having a local ID. The countries which have not secured their phone number system will be less trusted by spam filters.


Spam is an issue mainly because there are conspicuous meaty targets to be spammed, not in fragmented environments. And a target is meaty for spammers because that target has gathered, more often unnecessary, critical mass (large scale services, broadcast type news /thought leaders/influencers). Else even a small overhead for sending requests will drive away spammer incentive.

E.g. OS exploits were targeted towards Windows, not so much for so many of those Linux distros.


We can have spam filters for emails without any identity verifications. It is hard, but it should be possible for IM as well, right?


There's also this annoying flash perception that wins. As the big companies abandoned XMPP, less people considered it.

It's pretty good today! Lots of things improved a lot! Some big clean ups!

But think of how much better it would be if people stayed woke, if they didn't just throw up their hands call defeat & say it was never going to work. If there wasn't such a bleak rot in our soul, if we could try to play slightly longer games, I think in the medium & long run it would be much much better for us all.

It feels so easy to spread sedition, to project these fatalisms that only big dumb lumbering central systems win. I'm so tired of this bleakness, this snap to convenience as the only perceived possible win. Let the prophecy self fulfill no more, let us arise from this torpor. A little Ubuntu would be ao good for us all. Ubuntu the old saying (that the distro was inspired by) goes: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together"


Nobody said how hyper the HT in HTML and HTTP had to be, so here we are.

Oh, TLS also. Encrypted connections over HTTP are trivial.

Arguably this has created far more freedom by making encrypted network traffic default and free. Convenience is also freedom when it comes to accessibility.


Put another way, the services need us more than we need them.


Short-term yes, long-term it is often the other way around. In many cases, abandoning an open standard for a closed, centralised solution is surrendering to future enshittification for short-lived instant gratification.


> But this will only happen after the last programmer has died and no-one will remember programming languages, compilers, etc.

If we're 'lucky' there will still be some 'priests' around like in the Foundation novels. They don't understand how anything works either, but can keep things running by following the required rituals.


Part of the problem here is that people who love it are affecting people who do not. If you want to put cameras to record inside your home, fine, but this is people recording their neighbors without consent. The sales pitch is finding Fido, but I doubt that is the end game here.


A Ring camera pointed at a sidewalk or street is the clearest example of legally allowed filming in public I could imagine.


>legally allowed

People aren't arguing about what the law states.


"Recording their neighbors without their consent" implies that consent was ever expected or required. You're walking down a public street and have no expectation of privacy in the US, and correspondingly 0 legal or even "ethical" recourse.


First, in the U.S., privacy laws vary by state, so the blanket statement about 'the US' is incorrect.

Second, laws are made by people. The fact that many of us do not want to be recorded 24/7 is why it is worth discussing.


The 1st amendment protects your right to film in public, so my statement is correct.

The limitations only come from edge cases, like stalking, interfering with active law enforcement, or recording conversations in all-party consent states; none of which would apply to a security camera recording a public view.


A camera pointing at the sidewalk is fairly innocuous.

A camera pointing at the sidewalk that live streams everything it sees to several megacorps and law enforcement agencies is troubling. A million cameras doing this is a surveillance state. That's bad!

Legal? Yes. Dangerous to the populous? Also yes. Something can be legal and also be very very bad. You get that, right? Your argument comes across as "well, I'm within my rights to shout the N-word in a public place!!" Sure, and you're also an asshole. Not for having a camera, but for sending the footage to a bunch of creeps and thinking that's a fine thing to do.


Genuinely asking how is that realistically dangerous to the populace?

Set aside a slippery slope argument, because we’re just talking about security cameras in public areas: do you really think you have a right to privacy on a sidewalk?

If someone recognizes a criminal on a sidewalk from a wanted poster, or a missing child from a milk carton, is that surveillance state? Are they an asshole for calling the tip line, instead of keeping quiet?


> It's not really about the individual people. They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally. Our systems reward this behavior, so people do it.

Sorry, but people who do things they normally wouldn't because they are rewarded are not good people. They may be 'normal' in a distribution sense, but that doesn't mean the behavior becomes acceptable through it becoming commonplace.


The idea is compelling to consider though - I just saw a clip of comedian Romesh Ranganathan saying that a reason he hasn't cheated on his wife is lack of opportunity; another side of the same idea.

Perhaps we would all be shit-head billionaires if given the opportunity.

Most of us stay within our ethical lane, but then we don't have the money to afford a private island to abuse people on; we don't have to resist the temptation to incite an insurrection, or to shift gold markets by threatening a war ... perhaps we'd be tempted?


> Perhaps we would all be shit-head billionaires if given the opportunity.

Statistically, if we were living in WWII Germany, most of us would not become freedom fighters. We'd keep our head down and support the regime. I think most people like to think of themselves as the exception but that's just "cope".


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