We already have mass surveillance, and yet we still have major crimes. It's not working, and I see no reason to believe that removing more freedom will lead to having safer streets. Why are we giving up liberty and getting nothing in return? That's an excellent reason to protest against adding more surveillance.
Our public surveillance is actually limited relative to other developed countries because it makes people here uncomfortable for cultural reasons. You’ll also note that our crime rates are pretty high, especially relative to the surveillance happy countries in East Asia.
Regardless, I’m happy to take a results oriented approach here. Does tracking license plates make it easier to catch criminals? Does it make it easier to track stolen vehicles? I suspect cities wouldn’t be signing these expensive contracts if they didn’t see any benefits.
And finally, surveillance of public spaces is not inherently at odds with personal freedoms. Your mobility is not restricted at all, your core rights have not been touched. And you are always welcome to go live in the woods off the grid.
I firmly believe that living in dense urban areas with millions of others requires a reasonably limited expectation of privacy in public spaces.
Police states are great at solving major crimes. And when those are sufficiently solved, to justify their continued existence, they have to solve lesser crimes, repeating until you need enough surveillance to ensure no one's flushing their toilet improperly.
Police states are like autoimmune diseases under the hygiene hypothesis. They'll keep ramping up their sensitivity until they're attacking everything, even when it's benign.
Flock cameras can be helpful in all sorts of crimes. They've been used to solve everything from kidnappings to minor property damage.
There obviously isn't a future without crime. This is just a tool to make it easier for police to do their job and deter criminals somewhat, but that is probably marginal.
There will always be kidnappings, there will always be property damage. Having technology available to make it easier to solve those crimes seems obvious to me.
Yes, I can see how they would be helpful in solving crimes down to minor property damage.
I do not want to live in a society where police are watching everything I do in the name of solving minor property damage. "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is bullshit. I don't do anything illegal in my bathroom, but I do not wish to have a camera in there, even if it could solve a hypothetical crime.
Why not? Don't you want to stop all the crimes happening in bathrooms too? That would be a logical step if privacy is always an acceptable tradeoff for security (or at least the illusion thereof).
The difference is that public streets are public spaces. You necessarily have a limited expectation of privacy in public spaces. The government likewise already deploys cameras in public places to maintain a reasonable level of order on them.
If you want to put a camera in your personal toilet you absolutely can.
"Public" is not a blanket excuse for constant surveillance in a space. I do not have an expectation of being surveilled in public and it's not acceptable to normalize it.
Every single person who utilizes a navigation application to traverse a place that they have no previous independently verified experience, is taking existential risk based on a computer telling them what to do
There are literally thousands of cases of people dying or being injured because they did what a computer navigation application told them to do
This is also literally what the Target stock scheduling system does for target employees for restocking shelves
The vast majority of peoples lives are run by someone else’s computer
That’s fundamentally different, and I think you know that.
It’s one thing to ask an algorithm how to build an A* driving map from point A to point B. It’s another to ask one how to be a better person and go to Heaven.
I’m not religious, and I’m not arguing this from a pro-religion POV. I happily work in AI, and I’m not arguing this from an anti-AI POV. I am highly technical. I love computers. I’m excited about the future. I rely on deterministic algorithms to make my days better. And yet, I do not want to trust the words of an LLM to counsel me on how to be a better husband or father. At this stage, the AI does not know me in the way a counselor or advisor, or even pastor or priest would. And yes, I think that’s a crucial difference.
Sure, people die from regular programming. Mistakes happen. That’s not good or ok, but it seems unavoidable given today’s technologies and tools.
However, I think that’s in a different category than giving life advice. How is an LLM to know that God forgives Joe for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his children, but doesn’t forgive Tom for doing the same thing because Tom had money but was saving up to buy cooler shoes and didn’t want to spend it? A priest’s advice might be “Joe, don’t make a habit of it, but you didn’t hurt anyone and you children were hungry. Tom, would you freaking knock it off already?” An LLM might reply “that’s a wonderful idea!” to both.
Again, I’m firmly not anti-AI. I use it every day. I absolutely to not want to hear its advice on how to navigate the complexities of life as a human being.
Yeah, no. What you described here and what I described before are not programming errors, they're data errors. An A* route finder isn't going to know a bridge is out unless it is told, an LLM won't know that case history unless it is told.
I'd say the real problem with using an LLM for this kind of thing is not what the LLM writes, but that the act of writing helps the human understand their community, so when it is skipped that understanding remains absent. It's like cheating on your homework.
It’s not fundamentally different it’s people who are taking physical actions in the real world based on trust in some system
whether it’s a human or not they’re trusting the system with their existential outcomes
That is literally exactly the same thing.
The fact that you think that the rules of you being a father are somehow different than the rules of you driving to a appointment indicate that you have a completely incoherent world view based on two incompatible models of epistemology
As usual dualists will come up with a incoherent model and then try and act like it’s valid
> The fact that you think that the rules of you being a father are somehow different than the rules of you driving to a appointment indicate that you have a completely incoherent world view based on two incompatible models of epistemology
Two ways to look at this, both of which are coherent:
1. Current AI is better at some stuff than others. Saying "I'm okay driving in a waymo, but not taking spiritual advice from an AI" makes sense if you think it has not advanced to a near-human level in the spritual advice domain.
2. Even if you don't think that's true, it's reasonable to just want a human for certain activities, because communion with other humans in the same existential boat you're in can be the whole point an activity. I'd argue it is a significant reason for a majority of social activities.
Disclaimer: raised Catholic, now Atheist, married to devout Catholic.
The Church as defined by the institution is a community. I do not see it as a contradiction that the head of the institution is instructing the leaders to not add more layers of abstraction between them and the community, especially when those messages are on the subject of what it means to be human.
> The fact that you think that the rules of you being a father are somehow different than the rules of you driving to a appointment indicate that you have a completely incoherent world view based on two incompatible models of epistemology
I read it otherwise. This is the smoking gun, to me:
> So I stopped paying. Why keep paying charges I believe are wrong when the company won't discuss them?
That sounds to me like he thought they were mis-billing him, to the tune of $18K per year, not that they were billing him correctly but he wanted a better price.
I don’t want to victim blame… but I’m gonna. You’ve been paying $18K per year for infra you don’t use? Can I get in on this action? I’ll rent you some of my home lab for half the price.
But AWS doesn’t charge by the usage of allocated resources. They charge by the allocation of those resources. Have 50 EC2 instances at 0% CPU? Amazon sat them aside for you, as promised, yet you chose not to use what you paid for. That’s not their fault.
By analogy, a restaurant charges you for a steak, whether or not you eat it. Unless it’s defective, you bought it and you pay for it. And if you don’t want to donate $1500/mo to the AWS Steak House, stop ordering the ribeye.
for sure. along with just gestures etc... Communicating an idea is generally not all that difficult - you definitely dont need anything even remotely resembling proficiency.
It depends on a writer, but it can be very legible.
I used to be able to jot down notes during lectures almost as fast as the normal spoken speed. We often traded notebooks when preparing for the exams, and I rarely had problems reading other people's notes.
It's also really nice to write, once you learn it. I was surprised after moving to the US that almost nobody here knows how to write in cursive anymore.
The usual pictures of и / п / т / ш ambiguity that you see are exaggerated in that they show forms that are nominally “standard” but basically impossible to reproduce without a fountain (or, even better, dip) pen (think round hand or, as 'cyberax mentions, Spencerian script), yet use a constant stroke width that such an implement wouldn’t produce. For the latter two, people who actually write m and not т will often resolve the ambiguity with ш with an over- resp. underbar (the same ones that Serbian uses even in print[1]). It’s also pretty normal to exaggerate letter joins when they come out looking too similar to parts of other letters, etc. Overall, modern Russian cursive is about as legible as the modern French one, and I don’t think people complain much about the latter.
I also find the hand-wringing about English accents somewhat surprising. Yes, different accents exist, and yes, English has a much wider variation than (urban) Russian (there are things in the countryside that urban dwellers haven’t heard for a century), but phonemic orthographies are a thing, and though children in e.g. Moscow may perpetually struggle with orthographic distinctions that no longer correspond to anything in their accent, the idea of a spelling competition remains about as laughable as that of a shoelace-tying one. Nobody makes you represent the many mergers of English with a single letter in your new orthography (though it would be funny).
Different person, but I learned Mexican Spanish in school. The teacher taught us vosotros “for the test, and it’s not any harder than the others once you learn it, so might as well, but you’ll never need this again unless you go to Europe”. She seems to have been right. To this day, I’ve never needed vosotros.
That’s an excellent way to explain it. I’m already in the shell doing stuff. Whenever I can stay there without sacrificing usability, it’s a big boost.
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