AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

@ AmbitiousProcess @piefed.social

帖子

1
评论

290
加入于

6 mo. ago

Edit: For everyone downvoting me, please read my follow-up responses. I'm not advocating for surveillance, I'm advocating for privacy-preserving systems that simply send a ticket if you speed, without recording your location every single time you pass any camera, rather than a system that does, because that's actually a surveillance network.

As much as it's true that a lot of these cameras are just becoming other ways to engage in surveillance, it's also true that they do a lot to manage speeding. For example, NYC had a 94% reduction in speeding in areas with the cameras. It's also true that most existing speed cameras simply aren't equipped to be converted into ALPR systems. Most ALPR deployments are done via the installation of brand-new hardware, which many places simply can't justify the additional, new costs of.

This can be done with minimal surveillance capabilities, and often is in many places. (local compute board identifies license plates, calculates speeds, sends them to an isolated cloud service, and only forwards data to the police department if it was actually a speeding infraction, otherwise the data is wiped) The ALPR cameras are primarily being installed in specific areas, but aren't always across-the-board implementations, and sometimes avoid entire cities.

For example, ALPRs are becoming popular around Washington, but the Seattle police department only has a few ALPRs solely mounted on vehicles, but zero mounted in stationary locations. ("SPD’s ALPR cameras are not fixed in location") These aren't even used for speeding cases, but are used for missing vehicle cases, and the speeding cameras are entirely separate.

It doesn't make sense to eliminate all cameras, even the speeding ones, just because other cameras can be ALPRs. We should simply advocate for removing ALPRs, not speeding cameras. This is why organizations like the EFF, dedicated to protecting people's privacy, have previously argued against these cameras broadly not because speeding cameras are also bad, but because the way those speeding camera systems were designed allowed them to also be used as ALPRs. However, I haven't seen a single case of them arguing against cameras that are solely speeding cameras with limited capacity for surveillance, because it's just not a very big issue.

Sorry, long rant 😅

2周前

Valve compatibility layer for running Android games on Linux gets official name in Steam documentation

I cannot possibly overstate how amazing this is, given everything else valve is doing to make compatibility layers for practically anything.

This can attack Meta's near-monopoly on VR incredibly effectively. All those games made for the Quest? Pop 'em on either your higher-power PC, or directly on the Steam Frame, and it just works, very low effort to port, and you can squeeze more performance out of them if you're playing tethered.

Want to use an Android app on your PC rather than your phone? Done. Linux suddenly becomes much more useful to you on its own.

Being able to run Windows applications on Linux was just the start of making Linux more usable, and giving people more choice as to what software to use, but this expands it to an even larger scale. Simultaneously, this could mean some developers make things for Android that they otherwise would have only made to run on Linux, meaning Android users get more (likely open-source) choices too.

There's a metric fuck ton of apps that I wish I could use on Linux, but are only easily run on Android directly. (Yes, I know Waydroid is a thing, but it's been a pain to set up and use for me and many others. Valve has been pretty good so far at making sure things "just work" as best they can.)

2周前

I mean... they work on me

I forgot about Highlights! Loved that shit growing up.

2周前

Finding people who vibe with you is so hard

There's a reason so many people who suffer from chronic loneliness are told to first join some kind of socially-integrated hobby, activity, or group: Doing something you already enjoy, in the company of other people who enjoy the same thing, is likely to bring you people you are more likely to vibe with.

One of the best possible ways to start actually finding people you enjoy being around is to go to activities that involve people with a similar set of interests to you. For example, if I go to my local hackerspaces/makerspaces, I'm going to find a fuck ton of people who are interested in the same technology as me, and that means I'm probably gonna find people that have similar interests overall.

The main problem is that with the major reduction in third places, and with things becoming more and more costly to do, (e.g. my nearest makerspace costs over $100/mo to be a part of) it's hard to actually get into those social circles where you can meet people that you'll actually like being around.

2周前

Checking Account

Sounded to me like implying that he's already cheating on her.

2周前

Checking Account

The entire artist's portfolio is just "women bad and ugly and stupid. gay bad and weird. fat people ugly. cheating funny when man does it. wife only want sex because I buy her things." I fuckin hate this shitty boomer "humor" so much. It's all just disguising thinly-veiled fears about masculinity, beauty standards, and relationships, but dressing it up as "jokes."

...and it's always the worst art style imaginable, too 😭

2周前

Android is adding a new Wi-Fi hotspot option that maximizes speed and compatibility

It can often still have better range, even within an apartment building, since 2.4GHz will penetrates walls easier.

However, interference can be different, because 5Ghz has more channels, and many devices still primarily operate on 2.4GHz instead of 5GHz, meaning 5GHz can be interfered with less than 2.4GHz.

At the end of the day, it will depend on your environment, as interference can be a big factor, but regardless, you'll almost always find you have better, consistent signal range with 2.4GHz than 5GHz, because it's just that much better at penetrating solid objects, irrespective of interference.

3周前

PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

For real. It feels like any time anybody has anything good, some company finds a way to screw it up, sometimes without even benefiting themselves in the end. I'm tired of this bs.

3周前

But they're taking over!

I hate white panic in all its forms but as a matter of factual accuracy, we can’t lampoon it as freaking out over 2 people in 10 not being white. It’s further along than that, at least nationally. Granted, in any particular room, some white people will still freak out over 2 in 10.

True, yet in this specific instance this isn't about overall population, but specifically the muslim population, which if I recall correctly is under 1% of the population, far lower than the 10-20% in the comic.

3周前

So Trump is off his rocker, old bean...

Traffic is only really a valuable thing to get when it drives either ad views, or boosts your reach on a platform.

The thing is, you can use an adblocker, and since Trump owns the platform, no amount of views will change the likelihood of people seeing his posts. At the same time, the traffic you could bring is more server hosting costs that need to be paid to serve you the content.

Regardless, here's the video without having to go to Truth Social. Also, fun fact, did you know the pool gets cleaned every year, and this isn't some revolutionary thing that Biden just refused to do? Crazy! Who would have known the man known for lying would deceive people into thinking Biden just neglected the reflecting pool? Shocking.

3周前

Trains 🤧

But what about this promise makes it so uniquely seductive?

Part of it is, as you pointed out, just the elimination of costly labor. That's a capitalist's wet dream. But the main thing that makes it attractive as a slick, highly marketable investment vehicle is that AI models are inherently black boxes.

There are ways you can examine the ways they work (for example, researchers found that the parts of an LLM that "understand" one topic, like money, can also simultaneously "understand" other different, yet related things, like value, credit, etc), but we can't truly comprehend everything about them. It would be like looking at a math problem billions of equations large and assuming we could hold the whole equation perfectly in our brain and do the mental math to solve it. We can't.

That means that instead of seeing "here's our robot that is currently capable of this, but these are the components that could be upgraded/replaced, X is an issue it faces because of Y" and so on, instead you get "It's not good at this yet, but it will be if you just throw a few billion dollars more compute at it, we promise this time."

Problems are abstracted away to "something that will fix itself later," or something that "just happens, but we'll find a way to fix it", and not any kind of mechanical constraint a VC fund manager might be able to understand.

3周前

Trains 🤧

AI investment is expected to reach $1.5 trillion dollars in just this year alone.

Housing every single homeless person in the entirety of America would cost anywhere from $11B to $30B, per year.

That's anywhere from 50 to 136 years of housing, full paid for, for every single person currently homeless in the USA, at current market rates without any investment in affordable non-profit federal/state/city housing.

You could do so much fucking good with this money, and yet they choose to throw it all away on things that when they are successful in delivering value, deliver much less than the value that could otherwise be gained from that money, and at worst, create their own problems, like actual, direct deaths.

3周前

But they're taking over!

3周前

I signed up for Trump Mobile two weeks ago and I still don’t have my SIM

And it's more expensive than the most expensive US mobile plan, which would have faster speeds, whereas Trump Mobile's drops off after a certain (lower than T-Mobile's own plans) amount of GB data usage since they're solely using T-Mobile as an MVNO, and also has deprioritized data speeds during periods of network congestion.

It would also get you the ability to switch underlying network providers if you're in a dead zone, international calling and data in more locations, better customer support given all the experiences we've seen from reviewers, and unlimited hotspot data, plus better bundle deals for families or people with smart watches that need separate data.

Hell, even T-Mobile's own own plans, which are usually substantially more expensive than other companies they solely act as an MVNO for, like Mint Mobile, (which is actually owned by T-Mobile now) which will get you the same value as T-Mobile's $50/mo plan in a $30/mo plan that is just $15/mo for new users for up to a 12 month period.

Trump Mobile is just $2.55 cheaper than T-Mobile's $50 plan.

3周前

RFK Jr. says he personally directed CDC's new guidance on vaccines and autism

The CDC’s “vaccine safety” page now claims that the statement “vaccines do not cause autism” is not based on evidence because it doesn’t rule out the possibility that infant vaccines are linked to the disorder.

This dumbfuck doesn't understand that science can't fully rule anything out. That's why science continues to evolve, and things we once thought were true change over time as we get more evidence.

Science explains what we see in the world, it doesn't magically explain every possible outcome of every possible thing we look at.

No shit you can't "rule out the possibility", because you can't have an omnipotent view of every possible way every chemical reaction occurs ever between any infant and any vaccine.

What we can do, is look at how vaccines and autism rates are correlated, engage in numerous studies, and find out that there is no observable causal link between the two, or even a statistically significant correlation. That is the closest we can possibly get to "ruling it out."

You wanna know what there is an observable causal link for? Viruses killing people that would otherwise not have gotten sick from the virus had they gotten the vaccine.

Jfc we are so cooked as a nation.

3周前

Racism restaurant

I went to her profile expecting her to be the usual brainbroken conservative, and instead she's like, complaining about a reply getting removed because it had the F slur in it, but she also replied to one of Elon's AI-generated videos about his Tesla robot saying "Get the fuck out of here with this clanker bullshit", so I respect it.

3周前

"I love the round things!" - The Doctor

I could eat a party size bag of these things and still be craving more.

Good ass snack.

3周前

What's a better way to say "possibly possible" or "necessarily necessary"?

potentially possiblenecessarily required

3周前

Trump Called Epstein Right After Winning 2016 Election