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abhibeckert

@ abhibeckert @lemmy.world

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509
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Amazon defends facial-recognition tech sale to FBI despite moratorium

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  • Better cameras aren't enough - you also need much brighter lighting. So bright customers would complain and get headaches.

    Or alternatively, have the camera close to the customer's face. Again, nobody wants that... though we do put up with it for ATMs / etc.

  • Amazon defends facial-recognition tech sale to FBI despite moratorium

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  • No I don't think this is a training issue. Light skin physically reflects more light, which gives cameras significantly more data to work with to detect shadows/etc.

    The face recognition on a phone gets around that by creating their own light, with dot projection at a light wavelength the human eye can't see, but I've only ever heard of that being done for short range face recognition. CCTV cameras are too far away from the face and are not really accurate enough for anyone (including white people).

    AFAIK Amazon's system was mostly intended for their self service retail stores... that's a different scenario entirely since you're only comparing faces to other customers who are in the store at the same time as you. And also the stakes are much lower - if two people appear to be the same person you can just flag both customers as needing to be verified by a staff member. No big deal at all.

    Using it as evidence for a crime though, will inevitably result in false convictions.

  • Amazon defends facial-recognition tech sale to FBI despite moratorium

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  • You say that like it's not happening now, but it is.

  • Any free JMAP email service?

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  • IMAP is a mess. None of the major email services or clients properly implement the protocol and pretty much all of the major email services have a proprietary replacement of their own with IMAP as an afterthought. That's why so many of the best email clients these days only work (or only have all features enabled) with Gmail or Office365.

    For the user mostly it's just slow. It can literally take ten seconds just to check if there's any mail and that's if there are no new messages. When there are messages it takes much longer.

    It's not slow because the servers are slow, it's slow because IMAP sucks. Too many requests and the requests are not really in a format that works well for the actual database format used by clients and servers.

    For developers there are bigger problems, it's incredibly difficult to write an IMAP client that even works at all with all with all email servers.

    JMAP fixes all of those issues. It's still not perfect, I think a perfect protocol would use Activity Streams, but it's definitely the best (open) email protocol available right now.

  • The White House wants to 'cryptographically verify' videos of Joe Biden so viewers don't mistake them for AI deepfakes

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  • It would be nice if none of this was necessary... but we don't live in that world. There is a lot of straight up bullshit in the news these days especially when it comes to controversial topics (like the war in Gaza, or Covid).

    You could go a really long way by just giving all photographers the ability to sign their own work. If you know who took the photo, then you can make good decisions about wether to trust them or not.

    Random account on a social network shares a video of a presidential candidate giving a speech? Yeah maybe don't trust that. Look for someone else who's covered the same speech instead, obviously any real speech is going to be covered by every major news network.

    That doesn't stop a ordinary people from sharing presidential speeches on social networks. But it would make it much easier to identify fake content.

  • The White House wants to 'cryptographically verify' videos of Joe Biden so viewers don't mistake them for AI deepfakes

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  • Click the padlock in your browser, and you'll be able to see that this webpage (if you're using lemmy.world) was encrypted by a server that has been verified by Google Trust Services to be a server which is controlled by lemmy.world. In addition, your browser will remember that... and if you get a page from the same server that has been verified by another cloud provider, the browser (should) flag that and warn you it might be

    The idea is you'll be able to view metadata on an image and see that it comes from a source that has been verified by a third party such as Google Trust Services.

    How it works, mathematically... well, look up "asymmetric cryptography and hashing". It gets pretty complicated and there are a few different mathematical approaches. Basically though, the white house will have a key, that they will not share with anyone, and only that key can be used to authorise the metadata. Even Google Trust Services (or whatever cloud provider you use) does not have the key.

    There's been a lot of effort to detect fake images, but that's really never going to work reliably. Proving an image is valid, however... that can be done with pretty good reliability. An attack would be at home on Mission Impossible. Maybe you'd break into a Whitehouse photographer's home at night, put their finger on the fingerprint scanner of their laptop without waking them, then use their laptop to create the fake photo... delete all traces of evidence and GTFO. Oh and everyone would know which photographer supposedly took the photo, ask them how they took that photo of Biden acting out of character, and the real photographer will immediately say they didn't take the photo.

  • ‘What do you mean, the tower is gone?’: thieves steal 200ft structure from Alabama radio station | Alabama

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  • They have a 100+ mile range and often the same content will be broadcast on a different frequency by other towers. A lot of people would have just switched to the other frequency and moved on with their lives. You might have three frequencies to choose from for the same content.

  • ‘What do you mean, the tower is gone?’: thieves steal 200ft structure from Alabama radio station | Alabama

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  • Surely there's an easy to find switch to cut power and make it safe.

  • ‘What do you mean, the tower is gone?’: thieves steal 200ft structure from Alabama radio station | Alabama

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  • This reminds me of the time someone stole a mango in Australia... obviously, being Australia, the mango was very big.

    It was just a marketing stunt and it backfired — police weren't too happy about wasting their time investigating a fake crime. Even after they were told what happened, they still had phones ringing off the hook with people calling in evidence, wasting government resources.

  • Nuclear Fusion World Record Smashed in Major Achievement

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  • That problem has been solved. A bit over a year ago NIF was able to produce about 3MJ of energy with about 2MJ of input.

    This particular experiment didn't do that but that likely wasn't the goal... They managed a 69MJ output over five seconds... the NIF experiment was less power but over "a few billionths of a second".

    69MJ over five seconds is 13MW which is a very usable amount of power. About on par with the typical output of a real world utility power generator, compared to the old one which was similar to a small lightning strike - impressive but not useful. It's not enough to power an entire city, but you kinda don't want that anyway since a city should have redundancy. Several 13MW generators could power a city with enough excess production to take one or two of them offline for maintenance. If you combined this with solar/wind(*), you could have two or three fusion reactors for a large city.

    The tech is still not ready of course, but it's getting closer and seems to be accelerating too - those two breakthroughs were a year apart. This generator is right in the sweet spot, now they just need to improve efficiency / reliability / reduce costs.

    (* I seriously doubt fusion is ever going to be cheaper than solar / wind / hydro - but it could be more reliable making it a great "baseload" option - enough to keep the lights on, fridges cool, etc)

  • If you didn't get an invite for Arc on Windows, give Firefox + Sidebery a try

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  • Arc has uBlock installed by default. So that's not a differentiator between the two.

  • If you didn't get an invite for Arc on Windows, give Firefox + Sidebery a try

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  • Arc has a lot of unique features, but these three are funamental. It took me a couple months to adjust my browsing habits, and it has ruined me. I literally hate using any other browser now.

    Arc syncs tabs between windows. This allows new workflows that just are not possible at all in any other browser. I have five windows open right now, all showing the same set of tabs (which are split into groups, so not all tabs are showing the same group... but some are the same group, for example I opened Sideberry in a new tab in the same group, but I'm reading it in another window). This also obviously syncs between devices, so your work desktop, laptop, phone, gaming pc at home... all have the same tabs. All the time.

    Arc automatically closes tabs for you. That definitely takes getting used to, but once you do get used to it, it's awesome.

    Finally, there are no bookmarks in Arc. Instead of bookmarks you can "pin" any tab which essentially disables auto-close for that tab. Unlike a bookmark, a tab doesn't contain a fixed URL. For example i have a Lemmy tab, which by default is the homepage but it could also be this discussion temporarily, then go back to being the homepage again later today.

    Those three are tied together in a carefully thought out user interface, with a bunch of other nice little touches like the way audio/video is handled if you're not in the tab that's playing media right now.

    There are other major features in Arc too - for example the URL bar is, well, not a URL bar at all. It's a command prompt where the default command happens to be "search the web/go to url". Arc also has a growing set of Large Language Model integrations that might pan out into something interesting one day. And it has some half-baked stuff for teams/collaboration which may or may not eventuate into something interesting.

  • Shell Is Immediately Closing All Of Its California Hydrogen Stations | The oil giant is one of the big players in hydrogen globally, but even it can't make its operations work here.

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  • How many individuals can drive cars before congestion makes it impossible

    It's impossible to answer that - there are just too many other variables, such as how far are people travelling each day on average, how many of them are going to the same destination, how many roads are there (not how many lanes, how many roads), etc etc.

    A lot of the problem can be mitigated with zoning rules to encourage people not to travel to the inner city. Whatever reason they might have to go to the CBD should also be available elsewhere in the city if at all possible.

    The fact is trains also have traffic issues and that tends to get a lot worse as you increase the number of train lines in your city. The efficiency of train travel is in part because not many people use that mode of transport. Cities that have 10% of travel by train now probably can't expand that to 80%.

    Diversity is the only option. Give people access to every mode of transit, and let them pick the best one. I'm not from California so I don't know the local issues, but looking at a map I-10 has six train lines that run basically parallel to it. Trains are clearly available so why are people choosing to drive? I'm sure they have a reason. Rather than trying to add more train lines, how about figure out why people are driving that route and tackle it from that perspective? What are they heading into LA for? Can it be done somewhere else?

  • Shell Is Immediately Closing All Of Its California Hydrogen Stations | The oil giant is one of the big players in hydrogen globally, but even it can't make its operations work here.

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  • Most daily commuters could get used to a train

    It's definitely not "most". You have to live and work near a train station for that to be viable option. It's not about "getting used to" trains, it's just for most commutes a train simply takes too long - because they don't go directly to your destination.

    In Denmark, which has one of the best transit networks in the world, only 13% of commuting is by public transport. 20% is by bicycle. Cars are 60%.

  • Shell Is Immediately Closing All Of Its California Hydrogen Stations | The oil giant is one of the big players in hydrogen globally, but even it can't make its operations work here.

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  • First of all, there are three (popular) hydrogen cars available, and only one of them is from Toyota. And more are scheduled to launch very soon.

    Everyone who's tested those three cars loves them. The Toyota Mirai is supposedly very similar to, and in fact nicer than, the Lexus LS 500 and it's also tens of thousands of dollars cheaper than that car. When (and I believe it is a "when") hydrogen is easier to access, it's going to take off.

    The only real drawback Hydrogen ever had was cost. But that's not an issue anymore, prices have come down a lot. And the "range anxiety" issue is helped tremendously by just having a really really long range. You're only going to fill up twice a month or so.

  • Vision Pro EyeSight feature doesn't really work, argues Macworld

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  • They're probably running a meditation app and listening to the sounds.

  • Because AI and Crypto use so much electricity, what if a law was made that they had to power it with green energy?

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  • Why not just pass a law that no one can generate electricity except from green sources? It sounds so easy when I put it like that.

    Um - those laws have been passed in many countries. Usually with a reasonable approach such as "you can continue operating the coal plants that were already built, but no more can be built".

    What's actually happening around the world though is those plants are becoming too expensive to run, so they're shutting down even if they are allowed to continue to operate. Renewable power is just cheaper.

    About two thirds of global electricity production is zero emission now and it'll be around 95% in a 25 years or so.

    Source (note: this is a "renewables" article, not a "zero emission" article. Some non-renewable energy produces zero emissions and there's not expected to be much movement on that in the foreseeable future): https://renewablesnow.com/news/renewables-produce-85-of-global-power-nearly-50-of-energy-in-2050-582235/

  • Because AI and Crypto use so much electricity, what if a law was made that they had to power it with green energy?

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  • You mean "carbon offset", not "carbon capture". Carbon capture is where you extract carbon out of the air and make concrete or something else out of it. Capture isn't widely done but likely will be soon.

    Carbon offsets are very useful. They paid for a sizeable portion of the solar installation on my home for example. Which has cut my household power emissions by about two thirds and that's with us selling about 80% of the generated power to the grid (where it reduces emissions for other households).

  • Because AI and Crypto use so much electricity, what if a law was made that they had to power it with green energy?

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  • The hydro plant for my city doesn't even have a reservoir. It's just on a river that flows down a mountain. And 99.999% of the water doesn't go through any turbines.

    Having said that - it doesn't produce enough power for the city, let alone spare to be wasted on other things.