ricecake @ ricecake @beehaw.org

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In this case the helicopter came because they blocked a major highway.

A helicopter coordinating police movements during civil unrest is pretty standard anyplace that can afford helicopters. That's definitely not just an American thing.
Do you think France is eschewing using helicopters to coordinate police movements with their current unrest?

Is it? All I saw was a helicopter with decent optics, but nothing particularly special, and cops talking on low bandwidth radios.

Even when we get to actual behavior, we see the cops starting with the assumption that they'll be just telling people to leave and planning routes to do so, before it changes to arresting people for blocking a freeway. They make sure people are notified that they're under arrest early, and the make sure they have adequate transportation before they begin the arrest process.

Like, there's plenty of scary and shitty things cops do, but this wasn't one of them.

To me it's important to ask "what problem is it solving", and "how did we solve that problem in the past", and "what does it cost".
Crypto currency solves the problem of spending being tracked by a third party. We used to handle this by giving each other paper. The new way involves more time, and a stupendous amount of wasted electricity.
Nfts solve the problem of owning a digital asset. We used to solve this by writing down who owned it. The cost is a longer time investment, and a stupendous amount of wasted electricity.
Generative AI is solving the problem of creative content being hard to produce, and expensive. We used to solve this problem by paying people to make things for us, and not making things if you don't have money. The cost is pissing off creatives.

The first two feel like cases where the previous solution wasn't really bad, and so the cost isn't worth it.

The generative AI case feels mixed, because pissing off creatives to make more profit feels shitty, but lowering barriers to entry to creativity doesn't.

In my experience it's perfectly common.

We should also ban long hair.

I'm sure plenty of women only prefer to have long hair because they think they would be shunned or stan out if they cut it short.

I'm all for people getting to wear their hair like they want, but I'm confident that many women would actually prefer to wear their hair short, and so can't be trusted to make that choice for themselves or express an honest opinion about it.

The first step in women's liberation is making it clear that they lack agency and that other people know what's best for them.

Depends on your level of security consciousness. If you're relying on security identifiers or apis that need an "intact" system, it certainly can be a security issue if you can't rely of those.

That being said, it's not exactly a plausible risk for most people or apps.

Sure, I suppose. Or just don't expand the system until there's some measure of system in place to keep the AI cars from fucking around in emergency situations.

It might have none, or it might turn out to have some unexpected application way down the line.

The fun part about basic mathematics research is that sometimes it suddenly just perfectly solves some other problem hundreds of years later.

Like that time in the 1800s a guy figured out a solution to a 350 year old problem, and then in the 90s we realized that it was a description of particle physics and all the math had just been sitting there waiting.

Some of the vehicles don't have anyone in them.

https://missionlocal.org/2023/05/waymo-cruise-fire-department-police-san-francisco/

One of the incidents in question.

Where do you see it telling you you need precise location to see emergency alerts?

Your phone has two sets of things that could be called "emergency alerts". One is the emergency alert system that's controlled by the government and managed by your phone company. That one doesn't require precise location.
The other is "crisis alerts" which is Google basically running a search for crisis near you and then telling you. This one may require more precise location.

It's entirely possible for your phone to just not get the cell network based alert. You can be connected to a tower outside of the alert area while someone right next to you is connected to one inside. Or you can just not get it because cell communications are imperfect. The issuer will typically resend several times to try to ensure it gets through to people, but it's not perfect.

Big difference is that a human can be yelled at and told what to do, and we currently don't have a good way for someone to do that with an autonomous vehicle.

Michigan already has universal mail in voting for anyone who wants it without cause.
It's nice. You sign up to get sent a ballot for every election if you want, and they just send you one for every election you get to vote in.

Looks like the law came about in 1895 as an attempt to stop people from using transportation as a form of buying votes.
The context of transportation has changed a bit since then, so it wouldn't surprise me if it got tossed out by the legislature, given all the pro-voting stuff the state has had recently.

It's not nearly as nefarious as people seem to think. Effectively all applications that access web resources send along what they are and basic platform information.
This is part of how the application asks for content in a way that it can handle
It does a little to let you be tracked, but there are other techniques that are far more reliable for that purpose.

I don't think they work the same way, but I think they work in ways that are close enough in function that they can be treated the same for the purposes of this conversation.

Pen and pencil are "the same", and either of those and printed paper are "basically the same".
The relationship between a typical modern AI system and the human mind is like that between a pencil written document and a word document: entirely dissimilar in essentially every way, except for the central issue of the discussion, namely as a means to convey the written word.

Both the human mind and a modern AI take in input data, and extract relationships and correlations from that data and store those patterns in a batched fashion with other data.
Some data is stored with a lot of weight, which is why I can quote a movie at you, and the AI can produce a watermark: they've been used as inputs a lot. Likewise, the AI can't perfectly recreate those watermarks and I can't tell you every detail from the scene: only the important bits are extracted. Less important details are too intermingled with data from other sources to be extracted with high fidelity.

I mean, they're also "making you" pick up your items off the shelf, just like the gas station "makes you" pump your own gas.

Do yours not take cash at self checkout? That seems really odd to me.

My local store let's me scan with my phone as I shop. When I get to the checkout I scan a QR code, it transfers everything to the register asks if I have anything else. Occasionally it'll have someone come over and scan a few items to spot check, but not super often. Then I pay and leave.

Usually takes maybe 30 seconds to check out.

Yes, that's sorta why I picked that example. It's a symbol that's been used in other contexts and is almost entirely associated with a specific negative use case.

If you see a guy walking around with a swastika arm band, do you really think "oh, look at that man showing pride in his Hindu beliefs”?

Actually, I think that the opposite of a bad example. If I see you flying that flag, I'm not going to assume your an enthusiast of finish WW1 aviation.

I chose the swastika specifically because some other people used the symbol at some point and had it ruined for them. That's a thing that happens to symbols, they get associated with shitty stuff and you stop showing the symbol, convince people to drop the objectionable meaning, or accept that people will think you endorse the shitty one.