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Even red light cameras have a substantial potential for abuse. The revenue stream incentivizes messing with the light timing to cause more violations.

Great -- so fix those problems with legislation.

its not a legislation issue

Except it is? If the traffic light timings are controlled by law then they can't be manipulated in that way.

the ones we want to prevent abuse from are the ones making the laws. police and governments break existing laws all the time.

>they can't be manipulated

if you want something that cant be manipulated or abused, the solution is technical, not legislative.


The ones making the laws are your elected officials. If you want a city to pass a law prohibiting changing the traffic light timings, then go campaign for a candidate that has that on their platform.

>If you want a city to pass a law prohibiting changing the traffic light timings, then go campaign for a candidate that has that on their platform.

people love saying this as if its some sort of gotcha.

ive been campaigning for candidates i believe in since ive been able to vote, which is over 40 years now. additionally, i voice my opinion locally and online (hi).


That's why we have an independent judiciary. What's the alternative to fixing this with laws/lawsuits? Do we riot when "the police and governments break laws"?

>That's why we have an independent judiciary.

which is something that only happens after abuse occurs, is costly (time and money), presents a risk of retaliation, and offers no guarantee of being made whole.

>What's the alternative to fixing this with laws/lawsuits?

not doing mass surveillance means we don't need legislation about it.

>Do we riot when "the police and governments break laws"?

why did you scare quote this?


Right, and while we're at it, we can stop theft by having the thieves choose not to steal.

If your approach is that we can fix abuses by having the abuser write down rules that say they're not allowed to abuse us, why limit it to public surveillance? Stick cameras in everybody's houses while we're at it. Think of all the horrible crimes that go on behind closed doors. Solve the privacy issues with legislation.


If red light cameras are incorrectly calibrated, that seems like something that could be challenged in court and changed.

> If your approach is that we can fix abuses by having the abuser write down rules that say they're not allowed to abuse us, why limit it to public surveillance? Stick cameras in everybody's houses while we're at it. Think of all the horrible crimes that go on behind closed doors. Solve the privacy issues with legislation.

People have a constitutional right to privacy in their own homes.


"People have a constitutional right to privacy in their own homes."

When the current administration is wiping its ass with the constitution on a daily basis, are you really so daft you can't see the direction we're headed in as a society in regard to an unregulated surveillance dragnet?

People have a constitutional right to due process and to not get murdered in the street by ICE (that's pronounced T-R-A-I-T-O-R, btw) but look how well that's been going.


They made over one hundred billion dollars last year. Seems like by and large they're doing their jobs pretty well.

Oh, you expected them to care about users? Lol, lmao even.


As long as it makes them money, they're incapable of caring.

Make them liable for what they show, and watch them suddenly discover they are able to care a lot.


I don't even fill out surveys anymore for the most part, unless it gets me a discount or something.

It can be worth sacrificing readability and maintainability for better performance in hot code.

I imagine that if you're flying through an active nuclear war, false positives from the blade crack detector are pretty far down your list of things to worry about.

At that point a blade crack might be the best option

That list seems pretty easy to meet today. I’m not sure why they’re waiting for an approach to emerge instead of building it now, unless there’s something else they haven’t listed.

What features do you think meet the list right now?

I'm not sure where the supposed difficulty lies.

"User-controlled execution." Seems easy enough to add settings so this is configurable.

"No content may leave the computer without authorisation." OK, so don't do that.

"No telemetry of any kind." There are plentiful API providers with zero data retention. If this means no data of any kind, even just records of having accessed the API, then local inference is a thing.

"No dependence on a single provider." Trivial. The OpenAI API is a de facto standard implemented by tons of providers. If you really want to go broad, it's easy to implement clients for other APIs too.

"No compromises on format." I don't even understand how this would be a problem in the first place. Text goes in, text comes out. The client can put it into whatever format it wants.

"Entirely optional." Trivial to add an off switch. Or an on switch, so it's off by default. If it must be completely removable and not just turned off, it can be implemented as an extension.


How many, though? It looks to me like the anti-AI crowd is not all that big, but it’s a bubble so they think everyone thinks that way. Especially if we’re talking about people who are so rabidly against it that they’ll get upset about optional AI features that are completely ignorable.

Even if the features are ignorable, they have consumed development time and attention to get there.

That's true of any feature you don't use. And while it's nothing new for people to get upset about work being put into features they don't care about, I've never seen anything like this level of vitriol. In particular I never saw anyone say they won't use a piece of software at all if it contains a particular optional feature, until LLMs came along.

Is a law going to stop it from happening? The destruction of USAID was against the law but it still happened. Let's say that the president announces we're leaving NATO, all troops stationed in Europe are leaving immediately, and we will no longer be bound to collective defense. What would actually prevent that from happening? Maybe we'd still be "in NATO" in some technical legal sense, but would it make any difference?

I'm not excited to have France and Russia in direct conflict, but having two nuclear states at war would not be anything new. There's been China/USSR, India/Pakistan, India/China, and if you want to consider wars that mostly exist on paper at this point, North Korea/USA.

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