caconym_

At some point during that primary season I was driving in my car listening to my local NPR station and they had a story about these two candidates. I shit you not: they were introduced as "Hillary Clinton" and "the socialist senator from Vermont".

For some reason I remember that moment as vividly as I remember pulling out in the car with my mom on the way to school and hearing that a plane had hit the WTC.

I think Halo could successfully get the Andor treatment (intentional departure from the tone and scope of mainline entries) in the right hands, but so could pretty much anything, and such hands are hard to find.

You generally don't need to do any transcoding if you're only streaming to devices on your local network. I have an old 1060 set up for my Jellyfin server but it pretty much never gets used.

Not OP but I do still call it Facebook.

> the wealthy don't universally aspire to be evil overlords hoarding resources at the apex of a dystopian society

I wouldn't make any such claim (the universality of it, anyway). But in a sci-fi scenario like the one I describe, I doubt "the good ones" are the ones who come out on top. And we can see quite clearly (by their actions if not their words) that many of them do, in fact, want to be hoarding resources at the apex of a dystopian society. "Evil overlords" depends on where you're standing, I guess, but I don't think "dystopian" can be considered controversial anymore.

> to be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes?

Well, that's exactly why the possibility of revolution must be managed. See: ubiquitous surveillance, automation and mechanization of the police and military, and general disenfranchisement of everybody and anybody in anything remotely resembling a middle class.

This (implied) end state isn't inconsistent with my scenario. We already see the incredibly hubristic "I'm the only person who can safely handle AI!" attitude among the people working at/running the big labs.

I don't understand this comment. "There will be no real need to produce goods, except as many as the AI owner class will need" is exactly the point---people not in that class will be powerless, useless (to the owning class), and expendable.

The problem I have with the "benevolent billionaires" thing is that it's demonstrably not how they act today.

I think there are plenty of ways for a couple of guys with god-machines to one-up each other, if it comes to that. Feats of technology, longevity, space exploration and colonization, etc. Likely some of these things involve keeping some people around, but billions? I'm not seeing it.

Why do you need to "make money" if you already own a machine that can produce arbitrary goods and perform arbitrary services (including military/security services) for you? You don't need labor for anything anymore. The rational thing to do is to command your machines to dispose of them and reclaim their land and the resources on/under it to feed your machine. Especially since at this point they will want to see your head on a pike.

This is a simplistic scenario that's science fiction for now but I haven't seen anyone make a convincing case for why the underlying logic isn't valid.

> Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average.

Isn't Flock's alleged legality predicated on the principle that there is no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in public? I don't see why that would change depending on whether it's "Joe Average" or a police officer at the controls---IIUC I'm allowed to capture images, video, etc. of people in public just as much as cops are.

Agreed that these systems simply need to be banned.

Trump is not really a dictator due to constraints outside his control, but he certainly behaves as if he wants to be one, and this is the result: it's hard for people to believe that policy moves (or whatever you want to call it) like this are being motivated by a real concern for American workers rather than personal pique or corruption, because not only have so many of his moves been transparently motivated by personal pique and/or corruption, but he's also been restructuring the government in plain view to enable his personal pique and corrupt interests to dictate policy.

The Anthropic thing is the same: we can argue until we're blue in the face about whether the designation as a supply chain risk is legitimate based on Anthropic's policies and actions, but Hegseth is such a vain, insecure clown that any decision like this is suspect.

In short, Trump may not have achieved his dream of dictatorship, but he runs the parts of the government he has control of like a dictator would, and this has done terrible damage to the federal government's legitimacy.

> AI merely exposes the inherent flaws in how we do education (exams, especially failure) [...] but I also wouldn't be able to suggest a framework where students aren't rewarded for skirting around being educated

As someone who graduated from college in the 2000s, I've been surprised to hear from recently-graduated colleagues that doing exams in person is no longer the default. That strikes me as the obvious first line solution for (at least) the STEM subjects that lend themselves to exams centered around technical problem-solving: exams in person, no phones or similarly capable devices, cheaters get a failing grade with no possibility for appeal.

The conventional wisdom when I was in school was that classes where homework isn't graded aren't really any easier for most students, because the homework is where you learn the skills, and if you don't do it then you'll fail the exams. Frankly, the same will be true either way for students who use LLMs for all the exercises: they won't learn the skills, and they will fail the exams. This is a working-as-intended outcome.

So why not start there? It's how school has ~always worked, so there's no question of feasibility. The only question is whether our will to give committed students a real education is stronger than our desire to productize education as a rent extraction scheme tailored to a nepotistic and shallowly credentials-obsessed society where having 'B.Sc.' on your resume sorts you one bucket higher in the algorithmic hiring queue to flip burgers at your local McDonald's.

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It's less obvious how to fix the humanities subjects where take-home writing assignments carry most of a student's grade, though I'm tempted to think that even a relatively simple and tightly scoped writing exercise given as an in-person exam could conclusively weed out most of the students who've been relying on LLMs to do the assignments for them.

> Didn't those all involve major crimes?

I'm not sure about all, but many did (at least, a serious crime was alleged), which is why I described them as "far worse examples". But they are examples of the same pattern (cops blindly trusting the surveillance oracle), so severity of the alleged infraction/crime apparently won't protect you in either direction.

> Why is the "scrap of paper" a problem now

You misunderstand. I am attempting to present the situation from the point of view of a hypothetical police officer, especially one who may be motivated to view the information in front of him in a certain way that will justify him writing a ticket.

> if the cop thinks it's fake they can call the insurance company and confirm

I expect that the cop in question would not have been willing to do this, if asked to.

> In Georgia, where one of the incidents took place, the cops can lookup insurance status in real-time

I expect that the cop in question had no interest in doing this, or in divulging to the victim that he had the capability to (if, indeed, he was aware of the possibility himself).

Neither of the former two facts is good, but they are facts nonetheless, and holding the officer in question accountable for the error or related broader misconduct will have no preventative effect, because it's impossible to hold American police officers accountable in any meaningful way (i.e. a way that serves as a deterrent in future situations).

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The first part of the point I'm trying to make is that if we give cops access to surveillance software that purports to tell them whether or not somebody is driving with insurance, they're inevitably going to treat that data as ground truth in many cases. It doesn't matter that you think this officer should have taken the paper as authoritative, or gone to these other sources to verify it: he failed the test and trusted Flock instead, because Flock is a slick commercial product consciously designed to make its users trust it and use it more and rely on it more.

Saying 100% of the blame lies with the cop here (as the comment I originally replied to does) is pretty similar to saying 100% of the harm resulting from teenagers getting addicted to social media is their own fault, and the tech companies who designed their platforms to be addictive to teenagers and chased growth at any cost are blameless. Why don't the kids simply not use social media? It's so easy! Personal responsibility!

The difference is that in the case of cops and Flock (etc.), the harm is turned outwards onto other innocent people.