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Comment Re:Siri is so frustrating (Score 1) 10

My latest pet peeve is when Siri violates basic privacy standards by compelling data collection that isn't necessary.

A couple of days ago, I asked it for a list of restaurants near a particular town where I would be in a couple of hours. Siri immediately told me I had to enable location services for that query. What? Why? My query didn't ask for a list of restaurants near me. I asked for a list of restaurants near a different town, and more to the point, I gave both the name of the town and the state.

I attempted probably half a dozen different variations of that query, including things like avoiding the word "near", and Siri failed in the same way every single time, so this isn't just a one-off glitch specific to how I worded the query. It's a general problem with the way Siri handles queries that involve location.

This violates the first rule of location services, which is do not ask for the user's location unless you actually need the user's location. If the user is asking for restaurants in Panama City, Florida, Siri does NOT need to know that the user is currently in Charleston, South Carolina. It's none of Siri's d**n business. And more to the point, if Siri actually tried to do literally anything with that location data, it would be pretty much guaranteed to reduce the quality of the results rather than increase it, so having the data is just an invitation for any AI that might be involved to do something utterly stupid.

Submission + - An independent effort says AI is the secret to topple 2-party power in Congress (npr.org)

Tony Isaac writes: The rise of AI assistants is rewriting the rhythms of everyday life: People are feeding their blood test results into chatbots, turning to ChatGPT for advice on their love lives and leaning on AI for everything from planning trips to finishing homework assignments.

Now, one organization suggests artificial intelligence can go beyond making daily life more convenient. It says it's the key to reshaping American politics.

"Without AI, what we're trying to do would be impossible," explained Adam Brandon, a senior adviser at the Independent Center, a nonprofit that studies and engages with independent voters.

The goal is to elect a handful of independent candidates to the House of Representatives in 2026, using AI to identify districts where independents could succeed and uncover diamond in the rough candidates.

Submission + - Russia still using black market Starlink terminals on its drones (behindtheblack.com)

schwit1 writes: SpaceX has made no comment on this issue. According to the article, Ukraine is “exploring alternative European satellite providers in response, seeking more secure and controllable communications infrastructure for military operations.” While switching to another satellite provider might allow Ukraine to shut Starlink down and prevent the Russians from using it within its territory, doing so would likely do more harm to Ukraine’s military effort than Russia’s. There isn’t really any other service comparable at this time. And when Amazon’s Leo system comes on line it will face the same black market issues. I doubt it will have any more success than SpaceX in preventing Russia from obtaining its terminals.

Overall this issue is probably not a serious one militarily, however. Russia is not likely capable of obtaining enough black market terminals to make any significant difference on the battlefield.

This story however highlights a positive aspect of these new constellations. Just as Russia can’t be prevented from obtaining black market terminals, neither can the oppressed citizens in totalitarian nations like Russia and China be blocked as well. These constellations as designed act to defeat the censorship and information control of such nations, a very good thing.

Comment Not surprising (Score 1) 68

This is exactly what any smart educator expected and the smarter students do too. A lot of mine are not using AI or using it only very carefully.

What we will increasingly see is a large divide between good and bad students. Not a surprise at all.

Comment Re:Useless technology anyway (Score 1) 79

So it's not for you. You don't understand or need the use case.

And you've done nothing to explain what the use case is. As far as I can tell, the use case is "Someone who wants to use their phone to control the TV instead of the TV remote," which is a tremendous amount of technological overhead for such a negligible benefit.

It's way easier to point your camera at the screen and do an instant sign-in on the TV than it is to get your phone connected to the right Wi-Fi network and cast to the right TV, so the use case would have to be pretty compelling to make up for what a pain in the a** it is when it works, much less when it doesn't.

You're coming across as "old man yells at cloud", and about something you don't even use!

Major correction here: about something that I have tried to use on many, many occasions, but never used successfully. There's a difference.

I won't read or engage further as I for one only spend my time on worthwhile things and you seem stuck in the mud.

You won't read or engage further because you don't actually know any compelling reason to use it. If you did, you would have said what that reason was by now.

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