Yeah, I bought the Airtags because my girlfriend keeps losing her keys, so when she was in another city recently she emailed me to ask why something was beeping in her bag, which is when we found out that Airtags have this retarded 'feature'.

I didn't know this beforehand because until now I've been using cheap Chinese clones off Amazon which don't. So you can either pay $5 for a Chinese "AyrTag' which doesn't do this or $40 for an Apple AirTag which does.

It's retarded and it doesn't work because anyone can buy compatible devices off Amazon for less money if they want to stalk someone.

"Because 0.1% of people abuse this, we must make it useless for the 99.9%!"

Retarded, like I said.

Do that retarded thing Airtags do where they start beeping if they don't see your phone for a while? Half the point of these things is to track stuff if it's stolen, which is completely invalidated if they start beeping so the thief knows where they are.

Maybe this info needs to be stored in some kind of encrypted escrow format. The database, instead of having an address, would have a blob that decrypts to the address in the shipper's system. And maybe not the full address, but only just enough information for routing - when the shipper picks it up, if its local they get the full address, if its across the country they just get enough to get the nearest distribution center, which has a key to decrypt the recipient's distribution center, and so on. at each stage only enough information so that it doesn't prevent routing optimization.

When I think about it, I can see a clear difference.

There were all manner of places where human eyes were accepted, but still/video cameras were not, long predating "smart glasses". From changing rooms, saunas, locker rooms, and bath houses to performances like plays and concerts, and movie theatres to executive board room meetings, and even court rooms in many cases.

There are lots of scenarios where everybody accepts and consents that other people will see/hear them, but do not accept or consent to be recorded.

  Are you really incapable of seeing the multiple clear and obvious differences between "seeing/hearing something" and "recording something" ?

Big AI is basically making itself irrelevant with its push for "Safety" at this point.

You merely reiterate why no-one tales the left seriously any more.

The left: "Industry kills wildlife and creates waste! We must destroy it!"
Also the left: "So what if windmills kill birds and create waste? When did you ever complain about that before?"

The modern left exists to funnel billions and billions of dollars from taxpayers to billionaire oligarchs. If the left didn't exist, oligarchs would have had to create it.

Oh, wait...

It's hardly the only motivation. Many of them are death cultists who hate humans and want us all dead. Or technocrats who believe they're going to become gods... and want the rest of us dead.

It's inevitable that there will be more outbreaks of genetically-engineered disease in the future, and the kind of people with the wealth to create these kind of AI models are the last kind of people who should be allowed to use them for making new diseases.

Why? MBAs don't care what's good for the business, only what's good for the value of their stock options.

So telling workers to do what's good for the business would be pretty radical.

I might. I'd be interested to see how it sounded.

One of the people making those songs used to be in a band who got a few singles in the top 40 years ago. Now he doesn't need a band because he can write songs, have the AI perform them and mix them himself. It's allowed him to produce many of his songs that otherwise would never have existed.

"Creative" is just midwitslop they use to pretend that somehow they're creative and the plumber figuring out how to fix your leaking toilet at 3am without having to rip the walls apart isn't. There hasn't been a lot of creativity in Big Label pop music for decades.

And that's what this is really telling us: most pop music has been slop for most of my life, and AI can create infinite slop.

I've bought several AI-generated songs on iTunes and a few more that might be AI-generated. Who cares if it's a good song?

And that's what the "Major Labels" are scared of. They're used to being able to control which music makes it and which doesn't, and now anyone can make songs at home and sell them online. They're desperate not to lose the near-monopoly they've had for decades, which pretty much gave them a license to print money.

Except they still do it. That was just a glaring example that sprang to mind.

Another example more recently is going around in circles trying to find out how to change some setting because the "AI" (Google, Bing, whatever) pulls instructions from two years ago and the UI has completely changed since then. Or maybe it just made up UI features that never existed.

Oh yeah, and then there was Copilot recently, I asked it to suggest an app which would do something, it told me there were two free Microsoft apps which would do it, I downloaded them, neither would do it, I told it that and it basically said "Oh, sorry, I made that up."

Except the answer is often wrong.

For example, last year I was looking for info about a library that some old software we maintain every decade or so uses. The "AI" told me it was deprecated, but when I actually went through the search results it turned out there was some other library of a similar name which was now deprecated and end-of-life.

Without the search results you can't check to see whether what it told you us is true or misinterpretation or just plain made up.

... why they're teaching these models to know how to make cocaine, nerve gas and bombs?