does anyone at all really buy into the idea that guys are following around the women of Walmart to video them?

I do buy into it, but I don't buy into any allegations that it's typical or a significant fraction of users.

I know people who own guns but never shot anyone. I know people who have internet access but never pirated any movies. I know people who have very fast cars but don't get speeding tickets. You'd really be surprised at what so many people don't do, even though they could.

Then there was a case of some perv recording a woman in a shopping centre.

And then there was the case of the Satan-worshipping, D&D-playing Judas Priest fan, who was caught backtalking his mom!

The two different terms you used kind of look like they apply to different things. "Privacy rapist" appears to refer to the person using the product, but "pervert glasses" appears to refer to the product itself. (Maybe you wanted to call the computer a privacy rapist, but I'm going to ass/u/me that you wanted the more mainstream usage of calling the perv who uses the computer a privacy rapist. Please complain if I got this wrong. I only bring up this pedantry, because I want to distinguish computers from their users.)

Computers can be used for lots of things. They can be used for copyright infringement, for example. But I think Slashdot would be in an uproar if we banned computers due to fact that some people use them to infringe copyrights.

But if someone wants to gargoyle up, such that their cameras are on their face instead of on their lapel or hidden in their clothing or hat, the cameras are objectionable because that user might be recording other people.

If we look at it in terms of the user's intent, instead of worrying about what the equipment is capable of doing, this looks like a pretty inconsistent policy.

That said, I'm not going all the way to saying this view is wrong. As a defender, a potential adversary's capabilities are what's important, and you can't trust anyone's intent. So if you're worried someone might record you, it might really make sense to ban all cameras, not just cameras operated by known pervs.

But why don't we have that attitude about equipment's capability to infringe copyright? Shouldn't we ban all computers, since someone might do the wrong thing with them? I guess it comes down to this: because we aren't the defenders in that situation; MPAA is. Seriously, they really did try to ban betamax due to fears that some people might use it wrong. And they bought a whole law (DMCA) to try to ban lots of uses of computers, which they thought might sometimes be precursors to copyright infringement. So maybe this is a rules-for-thee-but-not-for-me thing.

I'm seeing an attitude toward wearable cameras emerge, that policy should be oriented more toward the the innocent maidens than the drooling gargoyles recording the maidens for later fapping. Well, sure, WHEN I PUT IT LIKE THAT! But what if we describe the gargoyle more fairly? Someone at an in-person office meeting, where maybe they wanna see peoples' names with their faces like they did on Zoom. Or someone recording some cops beating a handcuffed suspect. Someone playing games like Pokemon Go. Someone following a course on a map. Or...

What I'm getting at, is that perv glasses might be useful for more than just perving. Maybe they're really great at perving too, but I can think of plenty of harmless applications for them, and I'm not even very visionary or creative.

I don't like that we're looking down on some tech, rather than its abusive users. I'm not particularly attached to wearable cameras and wouldn't ever likely be in the market for Meta's products (any of Meta products, ever) anyway, so it's easy for me to just shrug and let the fascists have their way on this particular issue.

But I sure as fuck don't want to see this toxic attitude continue to spread to other tech. Because if we allow that, then MPAA is going to ban all computers unless they're running MPAA-certified AI lawyers, always spying on us like the pervs that they are. And even that is just the tip of the iceberg on the smackdowns this attitude will unleash.

Wearable cameras aren't evil.

Now put it on a pole and call it Flock, then it's evi-- no wait, that's a problem with the camera's user too, isn't it?

Uh huh.

You're long on claiming special knowledge and awfully short on demonstrating it. If you disagree then you don't know how it works.

You don't lose your PhD for getting scooped. You also don't lose it for scooping someone, even if you were "inspired" by their unpublished work. Ideas aren't protected. If you send them off to some corporation without an NDA, or a sufficiently unethical colleague, they'll get swiped with no repercussions except maybe distaste from the community. If it's a normal corp they might even tell you you can't publish your own work.

PhDs are revoked very seldomly and you generally have to do something bad relating to your own thesis to lose one.

Those were honorary degrees. He did not lose his actual PhD, in education. That should tell you how hard it is. It happens extremely rarely and pretty much always for plagiarizing or faking data in your thesis. You certainly don't lose one because you got scooped.

Engineers are well aware that time exists. The thing they forget is that people who don't know the specific set of tools they learned in university or were forced to learn for their job exist.

I remember the horrors of engineers writing large GUI programs in Matlab.

Why is it silly? It's perfectly reasonable for lots of things.

The reason it's used a lot in education is because you're not teaching kids to write embedded programs for microcontrollers. You're teaching them how to program computers. The computer they're programming just happens to be a $5 one that can do things kids thing are cool like making animated patterns with LEDs.

This is for fun, not "production." If someone hacks up something and got to play with pretty lights for 10 minutes before getting bored and building something else, that's great. And if they learned any engineering, that's a bonus. It's ok to stack your legos however the fuck you want to. I don't fucking care if a kid in 1982 did the "wrong" thing on his TI-99/4A or VIC-20. Been there, done that, got a 40-something year long career out of it despite my youthful unorthodox amateur whims.

Use python on quasi-embedded systems all you want to. Whatever figuratively gets you off your ass, is a good thing.

You are confused. First of all, I have provided nothing for you to think it's "obvious" that I support private industry's behaviors here. I already said explicitly that I'm no fan of Flock. I'm not carrying their water, or anyone else's in private industry.

As for the Fourth Amendment being "semantics and obviously false separation of government and private companies" -- well you're clearly wrong. The Fourth Amendment places constraints on government not the governed. If the government buys data from private companies in such a way that the government violates the Fourth Amendment, then that's clearly on the government, not anyone else. Other laws constrain companies.

As for who is worth spending time time on, I'll let others here decide.

How can you state that? I'm assuming you're a Rust proponent from that wild statement, which goes to show you how little you know about the topic.

Yes, memory leaks can and do happen in Rust. Rust is not perfect. Neither are the people who write it.

Most Rust code is written by its proponents' AI models, anyway.

This is an engineering maxim as old as time.

If your response to theoretically old, brittle, and "wrong language" code is "rewrite it in something better", you don't understand the problem.

There has never in the history of software development been an effort to rewrite a platform in another language which wasn't subsequently plagued by all manners of new and interesting problems.

In a best case scenario, the product has an exhaustive regression testing framework, complete unit tests for every function, e2e testing, and reintegrative CI/CD. But that is rarely true for any project, and certainly isn't true for old ones which predate such practices.

You make an important point: the biggest positive contribution to making old tools better without introducing more brittle behavior is with coverage from test suites, and improved code coverage.

This IS the Rust community you're talking about, after all.

While Rust is a fine language, the community tends to be a bit fanatical and irrational. Pair that with a generally shallow technical aptitude depth and a lack of experience, and vibe coding, and therein lies the problem. There seems to be a high intersection between them and the systemd, so that's not a surprise.

And that's without getting into questionable mental health practices that are common in that community.

You're not supposed to sell it. (Does anyone sell euros?) You're supposed to spend it. But hardly anyone takes it.

at some point most people want to sell the Bitcoin for dollars or pounds or euros

The fact that this is even significant (and it is) 15-20 years after the introduction of Bitcoin, shows that it has been a complete, miserable failure.

I think Bitcoin was a neat idea. Shame it didn't work.