aren't politically connected to the "right' people. They only want to punish peons, not the "important" people.

Let's be brutally honest: You have a community with Flock Safety (or other ALPR) cameras? You should be petitioning local officials to remove them immediately. They refuse? They should be subjected to recalls and / or have someone run to replace them outright. The people replacing them should have a known mandate to eliminate the cameras.

Until the politicians can be recalled the secondary line of change that should be brought up if a council and / or police are asking for these cameras (or refusing to remove the cameras) is the demand that one be placed on the street of the people supporting these cameras, with their property in direct view. When they start to bloviate ask them why they wouldn't want to be safer? That's the point, right? Safety? Not tracking whenever you drive by the cameras? I mean, if they've got nothing to hide then they have nothing to fear.

When in power any police chief or officer supporting these cameras should also be fired and replaced.

This will take longer to correct at the state level, but don't stop at the local level. These cameras are not just a dystopian stupidity, they are also massive national security risks.

Most businesses are doing it because the executives have been sold on the news cycle. Also saying "WE R TOTES IN ON AI!!!" means you get free stock bump even if you fire people for other reasons, but say it's because of AI. AI washing job losses is something that is going to have to be studied after the hype train crashes.

That and people have been told it's more efficient blah blah blah. That and sometimes people are told "You must train to use, and use, AI." by their teachers and bosses. The problem being AI is -expletive- terrible. In the job I do there is a regular amount of troubleshooting tasks. This is because while things usually go to plan, when they break they just break. That means a little bit of hard work trying to figure out why. Figuring out why can mean digging through things that get increasingly esoteric until you find out why. AI, to be blunt, -expletive- sucks at this overall. Why? It can't even parse technical documentation properly. I have younger coworkers who I have trained who will also not use AI because: AI sucks, and believing what it spits out as an "answer" sucks the big felota to quote the Expanse. AI is a time suck. Learning to ask a question, something that is a skill, and reading comprehension, are still the two most important human skills. Doesn't matter if you're a carpenter, IT analyst, or an MD, those two matter the most today.

The problem with that one is that AI is a terrible problem solver and, if the arc of performance remains the same, will never come close to matching people. I mean, it'd be one thing if it could come close. Having seen it, and humanoid robots, in action I'm left with the bitter truth: AI sucks the big felota. Humanoid robots suck the big felota. They just can't match, not even close outside of tests setup by the companies, people. Anthropic touted Claude passing a bunch of tests, but forgot to mention they wrote the tests. OpenAI touted ChatGPT doing well on some tests, but forgot to note they dropped the ones that AI typically fails hard. You see marathon and kung fu bots, but what you don't see (exception given to Boston Dynamics which even created gag reels) is the massive amount of work put into scripting a particular performance.

I think we'll see what you're saying, right up to the point it breaks. The problem is that AI is all smoke and mirrors, at least for now. You can't really replace a bunch of people. Even at Salesforce the CEO had to admit most of the people were reassigned, ironically to very similar jobs like customer sales, services, and success. Speaking of someone who did support, aka service, in college let me just say that's a fancy way of saying they built a new phone tree.

While that is true, we need to send a message that the fine is always going to cost you more than what you make breaking the law.

In the USA the problem is paying fines has become nothing more than a cost of doing business. Companies break the law, litigate it in court for a few years, get the fine reduced. They then pay the pittance where, even after accounting for legal fees, they make a large amount of money. We need to change that dynamic.

The new fine structure should erase all income derived in whole or part for the illegal act, and then double it to inflict a penalty on top of that number. So if the company's illegal act nets them $37M overall, then the minimum fine is $74M.

The point is to remove the incentive to do something illegal by making it far more expensive to break the law than you can ever hope to hide.

Perhaps to a point, but the problem with requiring civilized discourse about someone who doesn't see you as another person. To them you are simply a line item on a spreadsheet, and that is the disparity. You demand that people keep proper decorum for him, but forget that (and I have been around waayyy too many wealthy people to deny it) to many like him you're trash. Yes, even you, the person calling for decorum. Point in fact you're useful but pathetic trash.

I had a different opinion for a very long time myself, so do not feel bad. As someone who managed to meet some of the wealthier people in the world, by accident, due to my hobby: Calling them -expletive- trash is -expletive- polite. Even the few who grew up dirt poor were so disconnected from average daily reality they don't realize that minimum wage does not get you an a place to live, a car, and the ability to work / pay cash for college today... or they just don't care at all. The wealthier people born with a platinum spoon up their rectums in general never pretended to care, but they might be selling that "scrappy startup" image while they were insulated from the true cost of failure by mommy and daddy.

Just saying.

The fact this is happening means anyone affected should be able to disconnect from the grid for $0, and never be threatened with fees. As a point in fact, we should get it codified into law and make it apply to everyone.

I expect we would see energy execs change their mind when the majority of the customers they expect to finance upgrades suddenly start disconnecting en masse. I expect private equity that just bought a bunch of power will start sh*tting their pants as their previously captive customers no longer have to pay for upgrades.

Oh please. There is no reason a new Ford, GM, Kia, BYD, or any other car needs to be running full-time telematics on private cars. Heck it should be flat out illegal at least to sell this data if not make it illegal to collect. This is just one more reason that the United States (in particular) needs much harsher versions of the GDPR, DMA, and DSA. One could, in theory, make an argument for EV owners reporting the odometer (quarterly? yearly?) directly to their state DMV so they could be charged the equivalent of "gas tax" to pay for roads. I'd run that one by a lot of people first and make sure it's done in a way that it can't be used to report geolocation data, just mileage. Yeah, you'll have people cheating at some point... you have people cheating today with untaxed diesel and whatnot so it's nothing new.

Possible, until the costs come home to roost because even nVidia admitted that AI isn't cheaper than people.

I would also argue that AI is less useful than humans. I'm not even going to go into the bizarre circular financing, ridiculous energy costs that are currently being borne by average ratepayers that will come home to roost, the insane backlog of datacenters that are far exceeding any theory of profitability, or even the fact the best AI models get called a "nothingburger" or receive a collective "meh" upon release by professionals.

No let's focus on the grand pronouncements. There shouldn't be ANY PROGRAMMERS left now according to Dario Amodei. Claude should be programming everything. He said, last April, that it would take over in 9-12 months. We're in month 13 and it isn't close.

Where's the AGI? Even Sam's discount version of AGI, something that nobody who thinks of AI in movies would define as AGI, isn't here yet. That means it's two years late.

This reminds me of Tesla Elongelicals one of whom, last April during the runup to the latest super AI buzz, said Tesla had "cracked AGI" and their cars would be "driving everywhere soon without people" and he was giddy. I'm still waiting, and he's silent now, but saying "real soon" to Tesla AGI. To be fair, Elon has been fleecing suckers with this one running for about a decade now.

I'm sorry man, but I've been through this before: Sam and Dario know exactly what they are doing to keep the hype train going. They learned from Elon, keep the target moving so nobody in the press can tie you down. They are burning cash at a rate that is utterly insane. None of it is backed up by any GAAP approved financials, it's all "Trust us bro, it works, it's becoming AGI, it's profitable." They're so desperate now that they're playing more for the press than anyone... and that shows how bankrupt their progress is today.

LLM's are looking to be nothing more than an extremely expensive technological dead end.

Years ago my high school computer lab teacher taught us in our programming portion of the class: "When you don't know if it is secure, you should use the premise it is insecure until proven otherwise."

I think I can see why American corporations fail basic security audits today. They don't allow their programmers to follow basic concepts that were taught in high school.

This is likely a bit facetious but similar to spelling, some people never forget. I remember phone numbers from when I was a child. My kids remember numbers. Why? Because we taught them to remember numbers in case they didn't have access to their phone.

Just saying.

A minor addition?

I know companies that flat out block access to all models outright on all corporate assets. Why? Contractual security requirements. Adding a model, even a theoretically local model, is something that would cause serious heartburn for compliance.

When you make big changes, you don't hide it in the release notes you make an announcement. Don't believe me? You'd better see what happens when Microsoft pulled that crap in the past. They were absolutely roasted.

Let's be brutally honest and say Google is the first, and they expect defense from people like yourself. You make it easier to offer a half-hearted apology.

The simple fact is it appears to be (mostly) bluster and hype. Don't forget that Dario said Claude would be programming EVERYTHING.

AI is quickly becoming the Full Self Driving (NEXT YEAR!) of the computer world, only with an even higher cash burn rate. They (Sam, Dario, et al.) learned well from Elon.

There's a slight difference for farms you might want to consider before climbing on that horse: FOOD FEEDS PEOPLE. Now I'm not one to say flood farming, particularly for almonds, is a great idea. That being said part of the reason farms in California (or even Arizona) use all that water is because of the idiotic way we handle water rights in the US. They stop using that much water... they don't get as much a year later when they might need more water to maintain the crops due to altered weather.

Golf courses aren't my thing, but again, grass a growing thing that humans interact with directly in the physical world. Personally I can think of better uses for human uses, but even the golf course helps with area cooling because it's a green area not blacktop and concrete. So, again, you're climbing on a high horse that is pretty flipping stupid.

I'm not going to get into the whole "b-b-but datacenters totes don't use water like..." because obviously this data center used a fair amount of water. Personally speaking they should be fined 10 times the illegally taken amount. They also shouldn't get away with, "b-b-but we totes thought we were paying..." because as someone who approved bills to go to my accountant for the facility I ran you flipping well can read or you wouldn't be in charge. Either that or the company is completely incompetent and it sucks to be them, have a nice fine and explain your financial mismanagement to shareholders.

Did they add it without notification? Here's a hint snowflake: adding stuff that is security flagged to software without notification at the Enterprise level is not a good thing. Google, of all companies, should know that AI models are verboten on many systems for contractual reasons.

Saying "you can disable this with flags or GPO" after the fact is unacceptable.