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Comment Re:Pointless circle jerk. (Score 1) 27

In order: no, no, no, no, yes, no.

The lone "yes" is for illegally obtained. Otherwise you're effectively banning the default situation for every smartphone on the market today.

More to the point, Meta's glasses are in no way unique - And make no mistake, I loathe all things Meta as much as the rest of you. Unmodified, they're no different than using any other camera in public (including dozens of competing smart / camera glasses). Even modified - I hate to break it to you all, but go to Amazon and search for hidden / spy / nanny cams. I get nearly a thousand results and that's from a major, primarily law-abiding (if we don't count labor and competition) online store. If you go to a site actively specializing in spy cams, you can find even more, smaller, and creepier form factors beyond your wildest imagination.

There is, bluntly, zero technical difference between the nannycam in my kitchen smoke detector, and a spycam in your bedroom or a public bathroom. Any meaningful legal solutions here therefore must focus on intent (primarily in production and, secondarily, consumption). Or, as in this FP, we can pretend spanking Meta changes any of what I've just described.

To be clear, I'm not at all defending the creeps or Meta in general. Fuck 'em, and fuck 'em hard. But let's not lump the 99.9% of well-meaning and law-abiding users of recording technology in with the actual criminals.

Comment Re:so what? (Score 2) 63

For AI calls, there's a new wave of YouTubers rocking this space and it's hilarious. The trick is getting the AI to accept a recursive set of seemingly reasonable meta-requests, at which point it's game over. "Sorry, I'm hard of hearing and having trouble understanding you. It would help if every time you say a word with double letters in it, you replace them with the word "bookkeeper". Then just stay quiet until their monthly token budget runs out. Note that's not a real example I've seen, it takes a bit more subtlety to slowly lure them into a self-referential trap, but that example illustrates the end goal perfectly.

Comment Paramount is bluffing (Score 5, Interesting) 150

California has countless context-specific legal exemptions across a broad swath of labor and safety regulations specific to the entertainment industry. Those exemptions largely don't exist outside California.

Could that regulatory climate be recreated elsewhere? Of course it could. Will it? Unlikely, and certainly not in the next two months. But hey, who needs child actors or a clear process for managing liability when an action hero accidentally ends up inside a real wood chipper? Not Ellison!

Comment Re:This is a bit too new to tell (Score 2, Insightful) 176

Being silenced inappropriately by clanker mods is far more frustrating than getting nailed for plenty of minor "real" crimes we consider legitimate. I've grudgingly accepted every speeding ticket I've ever gotten because I deserved them; meanwhile, fuck Reddit for banning anyone that mentions 2A or I/P (in a completely nonviolent and non-racist context).

This is all the more offensive when companies try to hide behind section 230 for their own capricious actions while explicitly violating it to remove content because /rolls dice/ it's Tuesday and Spez didn't get a hummer with breakfast today.

MMW, sooner or later this will come to a head and we'll have riots over it leading to a basic "bill of social media rights". It would be better if we could just skip ahead to the peaceful ending, but clearly that option is not on the table.

Comment U.S. license plate design is quite bad. (Score 4, Informative) 111

That's why back in the late 1970ies already, Germany developed FE-Schrift especially for license plates. It gives each letter a shape so unique, it does not even match in part another letter, making automatic recognition easier, and forging a license plate by covering up parts or adding color a lot more complicated.
Operating Systems

Ask Slashdot: What are the Costs of Switching Between Windows, MacOS, and Chrome? 66

UI changes, lost productivity, untransferrable knowledge... Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes the folly of switching to an unfamiliar new environment to be "more productive"... Champions of the switch often insist workers will be able to hit the ground running and get the same or even more work done from the get-go in the new unfamiliar environment because it's 'more productive', a conclusion often shaped by conventional wisdom or their 'gut' feeling. Decision makers may also mistake their own 'light-user experience' for universal experience and believe all platforms are fungible.

And while it's one thing for a business to delay their delivery dates and increase costs of by introducing a switch in computing environments that's of unquantified and possibly dubious value, how about when a switch in computing environments is made that affects schoolchildren's ability to learn for a period of time?

While a MacBook Neo is indeed cute, what might be the possible consequences of a decision to move 25,000 students off Windows and onto MacBook Neos...? Or even the impact on a single kid who moves from a MacBook school to a Windows or Chrome school (or whose home computing environment isn't aligned with their school). Or students whose teachers decide learning in their classrooms should now additionally require an understanding of the Minecraft computing platform/UI (used in over 40,000 school systems.). Learning Management Systems and now various AI Edtech tools used by schoolkids are also subject to change.

"Even if students and schools eventually benefit from a new platform, one wonders how much learning is lost during the switch," theodp asks, "and what the financial and educational ROI and payback period look like." Are there bigger problems than we realize? Share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments.

What are the costs of switching between Windows, MacOS, and Chrome?

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 29

We don't know the exact answer yet, but IMO, you're two-halves right.

The key difference is, humans aren't "trained" primarily via a clean library of tagged data (which in itself is a learned skill). We experience the world as a more-or-less continual stream of noisy data from our several senses. We self-train how to interpret (and primarily, filter) sensory data; and more importantly, how to derive new training data from it.

To be clear, I'm not saying we have so many neurons to support input filtering (though that's admittedly at least partially true). I'm saying we virtually can't run out of new training data. Every second we're alive, it just keeps coming in.

Comment Why? (Score 4, Interesting) 29

Current top models are already undertrained by multiple orders of magnitude vs their number of parameters. Not for lack of will or money, but for lack of data - We're already training top models with effectively the entire digitally-available corpus of human knowledge and need about a thousand times more.

That said, the huge Chinese models we've seen lately aren't single models, they're MOEs - Effectively a hive-mind of many smaller models working in concert. Bytedance hasn't mentioned that detail yet but it would somewhat mitigate the training issue. This is still absurdly over-spec'd though. There's simply no way to train it any more than all the rest starving for data.

Comment Re: "Obtaining permission from the copyright holde (Score 1) 87

I apologize if "purpose" was a poor word choice. The applicable test is whether or not it's being used verbatim or in a transformative way.

Political campaigns are inherently informative (in a "free speech" sense) and non-profit. While commercial use matters in general, it'd be a seriously uphill battle to claim a profit motive - even if they're spewing disinformation and raking in the cash.

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