Oh my, that's going to be easy. All I need to do is take the entire use case of phones (there's almost nothing a phone can do that someone might not want to do while using these glasses as a display), and union with all AR applications, and union with whatever applications that Meta intends to develop to attract people to the camera-less version of the glasses.

So here's a few: reading texts/emails without having to look down, following a map, playing games, surfing the web (which might include posting to Slashdot), and answering a "what is this thing I'm looking at?" query.

local LLMs aren't there yet and probably won't for the forseable future for ordinary people. If you want to run a full model like DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, you need something like half a TB of RAM.

The open-source LLMs are a different threat: They enable a service industry independent of the large players. I could today get some venture capital, rent a few racks in a hosting center, install a bunch of beefy machines and offer the same service as Claude or ChatGPT, just on an open-source model. The differences in benchmarks are becoming irrelevant for 95% of common use cases. And if I can offer that service for $19/m while OpenAI wants $29/m then OpenAI has a problem.

And IMHO this is the chinese strategy: Undermine the US AI industry by breaking its business model.

Has everyone gone insane or are we witnessing a major PsyOps ?

Since AI isn't magical, for it to be able to "kill all humans", it would have to be able to acquire the means to do so. Which means that these already exist. It means someone is able to do it right now. And we're chill with that, but worried about AI?

No doubt a bunch of autonomous weapon systems linked into a C&C could cause considerable bloodshed. Given that most of the existing weapon systems of that kind are essentially suicide drones, it'll still be limited damage.

Human-killing virus? Still need a means of creating and delivering it.
Nuclear war? We have humans in the loop.
Drive us all insane with AI-slop TikToks? A few percent of humanity still don't use that.

So what is the actual scenario ? When someone shouts "AI will kill us all", why don't we ask them "how, exactly" ?

the vast, overwhelming usage is to produce non-consenting public recordings of people and leak them to Meta for further data mining.

I wonder where we find stats to resolve our disagreement. (I assert it's a rare case, but I'm pulling that "fact" out of my ass. Alas, I think you're also pulling the "overwhelming usage" claim out of yours, too.)

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?

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'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.

Considerably more difficult than you imagine. Between them, they have almost 70 command-line options or flags. Taking into account that many of those behave differently depending on the presence or absence of other flags, there's a couple hundred different code paths. Then you need to handle directories, files, sparse files, sym- and hard-links, on and across different filesystems, not to mention the various file-like things scattered around (pipes, streams, etc.)

It's not rocket science, but neither is it trivial.

We knew that. But now we have proof.

Will anything happen because of that? Nah, I don't think so. A few token gestures maybe. A friendly mail to everyone saying to write better reasons, followed up by an informal mail that tells them to ignore the previous one.

This isn't a mistake. It's intentional. The more arbitrary and uncontrolled the police can act, the more it is feared, the more it is a tool for oppression and not a part of civil society, the more likely the cops will stand on the side of the powerful when there are protests or uprisings against the increasing oppression and economic divide.

Why would they need a warrant? Flock consents to their customers accessing Flock's data.

[various anticipated objections] Yes, but this is in America.

So many Hollywood scriptwriters who lazily decided, "I'll just use Nazis for the bad guys, they're universally-recognized evergreen enemies," are facepalming these days.

(I'm just speculating.) People don't need help with selling fun things; they want a 'bot that can sell the crap which humans have given up on. Anthropic doesn't want to sell widgets; they want to sell stores which sell widgets (sort of like selling pickaxes instead of getting into mining).