Heh, I resemble that remark.

Fewer!

The problem with this argument, from the shop's point of view, is that the UK is in the middle of a shoplifting epidemic. The policing resources simply aren't there to deal with small scale (or even flagrant and much larger scale) shoplifting. It now seems to be rare for police officers to attend reports of shoplifting at all. And so effectively shoplifting becomes legalised, which is obviously hurting the big chain stores financially and potentially devastating for smaller shops.

Shops are trying to find some way to respond to this to protect themselves. They typically tell staff, even security staff, not to get physical with shoplifters as they walk out, not least because the risk of something worse happening and the business becoming liable for it is significant. But then the shoplifters know this and some of them will just walk in and openly empty a shelf into a bag and walk out again without paying because they know no-one will try to stop them.

Shops also know that our court system is completely overwhelmed at the moment and there is little chance of bringing any successful civil action to recover damages from shoplifters who aren't even being arrested by the police and put through the criminal justice system.

So what do they have left? Basically, they're trying to spot the "usual suspects" and refuse them entry in the first place, which is a less risky proposition in terms of potential for physical violence and quite effective because a lot of shoplifting is done by the same people, or they're trying to make it more physically difficult to steal goods, for example by using locking systems or keeping high value items behind counters where customers can't just pick them up. But these systems aren't perfect, far from it, and what we're discussing here today is one of the significant problems.

Obviously this kind of technology can have very bad consequences, as we see here. I don't think it should be used if it's not highly reliable, given the potential harm done in cases where it gets something wrong. But I do have some sympathy with the shops who are looking for something -- anything -- to reduce the threat they're facing because the rule of law has failed in retail settings.

That street is a public space, and there are myriad laws and court cases allowing that to be photographed or otherwise recorded.

New legislation supersedes old legislation and jurisprudence unless that old legislation (respectively, the legislation the old jurisprudence is based on) is more binding (e.g. the constitution). Maybe it's time to start pressuring for new legislation which explicitly recognises an expectation of a certain level of privacy even in public spaces. There are places where your business' security camera isn't allowed to see the street in front of it: I live in one, although it's not in the USA.

RF control drones are nowhere near dead. Even DJI Mavics are still used daily for recon missions, nothing beats their combination of price to video quality.

This is a love tap, fists will be thrown later. One thing can and should be done, we need to start adding aerosols into the atmosphere, the higher the better. Adding Na compounds to jet fuels would introduce just enough aerosols in order to start reflecting a tiny amount more of solar radiation than what makes it to the surface of the planet. 1-2% reflection is all we need to start reducing the temperatures. Of-course we will have to keep doing it until we figure out a more permanent solution.

Port 5900.

Simples :-)

Await onslaught....

This problem needs to be solved by references, ask AI, people, is this program safe before installing.

Google is now adding more rules to make sideloading more difficult while Apple never provided a way to sideload an app in the first place. People need to be able to build and load their own apps without permission from the OS manufacturer, a phone is a computer with specialized hardware, we do have ability to build and run apps on our own hardware.

On the contrary, I think most of your comment is as relevant as ever. A carefully designed UI is still better for almost any specific task than what "agents" will produce. It will probably be more efficient to describe what you want precisely enough to get it right. It will not be undermined by problems like non-repeatability, non-determinism and hallucinations that are inherent in LLM-backed agents.

Agents can be quite effective at getting something that seems about right, as long as you don't care too much about the details. And of course they get there much quicker than doing it manually as a human. This is useful for some tasks, and why they have become popular.

Unfortunately, it turns out that for many of the things we really care about, "about right" doesn't cut it. Right now, today, the software industry is already being overwhelmed by AI slop. It's hard to believe, but it's still only been a few months since agentic development processes arrived on the scene. And yet after just those few months of management trying to replace real developers with agents, we can see the slow-motion train wreck happening right before our eyes. And in return, where are the new applications that radically improve on what we had before thanks to all this added "productivity"? If this tech is going to change the world as the AI tech bros and the sycophantic CxOs kneeling at their feet would have us believe, where's my flying car?

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of AI-generated cybersecurity nightmares...

It is 12000 days into September, 1993: Usenet is long since an artifact in the memory of greybeards; the internet belongs to the monkey cage. Yet on Slashdot, we still get physics puns. Here, the golden age lives on.

the father accustoms himself to become like his child and fears his sons, while the son likens himself to his father, and feels neither shame nor fear in front of his parents, so he may be free ; the metic [563a] becomes the equal of a citizen and the citizen of a metic, and similarly with the foreigner.
It indeed so happens, he said.
To these, said I, such trifles do add up: the teacher, in such a case, fears his pupils and fawns upon them, while pupils have in low esteem their teachers as well as their overseers; and, overall, the young copy the elders and contend hotly with them in words and in deeds, while the elders, lowering themselves to the level of the young, sate themselves with pleasantries [563b] and wit, mimicking the young in order not to look unpleasant and despotic.

- Plato's "The Republic" (ca 375 BCE)

To be pedantic it's a semi-exclave.

In your haste to defend Morocco you've responded to a non-existent attack. GPP didn't say that migrants would be raped or killed in Morocco (although I suspect that your claims about the police's attitude to foreigners only really hold up for rich foreigners, not for South Sudanese with nothing but the clothes on their back and a phone because they gave everything else they had to the people smugglers). Migrants die in the Sahara, in the Mediterranean and in the Atlantic every year trying to get to Europe or the Canary Islands.