People have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Piecing together information from the thousand or so cameras that see you everyday is a violation of the 4th Amendment if sold to the police or otherwise is acting on the direction of the police. They need a warrant and Chatrie v. United States is only the beginning of how privacy violating tech companies are going to get slapped down.

Even that's not as creepy as Flock giving access to anyone who installs it access to the entire network.

It's the network effect - the whole is greater than the sum of its pieces - multiplied. A LEO in some rural part of a flyover state, because their town installed Flock, now has access to Flock cameras in Houston or LA or New York.

In other words, the potential for abuse is too tempting. Even if it was for legitimate law enforcement uses, if you required a warrant to get information on a car, you could ask your buddy to do the lookup for you located across the country where no warrant is required and get the same information.

It's funny because the other ALPR systems out there (e.g., Axon, etc) restricted users to the cameras they installed. So you could stalk your ex if they lived in the same town or city, but if they moved, that's it. Once they left city limits you can't track them anymore without cooperation from another agency.

It's not that ALPRs are bad - you probably run into a ton of them as they're everywhere. They handle your toll charges if you use a toll road or bridge without having to stop and pay at a booth. They handle your parking (did you know chalking a tire can be considered a 4th Amendment violation? Well, that just means cities switch to ALPRs to handle their parking enforcement).

And when Flock started, it started as a way for private individuals to monitor their traffic - private companies would install it to their parking lots, HOAs on their roads, etc. But it was again limited to just those uses - the HOA could only get information about its cameras.

The front/back split this research is about has nothing to do with reptilian vs human brain - it is about brainstem (back) vs rest (front), and reptiles have both parts combined just like us.

You have to go way back in evolution, to the pre-chordates, to find this mostly separated front vs back dual nervous system. In all the vertebrates, including fish and reptiles, the two systems are already combined (at least in the post-developmental stage).

You can still also see it in a few modern descendants of the pre-chordates such as jellyfsh and the acorn worm.

The question is ultimately if you would have been better served with doing your own investigation rather than relying on AI, did you retain the knowledge, and was the information complete/accurate.

I use AI, and it helps me navigate a code base far faster than without. Like if I need to know if a function is used, the AI could tell me in a minute, or I could be using grep on the code base for a half hour.

I know to not trust it and to verify the output. It crawled deep into a complex submodule I didn't understand and helped me devise a fix. I didn't check that fix in as it had a few errors code-wise that would have become a maintenance nightmare and a lingering bug if someone added a member variable to a struct.

Now, I could've gone through the code myself, and probably taken a few weeks to properly understand it. But AI did it, and I had it produce a few documents on the design of the system. Those documents let me understand what's going on so I can see how it's doing things and how I can actually see the code better. Granted, with a few false starts.

I would say the AI helped me - mostly because I was told to treat it as a co-worker than as an expert to ask to do something. So I would guide the AI into what needed to be done, and then leave the final details for the AI to do it. Then I would review what the AI did

My AI token spend isn't huge compared to other users, but that's because I'm judicious with how I use it. It spends more time doing cheap things before coming out with a result that's relatively succinct and correct so it's not wasted on expensive output tokens.

Everything I used AI for, I could've done it myself. It just means I have an assistant who saved me likely a month of work trying to understand the code and another month devising a fix and I managed to get it done is about 2 weeks and in a way I could understand what it did, and the code reviews of the changes make a lot of sense.

I still remain a skeptic and find these highly guided uses make me more efficient while letting me not get too bogged down in the details. I constantly question whether I could do it myself or if I'm relying on the AI and make sure the AI output makes sense. (I don't trust it to commit code to git, for example, so I have it make all the changes it wants, then I test them and review them before submitting).

Yes, but pilots have to fly from waypoint to waypoint in formation for training purposes. These flights over stadiums count for such training hours, so its not really an additional expense. Even if there are extra flight hours in some cases, pilots routinely complain they do not get enough flight hours. So any additional hours in the air is valuable experience to them.

But formation flying is at the basic end of what fighter pilots are trained for. It's flying, yes, but it's like work sending you to "training" that consists of learning about basic arithmetic again. It's basic enough that normal civilian pilots can get this training rather cheaply at under $100/hr with a Cessna. I know the F-16 is way different, but is it 22000% as different?

The training hours they want are ones that enhance and build on skills they have that cannot be done in other cheaper planes that enhance and develop their advanced skills.

Let's also not forget that for the F-16 and F-35, for every hour of flight, they udnergo multiple hours of maintenance - that is, for every hour spent flying, they need to go anywhere from 4-12 hours of maintenance. That 1 hour flyover event means that plae goes down for 4-6 hours as mechanics go over it and make sure it's ready for the next flight. And that plane is not available in the meantime. During real war conditions, this can result in deferrals as they get done what must be done, but it also means mission failures may occur if/when the unmaintained parts catch up and fail. (E.g., the USS Lincoln when it deployed and when it came back from deployment)

Finally, if you want aerial display, there already is a F-16 demo team - it's called the "Viper Demo Team" (Viper is the callsign for the F-16), and they have two divisions - an East coast team and a West coast team. They're not as flashy as say, the Thunderbirds, but they exist for the sole purpose of having F-16s do fancy flying. The F-15s they fly are generally older retired models (so they're not taking time off current models in flight), of which there are plenty of spare parts at the boneyard. And they're trained for things like this so regular fleet pilots get training they need and not just something that gives them hours but no real training value.

Yes. "Cock-up" has had both of its meanings entrenched for a long time for a good reason.

I mean the first question is do you or anyone believe impeachment was justified in either case, like do we remember why he was impeached twice?

First was for the Ukraine funds withholding which clearly violates the law since Congress allocated the money and on ethical and diplomatic grounds the President should not be trying to extort other nations to fabricate political dirt against their opponents, just plainly illegal for him to do any of that. Is your view Presidents should not be impeached for doing illegal acts?

Second was for January 6th in which a litany of crimes were committed by his admin and the man himself failing to act for hours while their supporters tore up the capitol while Trump and Giuliani were watching and making phone calls to Congress members to effectively threaten them to vote for the fake electors, again, against the law.

In a utilitarian sense you might be right which is a depressing state of affairs do you agree? Sad because we have a President who so clearly violates the law and sad because his Republican colleagues are so cow-towed and craven they will look the other way even when their own lives were in danger due to the President himself. This not worthy of impeachment? Also there were more than enough votes on Jan 7th to impeach but given a week they were able to shrink back into their turtle shells and give themselves permission to forget such things. That feeling of a spine growing was just a phantom.

I think your concern trolling is pointed in the wrong direction but that's probably on purpose, you likely support all the above acts.

It's been known for a while that the nervous system of animals started out as separate front/sensory and rear/motor+autonomic-functions, and in humans we see the same gene expression markers in front/back (fore/midbrain vs hindbrain aka brainstem) as we see in primitive animals such as the acorn worm where these remain far more separate.

What this new research shows isn't that our brain originated as two organs/systems, but rather that it still goes through that stage during embryonic development rather than having been more fundamentally fused into one earlier in our evolutionary history as had been believed to be the case.

It's yet another case (cf human embryo having a tail, chicken embryo having teeth) of "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" whereby embryonic development does through the same steps as evolution did.

>"regularly access my accounts on five different UK banks from my Raspberry Pi and I don't use an App to verify on any of them."

Topic shift, but.... I believe this is why so many companies have fought against TOTP. They want to FORCE you to use their proprietary "app" so they have full control over you. Walmart JUST DID THIS. I can no longer order online with Walmart because they stopped supporting 2FA with Email. I will not use their spy app, and I will not give them access to my phone number because I don't want to be spammed or have it sold to others who will spam me. And they refuse to support TOTP, which would work on ANY device, on ANY platform, with near zero cost, with 100% no tracking, zero potential for additional spam channels, and work even without a network connection or 4/5G connection. Consumers should be fighting back hard on this.

And this is why I 110% advocate for and support Democrats going after the conservative institutions the way the Trump admin went after law firms and universities. Crypto, car dealerships, social media companies all some others to be investigated and heavily regulated and exposed. This system that creates these robots needs to be stopped.

The media environment and top-down Republican messaging apparatus is exactly why you think that sentence is true while at the same time providing zero examples and when you try and do it will just a series of regurgitated talking points and culture war. Watch this one try to justify that statement and there will be nothing substantive, just whatever today's algorithm has served up.

Also notice how these dishonest children subtly already shifted to "well, you see, we were just forced to support Trump! You gave us no choice!". Literally the Joker defense, you see they have no agency or brains of their own, why didn't the Democrats take that into account?! "They can't expect us to actually care about politics!"

Here's the thing also to never let these folks forget: It was solely their choice to elect Trump over any other Republican. Desantis or Haley or just about anyone was favored against Biden in 2024 but they still picked Trump, even when Trump disrespects them so much to not even debate those opponents. He think so little of his supporters that he can just insult their intelligence and values and he was right to. We just have to do the same now.

So make it make sense...

The AI companies are themselves calling for an AI slowdown, but Trump says this is a hoax. Are the AI companies hoaxing themselves? Trump says republicans want more datacenters in their back yard. Trump's going to appoint an "AI Tsar" (he loves Russians, doesn't he!) to educate the AI CEOS on AI ...

Please make any of it make sense is a world outside of Trump's head.

To be fair, if you do want a datacenter in your back yard, or are hoping to be laid off due to AI, then Trump maybe is your guy. He has already massively accelerated AI, although only in China so far.

... But it is for surveillance of the population, so it does not rise up.

When the official current AI business model fails, what else would the infrastructure be useful for?

It is already being done. Anthr*pic is already being used to spy on protestors.

That's presumably his idea of a "high IQ individual" - someone who can tell that a line drawing of a giraffe is not an elephant, just like he can.

You forgot his Voter Force.

Interesting spin though - that the AI companies calling for a slowdown are perpetrating a hoax on themselves, although it's not clear who Trump thinks the victim of this HOAX is ... himself? The data-center loving republicans what are hoping to have one built in their back yard?

So Trump will be appointing a "high IQ individual" to put the AI CEOs right on AI. Who will it be? One of his idiot sons, or some random idiot like JFK Jr? Kid Rock perhaps?

Instead of a ban, why not have an open source, social media app that is certificate based and allows each geographic region to dictate policies for the app on their turf, with the app using GPS coordinates and maybe other authentication methods to reduce spoofing? Yes, it would have boundaries in place (keep 18+ who are not family away from those below 18+, have geographic regions fenced off from each other), but why not offer something.

Outright bans don't help. However, having alternatives that do the same thing, maybe even better would bring better results. Otherwise, you will get a bunch of teens inventing new, decentralized, hidden P2P protocols to get around this.