I don't think anyone's worried about a "blue wave" showing up. We all remember the "blue trickle" of 2018, when the polls showed a massive blue wave that failed to materialize. "The polls" have been massively off for at least the past decade and there's no reason to think anyone has figured out a way to fix that.

Assuming there isn't ballot fraud on a massive scale, the worst we're likely to see is the gap in the House become slightly narrower. The idea that either will flip control is ludicrous. People forget how utterly despised Democrats are.

The real killer app for AI will be when someone creates an AI that grovels over all the millions of low-effort AI slop games out there and flags just the interesting/fun/novel ones for your attention. Otherwise you'll never find the gems amongst all the dross.

There's no reason why Python (compiled from Rust) would be any slower than Python (compiled from C). Both languages compile to native executable code, and both have good optimizers available.

There's nothing wrong with knowing your own limitations and acting accordingly. Had Mr. Zuckerberg had that sort of self-knowledge, he might have avoided lighting 80-billion-with-a-b dollars on fire and renaming his social media company after a technology that nobody wanted.

That is true, but it's a little more complicated than that.

The average driver is pretty good, 99.9% of the time. The other 0.1% of the time, they are tired, or angry, or momentarily distracted, or just looking the other direction from where they need to be looking under those particular circumstances. It's those occasional blips of inattention that cause lead to most accidents occurring.

Yes, I agree. The problem with thinking "this bug seems harmless, because I can't imagine how anyone could exploit it" is in the "I can't imagine" part; my imagination is limited to what is covered by my mental model of how computers work, but an attackers' ingenuity is not.

In particular, the C/C++ optimizer is a devious beast, and will exploit any opportunity to make the code more efficient, even if that means doing things that are wildly unintuitive to a naive human reader -- and it sees any instance of undefined behavior as an opportunity to exploit.

(C) is the only one of those the AI companies are really concerned about -- they want to stave off model collapse for as long as possible. The problem is that AI generates so much content that the ratio of AI-generated data to human-generated data keeps rising, and sooner or later there simply won't be much human-generated data left to anything to consume. At that point they'll either have to figure out to ingest AI-generated content without causing degradation, or they'll have to accept that AIs have gotten as smart as they will ever get, and it's all downhill from there.

Good point. It's something that really should be addressed. But the Constitution was designed as a limit solely on the government's powers, and it's up to the government as described in the Constitution to write laws that restrict what private entities can do, within the bounds of their enforcement powers as provided by the Constitution.

This isn't a new problem. After Snowden, the US realized they could pretty much just outsource the NSA's spying. And they have.

And the other thing is: none of this is really relevant. There's nothing unconstitutional about sitting in a public space and recording the license plate of every car that passes. There's nothing unconstitutional about building a network of people doing that and storing it in a giant database. It was just infeasible to have a bunch of people doing that. Now it can be automated.

There's nothing unconstitutional about compiling data about people that people agree to hand over as part of the license agreement for using a thing. Once that information is owned by a private entity, there's nothing unconstitutional about the government buying it from that private entity. It's just the government receiving data that was either generated in a public setting or that was willing given in a private setting. (At least, legally. I doubt most people realize how much data on their lives companies collect, and I doubt most people realize they agreed to hand it over.)

Maybe handing over data collected in this fashion should be against the law. Maybe there should be privacy laws preventing it from being gathered in the first place. But there aren't, and neither party is interested in changing that. Which leaves us with the reality that nothing Flock was doing is illegal, and that the replacement systems localities are using aren't illegal either.

I really wish more people understood this. The Constitution only protects you from the government. It does nothing to protect you from private companies collecting your information, and do they ever. As electronics get more advanced, the amount of information private companies are collecting is ever increasing. TVs listen in on every conversation. VR headsets map out your house. And cameras installed on street lights record every vehicle they see.

Which brings me to the second very important point about Flock cameras people forget: pretty much every town that is canceling contracts with Flock isn't getting rid of license plate scanning cameras. They're just replacing them with cameras from other companies that do the same thing. Companies that people haven't heard of and that therefore haven't raised the same complaints.

...Modern ejector seats cause spinal injuries from which full recovery is "unusual". Smashing the spines of pilots might not be the most effective way to boost morale.

$22,000 per hour. The F35 will be nearer $42,000 per hour. These are under-estimates, as they do not include price hikes, crashes that close businesses, crashing into businesses, crashing into heavily-populated sports centres, etc.

It's really the same problem that we see with quantum physics -- the subject matter is esoteric enough that common sense can't be used to determine whether what you're listening to is really advanced theory or utter BS (or some combination of the two); they both sound the same, and the situation isn't helped by the presence of large numbers of people who think they know what they are talking about but don't. :/

I think the distinction they are making is between technology that kills people, and technology that entertains people. If someone fitted actual weapons to a Doom engine, they'd probably object.

I think the infographic they put out said that the "always listening" features were not available in the EU and China. Although honestly I don't see how anyone can trust the hardware when the "always recording conversations" features are part of the SIP.

I can't wait to see how many places ban this Apple Watch entirely. First, there's no way this is legal in two-party consent states, and I don't care how Apple tries to re-define "record."

Secondly, I don't think anyone really cares how secure Apple says "Private Cloud Compute" is, no one is going to trust that a device that's designed to "listen" (but not "record") every conversation in the vicinity isn't "recording" especially when it can produce an AI summary of a conversation.

There's no way this Apple Watch will be allowed in government buildings or anywhere else that people may not want to be recorded, no matter Apple's privacy claims. I expect to see "No Apple Watch Allowed" signs start appearing all over the place once this releases.