Which is often intentional.

We live in 2026. You can order an artillery or drone strike in Ukraine from a tablet and it'll be delivered within minutes. Data processing speeds are essentially instant for data sets not on LLM sizes. We have automation everywhere when it suits the right people. e.g. that speeding ticket you received for going 12 km/h over the limit? No human ever so much as saw that. Full automated process. Takes 6-12 weeks. Why? Because otherwise you might still remember how fast you were actually going or that you weren't even in that street on that day, and fight it. Same principle here: The slower the bureaucracy, the more people will just give up and go away. It's a self-regulating system to reduce the number of inquiries to the amount that the public servants can comfortably process.

that's a per-character stat.

If your average license plate has, say, 6 characters, you get a 78% total probability that it reads them right.

If you have 8 Flock cameras in your town of let's say 100,000 people, sitting at busy roads or intersections, 10 to 20 thousand cars per day is a reasonable estimate, which means you get 62,400 to 124,800 mis-read license plates. Per day. Every day. Under optimal conditions.

That's more false readings than you have people.

I wonder if just randomly assigning traffic tickets to license plates in your register wouldn't get you a lower false positive rate.

Microsoft has done a pretty thorough job of locking companies in like this, particularly through authentication and authorization systems (Active Directory) and the locked-down IT management infrastructure around them.

Add to this that all of the applications I use on macOS or Windows are either open source or at least cross-platform anyway. As long as the apps don't change, neither does the way I work; not really.

What ideas are those? Are you familiar with the policies of Stalin and Mao in any way, or are you just parroting something somebody else told you?

And here I thought the First Impact was billions of years ago, when the Black Moon carrying Lilith crashed into the Earth.

That's an interesting observation. Yet, apparently, the little widgets at either end of the cable are a potential national security risk.

At least for me and many others I spoke to.

Go and use books to train AI.

Just don't fucking destroy them afterwards! Many of these are out of print, impossible to replace! How much of a douchebag do you have to be to destroy them ?

You are so wrong. The country I live in now has it. It's not called the same, but it amounts to the same. Near impossible to sue the police here.

I'm pretty sure most countries have something similar on the books.

I'm fairly sure at least one entire department at MS is tasked with making sure people don't switch to other formats, that despite on-paper "open" XML it remains incompatible and no competitor software can flawlessly read and write it.

So no, unless you can hire a dozen people full-time to counter that, you don't have a chance to break through that.

Qualified immunity is a reasonable concept that I agree is needed for police work.

It's just being completely overdone, used to cover up clear abuse. The basic idea of "when in doubt, police still needs to be able to act" is sound. The actual practice "unless you can prove to criminal standards and beyond, that the police officer knew at that exact moment, that what they were doing was totally definitely illegal and they intentionally decided to break a law. That's quite a bit too much of "err on the side of caution".

What a complete and utter surprise... to the three people who are so high their brain stopped working but miraculously didn't kill them.

For everyone else, this was literally the first thing we thought about, right? Please tell me I'm not the last sane person on planet Earth. Nobody expected that this would NOT be abused in such ways, right?

I assume there was some form of contract. Generally speaking, any time you send somebody unsolicited copyrighted material, you can expect it to get summarily thrown in the trash, so whomever you sent it to can't fall for the old "you stole my idea" bugaboo.

VFX studios are already doing this for their production pipelines. The processing happens in a data center; all the artists see is essentially a terminal window. Nobody can "walk off" with anything.

Which is why you never answer "yes" to anything a prosecutor asks you. It's always a trap. In this case, asking if this is your account and not asking if you sent those messages is the trap.