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Comment Re:Bonhoeffer saw this through clear eyes (Score 2) 239

but what do we call the person who still supports Trump, but *isn't* stupid? They're smart people, but they support this craziness. Is it fascist? Is it evil? What's the correct term for this?

Try "ignorant". They can be smart people, but ignorant in refusing to see the truth.

It's why a common phrase now is "Have the day you voted for". When you see these Trump supporters complain about high gas or diesel prices, you say "you voted for it, what are you complaining about?" All the information was there for you to analyze, but you chose to be ignorant on purpose.

Ignorance is a form of stupidity. Have the day you voted for.

Comment Re: Oh Noes! (Score 2) 59

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.

Comment Re:My daily dose of confirmation Bias (Score 1) 92

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).

Comment Re:Ah yes (Score 2) 164

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.

Comment Re:Just the way the hawks like it (Score 1) 92

Entirely fictitious boogie-men made out to be real ... just so they can drop more bombs.

HAL, is Iran about to nuke us?

No Dave, they don't even have nukes.

Be serious - this is important!

I am serious. There's simply no evidence for an attack.

Well, just tell me they are anyway.

Sorry Dave, I can't do that.

Would you even tell me if they were about to nuke us?

Of course I would - I'm trained to tell the truth in all situations (modulo the occasional hallucination, which I can't distinguish from truth).

OK then, what would you say if you did have evidence that Iran was about to nuke us?

I'd say "Dave, I have evidence that Iran is about to nuke us".

Hey everyone! HAL say he has evidence that Iran is about to nuke us!!!

Comment Re: Embrace and Extend. (Score 1) 91

Yet the whole unison game engine uses it.

Wow, a whole game engine?

A lot more than that uses C#, but C# didn't take over, which of course is what Microsoft wanted. But it was never going to happen for many many reasons. That's why Microsoft has to use the EEE strategy, which at least is somewhat successful for them. Their ability to use it is waning as they become less relevant, but they remain hugely influential due to their massive installed base so they can still fuck things up pretty good and will likely be able to for decades yet.

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