Having to poke through an about: page and find the thing to toggle to turn off this specific AI feature but not that one, and knowing they'd change it on you a couple of releases later, never filled me with confidence.

One switch in a readily discoverable location in the settings menu and it's all gone? Just the job, killed it now on the laptop and the mobile both.

I think you responded to someone else's comment.

Your comment is pants.

Surely you know that's an absurdly dismissive opinion? North Korea has the capacity to gain access to anything anyone else does, especially if it comes from China.

Considerably more difficult than you imagine. Between them, they have almost 70 command-line options or flags. Taking into account that many of those behave differently depending on the presence or absence of other flags, there's a couple hundred different code paths. Then you need to handle directories, files, sparse files, sym- and hard-links, on and across different filesystems, not to mention the various file-like things scattered around (pipes, streams, etc.)

It's not rocket science, but neither is it trivial.

We knew that. But now we have proof.

Will anything happen because of that? Nah, I don't think so. A few token gestures maybe. A friendly mail to everyone saying to write better reasons, followed up by an informal mail that tells them to ignore the previous one.

This isn't a mistake. It's intentional. The more arbitrary and uncontrolled the police can act, the more it is feared, the more it is a tool for oppression and not a part of civil society, the more likely the cops will stand on the side of the powerful when there are protests or uprisings against the increasing oppression and economic divide.

I see the future of movies as being AI-generated, with viewers providing scripts, actors, directors, and whatever else they care about, either their own or rented. You'll choose everything and the AI will generate it real time. You'll be able to adjust parameters on the fly -- funnier, darker, more introspective, more action -- overall or per actor. You'll be able to talk to the characters, provide real and misleading clues to detectives, tell the AI to throw in a car accident or a broken sidewalk just to see the characters react to it and change the story for a few seconds.

It will certainly be possible within 50 years. Might be possible within 25 years. What it will do is destroy top actors' salaries. Why rent some famous actor's visage for $5 when you can make one up from scratch or pick some new actor for $1?

You'll also be able to remake old movies. There are stories about famous movies who had to settle for an actor because their first choice was unavailable or too expensive; so change to their first choice, see how it changes everything. They'll be out of copyright and cheap, and probably have a dozen businesses offering their own take on the same actor.

It's going to relegate live actors to stage work, which may or may not be live streamed. The days of $10 million acting gigs will be over. And actors won't be nearly as insufferable pontificating on things they think they learned from roles.

This seems like a very obvious and straightforward requirement, force the officer to select an active case to tie the inquiry to.

And at the same time display a warning that selecting an unrelated case "will result in disciplinary action, up to and including termination".

Make them just as accountable as any other security system in the pirvate sector.

Obviously, I agree.

My other question, is how long will they be able to get away with this sort of thing, before customers decide the risk of disclosing your data to these external AI firms, is greater than the cost of building the capacity to run your own models in-house.

I don't use LLM, generally. But I was messing around and got some older models running on my laptop last night. Nothing special, no idea what I would use them for (couldn't generate a paragraph of text before clearing losing all coherence, because these were small old models running on 5 year old hardware). Supposedly Mac Studios and Mac minis are selling like hotcakes because hobbyists want to run local models. How long before the Venn Diagram for "can be run locally" and "capable enough model" overlaps for most use cases, making the risk of data exfiltration by these firms not worth the risk?

Lot of words to say this kind of thing may accelerate the bubble bursting.

How many of the other miraculous math solutions attributed to LLMs recently were similarly snooped from academics who bowed to pressure to stay silent on the matter?

I prefer the Martian bear.

That's a pretty shallow(thought admittedly depressingly popular) analysis of the situation.

Being in public does leave you with no particular defensible expectations of not being observed, and possibly even remembered for a time, by assorted passers by; and typically also permits more direct tailing of people for observation purposes(subject to some, often slightly vague, threshold at which having PIs or paparazzi hunting someone remains a problem even in public; as we saw here where the police took the notion seriously enough to show up but not to do anything in particular).

What it has historically never meant, for technical reasons, was pervasive coverage and longterm retention. Which is certainly increasingly feasible with only moderate levels of investment; but is absolutely a novel development for what 'public' and 'no expectation of privacy' meant.

It's like defending the installation of a massive network of sprinklers because "you have no expectation of staying dry when you go outside; haven't you heard of rain?" Sure, nobody the weather to be sunny all the time, any more than they expect everyone to avert their eyes in public; but they would correctly consider the installation of irrigation equipment on every lamppost to be an intrusion on their ability to stay dry despite the fact that the sky has never extended them a constitutionally protected right to no rain.

so Keefe also returned to his car and followed several cars behind, hoping to document the next stop."

Yeah that was a stupid thing to do. I don't care which side of the fence you're on regarding Flock cameras, police, or government surveillance, following someone is the wrong response. They're merely an employee doing their job, and you've just escalated it into something very personal.

If that'd have been me, I'd have driven to the cop shop and flagged down an officer, pointed out the car following me, and asked them to go have a word with my tail and ask them to leave me alone.

Taking pictures and filming me out doing my job in public? Sure, fine, go ahead. But if I get tired of it I might leave. Don't follow me, don't harass me. How'd you like it if my buddy with the flock camera mounted on his roof starts following you around? Oh that's different is it? is it really?

Forgetting he exists would be the best punishment.

"we demand our sovereignty, and also demand you relinquish yours!"