I have a set of 5 Echo Dots around the house and ever since I "upgraded to Alexa+" -- it's a train-wreck. Sure, the AI gives much smarter answers to questions. But they continuously forget my preferences for the voice I chose for them to use. (My wife and I both prefer their "female 2, relaxed" voice, as most similar to the original and more "professional" sounding than the others.) But no, it keeps going back to a voice that sounds like a bubbly, annoying teenage girl. Worse yet, there's no way to set a voice as default for all devices. You have to go around changing it for each one independently.

And that's before all the creepy, info-stealing behavior it has. EG. Someone will come over and ask it a few questions. Next thing you know, it's asking them to share their name since it's a voice they don't recognize.

The private sector has a solution to all of this that "just works". You acknowledge the supply and demand. Swamped with public record requests? Great! Hire more people to handle them as their job description/title, and charge enough for them to cover their salaries or hourly contractor rates.

IMO, asking one group to pay $2.3 million for a records request is unreasonable. But why can't you ask all of them to pay a fair share so the process works smoothly and effectively for everyone involved? A qualified govt. contractor hired to fulfill FOIA requests is typically paid a midpoint salary of about $88K per year.

Fact of the matter is, TX has been more the extreme, modern Facist-Republican governed state than "traditional Republican" for decades now. It took a lot of people some time to come to that realization. But definitely by the 1990's, watching what was happening in Texas made me solidify my views as more Independent/Libertarian than Republican.

As just a couple of examples?

- TX passed a law requiring people get a permit to legally possess Pyrex glassware. (Thought was, if you weren't a research lab or a school, you probably only had it around your residence if you were making illegal drugs.)
- TX was well known for their "Vampire cops" who were legally allowed to hold a person down after they were pulled over, and draw their blood to check for alcohol.

The general populace of Texas doesn't necessarily reflect this at all, especially with so many liberal-minded people who moved there from places like California in recent years. But the people in political power there operate with a lot of support from those who like the traditional ideals Texas claims to stand for, while acting in ways contrary to some of those ideals.

I have to admit, when I first heard Trump going on about yet another web site, I thought "who cares?" and ignored the rest of it.

The truth is though? Government web sites are notoriously horrible to navigate. The general public usually wants to do one specific thing that can take a whole lot of searching on the relevant department's own site -- if they even go to the correct one to begin with.

A one-stop AI powered "index" would add some value, IF it was done correctly. I have little faith it will be, but I'm not so opposed to the idea itself.

What they really said is they saw what they estimated to be about a 10% decrease in ability to see faint stars in the night-time skies each year from 2011 through 2022. But this article was written back in 2023 ... three years ago. So why is it "news" on Slashdot right now? And more importantly, is there any follow-up research showing this 10% annual reduction in darkness is continuing?

It stands to reason that as we improve night-time lighting in cities and towns on our roads, this would be a trend. But it also stands to reason that 10% decreases in darkness at night will cease. I would imagine much of what they observed was due to the near wholesale swapping of inefficient incandescent or mercury vapor lighting with brighter, more "white" LED lighting. I don't think there's any real trend of adding more and more lighting?

People are getting angry about officers mis-using Flock to stalk or spy on ex's and other women they meet. But the bigger problem is the law enforcement culture itself. This has been going on for decades now, with very little real effort to change things. It's pretty much common knowledge that police have one of the higher rates of divorce and relationship issues. It's the type of job where people wear the uniform and are given some power over the general public, with the assertion that they're only there to "protect and serve" you. Women are generally attracted to both men in uniform and men who want to act as a protector.

Combine that with the job of a police officer involving constant interaction with random people in public, and you have a perfect storm to tempt a cop into cheating on a significant other or to take advantage of their position to stalk one of them.

IMO, this is called "being human" ... In any large enough group of people, you'd have a percentage who'd justify this type of behavior as worth the risk when it's about sex/relationships. But the law enforcement culture is more about "brother looking out for brother". The police think they're part of a special group who are generally above the "lesser" laws that interfere with what they feel needs to be done. I've watched plenty of them exceed posted speed limits when they aren't running traffic enforcement themselves. I've seen them turn on the lights and sirens briefly, to get through traffic so they're not late for lunch with someone. So sure, they'd do a few plate lookups to track people they know, if they've got some personal excuse to do it. More needs to be done to audit and monitor police behavior and discipline them when they're in the wrong. Saying "it's a tough job" or "it's risky vs what they're paid" or anything like that is no justification.

I only know this as an anecdote (so would be happy if someone "in the know" can clarify more about it). But a buddy of mine was upset when he saw an AT&T worker wandering around his back yard, a while back. The guy was clearly trying to mark an area to dig, to put fiber in. My friend was mad not simply for the guy trespassing on his property, but specifically because he had a plan to pour a lot of concrete back there to expand a small back patio. He didn't want a situation where a fiber connection ran under his back patio.

He caught up to the worker and questioned him, and was told they were trying to find the shortest and most cost-effective way to extend fiber to his neighborhood, and not going through his yard would create a big hassle for them, having to take a long path around. The worker ultimately said he understood my friend's concerns and promised he'd call a supervisor to discuss it. But he added that "AT&T always has the legal right to run cables through private residential property thanks to Federal laws established back when all they did was run copper wire for telephone services".

I think the real shift began when computer processing power became great enough to make it feasible to analyze public video footage and index it for long-term storage. The idea you don't have an expectation of privacy in public always made sense to me. But it was intended to protect the rights of photographers and videographers, primarily. (You should be able to take a photo of your friend or family member in public, while random strangers mill about behind them, and not risk them filing a lawsuit against you for it.) If someone can see you and what you're wearing or doing in public, with the naked eye? Then they should be able to photograph it too. If you didn't want that to happen, then you shouldn't have gone out in public wearing or doing whatever it was.

Until recently though? Nobody thought photos or videos were providing people with any capabilities beyond keeping the captured content for a fairly long period of time and them having ability to view them or show them to others they knew, at will.

Now, it all extends to that captured information getting automatically data-mined/processed. Numerous aspects could be resold to interested parties, for all sorts of uses the subject of the photo or video never even imagined. Even the location and time can become part of a bigger goal of tracking one's travel habits. And contrary to what used to take place, a person being captured on video or photo is part of whole networks of cameras doing the data collection all over the geographic area. This is no longer about, say, the shop owner who wants to record his customers at the counter for security reasons. Now, that shop owner might buy a networked camera system for that purpose ... but the info the camera captures goes into a "collective", well outside the shop owner's control.

With all this rushing to improve AI engines and whatnot? It's the uptime/reliability that's concerning me as much as anything else.
I've seen ChatGPT Work have multiple outages just in the short time our office started using it. And even when they claim systems are running normally? You can easily get timeouts trying to complete relatively simple requests in systems like Co-Pilot, at least using the free edition.

If I ask my co-worker to complete a task, I have a pretty reasonable assumption he's going to do that. If he fails to complete requests several times in a short time-frame? Then it's likely he'll get in trouble for that, even potentially resulting in his termination. AI should be held to an even higher standard since it's a machine.

What happens when everyone is counting on AI to do necessary parts of daily workflows and then it has an extended outage? That's like your whole workforce going on strike.

...and I know from years of experience in I.T. that any time you give people the ability to do a database search, you'll get people putting nonsense in fields for testing purposes. So at least SOME of the "button mashing" and entries like "dickhead" sound to me like officers trying out the system for the first time, or experimenting because they weren't trying to conduct a REAL license plate search.

That doesn't disturb me as much as the overall problem of allowing these searches without a warrant or at least a judicial review. Even if it's decided that a license plate search doesn't rise to the level of requiring a warrant to conduct it? There should absolutely be someone reviewing the searches being done. (EG. The officer who is too lazy to properly document why he/she is doing them and consistently leaving fields empty needs to be punished.)

This should be the standard for all grade schools, really. When you're in grade school, you're being taught fundamentals. You're literally learning how to use and write the language that you'd eventually use to form queries for AIs.

There's just no good that will come of introducing kids to using AI in a school setting at this age. What you'd get instead are kids who learn how to leverage it to cheat and avoid the work they're asked to do so they learn and memorize the materials in class, and kids who don't grasp the fact the AI isn't something you can treat just like a human friend.

Like many other people, I dumped the Sonos ecosystem when they started killing support for their hardware I owned and still actively used. Even with their "trade in offers" to upgrade? It made no sense, when the new speaker or interface wasn't going to sound any better than the one I already owned.

I felt like the brand was nearly irrelevant in today's world where practically every audio device supports Bluetooth connections and everything has mobile apps.

But Sonos is right about this idea/realization: They're really not a "speaker company" (at least, not one of any consequence). What they really have to offer really is an "audio operating system". How well that works out for them depends on how well they design it. But at least there's some potential buy-in for me here.

If you can make it co-exist on top of everything else i use, like streaming audio from a Mac's Music library via AirPlay or my wife wanting to send music from her phone or tablet to either the soundbar on our living room TV or alternately to her little Sony bluetooth speaker? It starts to make some sense. It's great if it makes any and all Sonos branded hardware super easy to configure and use, but should also allow managing everything else under the same roof.

Every time people hear what it actually involves is outrage and opposition, at least all the way back to when Intel first announced that they wanted to hardcode identity numbers inside CPUs in 1999. But the corporations involved have been relentless, and have sunk countless billions of dollars steadily forcing it forwards, and building front organizations to obfuscate and whitewash it.

With Windows 11, Microsoft was finally able to FORCE Trusted computing hardware into every new computer. Not just every new Windows computer, but every computer.

Every new Intel PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new AMD PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new ARM PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. The only processor lines that DON'T have it are the microcontrollers.

There are some unlocked smartphones available, but as far as I can determine it's literally impossible to buy a smartphone that doesn't have hardware trusted computing built in.

I specified that enforcing Trusted Computing at the internet access level is still a long term goal, they couldn't get away with it today. However they are well on the way to success. Virtually all new hardware supporting trusted computing, all the front groups rolling out standards and systems, and as it gets incorporated into things everyone is going to increasingly running into situations where they get locked out of stuff if they're not Trusted Computing compliant. Streaming already restricts you to the worst quality if you're not compliant, and it's only going to get worse as pre-Win11 computers fade out and as more things require it.

Lots of posts here bashing this product while I bet exactly none of them have tried using one yet.

No argument Dyson makes a lot of high-dollar products that just attempt to be a little better/different than the norm -- and won't impress people who are always looking only for the lowest cost solution.

But I have yet to really use anything Dyson branded I thought was a bad/dysfunctional product. I owned the orange Dyson ball vacuum cleaner, many years ago, when it had only existed for a short time. It was 4x-5x more expensive than a typical Hoover or Eureka upright vacuum from a discount or department store. But I got a good 12-13 years or so of use out of it, before selling it to someone else. I remember when I first got it, thinking it felt "too plastic-y" with plastic hoses and attachments and levers. Wasn't confident it wouldn't just crack/break on me. But it never did, and my only real complaint with it was the ball design prevented getting the vacuum under the coffee table. (Obviously, switching to one of the suction attachments let you get around that.)

I feel like at $500, I don't want to be the first guy trying one of these out. But if early adopters decide it really works, and isn't too slow at sensing where gaps are between your teeth while brushing with it - I would consider buying one on sale and giving it a shot.

I'd hardly call exact date of birth "low information content".

And yes this does reveal exact date of birth, regardless of the bullshit obfuscation that it supposedly only reports age range. The server simply tracks the reported result every time the user connects, and on some specific day the result CHANGES to announce their date of birth.

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