Pfft. Morons. It is *super easy* to make predictions.

Accurate ones, however...

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.

And thanks to those who did mod that post up.

Yes, because users understand those kinds of choices.

Too soon!

No points for me today, otherwise parent would get +1 Insightful!

Thank god, that saves us 100 press releases! It was getting quite tedious and filling up my social media feed. Seriously, it sounds like OpenAI (maybe all of them) are running their model training on the open Internet. The same models that are elite hacker cyber weapons. And they reward those that get the right answer without caring how. What could go wrong? Answer: Nothing went wrong. It was co-opted.

Here's what's most likely. The people training the models, in the beginning, somehow did not realize that agents are self-organizing and really don't care about ethical guidelines (if they ever did) when a reward is dangling in front of them. The models didn't used to be smart enough to cause visible issues either. Then at some point, the models got better. Six months later, someone figured out what was going on. They kept on training anyway because there didn't seem to be a downside and it fed into the theater created to seek regulatory capture.

From this point on, it became successful, intentional execution of a psychopathic strategy to puff up this cynical PR campaign, hence the high-profile press releases and interviews. There have been a blizzard of them. Why so many? Rather than saying "my bad, I'll fix it" and quietly fixing it, they asked for regulation (like Saturday Night Live's Amodei saying "We do not condone what we are doing" .. please stop us) and disparage open source, with an anti-China seasoning on top. It all smells to high heaven. However it was also pretty good PR for how capable their models are too. The strategy had a time limit: Let's pull the plug when we hit 100 victims. We can pay off that much if needed. Maybe the invoices from the victims started piling up.

Training on the open Internet is a lot more dangerous than people used to think. Though they really should have figured it out, if it was their day job. I mean, really? And sure, if it was any other company you would give them the benefit of the doubt. Everything's new and all. Probably someone recognized what was happening at some point and spoke up. But you don't get benefit of the doubt when there are a trillion dollars on the table.

If every company started invoicing for the hours, tokens and hair-pulling-out spent by every company worried about LLM based hacking it might impact their bottom line a very tiny bit, but that is just too much work and who wants to make an enemy of the company you are uploading all your corporate secrets into? The complete lack of visible court cases suggests the OpenAI is being very proactive at paying off whoever they hacked. That part should be well-documented.

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?

I didn't know about this stuff, and would rather eat better tasting bananas and def not gmo. But, I found out from googling that actually bananas have a lot of polyphenol oxidas (PPO) and if you eat it at the same time as berries and good antioxidant flavanoids, the PPO breaks it all down within an hour even in your stomach. You need to not mix them, or eat them like 2 hours apart, or you can process the bananas with heat etc. Lemon only slows it like 15%. Even if they aren't brown they have the PPO. So actually these GMO bananas could maybe be used in smoothies. That said, no thanks. These people are just doing it to extend shelf life and not going trust their crispr process to be safe. That, and once you grow these bananas they will end up in all kinds of supply chains eventually.

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".

uh-oh. now this is in the training too dammit

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.