• 2 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Everyone needs a driving force. It’s what smooths out the little problems and keeps you going

    It sounds like you lack hope in the future. I think that’s pretty understandable right now, it’s in short supply

    People also sometimes to say to believe in god. I am not against that but I do not get god. How can I get anything anyway that is outside my own comprehension. Outside the laws of the universe, my brain cant visualize it. And I do not think the man in a sky god can be real.

    If you want to develop spiritually, start looking inside yourself. Learn to meditate, learn to focus on your body and study your mind as it works. And most of all, look for contentment in the present. Connect to the world around you, and the universe inside you

    If you don’t find God, at least you can find yourself

    And as for hope in the future… Things are going to get worse for humanity in general. Then they’ll start to get better.

    This too will pass… Things are going to change, they are already beginning to change. You can be a part of that change if you’re inclined

    For now, find things you want to do, and savor them as much as you can. It doesn’t have to have meaning. You don’t have to justify it to anyone.

    If you want to stare at clouds, stare at clouds. If you want to make music, make music. Whatever keeps you going, find a way to make it happen


  • not really. you don’t want to keep frames without movement, faces or license plates. then you can throw away most frames from a 60 FPS recording. 2 frames per second is better than nothing for running a portable surveillance station. then you can encode them in some efficient format with acceptable compression, and it’s not that much anymore. massive 5G rollout was explicitly happening for IoT devices, to be able to handle the load.

    Let’s do some order of magnitude math… Let’s say each car on average “sees” 100 things a day (which is very conservative since there’s multiple cameras and with basic object recognition you’re going to have a lot of false duplicates). Let’s say each picture is cropped to a megabyte with compression, which would be pretty low res to grab identifying information from

    You can’t do much in the way of video compression, because this isn’t a video - we’re cropping pictures, too much will change frame to frame

    So 100MB a day per car, that’s nothing… For one car. How many cars are doing this? 10 million? 50 million?

    (Oh, and btw 5G is basically just 4G or 3G outside of Metro areas in the US)

    debatable. google picasa had pretty good on-device facial recognition more than a decade ago, on average desktop computer hardware. ente.io runs something similar in their smartphone app today, fully locally. detects faces very well even in memes. tech that can go into a smartphone can go into any smart car too, and likely does.

    It detects faces well, that’s easy enough, and it can generally label the people because you only have so many in the pool of subjects. If you want to identify people in a population? You’re not doing that on a phone. Even the best systems have a big problem with false matches

    that’s a wrong question. the correct question is what percent of the time is a car outside of the garage. lots of cars are parked on the street all the time while not driving.

    Parking lots are not usually good vantage points… That’s where most cars live

    And as for disparate data points… Unless ever auto company is using the same system, it’s going to take non negligible amounts of work to integrate different systems. Palantir is probably going after the lower hanging and more juicy fruit, like Ring doorbells and commercial security systems. Or, you know, phones

    That’s what it comes down to. All this for what? I’m not saying they wouldn’t do it, or it couldn’t be done, I’m saying there’s better options that they are already using for surveillance

    If they were to do it, you’d pick Tesla - they have the cameras and sell monitoring as a feature. They’re reasonably widespread, so you’ll get almost the same coverage as if all automakers were on board - remember, this is about tracking people and vehicles, if we’re recording them we’re in a whole different ballpark

    Or, you know, set up 100k cameras at key intersections and get a more comprehensive system with a lot less moving pieces



  • Pictures are expensive (data wise), and on-device facial identification is not very accurate, especially at a distance in a variable environment

    Cameras inside the vehicle? Those might be worth mining for data. You can easily detect if there’s a person in frame, and snapshot all the passengers. Insurance and law enforcement would be interested in that

    Cameras outside? You could search for human faces or license plates and upload them off peak hours… But how much is that information valuable? What percent of the time is a car even driving? Is palantir even set up to ingest that kind of disparate moving data sources?

    Flock cameras just yield much more useful data… They’re designed to sit somewhere and capture those pictures. Even if public outcry gets them removed, they’re just going to wait until the public gets bored and then put up less noticeable cameras… We really need to fight this forever

    All that being said, I have a car with no cameras and I’d only budge on that if the car reliably could drive itself. I don’t like having cameras pointed at me




  • And number 4, I do not need to be sent an amber alert from two counties over. And because they’re usually not nearby, they’re super annoying, and tend to contain very little information that I cannot retrieve…

    I just dismiss them. I don’t know all the car models, and I’m going to forget the color the moment I stop reading it

    What they should do is make them undismissable notifications with a short unique chime, that way they can also dismiss them when they’re no longer active

    And only show them if you’re in a certain geofence that could be expanded over time… If I know a kid is missing down the street, I’d actually take a look around. If it stays to for more than a few minutes, I might look up the model of the car and keep an eye out

    And if they sent a pic of that model of the car, I might recognize it


  • It’s largely a matter of lateral thinking and metacognition

    Like tripping over a bucket isn’t going to make you shout eureka! But you’re thinking on the problem, and you remember seeing a seller carefully packing his things up for the day into neatly sorted boxes

    (Or sometimes you do trip over a bucket, which reminds you of the seller)

    You take the root concept, sorting things using a number of containers, and then you deconstruct and reconstruct pieces of the pattern to reapply aspects of it to your problem







  • It’s actually good UX practices to do this. You light up a path to get a result (pressing the start button to continue to the menu), and then a large segment of people will continue to press start, even if they’ve previously stumbled upon the fact that any button will work

    It’s like picking a home server in the fediverse. You can tell them it doesn’t matter what they pick, but a lot of people will be intimidated and nervous about having to make the choice. It’s a major problem for adoption

    You also don’t have to tell computer minded people inconsequential rules, they’ll figure it out themselves pretty quick

    So by choosing an arbitrary button for the instruction, you remove a meaningless “choice” that genuinely lowers the friction for a large chuck of the population

    There are also people who, if you tell them to press any key, they will happily mash the function keys and be confused and upset that unexpected things are happening

    There’s even a select few who will physically look for the any key every time just to make sure it’s not suddenly been added to their keyboard, and there are even the special few that will hit the power button and get angry because they think you’ve caused them to break their computer

    Some of these people have higher degrees too…I didn’t believe it until I saw it for myself




  • What you’re saying is more consistent, but I don’t think it’s more readable

    I’m fine with let or var…if the compiler is going to infer the type thats all well and good. But it’s a replacement for the type - why would you write both? It should be either or

    And if the type is being inferred, the next thing I want to know is where it came from. That tells you the type and more, I don’t want to have to see a type name that may or may not be there