It's honestly kinda hilarious that the person defending the anti-consumer choice to remove features is accusing those upset about their removal of shilling.
GeekyNerdyNerd
joined 1 year ago
s you noted we already know the causes, but trends do not predict which individuals will commit crimes. There will be no point in time that an algorithm will be able to predict that an individual will commit a crime at a specific point in time.
I think we might've had a bit of miscommunication here. I wasn't talking about predictive policing at an individual level, that's highly unlikely to be possible, at least with traditional computing technologies (not to mention that individual predictive policing isn't even desirable for a multitude of reasons explored by many dystopian fiction authors throughout history) but rather at an area level. Being able to predict where and when crimes are likely to occur and with regularity, predicting that a specific drug store will probably be robbed within a narrow window of time for example. Even if such an algorithm was only accurate within a couple of hours it would fundamentally change how law enforcement functions, as well as the purpose it serves. Instead of merely enforcing the law after a crime is committed they could prevent crime/catch the criminal mid act without the need for informants, and without even knowing who they are gonna be arresting prior to catching them.
Highly unlikely that'll be the case forever. We can already do population level behavioral prediction for advertising purposes. It's just a matter of time, quality data generation, and finding the right algorithm before we will be able to accurately predict where and when police resources should be deployed to efficiently deter crime. Especially since we already have a decent idea as to the factors that generally lead to spikes in crime-rates things like: poverty, widespread social isolation and low social cohesion, alcohol and drug use, perceived opportunity, and the presence of easily victimized populations such as racial minorities, religious minorities, the disabled, and the LGBT+ community.
Tbh, we don't even need such an algorithm because we already know that the best ways to reduce crime are to increase protections for those minorities, alleviate poverty, reduce the presence of alcohol selling establishments, provide addiction/mental illness care, promote social cohesion, and have community events where law enforcement builds trust and bonds with their local communities, promoting co-operation and mutual respect between law enforcement and the people they are supposed to protect. In other words, the best ways to combat crime are the exact opposite of what everyone in the USA has generally been doing, especially conservative areas. Predictive policing is only even desirable because we don't want to do the hard work of actually improving people's lives and building communities where crime isn't something people have/want to consider.
Google knows that the more irrelevant results it returns, the longer you spend looking, which translates into more opportunities to show ads.
Which is ironic, as Google only managed to get as far as they did by doing the exact opposite in an era where Alta Vista and the small handful of other OG search engines were focused on maximizing revenue via ads.
Google has become that which they sought to destroy.
Amtrak already has the legal right of way on pretty much all lines it operates on, that's not the issue. The issue is that the cargo companies abuse the shit outta loopholes letting them go ahead anyways by having cargo trains so long that they cannot go onto bypass tracks, forcing Amtrak trains to wait for the cargo train to fully pass before it can continue despite Amtrak having the legal right of way.
It's basically the same thing that happens with 16 wheelers vs pedestrians. A pedestrian might have the legal right of way when the crosswalk signal is going, but that doesn't matter because that 16 wheeler isn't gonna stop in time to avoid hitting them when it's going at 40MPH. Physics beats laws every time.
Then where's the call to ban apple products? They famously defied the FBI's call for a backdoor during a terrorist investigation after all. Apple's actions have proven themselves to be more resistant to regulatory actions than frickin tiktok which actually proposed letting an American company host and oversee tiktok's infrastructure and data collection for the USA as a solution to such concerns.
That would be incredibly stupid to do that for the commerical real estate industry alone. The online retail industry alone is equal in size, and that doesn't even take into the dozens of other similarly large industries that would become too risky to exist without TLS and other encryption schemes.
I think it's significantly more likely that the effort is actually genuinely about muh terrorism/muh pedos than I about protecting landlords that are dwarfed by the industries this kinds crap would undermine.
A slower connection is better than ending up in prison, the re-education camps or worse, beheaded.
Without average Joe's using it for nonsense Tor usage is basically a neon sign saying "I'm doing something worth hiding. Come and kill me."
I can't wait for musk to be arrested for distribution of CSAM because of his shitty moderation policy decisions because that's clearly what he wants to happen.
I gave OpenStreetMaps a try a few years ago and tbh it was shocking just how outdated it was. It listed businesses as existing that hadn't been around since before I was born and there were several streets that just didn't exist at all.
I did my best to update it, but there was just so much that was outdated in my area that I eventually gave up. It honestly would've been easier to just redo the entire thing from the ground up, that's how bad it was for my area. To be fair, even Google maps isn't idea, there are parts of the city where I live that haven't had a street view update in 10 years, but at least the actual map info is accurate.
I've heard from people in Europe that their experience was that OpenStreetMaps was actually better than Google maps, so yeah there is some significant variance in quality depending upon region.
Yup, choice paralysis is awell known and well studied psychological phenomenon. People generally speaking want at most 3-5 options, after that they get overwhelmed.
It's why when Steve Jobs first came back to Apple in the 1990s the first thing he did was simply Apple's portfolio to just a handful of products. The idea was to make one perfect product for each of four different broad categories of consumers, it was only after simplifying the lineup that Apple released new product categories each with their own four quadrants approach to choice.
Choice Paralysis and "The Tyranny of the Default" are also the reason why when people do move to the fediverse they all flood to the same handful of top servers, causing them to have performance issues.
Those suck worse than the old school 3.5mm splitters we all used back in the discman, and later iPod days.
The removal of the headphone jack is one of the worst developments in personal electronics over the last 30 years. Personally I hope that the EU's next port mandate forces its reintroduction as Bluetooth headphones are an environmental catastrophe.