Many traditional machines where you put in 2-4 quarters and a real penny have been phased out for credit card readers now that just drop a penny from inside the machine. It does kind of ruin some of the charm.
Was just in vegas and one of them kept spitting out blanks. I have a feeling people swiped their card and didn't realize they needed to keep rotating and assumed it broke. Ended up with a whole collection before getting tired and leaving it. No telling how many more it would have spit out.
The people in support of these bans generally aren't interested in "good vibe coded" software. They oppose LLMs altogether on various grounds, not just the output quality.
FWIW, if an LLM is writing significant code, I'd consider it vibe coding regardless of your understanding of the code or expert guidance and almost certainly ban-AI people would too. The scale people seem care about when this comes up is code percentage that's LLM-written to hand-written, not code ignorance to full understanding by the author.
> The people in support of these bans generally aren't interested in "good vibe coded" software. They oppose LLMs altogether on various grounds, not just the output quality.
I think you're very wrong.
I think many of the people who "support these bans" do recognize value in LLM's and use them as tools in the kit applied to their workflows but recognize that rampant abuse and misuse of those same tools threatens to ruin (or already has ruined) many community projects that had previously been healthy and thriving.
And so they find themselves insisting upon unambiguous firewalls as an existential necessity for the communities they have invested years or decades of their lives into.
I support physical media and doing whatever you want with said physical media. If you want to overpay for a copy of Sharepoint 2007 For Dummies and destroy it, knock yourself out. Just because media has been printed and is "rare" doesn't mean it has any practical value.
You could easily write an article about how Goodwill and the Salvation Army dump millions of "rare" books that no one would ever buy for $0.50. And thrift stores will dump multiple copies of said books. AI companies would only ever need one!
The only thing I disagree with is AI companies feeling entitled to freely use every piece of copywritten work without restriction, but that applies just as much to web scraping, pirated books, etc.
There are some all-timer not X but Ys in this tweet.
"A pair of 3090s, a Mac Studio, a DGX Spark, an on-prem rack, a cluster of rented H100s, or a fleet of consumer GPUs is not just hardware. It is a vote against subscription feudalism."
There was that time Grok persistently brought up "white genocide" regardless of prompt, so I'd say Elon has a big personal role designing Grok's outputs!
The very first thing in their demo shows Grok logging in with the user's username and password to a website, presumably so it can perform actions and the human can get the blame for them. Apparently this is marketing and not terrifying to people.
The inaccuracy of our omniscient AI surveillance network isn't why I'm against it. The conclusion of this article is that we need more humans in the loop for a successful police state.
Right. A perfect surveillance state is still wrong by design.
If you dont accept this, consider the perfect surveillance state under president N, used by president N+1 given the inevitable flipflop in party control.
Well, not by free and fair election, but unless the perfect surveillance state also solves the problem of mortality, there will probably be a successor.
Possibly at a time facilitated by the security apparatus that puts the teeth in the surveillance state, because even if they theoretically have the capability autocrats rarely are interested in running their surveillance and security systems themselves, and want to spend time doing other things—which puts a lot of power in the hands to which those tedious bits are delegated.
Unfortunately, the Trump presidency has conclusively proved the "imagine if your opponent was in power" argument doesn't work. Everybody says Trump should be impeached, nobody says the office of the president should be deprived of the powers Trump used to do the things he should be impeached for.
Exactly, the abuse of power and the everyone going along with it is the issue. The supreme court and executive now function as a complete governing body without any input from congress. Every spending bill gets passed with bipartisan support, even if the Democrats need to sacrifice a few members. Meanwhile I hear very few people complaining about colonizing Venezuela.
I think that's because he doesn't have those powers. He only wields them on behalf of Congress, which has decided not to defend that which belongs to it.
that's strictly not true. at least one person doesn't believe in absolute presidential power. a lot of us believe that the president should really be an administrative head, and very limited ability to effect policy directly at all.
People believe a lot of things, especially when the other side has power. The point is that people complain about how the power is used by the other side. When power switches sides, they don't roll that power back. They pretty much always leave it in place.
no one, including me, actually believes in democracy. its just an eternal fight between the libertarian and the authoritarian. pick your side and fight as you can. thanks for disabusing me of my illusions, you know me better than I know myself.
you can mock my beliefs, you can try to convince how misguided they are, but its really outside the minimum rules of discourse to tell me what I actually believe
People say that and maybe even believe it but, even more than they believe that, the believe that the one thing the next president is going to unilaterally do is too important to let Congress deliberate on and, possibly, not do.
>Everybody says Trump should be impeached, nobody says the office of the president should be deprived of the powers Trump used to do the things he should be impeached for.
Because when the other side gets in they're going to use those awesome powers to do "good" things. No one believes in institutions anymore.
> Everybody says Trump should be impeached, nobody says the office of the president should be deprived of the powers Trump used to do the things he should be impeached for.
While I don't think inaccuracy is the ONLY reason to be against a surveillance state, it is certainly a big part of why omnipresent surveillance is always going to lead to more problems than it will solve, and can be a good way to convince people of why we should not have it even if they don't agree with us on all the other reasons it is bad.
This case is a perfect demonstration of the Base Rate Fallacy, and shows what happens when you surveil EVERYONE hoping to find a small percentage of bad people you want to stop.
Almost every car that Flock scans is a normal, law abiding citizen. Even at very high levels of accuracy, any sort of flagging it does is going to most likely be an innocent person simply because of the Base Rate Fallacy.
There are going to be a LOT more of these types of stories than there will be where they actually find a bad guy.
> we need more humans in the loop for a successful police state.
There is enormous variance in performance between police departments. Where I live now the police have been nothing but helpful. In college our neighbor was a cop and was ten times cooler than he had any obligation to be. I've also lived in places where they were nothing but a hindrance.
In fact I was once pulled over something like three times in a few weeks by one police department and given a warning each time for "speeding". The third time it happened I told them that I wasn't speeding, had dash cam evidence, and that I knew something was up given the frequency with which it was happening (probably not a wise idea but I was pretty fed up with it). Officer went to his car and came back five minutes later with some nonsensical excuse about my "VIN number [sic] not coming back properly in the database" and said I'd stop being bothered from them on. In his defense he seemed like he knew they'd made a mistake and was stumbling over his words a bit but the whole thing made absolutely no sense. No retired LEOs I've asked about it had good theories either.
It seems like this woman dealt with a more extreme, AI-powered version of the same. She has my sympathies, but this won't stop until LEOs that act like this are either upskilled or removed from positions of power.
For successful policing*. Which everyone should be for.
edit: Every single thing you guys have replied with are policy/law debates, not enforcement debates. I disagree with many laws on the books today. I want the laws changed, not selective/arbitrary enforcement of them.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
A fundamental tenet of the US Constitution is that policing should be hard, lest average citizens lose their rights.
While I merely quoted the text of the Forth Amendment, the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth are also arguably limits on policing power, making fully half the original ten amendments about limiting policing.
Unless we change the law, selective enforcement is the default. Courts have found again and again that cops have effectively no responsibility to even try to do their job. They can enforce what they want, and ignore what they don't.
So the question isn't: "Should we take away the tools these cops use to serve the public?" but "Should we give even more powerful surveillance tools to a group of unaccountable thugs who routinely abuse what they already have?"
When I was younger, in the summer, when I had a (very dark) tan and worked a night job which involved my driving around at odd hours I would get pulled over once or twice each summer for pretty flimsy reasons which equated to me matching the profile of the sort of person the police officer in question felt should be stopped/questioned.
It should be a quick bit of data work for records to be made of such stops based on duty logs (sans personally identifying information) and compare it to actual arrest/conviction rates to verify that at a minimum the perception of the police match reality. If they don't, then the local community should exert a suitable oversight to adjust police procedure.
The arrest/conviction generally follow the pulled over stopped rates. It's pretty hard to arrest/convict people you aren't stopping. These types of biases and stereo types are often pervasive within certain groups of people, including law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, and often the subset of the local community in power. If you've ever been to court (even traffic court) you'll find the word of the officer is given tremendous weight, while the word of the defendant is almost totally marginalized (no matter what your race). Even though you are "presumed innocent", the defendant has a natural incentive to lie and the officer presumably doesn't.
To top that off there is almost no "suitable oversight" of any police departments in the US of any kind, let alone by the community.
There really are no simple solutions to this, even places not plagued by bigotry and racism have major structural power problems for the average citizen.
I didn't say this was a solution or that the problem has a simple solution, but pretty much any solution needs to start with community involvement and community oversight seems a useful component to consider.
I'm not for “successful policing”: the term is way too ambiguous and I know that many people would have definitions in mind that I would find repugnant.
Should they? There's lots of things that are currently crimes that I don't believe should be crimes, so I have no reason to support policing in at least those cases.
The problem with rats' nests of infrastructure is that it is effectively impossible to determine what wires are structurally load-bearing in unexpected ways, and there's literally nobody in a position of authority that would be even remotely trusted by a super-majority to construct a suitable replacement system from whole cloth.
“Sir, we are coming by today because we are concerned you are insufficiently supportive of our public servants in uniform. It has come to our attention that you have been disparaging some members of our law enforcement divisions to groups as large as 100 people! This is part of our new thought policing initiatives, we need everyone to support our policing efforts!”
“Yes, I work for Flock Online. We only index statements posted at publicly accessible URLs, which in principle anyone can see. We are able to profile every person at scale for a more effective community policing database. This new thought policing initiative is being carried out as a public-private partnership with the full support of your county’s representatives, as a way to preserve our community’s harmony and enhance social cohesion.”
“Please don’t be alarmed, the AI flagged you but I assure you, this is a real human in the loop wanting to talk to you about your comments. I am here because we know you’d be home around this time. Can you please come down to the station with us?”
If your notion of good/bad policing is predicated on perfect policy, your notion of good/bad policing does not survive contact with the real world.
I expect this argument is actually a poison pill for some anarchist or libertarian fantasy of “if the laws fit onto a single sheet of paper all these problems would just go away”.
Why should I be in favor of 100% successful policing? I don't accept the premise that all de facto law should be in line with de jure law. That sort of society is unprecedented
The one official statement I have ever seen on that was when a new Base Commander was being interviewed and was asked, "Will there be a quota on the number of speeding tickets issued by the Security Police on base?" and his response was, "Absolutely, and it will be 100% --- I expect all instances of speeding and other traffic violations which endanger public safety to caught and ticketed --- such disregard of regulations and safety is incompatible with the standards of the Air Force."
Virtually everyone is, including those who oversimplify and go too far with words like "abolish". The problem we have right now is that "successful policing" is currently defined in such a way that there's almost zero accountability for those who enforce the law.
With the so-called justice system the US has got -- which is a mixture of inane proceduralism with senseless brutality -- I'm very much not for "successful policing." I would be, as I think that every person in the abstract would be, if there were comprehensive justice reform and tort reform.
Yeah, so you fit in exactly the category I described. Assuming a better system then almost no one would argue against it, but our system is so tragically flawed that many conclude we don't need a justice system at all.
Policing is enforcement of law, which inherently lags/fails to reflect reality. "100% Successful Policing" would have even larger swaths of the population in prison for use of controlled substances, which includes you if you've ever even TRIED smoking weed.
If policing was really "successful" there will not be a single person not charged with some crime. So fuck that. There has to be a balance. Lots of laws serve anything but "the people"
Sure, if anyone could agree on a definition of success. Police forces don't even obey legislative bodies where their definition of success and the public's definition of success differs.
Things have drifted since Robert Peel defined successful policing as "Whether the police are effective is not measured on the number of arrests, but on the lack of crime". Civil forfeiture is a good example that would horrify him.
His insistence that "The police are the public and the public are the police" doesn't really hold up in many countries anymore.
Perfekt enforcement never existed and our current laws were written for a reality where that was an impossibility. Not considering second order effects is reckless IMHO.
Unless you can block illegal unsolicited scam/marketing calls, the medium of phone calls is dead to me.
If it had 25% unsolicited calls, it would be a bad way to communicate, and in the US it's more like 95%. You could cut the majority of spam calls and I'd still associate phone calls as mostly a waste of time.
Your competitor has a $100m self-implosion in what must be an all-time slam dunk marketing moment and you spend 7 cents generating a marketing blog post instead of having someone write it.
