I’d say that AI can be useful, but not necessarily in the way it’s being marketed and possibly not profitably so for most anyone who’s not selling the hardware it runs on…

Destroying what (appearance of) democracy they had as well

Assuming age ID wasn’t invasive and stupid to begin with, there could be other ways to set it that would be much less invasive for many devices, such as setting an “IS_ADULT” flag on devices (or even an associated account) at the time of registration.

“Hey Mr Smith, it looks like you’ve never registered a device on our phone network before but you’ve got a driver’s license from 1979 so we’ll just set the age code on your account aaaand, done”.

Then you get a sheet of random scratch-off AV codes pulled from a drawer that you can use on other shit, similar to how VPN providers do to separate payment vs login. Nothing should ever say who you are or even your age, just “hey this person is old enough, fuck off and let them at it”.

It’s still annoying, but less privacy invasive. And it’ll never fly because what they really want is to tie all communication back to a person not just an age.

They don’t give a shit about any of that they just say “jump” and expect people to do something in response

That is more or less what the old TrueCrypt (and also VeraCrypt) systems did. One password gets you the real data, the other opens a different partition that could be stuffed with dummy data.

True privacy/security night involve a hybrid, where it opens the device to the fake partition+profile but also kills off internal keys to the real data when the duress is used

Hopefully also as a supported option to the existing phones. I’ve got a Fold and switching is sounding pretty good right now…

I’m kinda surprised that these things aren’t being stripped for parts by meth-heads TBH

If you’re willing to wade into FB Marketplace there’s also a lot of mini Dell/HP PC’s - probably retired business workstations - out there for cheap with 8-16GB of RAM.

They make dandy TV boxes of mini homelab hosts

Yeah, cameras should almost always be on a segregated network, preferably with port-security. The NVR may need to connect to the Internet for updates - assuming one can’t just upload that via the UI - but that’s about it.

Yup. I wasn’t disagreeing so much as pointing out a common failing with AI adoption in general: the number of cases where it’s being implement as a replacement for existing functional systems or humans rather than an augment to them. The “additional tool” aspect is 100% my preferred use case (where it functionally makes sense), but many are seeing it as a human-replacement that feeds into their desire for control/subservience, cost-reduction, or rent-seeking.

Local-AI actually has a lot of useful cases, and AI vision is something that in many forms has been around for awhile and is generally fairly effective. It’s great as a tool for indexing or enriching visual data that would otherwise at best a slog and at worst improbable for a human. Surveillance video is especially good with this. I see it as an addition to motion detection. Instead of needing to go through hours of footage of video, you only need to go through stuff where movement was detected, and from that you could further search for “frames tagged as having a person/bear/vehicle/whatever”. The thing is, I’m not depending on it to protect me from running into a bear when I go out out my trash (although Frigate can do alerting), but I could use it to follow how the bear moved between cameras/zones through my property and possibly use that to better bear-proof the premesi

In this particular case, it might be somewhat useful as an early warning if it can actively detect human+firearm, but there were obviously going to be either a number of false positives or negatives that make it less valuable as such. It could still be useful in reconstruction or actively following some incidents, but we need to keep humans in the loop too.

AI isn’t bad/evil or good when used correctly and with knowledge of the limitations in a given use-case. Trusting AI to replace humans/judgement is often very bad, and massive datacenters are obviously a major source of concern, but the issue is again in the use not the overall technology. Just like nuclear fission can produce huge amounts of power to either keep the lights on or blow stuff up, AI can help sort through your album if 5000 photos to find that one shot in a jiffy… or it can be used identify, track and you for a surveillance-state, and false positives in the latter case can make for a very bad day.

The cheap system I have with a Google Coral and FOSS software is pretty good about detecting people and dogs from my camera streams. Sometimes it detects my one dog as a small bear if I haven’t cut his hair recently.

Having such systems as a later if defense is good. As the only defense, not so much.

I - way back when - bought a Switch 1 because it played a bunch of the games that I could easily involve my kids/family in, and can come the times I’ve used it on battery with one hand.

However, that was also before the Steam Deck became a thing and haven’t really given Nintendo my patronage since.

The Deck also has an internal-only battery but replacing that at least is fairly straightforward (I have not needed to do so but was in the area when upgrading the storage card).

Depends on what you want to do, the model, and optimization or quantization.

A lot of LLM stuff that seemed pretty amazing a few years ago - chatbots and the like that respond to questions in plain language - can run in comparatively light hardware. Coding agents can take more, but could also be optimized against a particular language and spit out useful snippets.

Image stuff can be pretty complex especially at higher resolutions and detail, and creating seamless video segments gets expensive on hardware, fast.

Amazon should not be able lock authors into exclusivity contracts with Kindle Unlimited either, but who’s gonna stop them?

Canada needs this. Also either a full fucking ban on the remote-updated epaper price tags, or at the least very strict rules on when they can be updated (i.e. once a day before opening or after closing to the public)

Canada, and still not mandatory here apparently. Which is weird because a lot of our automotive requirements do tend to follow the US due to common production lines and other such factors

Are you sure on the TPMS date? I’ve got a vehicle that’s much newer than 2007 that doesn’t have it

Yeah IIRC emissions shit was like that. So you can get a truck that weighs 2500kg puts out 158g/km of emissions but not an Asian style mini-truck that weighs only 1500kg and puts out i.e. 130g/km of emissions because it’s in the same weight-class as say a Corolla (for which the max emissions might be only i.e. 100g/km)

So the mini truck might produce less pollution than the bigger truck and be perfectly useful for many people, but it’s too much PER WEIGHT and thus doesn’t qualify under the emissions regulations

That sounds pretty close to what I’d expect, except for it presumably still being tied to the person overall

I think it’s less a matter of “can’t” and more a matter of “can’t … be added to bother putting in a significant effort/investment”