• 11 Posts
  • 336 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • Hmmm…

    As the article correctly states, machine learning (“AI” is a misnomer that has stuck imo) has been used successfully for decades in medicine.

    Machine learning is inherently about spotting patterns and inferring from them. The problem, I think, is two-fold:

    1. There are more “AI” products than ever, not all companies build it in responsibly and it’s difficult for regulators to keep up with them.

    The gutting of these regulatory agencies by the current US administration does not help ofc, but many of them were already severely undermanned.

    1. As AI is normalised, some doctors will put too much trust in these systems.

    This isn’t helped by the fact that the makers of these products are likely to exaggerate the capabilities of their products. This may be reflected in the products themselves, where they may not properly communicate the degree of certainty of a diagnosis / conclusion (e.g. “30% certainty this lesion is cancerous”)


  • Well, I’d summarise the X-Files as (no spoilers):

    • Mulder has his sister (purportedly) kidnapped by aliens as a child.
    • As a result, Mulder is an occult nut who wants to spend all his time investigating supernatural stuff.
    • For some reason the FBI lets him spend all his time doing that. (Kind of nepotism maybe?)
    • They send Scully to go watch him, but she does a terrible job of that.
    • Every episode there’s a different monster or paranormal thing. Mulder says something like “It’s Bigfoot”, Scully says “That’s silly, Bigfoot isn’t real”, then they see it is Bigfoot but Scully tries to rationalise it away.
    • At some point Mulder gets tangled up in government conspiracies.
    • He makes it his side job to try and crack those conspiracies, but continues his monster-of-the-week formula of normal paranormal investigations for the most part.
    • As time goes on, there’s more and more conspiracy unwinding stuff, but they never fire him or kill him because one of the secret cabal members has a soft spot for him.

    More stuff happens in the later seasons, but I’ll leave it out for spoilers.

    TLDR; Mulder is not anti-government / FBI, he’s anti-secrecy and anti-conspiracy. He’s an occult nut who just wants to engage in his hobbies on the government dime.









  • Has anyone here actually read the article? As far as I can tell, facial recognition is being increased in availability, but it was already in use.

    Every police force in the country will be able to use live facial recognition vans, with the number of vans set to rise from ten to 50.

    It’s also worth noting that in the UK for a very long time now any data that is not E2EE can be seized by the government from companies without the consent of their users if a warrant is issued. That’s obviously bad but nothing new.

    It sounds like what’s actually new here is that the police is becoming more centralised and organised. Instead of a lot of smaller departments in local areas with lack of expertise, more centralised organisations will do the policing.

    The article covers some pros and cons from different people’s perspectives.

    • There might end up being more policing in cities and less in rural areas.
    • There might be some downsizing of policies forces
    • Police forces may be less accountable as they grow.
    • Police forces believe they will be better equipped to tackle cybercrime.

    Overall, to me, this seems like a generally negative move. I don’t want the police to spy on people, and I want them to be more knowledgeable about their local area and more accountable to their people. It does look like there might be more surveillance, and that’s bad too.

    Please read don’t take headlines for granted.



  • When you log into Windows with a Microsoft account, your recovery key is often automatically uploaded to Microsoft’s servers as a backup in case you forget your password. Legally, this means Microsoft owns the key and must surrender it under the U.S. CLOUD Act.

    I find that really quite shocking, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

    Given the legal and technical risks, the advice for business travelers is clear: do not carry data.

    The US really is a hostile surveillance state.




  • Yeah, that’s why I’d like them to build more social housing.

    The lifecycle of social housing projects like these, as I understand them, is meant to be that you continue to build them, and as the old ones reach the end of their lifetime (around 60 years?) you demolish them and move the people into the new ones.

    In practice, most places are not continuously building them as they should, so many of them are reaching the end of their lives without a plan for where to move people afterwards. This shows a lack of foresight and long-term planning.

    Of course, politics are a fickle thing so the latest government can choose to decide that actually, poor people should be punished for the failures of the system and long-term initiatives fail.