I've been thinking about this story a lot lately. When giving away your agency gives strictly better results, should you? And if you shouldn't, do you really think you're strong enough to resist it?
I'm super excited about the Index. All the time, I feel like I go "oh, I need to buy this thing" or "I should message that person about this" but I'm in the middle of a task and then I forget. (Or I have to get out my phone or a notepad to write it down - the phone is distracting and the notepad needs to be synced manually later, which I won't do.) I think my main use case is probably going to be adding stuff to my grocery list while I'm cooking, but I'm also excited about the webhooks integrations - I can pipe my idle while-driving questions to an agent and read the report later, for example. Or maybe I'll connect it to home assistant - "It's cold, turn down the AC please" or "hey can you play some music" without having to break focus. If this all works alright, I'm thinking about figuring out audio-out, so I can ask "what's on my calendar for tomorrow" and get a verbal answer. (Or maybe, putting this+todo lists on e-ink displays in physical space.)
I think the reason this is so exciting to me is that it's a way to interact with technology that's a lot less "evil" feeling. I am at my best when I'm not looking at screens all day, and the index provides an off-ramp that can potentially move several common workflows off those screens. I think even on my technology-off days, using the ring would still be fine. It also looks cool, and speaking into a ring to make things happen is much more aesthetically pleasing to me than "ok google." I really think you can't discount the cool factor here.
they want to isolate gay and trans children from other gay and trans people. don't you know, there's social contagion afoot, but if we protect y^Wour children from this inherently sexual (and thus adult) content, we can prevent it. this is enough to make me oppose age verification wholesale. I don't care if there's fancy ZKPs, it's still going to be used to isolate and harm hundreds of thousands of vulnerable trans kids, who are already experiencing astronomically elevated suicide rates over the past few years. they don't need more of this.
In Denver, they'll be expanding once they have budget. Also as soon as Axon finishes developing their integrations with civilian cameras into their Fusus product. They've also got natural-language queries in the pipeline ("find red trucks near here"), and they already have integration with the hundreds of existing non-ALPR LEO cameras. It's not better.
It's different. The primary harms of flock come from their horizontal integration into a nationwide surveillance network, working with ICE etc. Axon (formerly Taser) has strong vertical integration, which is new and we haven't thought through as much yet. (This is the position of city councilmember Sarah Parady, who's been part of a working group to research+draft ordinances about surveillance technology, and whose speech at the meeting voting on the contract I really respected. I think it's available online.)
The Axon contract is smaller than the Flock one, 50 cameras instead of >100, but that's because it's all they could get budget for, and they want to expand. DPD owns the data and is theoretically not supposed to share it with federal agencies, but there are lots of legal ways to make them comply. They're setting a 21-day retention period for data that's not part of an ongoing investigation, but I think that's missing the point, and it's not codified into law. The Axon cameras can be switched into a mode where DPD can view live feeds. Most of the contract provisions that the mayor's office added because of significant public outcry I would call "token." They're not addressing the real issues, and it's still contributing heavily to the development of the surveillance state.
Overall, it's an improvement, in the sense that breaking your leg is better than breaking both your legs. But don't get me wrong, they're coming for the other one as soon as they can.
Hi, I'm in Denver. They're already doing this over on Colfax. It's a significant change vs the existing halo cameras, because they use the drones to follow people.
We have ceded too much ground in this debate. When I say "trans women are women" I mean that, ontologically, it is really true that trans women are a subcategory of the general class "women."
Like you say, we are searching for outliers. We don't cut women that are too strong or too tall. We shouldn't cut out women that happen to be trans. If all the top levels of women's sport end up dominated by trans athletes (something I don't see occurring, and that isn't supported by the data), then good, outliers found. We love to see women succeed.
(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)
It's being built as we speak. I attended at a city council meeting yesterday, discussing approving a contract for ALPR cameras. I learned about a product from the camera vendor called Fusus[0], a dashboard that integrates various camera systems, ALPRs, alerts, etc. Two things stood out to me: natural-language querying of video feeds, and future planned integration with civilian-deployed cameras. The city only had budget for 50 ALPRs, and they stressed how they're only deploying them on main streets, but it seems like only a matter of time before your neighbor is able to install a camera that feeds right into the local PD's AI-enabled systems. One council member raised concerns about integrations with the citizen app[1] specifically (and a few others I didn't catch the names of). I'm very worried about where all this is heading.
It's already happening. Someone local to me seems to be spray-painting over ring cameras and leaving flyers about the ring-flock-ice connection. I can't say I agree with the methods, but it is sending a message.
Oh, this will be very useful. My current solution is incredibly hacky, I run an unauthenticated SSH server on the Kindle (key-based wasn't working), port scan to find it, and SFTP new files. At home, at least, I have a static IP. The whole system falls apart enough that I usually just connect to calibre's remote server and send books that way, though. I wonder what the battery impact of running tailscale on a Kindle is.
Right now the solution that makes the most sense to me is intentional communities. If anyone reading this has experience living in one, I'd love to chat. Email is in profile.
> I got the distinct feeling that she really died and that I was just in a very long dream in which she survived, and that I would wake up very soon to a world of sorrow.
This is how I've felt every time a friend has tried and failed to commit suicide. I'm so sorry.
Similar story to you with non-celiac gluten sensitivity: I was having disabling flank pain for months, but after ruling out a couple things they shrugged and gave me an IBS diagnosis and a prescription for a drug with bad long-term side effects. Someone suggested cutting out gluten, which I tried and the pain went away. Intentional and unintentional reintroduction of gluten leads to the pain coming back within a few hours.
if not for the work requirement, at 80gb you could likely do what I do: use syncthing to make there be a full copy of the files on your phone. I've got a media terminal, my laptop, and my phone each keeping each other up to date. it's never broken or been frustrating. it works offline perfectly.