This is much less concerning to me than mass surveillance. If someone calls 911 and you need to send a first responder, why not send a drone to get there faster while a person is on their way?
Because today it will be used as a first responder.
Tomorrow a police officer will suggest that these drones (that we are already using successfully) could be very useful for checking up on that "dangerous" neighborhood.
In the city I live in, there is a chronic shortage of police officers and a lot of dangerous neighborhoods. If a drone could be used to do the same or a substantially-similar policing job in those neighborhoods that a human cop would, without having to pay for a human cop (not just their salary in and of itself, but also in terms of making the police department a place people are willing to work for at that salary), this would be an improvement to public safety and quality of life.
Also remote-operated drones don't need to fear that they will get suddenly shot or stabbed to death by a criminal suspect whose potential crimes they are investigating, like a human cop does; and this would itself have some beneficial effects on policing.
The "same or substantially-similar policing job" is the key to this argument. Which it can't. A drone can't de-escalate a tense conflict between neighbors, it can't provide traffic redirection after an accident, or even rescue a kitten from a tree.
It can't be a calm, reassuring presence, offer a kind smile, or give directions. It only disconnects the police force from the policed community. Its presence will only raise tensions and paranoia. And that's with unarmed drones!
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.
I'm not really worried about the police. There's mountains of well reinforced legal precedent restricting them. Sure they have violence, but they kind of need to show up to do that. All the other stuff they do runs up against your rights which are really well established. Even the "civil" traffic stuff is pretty hard fought, comparatively.
Every other civil enforcer can basically fine you on a whim and then your appeal goes into a system that makes jim crow look impartial. So yeah, I'm not worried about the cops. I'm worried about the zoning office "fixing" a budget shortfall by fining people for unpermitted kiddie pools or whatever and in the 10yr it takes to get smacked down in court they'll have stolen the property of a ton of people. I'm dead serious. However bad you think it could be reality is worse. These non-LEO departments make the most sloppy podunk sheriff's office look like the FBI.
If the drones are "providing information" to the police, it's only a matter of time before their AI hallucinates something that gets someone killed. We've already seen AI gun detection services that report things like Doritos bags as guns.
OTOH it will provide more surveillance of the police themselves. Humans are also bad at gun detection (sometimes willfully so) and this provides another check.
That's right. And also just like the missing epstein footage.
Because it's a social problem, not a technology problem.
At the same time, just because these instances of "missing" tape happen, does not mean that body cams and jailhouse CCTV are useless. We would not take those away. Likewise for the future drone footage
Not as often; it creates friction and requires cooperation from others (or an officer with unusual skill and access, presumably).
It will absolutely happen in corrupt departments, or those involving an officer with those skills and access. But data that is uploaded is infinitely harder to erase than simply turning off the camera in the first place.
How exactly does this provide more surveillance of the police themselves? I've done about ten FOIA lawsuits against police departments and it's laughable to think that they won't just lock footage away and exempt it from the public's eyes. Probably through a trade secret exemption because private companies are involved.
I don't trust the authorities to use information just for public safety and against legitimate criminal activity (in part because legitimate crime needs to be decided legally in court not just because of police suspicion).
There's too many examples where they've abused information for harassment, dubious arrests and prosecutions. And this can be systematic not just a few bad apples here and there.
We've already seen this with how ICE has conducted itself with more funding and surveillance.
You are giving those people the benefit of the doubt. It's been proven many many times that police will use "more information" to excuse their own decision to use violence. A decision that they already made well before the incident.
It's more "sus" that you blindly trust the police, politicians, and billionaires that have a history of discrimination, violence, and oppression and attempt to slander those who don't. Not to mention blindly trusting AI systems with someone's life - the only reason one would do that is because they either stand to profit from it or don't understand how they work. Are you really willing and eager to put your life in the hands of a piece of software that can't distinguish a gun and a Doritos bag?
Remember, oppression and invasion of privacy is still bad even if it isn't currently happening to you. If you think you can't be a target, you're sorely mistaken.
Likely: Scan everyone's home while en-route to the 911 call with an infrared camera. Or scan all of the license plates and faces of people along the way.
Yes. If you called from your cell phone while on foot or in your car, the drone can find your exact location and hover over you until help arrives, quicker than if EMS has to search you out themselves.
How so? I ask as a paramedic of 14 years, now retired.
If EMS has to "search you out" so does the drone.
At least in my County, we actually get very good triangulation info from 911. It was very rare that Dispatch told us they only had Level 2(IIRC) location info (which might be to several hundred feet).
FAR more common was people who actually told us the -wrong- location. Car accidents that were several miles up the road from their location. Saying Blah St SE when they meant Blah Rd NE, etc.
Drones don't solve for that problem. They're going to the wrong location, too.
> If EMS has to "search you out" so does the drone.
The point is that the drone is fast enough to arrive first, and do the searching so that you don't have to. It's just one of many possible scenarios.
I totally understand the argument that this might not be the most effective use of money, but I honestly don't understand the lack of appreciation for the number of places this could be used effectively.
Modern fire departments (including my own) are already using drones, and have found that the best use for them is not "how quickly can we find someone", but thermal imaging from above on structure fires.
> and do the searching so that you don't have to
The searching that we did just isn't really solved by drones (and I love them, some of my best photography is from a drone). It's things like "obscured house numbers on a street", "ambiguous address", not "person lost in a forest". Now if you want to talk about the use of drones for SAR? Absolutely. But for the vast majority of 911 "attempt to locate", getting there quickly is rarely the issue. We can get there quickly and still spend minutes figuring out that you're actually living on a flag property (where your home is behind another, but you share a driveway).
I want to see who is in a location. I get a plant to call 911, which triggers Flock drones in the general area and scans the faces of everyone it can find. I get that info from Flock.
There are always security concerns and exploits. Some crazy gamers call 911 swat attacks on people; that doesn't mean that the police shouldn't have guns, or that 911 should be turned off.
Yes, the drones should be secure. Yes there should be measures to make sure that they're not abused. But none of that takes away from anything i've said, which is ONLY to point out the situations where they could be useful. And people seem to be having a very negative visceral reaction to even considering the possibility.
Also, i'm not recommending or supporting Flock, just the concept of drone use in general.
Obviously I don't know the specifics of your city, but in general there are a lot of scenarios where it's valuable to get to a scene very quickly (no traffic, etc.) and obtain reconnaissance. Especially violent scenes, or it could even be a drunk driver who is still on the move, or a stolen car where the perpetrators are likely to flee on foot if stopped.
I'm sure you can come up with a lot more ideas using your imagination.
One of the best reasons is that a very large % of calls can be cleared without anyone actually going to the scene. Many cities using drones as first responders now report that they clear ~30% of calls with just a drone. This is great for small cities/towns that struggle to recruit officers and have had ballooning labor costs for police in order to get people to work there. Its also great philosophically if you want police to be involved less, because it dramatically lowers the amount of time they are going to scenes
There's more than one definition of missile. Florida criminal code's just one place where a drone could be considered a "missile".
Florida criminal code:
"790.19 Shooting into or throwing deadly missiles into dwellings, public or private buildings, occupied or not occupied; vessels, aircraft, buses, railroad cars, streetcars, or other vehicles.—Whoever, wantonly or maliciously, shoots at, within, or into, or throws any missile or hurls or projects a stone or other hard substance which would produce death or great bodily harm, at, within, or in any public or private building, occupied or unoccupied, or public or private bus or any train, locomotive, railway car, caboose, cable railway car, street railway car, monorail car, or vehicle of any kind which is being used or occupied by any person, or any boat, vessel, ship, or barge lying in or plying the waters of this state, or aircraft flying through the airspace of this state shall be guilty of a felony of the second degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084."
Yeah this doesn't bother me in any way, shape, or form. We already have manned aircraft that respond to such things, unmanned aircraft are a strictly better solution. It makes sense for police and it makes even more sense for fire. An aircraft can arrive at the site of a reported fire while firemen are still buckling their pants.
There is no cold starts at all. It’s running non-stop.
Bunny bills per resource utilization (not provisioned) and since we run backend on Go it consumes like 0.01 CPU and 15mb RAM per idle container and costs pennies.
They're not coming out in favor of Chat Control -- they're coming out in favor of having some option where they can operate without violating the law.
The problem right now is that they can be held liable for distributing CSAM content on their services and, since April 3, they can also be fined if they try to detect that content. It's an impossible situation.
Now, I'm not claiming that these companies always have noble intentions. But there's nothing nefarious here -- they just want regulatory certainty: do X, Y, and Z and you won't be fined or sued.
Blatantly false. They aren't liable as long as they promptly action reports, just like everyone else.
My impression is that they don't like the bad PR currently associated with various debates surrounding use of social media by children. At the same time they don't want to implement various policies that would be popular with the general public but would hurt their bottom line (ie they don't want to do the right thing).
So instead they make a big deal about various imperfections to justify draconian solutions that would see them able to implement all sorts of privacy violating measures. Thankfully that failed so now they're engaging in a smear campaign.
The current conduct of these companies in this regard is openly evil.
It's not impossible; it's their centralised model that is. It's unthinkable to have private platforms on modern mainframes (data centers) instead of distributed, decentralised services where everyone holds a piece (DHT) or whatever they want (e.g. Nostr/Blossom), and is responsible for what they do.
It's impossible to imagine having democratic societies where four fat cats know everything about everyone and most people know almost nothing about them, where information, instead of being scattered everywhere for resilience, is concentrated in just a few hands.
The graph in your Macrotrends link shows the exact same numbers as the AI source, but is harder to read and the page is half ads. It's not an authoritative source -- the data was most likely parsed out of Oracle's earning reports by some janky regexp. I don’t know why you would trust this more than AI.
with an adblocker ... there is one ad on the page just above the graph about "Unlock Macrotrends Premium" which takes up 1.5/2cm of the page, while the graph underneath it takes up like 15cm. Then there's a bunch of other information on the page, none of which are ads. yes, there's a "you only get 5 page visits free" whole page pop-up thing, but there's an easy and well-known way round that for individuals who understand basic internet browser usage.
maybe start using an ad-blocker? pretty much everyone else does these days.
> the data was most likely parsed out of Oracle's earning reports by some janky regexp.
which is probably what the ai would do... or more likely it's just stealing it from the source i linked, since the numbers are exactly the same...
also, probably not because see (1b) below.
> I don’t know why you would trust this more than AI.
because (1a)
> Fundamental data from Zacks Investment Research, Inc.
> Built on Zacks Investment Research — trusted by institutional investors, academics, and financial professionals for over 45 years. [0]
I'd take people who have been doing this stuff for 45 years over some new-fangled toy that's well known to hallucinate and get things wrong in ways that appear authoritative.
also, on that (1b)
> Zacks employs a rigorous quality control process to make sure all data points are recorded accurately. For each company, a trained analyst enters the data from SEC filings, which is then double checked by a senior analyst. Once the data is entered, a senior analyst signs off on final completion after reviewing all the data. In addition, the data is subjected to a battery of automated checks to verify balancing relationships and correct errors. All data items are reviewed by multiple sets of trained eyes as well as automated computer checks. [1]
and (2) because that site provides other contextual information that is helpful, like the fact that Oracle's stock price has been trending downwards, which is possibly a reason why they felt the need to make cuts now. [2]
ai gives you the answer you want -- not the answers you might actually need.
> For one thing, we don’t have access to all the data
In the US, we do have access to all the data [1]. They're required to report every incident with an injury or any amount of property damage, and it's all available for download as CSV.
> For another, it at best shows that Waymo is safer than average.
No, it shows that Waymo is 6 to 12x safer than average.
You probably haven't noticed it before because when it's done well, it's a subtle and pleasant effect that can be used to draw your attention to particular elements on the page.
This site is intentionally doing it very poorly to make a point. Really, the takeaway should be don't do things poorly. But that's kind of obvious.
It's always awful. This site is exagerated in degree, but in kind it's merely on the scale of awful.
Computers should not waste my time. Even if eyes are 10ms faster than the awful fade, if a million people see it, that's almost three hours of human life down the drain.
And when scrolling fast, or far, it's not uncommon to have it waste a second of human time. A million of those is 38 human working days, just flushed down the toilet, because someone wanted "pleasant".
It's fantastically disrespectful of other people's time.
The web is already slow. No need to deliberately spend effort to make it even slower.
"It's fantastically disrespectful of other people's time."
And this is what people have become way, WAY too tolerant of. The deliberate theft of customers' time. While this is obviously a very minor example, there are lots and lots of others that aren't.
I’m a fast scroller and skimmer. Info scroll down and the text is not there I’ll just assume that the site is shot and close it. Ain’t nobody got 200ms to wait for a god damn fade in when there’s an infinite amount of sites out there to discover.
> million of those is 38 human working days, just flushed down the toilet, because someone wanted "pleasant".
This is the wrong conclusion. The amount of work that can be accomplished summing one second from 38 million people is approximately zero - much different from stealing 1 day from 38 people or 1 hour from 912.
It doesn't matter whether useful economic work can be accomplished with savings of one second per person. Directly inflicting frustration one second at a time is still a bad thing.
And obviously, those seconds can add up to meaningful time wasted even on an individual basis.
> The amount of work that can be accomplished summing one second from 38 million people is approximately zero
First of all, I said one million people, not 38 million people.
But second (no pun intended), this waste of human life doesn't just aggregate across people, but also for multiple offenders one any one particular victim.
A second on this website, a second on that site, a 10 second "loading" animation screen on a blog. It adds up. It adds up to all individual users actually wasting their life and productivity.
Your implication that it's fine to willfully waste a second from a million people is either not understanding what "a million people" means, or a borderline psychopathic disregard for other people.
You can also throw your trash on the ground, because really, is the city measurably worse off just because of you throwing just two candy wrappers in the park once a day? If someone accidentally drops trash, or makes a slow website because they don't have skill or time to make it faster, then that's a completely different matter.
I don't have a strong opinion either way on the effect, but I do have to say that I always find it amusing how fatalistic HN can sometimes be over the most minor cosmetic inconveniences, couching them as "wasting (large amounts of) humanity's time" and "disrespecting people" as if we're talking about something far more serious than little animations on a webpage.
I mean, you might not like it, and that's fair and understandable, but is it really that big of a deal? Surely not.
I mean, like the other commenter I would just close the page instead of enduring it.
But yes, in fact if this page succeeds then it's wasting human life on things as productive as spam phone calls. People have solved the latter by simply not answering for unknown numbers.
Not sure what you mean by "fatalistic". To the point where I'm not sure that's the word you mean. It's fatalistic as in fate. Maybe you mean morbid?
Standing in line at the DMV is also all "counting flowers on the wall, that don't bother me at all"? But even at the DMV it's (hopefully) not done maliciously.
> cosmetic inconveniences
Sometimes things suck. That's not remotely as frustrating as knowing that someone went out of their way to make your life worse.
> is it really that big of a deal? Surely not.
If we capped all laptop CPUs to 600MHz, would it really be that big of a deal? Maybe they did it because of the acoustic preference of not needing to spin the fans as much, and therefore you are not allowed faster CPUs?
They didn't go out of their way to make your life worse. They went out of their way to design something they thought you would like, but you didn't like it.
Yes, if you make things only slightly worse it's better than if you make them a lot worse. But neither is quite as good as not deliberately making things worse.
The Walmart greeter also isn't paying for the bulk of their healthcare expenses because Walmart provides subsidized health insurance to all employees who work at least 30 hours per week. All US employers with at least 50 employees are required to do so under the ACA. If the greeter worked fewer than 30 hr/wk, they wouldn't get insurance through Walmart, but they would likely qualify for an ACA subsidy that covered close to the entire cost of a health insurance plan on the marketplace.
The statement, "The US spends ~$14,570 per person on healthcare. Japan spends ~$5,790" is about the average amount that the country as a whole is spending per person on healthcare, not what any given individual is paying. Per-capita GDP (i.e. the average economic output per person) is the most relevant comparison.
They're entertainment, yes, but really not the same. I'll look for a specific game to play, I'll look for a specific movie to watch, and I won't play a game when I want to watch a movie.
No, they're not the same, but the amount of time people have for entertainment is generally fixed. In the old days, they spent it reading books or socializing or doing a hobby like playing music or painting. Then radios were invented and people spent some time doing that. Then movies were invented and people spent some of their time going to those. With each new type of entertainment, people spent less time per-capita on the previous forms of entertainment (generally; radio was probably a bit unique because it can be done simultaneously as other activities such as driving, but in the old days it was a family activity).
Video games are doing the same thing. You can't watch a movie (easily) if you're playing a video game.
Yes, and yet by the counts, Westerners watch more televised content than ever.
If anything the substitute has been TV. Gaming is big, sure, but that doesn't appear to crowd out time reserved for watching media. I expect that the marathoner gamer who plays for hours daily is a comparatively smaller demographic.
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