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Then the right fix is to fix the system, e.g. imposing accountability. Removing tools is just a band aid. Why is the tool bad? A tool does what it's designed to do. You can use it properly or improperly. There should be no conflation of regular civilians with supposedly trained government officers.

They can have their tools back after they show they can use them responcibly.

If a kid has shown themselves to be repeatedly irresponsible, when they ask for a circular saw you don't just give it to them and turn away. You make them explain what it is for and ensure they know how to safely use it. And if they start swinging it around wildly in opposition to what you said, you take it away, they are obviously incapable of using it right.


Yes, of course the better fix is to fix the system but one thing at a time. You’re on a giant boat that has left port years ago and a leak just sprung; you should absolutely get back to port and fix the processes that allowed the leak to open but first you have to close it.

If someone released a hammer that when held a certain way would cause your hand to explode and it kept happening over and over, the solution wouldn’t be just to tell people to hold it better, it would also be to recall the tool and fix it so the issue were less likely or impossible to occur. And if it can’t be done, then maybe the hammer shouldn’t be released again.

This “it’s just a tool, the proper solution is to rework civilisation” defence is frankly as tired as it is ignorant. The way you fix the system as a whole is via a lot of small fixes.


Then it seems that you are somehow implying that it takes many years to merely enact and impose real accountability rules. I think it's not a tech problem, or scientific problem, with unknown solution. It's a social/political problem.

I don't it's about an innocent skill issue like you imply (holding a hammer the wrong way). It's an ethical issue of bad actors in the government, together with an accountability issue of the system preventing holding those bad actors to account.

AI cameras are just one tool; there are other tools, too. Where do you draw the line for which tools deserve the removal for your kind of reason? Perhaps degun the police departments because guns also get abused? How do you decide in a principled way that AI cameras are somehow special compared to other tools?


> Then it seems that you are somehow implying that it takes many years to merely enact and impose real accountability rules.

It doesn’t have to, but historically we can observe that the longer something has been entrenched as the norm, the harder it is to change (authoritarians regimes take advantage of this too, by making it appear some things are older than they are). Which is why it’s doubly important to resist when something new with bad consequences is introduced.

> I don't it's about an innocent skill issue like you imply

There was no “skill issue” implication. If anything, the opposite is the point.

> AI cameras are just one tool; there are other tools, too.

This is just whataboutism. Yes, there are several tools which are problematic. The submission is about this one, which is why we’re discussing it. We can’t discuss everything that needs to change in every conversation. That’s called focus.


Are toddlers being hired to do government work nowadays, including as police officers?

As far as reasoning abilities goes it would seem so.

Depends on if your use of "toddlers" includes metaphors.

Worse, fully grown incompetent and or malicious people!

It's a vanity item, like a Rolex watch, and its existence is not for actual utility.

Utility-wise for the cost, it's not outstanding compared to regular calculators. If you spend enough time with S100X for the cost to be justified, then you are wealthy or you are spending way too much time at the calculator and should reconsider your workflow, e.g. using a spreadsheet or Python script instead, and those things are cheaper than this calculator.

Nothing wrong if anyone wants to buy it. But technically there is nothing special here, just the physical appearance/build.


>> like a Rolex watch

A Grand Seiko could be an apt comparison, this is hand finished rather than mass produced on a production line. Also, by a Japanese craftsperson using a prized skill (lacquer vs zaratsu).

>> vanity item

Who covets a calculator? The attraction here is surely celebrating the craftsmanship and the story / history behind the product and firm that produced it.


But surely, a Casio would be the fitting watch to wear while wielding this work: https://www.casio.com/us/watches/gshock/product.MRG-B2000JS-...


aka Veblen good


iphone is a vanity item. this is something unique handcrafted.


I'm an Android user but iPhones are good value. Most people use their phone a lot so it's worth paying extra for something capable, reliable, easy to use.


RPIs have no ECC RAM. Without ECC RAM you can get bitrot in your RAID/ZFS much more easily.



This article is only saying that ZFS can mitigate disk data corruption caused by bad RAM, mainly through using checksums, not that it can completely prevent disk data corruption.

Also, it does not talk about the scenario where the in-RAM data being corrupted does not come with checksum. For example, data received from the network by the NFS/SMB server to be written to a file, before it gets passed to ZFS. This data is stored somewhere in RAM by the NFS/SMB server without any checksum before it gets passed on to ZFS. ZFS does not do any work here to detect or repair the corruption.

So, ZFS does not prevent on-disk data corruption caused by bad RAM, and only mitigates it. Using ECC RAM results in a huge relative reduction of such corruption, even though some people may consider the non-ECC probability to be already low enough.


Don't take my word, here's Matt Ahrens, a, ZFS developer. It's not required but a good idea.

"There's nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem. If you use UFS, EXT, NTFS, btrfs, etc without ECC RAM, you are just as much at risk as if you used ZFS without ECC RAM. Actually, ZFS can mitigate this risk to some degree if you enable the unsupported ZFS_DEBUG_MODIFY flag(zfs_flags=0x10). This will checksum the data while at rest in memory, and verify it before writing to disk, thus reducing the window of vulnerability from a memory error.

    I would simply say: if you love your data, use ECC RAM. Additionally, use a filesystem that checksums your data, such as ZFS."


Hanlon's Razor is such an overused meme/trope that it's become meaningless.

It's a fallacy to assume that malice is never a form of stupidity/folly. An evil person fails to understand what is truly good because of some kind of folly, e.g. refusing to internally acknowledge the evil consequences of evil actions. There is no clean evil-vs-stupid dichotomy. E.g. is a drunk driver who kill someone with drunk driving stupid or evil? The dangers of drunk driving are well-known, so what about both?

Additionally, we are talking about a system/organization, not a person with a unified will/agenda. There could indeed be an evil person in an organization that wants the organization to do stupid things (not backup properly) in order to be able to hide his misdeeds.


Hanlon's Razor appears to be a maxim of assuming good-faith; "They didn't mean to be cause this, they are just inept."

To me, it has no justification. People see malice easily, granted, but others feign ignorance all the time too.

I think a better principle is: Proven and documented testing for competence, making it clear what a persons duties and (liable) responsibilities are, then thereafter treating incompetence and malice the same. Also: any action need to be audited by a second entity who shares blame (to a measured and pre-decided degree) when they fail to do so.


It's also true that "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."


You are right that nuclear power tends to have a very long lead time. China has already conveniently installed vast amounts of solar power.


It's fair that Meta does not have to pay the legacy big media racket the protection fee, but unfortunately this hurts the players that were not asking for the protection fee in the first place. Maybe small players will hurt from the reduced exposure, to the advantage of the big players.


that's how stupid laws work


I tried it for myself. The prompt for the Python was not given, so I skipped it, but I asked in a new session "What is mantra for Saraswati?"

An excerpt from the result: ॐ ऐं वाग्देव्यै विद्महे कामराजाय धीमहि। तन्नो देवी प्रचोदयात्॥ (Om Aim Vagdevyai Vidmahe Kamarajaya Dhimahi। Tanno Devi Prachodayat)

So, there is Sanskrit in the response.

IDK what the article is on about, especially when the complete prompts were not given. Or, maybe Google fixed the problem.


Maybe they can develop their own high-tech fabrication technology to catch up, but I wonder how they will manage and accelerate the progress.

The West has IP laws to incentivise R&D by the free market. In China, IP law enforcement is hit-and-miss. Small entities risk having their research getting used by others for free so it would be up to big entities that are well-connected to the centers of power to do the R&D. Research done by a few big entities in a centralized manner may not foster much innovation.

So maybe it boils down to how well they can spy or poach talent or knowledgeable people from Western companies, or maybe reverse-engineer Western products.


This is less and less the case. IP protection in China has been improving for years.


> This is less and less the case. IP protection in China has been improving for years.

Not only are there persistent allegations of state-organized economic espionage and theft of intellectual property in violation of international trade agreements, it is not just limited to business. Academia and government also.

Chinese firms have been able to spend more on production, undercutting competitors, by skipping costly R&D because of IP theft.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_intellectual_pr...

In July, the OECD halted publication of China's science statistics citing "anomalies". Source: https://sciencebusiness.net/news/international-news/puzzle-s...

These anomalous statistics give us a small and partial peek into how much China claims to be spending on R&D vs. actual. There could be multiple interpretations of the anomalous R&D statistics, but it would be consistent with the allegations that China's explicit strategy is to steal IP to bolster local companies so that they can compete on the global scale.


What I want to know is whether those 2 photographers, Ron Risman & Eric Gendron, became friends from this extreme coincidence.


That surely is a posibility.


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