syrrim · HackerTrans

3 years agodiscuss

The recent kyle rittenhouse trial had an element that hinged on whether apple's current image upscaling algorithm uses AI, and hence whether what you could see in the picture was at all reliable. The court system is already aware of and capable of dealing with these eventualities.

syrrim

4 years agodiscuss

Google is also bad. We are agreed on that.

syrrim

4 years agodiscuss

False positives are inherent to the justice system. While unfortunate, they do not cross any lines or send us down any slippery slopes. They are priced in. Thus, "what about google" is a mere "what-about-ism". People are ocassionally falsely accused, charged, and even convicted of crimes. That is not what is under discussion here.

syrrim

4 years agodiscuss

Apple's proposed system did scanning on your device, whereas google's system does scanning in the cloud. That is the distinction. A person's own hardware shouldn't be used to report them to the police. You cannot interpret technology like this in terms of what it is applied to today, because its use will be broadened in the future.

syrrim

4 years agodiscuss

This hypothetical is utter nonsense. If you weren't helping hitler, he would send his storm troopers to arrest you, then do what he wanted anyways. There's a reason godwin's law exists: people think that invoking hitler is an argument cure-all, not realizing there's a reason why hitler is considered a uniquely bad person.

We pretense to live in a "free society". This refers to one where each person is allowed to do as he pleases, as long as he isn't interfering with another's right to do the same. The concept of "utility neutrality" can only exist within such a society, but more importantly, a free society cannot exist without such a concept. As long as there are laws preventing a person from misusing utilities, someone's use of a utility can never be an attack on another's freedom: before that occurred, they would be arrested for breaking the law. On the other hand, people rely on access to utilities for heating, for cooking, and more broadly for survival, let alone necessary for that pursuit of happiness supposed to be crucial to the american dream. If a person's utilities can be cut off arbitrarily, then naturally this can be used as a punishment for their behaviour or identity; their person, in other words, is no longer free to do as they will. If you cannot see how this is exactly a step towards hitler's dystopia, then there is no helping you.

syrrim

4 years agodiscuss

In C you have a system of memory allocation tied to scoping. A statement like "int x[10];" allocates memory such that when x goes out of scope, the memory is deallocated. RAII generalizes the concept so that when the variable comes in scope, some initializer function is called, and when it goes out of scope some destructor is called. This allows us to use it for dynamic arrays (unlike VLAs in C), hash tables, etc. We can replicate the system by simply calling the initializer when the var comes in scope, and the destructor when it goes out of scope. However, this creates the problem that the two statements are far apart from one another, and thus there is a chance that they might grow out of sync as the code changes. Defer allows us to cause some action to occur when the variable goes out of scope, but declare this at the site where we perform initialization, thus grouping the two together and making it easier to modify them in tandem.

syrrim

6 years agodiscuss

An important part of the criticism is that the apps being proposed won't tell you who or where you had a contact, just that it occured anywhere. This leaves you with no capacity to judge the actual danger of being infected. An app being used to augment practical contact tracing, for example by reminding you who you'd been in contact with, would be potentially useful, but that isn't what's proposed.

Another way that such apps become useless is their voluntary nature. Ie that use of the app, and self-quarantine in response to an alert, are an individual's choice. Obviously, if you passed by a sick person in the grocery store, you do have a chance of being sick, and therefore quarantining is still useful. But most people will feel silly about quarantining themselves in response to such a low probability event. Having even a small fraction of people act on these alerts would therefore require enforced compliance of some sort.

Note that I'm not per se advocating either that the app be less privacy aware, nor that compliance be enforced, just expanding on the source of the impotency schneier talks about.

syrrim

6 years agodiscuss

Any practical UBI will require a large increase in taxes. If this isn't an income tax, it will be a payroll or sales tax, which both have a similar effect. A UBI pilot needs to model that tax just as much as the actual money transfer. If a practical UBI system contains a "massive disincentive to work", a model of such a system should contain this as well.

syrrim

6 years agodiscuss

How do you expect UBI to be funded? Either taxes or wars, and we haven't invested very much in our army.

syrrim

7 years agodiscuss

There are good boards on 8ch too. Probably more, considering anyone can make a board.

syrrim

7 years agodiscuss

>abortions are not "universally understood to be reprehensible".

Some abortions. Late term, say.

syrrim

8 years agodiscuss

Tiling wms support tabs and workspaces, not just tiling. Similar to how floaings wms support fullscreen and workspaces, not just floating

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