Yeah, a symptom of late stage capitalism that large companies no longer compete by improving their product or service, but by manipulating the regulatory environment and/or competition, through collusion, legal attacks, or acquisition. It’s much less risky of an investment for larger companies post-mass-consolidation.
Yeah and it’s not that I’m blaming the workers, far from it. The issue is the contractors create such strick timelines and quotas so they can pay them as little as possible that they don’t have time to do any of the stuff that government workers did have time for a couple of decades ago. If the companies are going to hold homeowners responsible for so many nitpicky things so they can charge them more, then they better hold themselves as responsible and do the full job that we pay for through taxes and garbage bills.
Then they better freaking make the garbage contractors do the rest of their job, not just the pickups, but also keeping things tidy. They make and leave behind such a mess. When they used to be government employees they were actually “sanitation workers” and responsible for more than just collection, or at least would clean up the messes they made and were sure to fully empty the bins every time.
I’m not going to subscribe to read the article, but I’d be willing to bet they’ll just replace then with another, just as bad company like other cities have done. Flock will likely eventually buy up those companies and rename themselves once the media loses interest. That’s how it usually goes.
Yeah, but it’s nothing new. VCs have been used for nefarious purposes for ages. For example, there are documentaries about how they’re often used by competing companies to buy up a company that’s foundering (sometimes due to the actions of said competitors), split off a few valuable assets to give to the competing company, and dump the rest onto taxpayers to deal with in bankruptcy.
So, sure, these are another example of how the VC process is being used nefariously against the original purpose of such organizations, but they aren’t small exceptions to the rule. The system was always designed to do these nefarious things under the guise of “investment”. Without an overhaul so that these organizations are legally required to show how they use their money so that both investors and the public are able to see it, it’s not corruption of a process, it’s standard use of a process designed, in part, to mask corruption.
Yeah, “AI” is not intelligent enough to even come close to being able to recognize a problematic situation. Just like smart glasses have people doing a lot of the work behind what the glasses recognize or airport xray scanners have a person likely in another country looking at your fully naked bodies to indicate to the security people to let you go or do further patdowns. None of that kind of stuff is automated. Software developers to design that are way too expensive in the short term than hiring actual people at very low pay.
There are good use cases for swap. I work with very performance sensitive memory hogging applications that tend to process in bursts as incoming batched data arrives. We also have a lot of required background “security” applications.
Having the idle applications move out to swap so that a significant amount of free RAM to allow for the active, real-time applications to expand into is a major boon. RAM is expensive now, so it’s become even more critical to not waste it.
But even in self-hosting at home I take advantage of it since I have a limited number of servers with limited RAM and a bunch of applications and/or docker containers running, many of which don’t need to be active at all times, but if they were all active, would have trouble with the limited RAM. Swap allows for inactive applications to free up RAM for the active ones and leave enough available at all times to allow an application to quickly spin up new jobs.
Anyway, sure, for a simple desktop computer without a bunch of junk background applications running for “security” or whatever, and an overabundance of RAM installed, it’s probably not useful. But for high performance, memory hungry applications with lots of background stuff running, it can be a big help.
That said, there are use cases where the opposite is useful and using a RAM drive is better than writing to disk for cache and temporary logs when you have enough RAM. My opnsense router for instance uses a RAM drive to store cache and logs (logs are mirrored to the NAS for long term storage, so just the local copy is lost on reboot). That system has enough RAM and I’d rather reduce disk wear, and I don’t plan to add too many other applications to that server that it would run low.
Yeah, need to find a way to go after the government to stop using the tech rather than going after a single company. Eventually, Flock will just go bankrupt, the pieces will get bought up and either sold to a competitor or the VC that buys them will change the name and start a new company that’s basically the same and the executives from Flock will join that or go to competitors. There’s not much use attacking a single company these days. But it is good that attention is being brought to the technology in use and how the government is using it.
I know generally what alistral is, but I’ve never uses it. What does the "sex’ command do or what’s the joke about it? The description is blank in the documentation and I’m too exhausted from work to dig into the code repo, lol.
I mean all of their products are subscription based and this is only a 1 year subscription. They’re just giving away a free trial to open up a new market is all. Not really big news. If they were making it free for the life of the product, that might be a bigger deal.
But yeah, also F*** the SA government.
Wish my company held off. So few with any experience left and “AI” not only isn’t going to replace an experienced engineer, only junior ones really, but the things I work on are proprietary and so “AI” has no way to understand them much less interact with them or deal with the proprietary devops, upgrades, migrations, etc. There’s basically 4 people left doing the jobs that used to belong to 20. Sure “AI” is a useful timesaver oncenin a while, but it can’t replace thinking, actually intelligent people, much less all of their experience that’s not documented anywhere for “AI” to even learn it.
Yeah and when teachers or employers use it to reject things outright, it’s really dumb. But if it’s presented as a probability to the user rather than a binary like most LLM results are presented to users, then it is useful. If something has a high probability of being LLM generated then it can cast suspicion and investigation can happen. Unlike how things like facial recognition are used to prove guilt without any investigation when the probability of a match is low, but no better matches were found and the police aren’t told it’s low probability because then the product would look useless in solving crimes for them which is what they want in a product, not an investigation tool. That’s not what they were sold.
Point being. It’s a tool. It’s a metric. And used as such it can be helpful if all of a developer’s contributions get flagged as high probability, then looking more closely at the code can be warranted. Though if LLMs themselves were configured to tell the user how probable that their answer is correct, it might not even be an issue needing investigation. It’s not the malicious ones that they’re looking to stop with these policies. It’s those unwittingly submitting bad LLM generated code with serious consequences. Like all those destructive things that happened at Amazon (and others I’m sure, just Amazon was in the news) when they started replacing senior developers with cheap contractors armed with LLMs and no experience. Even my company has been doing it. It sucks all that we’ve lost and how bad things have gotten.
There are “signatures” that can be detected in code just like universities detect it in student work, online stores detect it in reviews they compensate people for, and some employers detect it in resumes and cover letters. It’s bland, just like when it tells you to remove colorful phrases or adjectives that add emphasis from your text in an email. Things like that.
That said it doesn’t detect it all, and it does rely on the developer to be honest. But it’s also a good indicator when reviewers post questions to the developer and they can’t answer them because they don’t understand the code and things like that. Also, if the developer did not follow coding standards, which LLMs can sometimes have trouble with. And there’s always been malicious code submissions in open source software, so there are other ways.
Anyway, it’s more of a policy discussion at this point, and why LLM generated code is bad. I use them for manipulating data, figuring out syntax, and getting examples, but there are always problems with anything they generate, so I never would allow one to write any production bound code. I see use in the technology, but it’s not creative and it doesn’t understand what it’s writing so it can’t write code with consequences in mind. So it can write Jr level code, but not solid code, at least not without being properly trained on only well written code, and that proper training would be too expensive for an LLM company to actually do it.
Yeah, gotta keep your employees poor so they can’t afford to leave no matter how badly they’re treated.
Too bad LLM “AI” can’t pick up the slack which is the whole reason it was still around and so active.
Oh, yeah, but at least the courts would intervene back then. Now many of the courts have been corrupted and the ones that haven’t are bound by precedent which the supreme court no longer obeys and courts above them that are corrupted. So these specific interpretations are becoming more and more common and not just against poor people who can’t afford lawyers.
I got a smart TV because the dumb ones were more expensive. But I’d never do that with a monitor. A monitor is not meant to be interacted with directly. Just display what the computer says to display. The computer is all that should be running software besides basic firmware for adjusting overall settings like brightness and contrast which computer OSes don’t have enough information to do most of the time. But that’s it.
The current administration has stated that even for US Citizens, border entry suspends all constitutional rights. They’ve also said they believe this applies to allow warrantless searches within 100 miles of a border, which includes most major US cities, thus allowing ICE to search and kidnap basically anyone, not just immigrants. And they have stated that searching an electronic device is not a “search” as mentioned in the 4th Amendment and so you can’t refuse to unlock the device or “destroy evidence”. And that once you give them that access, that you have also “freely given” them access to your private social media, bank, etc., records and so those no longer require a warrant to access. And it’s “gun to the head” tactics because they also believe they can detain you indefinitely in the 100 mile zone without a lawyer or any other usual rights, because you aren’t being arrested, just an extended interview or whatever they call it. All in the name of terrorism prevention, of course.
Since they have corrupted the Supreme Court, this has been mostly upheld in various court cases so far. But any legal scholar will tell you it’s nonsense. But that doesn’t matter to authoritarians. They don’t work within the law.
Disclosure isn’t “cracking down”. I think it’s becoming common knowledge anyway or the FTC would never even go that far, especially the current administration.
…on purpose. The current administration and companies that control most politicians, are heavily funded by or invested in the oil industry.