Conferences are a long-lead-time project. The contract described here was signed in July 2023 - 2 years 9 months before the event date. Even if it was possible to setup a new event, the current contract would not be nullified.
Additionally, the Python Software Foundation is a US Based Nonprofit - spending money outside of the Country is generally more difficult than in-country. PyCon was held in Canada in 2014/2015; and there are apparently many smaller local PyCon events.
There is enormous variability in how hard a tool is to use correctly, how likely it is to go wrong, and how severe the consequences are. AI has a wide range on all those variables because its use cases vary so widely compared to a hammer.
The use case here is police facial recognition. Not hitting nails. The parent wasn't saying "AI is a liability" with no context.
When somebody uses a tool to hurt somebody, they need to be held accountable. If I smack you with a hammer, that needs to be prosecuted. Using AI is no different.
The problem here is incidental to the tool; it was done by the cops and therefore nobody will be held accountable.
Systems are also a tool. Whoever institutes and helps build the system that systematically results in harm is also responsible.
That would be the vendors, the system planners, and the institutions that greenlit this. It would also include the larger financial tech circle that is trying to drive large scale AI adoption. Like Peter Thiel, who sees technology as an "alternative to politics". I.e. a way to circumvent democracy [1]
Nonsense. The manufacturer, distributor, and vendor of a hammer are not liable for its misuse. We already litigated and then legislated this regarding guns in the US.
As much as I detest Clearview and Thiel the fault for this incident falls squarely on the justice system.
Your first paragraph conflates the system with the tool. Please at least parse what I wrote before you respond.
You are also conflating legality and morality. The US gun industry being good at lobbying has no bearing on whether an industry that enables mass school shootings is accountable or not. I mean it clearly is. Just compare gun deaths in the US to any civilized nation and you'll see that gun control is the moral and sane approach.
A hammer/gun is not the same as the wider hammer/gun industrial system, and the societal systems it is a part of. The justice system is a part of that. So even though you say you disagree, somehow you still agree?
> Your first paragraph conflates the system with the tool.
No, it responds to the claim you made. You asserted that systems are also tools and attributed fault on that basis. Perhaps at least reread your own comment before condescending.
> You are also conflating legality and morality.
Also incorrect. I understood you to be claiming tool vendors to bear both legal and moral responsibility; perhaps I misunderstood. Regardless, my position is that tool vendors bear neither of those more or less unconditionally. The only way a tool vendor can become responsible in any sense (IMO) is if they knowingly and intentionally facilitate a particular outcome. The manufacturer of a hammer, gun, or AI facial recognition system is never at fault for what the user does with it unless they actively encouraged that particular use.
This tool, however, is specifically built for mass surveillance. It serves no other purpose. The tool is broken, and everybody knows it. The tool makers are at least as guilty as those who use it.
The tool is unethical, not broken. And unfortunately remains legal for the time being. To that end it's a social or political problem that can be fixed.
Yes. But doing the investigation negates much of the incentive for using AI.
Look for similar to play out elsewhere --- using unreliable tools for decision making is not a good, responsible business plan. And lawyers are just waiting to press the point.
In this case it sounds as though AI could have been used to generate preliminary leads. When someone calls a tip line with information, police don’t just take their word for it, they investigate it. They know that tips they receive may be incorrect. They should have done the exact same here, but they didn’t.
I’m very opposed to AI in general, but this one is clearly human failure.
The noteworthy AI angle is the undeserved credence police gave to AI information. But that is ultimately their failure; they should be investigating all information they receive.
The failure starts with tool vendors who market these statistical/probabilistic pattern searchers as "intelligent". The Fargo police failed to fully evaluate these marketing claims before applying them to their work.
So in the same way that the failure rolled down hill, liability needs to roll back up.
The article says that the Fargo police claimed to have done "additional investigative steps independent of AI". (Perhaps they're lying, or did a poor job because they thought the extra steps were a formality.)
Given the actual outcome it’s hard to imagine what they actually did. It would be less embarrassing for them if they had said they did no additional investigating.
It's not even the right question, really. If they found some crazy coincidence that genuinely seemed to corroborate the identification, it's still not OK that this woman was dragged across the country. They rightly identify that the initial AI scan was wrong to do even if everything that followed was by the book. Our law enforcement processes were developed in a context where this kind of error was much harder because there was no routine way to scan every person in the United States for people who look like your suspect.
Look, I'm generally considered AI's most vociferous detractor.
But...
> there is no way to tell if you are using it "correctly".
This simply isn't true, at least in cases like this.
I know common sense isn't really all that common, but why would you give more credence to an untested tool than an untested crack-addled human informant?
The entire point of the informant, or the AI in this instance, is to generate leads. Which subsequently need to be checked.
We will find out. But relying on AI is likely to cost the city of Fargo in one way or another. They say they have already stopped using AI and returned to good old fashioned human investigation.
What kind of outcome results from misuse? Clearly a hammer's misuse has very little in common with a global, hivemind network used in high-stake campaigns.
Now, if I misused a hammer and it hurt everyone's thumb in my country, then maybe what you said would have some merit.
Otherwise, I'd say it's an extremely lazy argument
AFAIK the actual cause for our high incarceration rate is that we have longer sentences. The conviction rate, for example, as compared to the UK is similar.
Inversely I leased a Fiat 500e for a year in Detroit Michigan and had no issues with range ~130 miles. I would plug it in nightly as I had a level 2 charger installed at my house.
The experiment was quite successful. I just didn’t like front wheel drive on somedays with heavy snow.
I used it for commuting to work, buying groceries and visiting friends nearby. It met my needs and I feel a slightly bigger car with 4 doors and 200-250 mile range should be sufficient for most of the people (assuming it is affordable)
It's not a prerequisite: I see lots of people plugging their cars at public chargers in my residential area; I assume they charge once a week while doing groceries or dining out.
And being in your car doing nothing waiting for the charge for 25mn is frustrating. Even more so when it’s the height of summer (and that was in a car where the AC didn’t block charging).
If you can time it with some errands it’s less of a hassle, but that was one of the main non-car annoyances with my EV rental (the other was the flakiness / unreliability of getting a charging session to start).
I only use public fast charging when on a long road trip. So the 30 min charge always coïncides with me emptying my bladder, so it's never been a hassle.
As I wrote, this was a rental, there was no charger where I was and no mains adapter provided with the car, so my options were fast charger or pushing the thing.
And even during long legs I don’t need to piss for 30mn every two hours.
I charge my car with the granny charger dangling out the window next to where I park. Been doing so for 2 years now. I have some high density foam packed in the window crack to keep the cold out. Im in Ireland.
My friend has had one for about 6 years and put about 40,000 miles on his. Then one day some battery control module died. Now the car is a brick, and isn't worth fixing. The whole battery has to come out to get to the module, and it's possible that the battery itself is still bad. But we won't know until the module is replaced... which means putting the battery back into the car before knowing it's condition.
Shouldn't that still be covered under the battery warranty?
Related: The problem I have with Fiat is that there's an obvious step to combat the impression of poor reliability/durability: Increase the standard warranty. If Fiat declines to increase the standard warranty, the impression is even worse — it's that they're not increasing the warranty because it isn't financially viable for them to do so, because the reliability is bad and that Fiat can't afford to warranty the cars past 3 years. Compare to e.g. Hyundai with a 10-year/100k-mile powertrain and 5-year/60k-mile general in the USA.
Also related: I'm in Canada but looked up Hyundai's USA warranty there just to give more-broadly-applicable numbers. It seems that Fiat's warranty in the US is actually better than in Canada, where it just seems comically low — other than for the high-voltage battery the Fiat 500e new vehicle warranty is lesser of 3-years/37k miles.
>Compare to e.g. Hyundai with a 10-year/100k-mile powertrain and 5-year/60k-mile general in the USA.
Most cars are sold by the first owner between 30,000 and 60,000 miles. Hyundai's warranty is cut in half for the second owner, 5/50k powertrain and 2.5/30k general. There's nothing to cover, so it's basically free to put 10/100k in all of the commercials.
Ice car engines also sometimes grenade themselves for no reason sometimes. Same story: too expensive to fix and on cheaper cars that means a write off.
Lithium batteries are highly recyclable, so is all the copper in the motor. I can promise you that fiat will never en on a landfill battery and all.
And fake meat is highly edible. But do many people eat fake meat? No. Do many people recycle lithium ion batteries? Also, no. Less than 5% is the current estimate for what percent of lithium ion batteries is recycled.
I'm curious where you got those numbers from. I did a quick search and find wildly different numbers (depending on method and source, from ~60% to >98%).
However I don't find anywhere claiming anywhere near <5%. Can you back that up?
Example source of manufacturers claiming >95% [0].
This is probably because it's not economical to recycle lithium ion batteries, certainly not for the lithium itself. Lithium is an extremely abundant element. If this ever stopped being the case, or if there are other battery components that were scarce enough to make batteries economical to recycle, we'd start doing that.
There's no virtue in recycling equipment for recycling's sake alone, we do it in exactly the situations where some raw material in the equipment is expensive enough to justify the cost of the recycling process.
Anything at all is recyclable if you're willing to spend enough money on the recycling process. If the raw materials of that thing are cheaper to get from nature than they are to get by recycling old versions of the item, then this is a good sign that it's not worth recycling the item and therefore we shouldn't do it.
We couldn’t find a commercial jet (MH370). Both, while it was still flying in the air and after it was presumably lost in the ocean.
They couldn’t track it in the air nor can they still find its remains after looking for it for so long. This problem is not trivial.
A commercial jet is both way smaller and faster moving than an aircraft carrier. I suspect this is like saying: why can’t you see the fly in the photo, the turtle is right there!
There's a nonzero chance military intelligence agencies of multiple countries know exactly where that plane fell, but none can say anything, because that would reveal the true extent of their capabilities.
They could just feed the data to some associated outside party with some other plausible explanation. But, there are only a few, maybe two countries, with the ability and desire to have listening stations all over the ocean, and neither one is particularly interested in the Indian ocean.
They don't normally go that fast from what I understand. That is their top speed in reserve they can use for evasive maneuvers, they don't want to go faster than their support fleet or deal with the high maintenance running at threshold will cause.
It's like when you drive your car you're not normally redlining it since that will kill the engine if you do it all the time.
Surprisingly, it is much easier to find a big chunk of steel floating on the Mediterranean, knowing where it was a couple of days ago, than a smaller object disintegrated in small pieces under the Indian Ocean. Go figure.
Nobody was looking for MH370 while it was in the air. After a few hours, it rapidly became a submarine, which is a type of craft that's well known for being hard to find. In addition to that, it took on its new submersible form in one of the most remote areas of the ocean, rather than in a small and very busy sea.
Err, no. The consensus and available evidence including washed up components seems to be that it crashed in the Indian Ocean, that's the (also vast) space between ~Australia and ~Africa, bounded in the north by Indonesia, the Indian subcontinent, and Arabia. It crashed somewhere in the eastern portion, not far from Indonesia and Australia. Currents then took parts as far as the Maldives/Sri Lanka, IIRC. The Pacific is the other (eastern) side of Australia, which stretches from the Aussie-Kiwi approach to the South Pole to Alaska, and Vladivostok to Tierra del Fuego.
> Currents then took parts as far as the Maldives/Sri Lanka, IIRC
Some bits ended up on a beach of the Réunion island, closer to Madagascar than Sri Lanka. I am not disagreeing, it’s just that the whole story is fascinating. It’s easy to think "well, it just crashed into the sea so of course some bits would show up on a beach" until you look at the Indian Ocean with a proper projection and figure the scale.
Floating is a powerful physical configuration! You get currents plus windspeed. If you're in to this sort of thing, I can recommend The Seacraft of Prehistory, We: The Navigators, and Archaeology of the Boat approximately in that order.
Are you making the same point as the person you said "err, no" to, or are you correcting the inconsequential details while not addressing their main point?
Counter point. It’s always advantageous to learn and grow as things evolve. This way you have an active role and maybe a say in how it will evolve. And maybe you could contribute towards that evolution (despite poor execution openclaw showed what LLMs could be doing)
> There are a 16,000 new lives being born every hour. They're all starting with a fairly blank slate.
Not long ago we were ridiculing genZ for not knowing why save icon looks like a floppy disk.
I’ve learned a lot of stuff that don’t really benefits me right now, but now and then I encounter a situation that made me happy that I did. It may never happens for some, but at the time, I was probably happy learning it.
But there’s some stuff that I don’t bother explore in depth because my time is finite and I don’t really need it. And anything LLM tooling is probably easier than a random JS framework. Vim’s documentation is probably longer than cursor’s.
I agree with this point. There is absolutely a 'left behind' gap that is under-explored.
My last job was a cable technician - making house calls to fix wifi, satellite tv, phone issues. Mostly elderly residents. The majority of them all were computer and phone illiterate. They were slow adopters to the fast-moving technology and many of them did not know how to operate their devices after we (UI/UX/hardware/software engineer 'we') removed them.
I wonder if this also has contributed to the elderly lonliness problem - sure its probably mostly related to physical companionship, acceptance of aging, etc, but the world that they knew (in general and the technological world they grew up in) is no longer recognizable.
But maybe it doesn’t matter that much to them. I don’t know how to skin a rabbit, but that knowledge could be handy in some situations. But I don’t see myself being in that situation other than accidentally.
My mother has a phone, but only use it to call. She has never needed a computer even though I spent my teenage years glued to one. But I have like 1 percent of a skill in cooking.
Exactly. We look at older people and think “oh, look at those poor souls. They don’t know X and Y technologies and they keep doing things the old way! They must feel so left behind.” Nothing is further from the truth. My whole life I’ve lived in neighborhoods full of people 20+ years older than me and not once did I have a neighbor or friend who I thought was overwhelmed with the pace of modern life and upset about how different the world was becoming from what they are used to. This is a trope. People are resilient and adaptive, and as you get older you learn how to embrace new things that actually help and reject new things that don’t. As I get older, I find myself just not caring about a lot of things that younger people care about and not doing a lot of things they do. I don’t use social media, I still pay for things with cash and checks, I don’t understand or care about the Kardashians or reality tv. My phone is 8 years old. I listen to prog rock and new wave music, and I probably couldn’t name a single popular musical performer today (besides Taylor Swift because I have a daughter). I don’t feel even slightly “left behind” or “obsolete.”
As opposed to bills sponsored by real people that completely decimated privacy? Patriot Act?
I’ll take slop that has some semblance of reasonable privacy protection any day.
Poverty doesn’t have the luxury to choose or take moral stands. When a dollar worth oil price fluctuation can lead to thousands going hungry for a day, you as a leader will do everything to avoid catastrophic sanctions.
India agreed to capitulate on the Iranian port investments before the US-Israeli invasion, when Trump was playing the tariff games. If a growing economy can be subverted and forced to act against its interests, is it really a superpower at that point?
Guess the US Deputy Secretary was right when he stated that they'll never make the same mistakes with India that they made with China.
you can use https://nginxproxymanager.com/ to manage various services on your homelab. it works flawlessly with Tailscale - I can connect to my tailnet and simply type http://service.mylocaldomain to open the service.
you will also need adguard -> adguard dns rewrite -> *.mylocaldomain forwards to the NPM instance and NPM instance has all the information of which IP:PORT has which service
Also tailscale DNS should be configured to use adguard -> you can turnoff adblock features if it interferes with any of your stuff.
I would also suggest to use two instances of adguards - one as backup two instances of NPM.
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