I disconnected my Roomba from the network right after programming its schedule. It still works great, following the same schedule for 7 years.
I recently bought a cheap Chinese roomba clone. It comes with a remote control so you don't need to connect it to the internet. I do have to press a button to start it but it works great.
If you care about your privacy, choose products appropriately and/or take 5 minutes to protect yourself. Most people don't seem to care, which is their choice.
> Most people don't seem to care, which is their choice.
Most people don't have the required knowledge to make an educated decision about whether to care. In fact, most people are not even aware of the question, let alone have the knowledge, let alone caring, let alone making a choice.
It's almost impossible to navigate parking garages if two such trucks park opposite each other. Or if one parks on an end that people need to navigate around.
People spend insane amounts of money buying these monstrosities too. It seems as a society we've normalized spending a year's salary on a vehicle, or rather getting a 7-year loan and making crazy monthly payments. I don't understand it. My then normal-sized, now smallish, 13-year old car, that I paid off 11 years ago, still runs great and I can park it easily.
> People spend insane amounts of money buying these monstrosities too
This is also another part of the whole truck-craze in the US that I do not understand. An F150, for example, starts around $40,000 USD for base models, not including taxes and hidden fees. I purchased my car (an HEV, mind you) back in 2019 for just over half that price, spend about $500 annually on regular maintenance that I'm not able to do myself to keep things tip top, and spend about half as much in fuel as my coworkers who travel about the same amount as me for our jobs. Accounting regularly double-checks that I turned in all my fuel receipts because they still don't quite grasp that my car gets far, far better gas mileage.
All that said, these guys make about the same money I do, some a little less since they're newbies, which is to say we are all very underpaid for what we do, wealthy by no standards. And yet, they made these massive purchases while struggling to pay bills or complaining that fuel is too expensive at the pump, etc. These are the same people who buy two paychecks worth of fireworks every July 4th just to watch it all burn in 15 minutes.
Makes me think part of our cultural identity includes regularly acting against our own interests.
> Who cares, insurance probably covers some or all of it
Exactly, this is why vision "insurance" is basically a scam, supported only by US tax laws that enable employers to offer vision "insurance" tax-free, while people buying their own eyeglasses have to pay with after-tax dollars.
Except where insanely inflated, glasses cost at most tens of dollars. Certainly not the kind of thing one needs insurance to cover.
The ICC sanctions are politically unpopular in Europe, whereas the Russia sanctions are popular in Europe. But the email account was not closed simply "at the request of Trump." Companies face serious consequences if they do business with sanctioned persons or entities - that's what makes sanctions work.
Agreed that the sanctions aspect is an important part here. But the sanctions are only for the personal and partisan benefits of President Trump, there was no benefit to the United States here.
The tariffs in your second link are not sanctions, and in fact the President levying tariffs as a normal course of business is illegal and unconstitutional in the United States. But it's a good example of the lawlessness of the current President, and his grabs at more power in an attempt to become a tyrant.
> But the email account was not closed simply "at the request of Trump."
Yes, it absolutely was closed at the request of Trump, via sanctions. That's the entire point. The President of the United States can and will target anybody he does not like for whatever minor reason crosses his mind on a random afternoon. That makes it risky to engage in any sort of long-term transaction with a US company.
My company avoids most of the "cloud" hype. We've found it more cost effective to self-host our internal services, plus it gives us more control over our configurations and data. We don't need 24/7 guaranteed up-time; we have occasional hiccups and resolve them in minutes or hours.
But communications within and outside of the company is so vital, that email is the one thing we outsource to the cloud.
Exactly. In a saner world, we could use fallible AI to call attention to possible concerns that a human could then analyze and make an appropriate judgment call on.
But alas, we don't live in that world. We live in a world where there will be firings, civil, and even criminal liability for those who make wrong judgments. If the AI says "possible gun", the human running things who alerts a SWAT team faces all upside and no downside.
Hmm, maybe this generation's version of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" will become "nobody ever got fired for doing what the AI told them to do." Maybe humanity is doomed after all.
I can't say that I think it would be a saner world to have the equivalent of a teacher or hall monitor sitting in on every conversation, even if that computer chaperone isn't going to automatically involve the cops. I don't think you can build a better society where everyone is expected to speak and behave defensively in every circumstance as if their words could be taken out of context by a snitch - computer or otherwise.
Absolutely agree, constant surveillance is something we have too much of already.
My thought when posting was, if the schools already have surveillance cameras that human security guards are watching, adding an AI to alert them to items of interest alone wasn't bad. But maybe you've changed my mind. The AI pays more invasive attention to every stream. Whereas a guard may be watching 16 feeds at once and barely be paying attention, and no one may ever even view the feed unless a crime occurs and they go looking for evidence.
Regardless this setup was way worse! The article said the AI:
> ... scans existing surveillance footage and alerts police in real time when it detects what it believes to be a weapon.
Wow, the system was designed with no human in the loop - it automatically summons armed police!
There is still liability there and it should be even higher when the decisions to implement so callously bad processes. Doubly so since this has demonstrably happened once.
>we could use fallible AI to call attention to possible concerns that a human could then analyze and make an appropriate judgment call on
That "we could" is doing some very heavy lifting. But even if we pretend it's remotely feasible, do we want to take an institution that already trains submission to authority and use it to normalize ubiquitous "for your own good" surveillance?
Not to mention that the human in question can either accept responsibility for letting a weapon into a school, or "pass that liability on to the police". What do you think they'll do?
At least the current moment, the increasing turn to using autonomous weaponry against one’s citizens - I don’t think it says so much about humanity so much as the US. I think US foreign policy is a disaster but turning the AI-powered military against the citizenry does look like it’s going to be quite successful, presumably because the US leadership is fighting an enemy incapable of defending itself. I think it’s unsustainable though economically speaking. AI won’t actually create value once it’s a commodity itself (since a true commodity has its value baked into its price). Rates of profit will continue to fall. The ruling class will become increasingly desperate in its search for growth. Eventually an economy that resorts to techno-fascism implodes. (Not before things turning quite ugly of course.)
Actually China is far further along in "turning autonomous weaponry against one's citizens" than the US is. Ubiquitous surveillance and "social credit score" have been expanding in China since the early 2000s.
In fact one might say that what the communist parties did in the 1910s was pretty much that. Ubiquitous surveillance is the problem here, not AI. Communist states used tens of thousands of "agents" that would just walk around, listen in to random conversations, and arrest (and later torture and deport) people. Of course communist states that still exist, like China, have started using AI to do this, but it is nothing new for China and it's people.
And, of course, what these communist states are doing is protecting the rich and powerful in society, and enforcing their "vision", using far more oppressive means than even the GOP dares to dream about. Including against "socialist causes", like LGBTQ. For starters, using state violence against people for merely talking about problems, for example.
But a false dichotomy isn’t it? Authoritarian communist vs techno-fascist?
> far more oppressive means than even the GOP dares to dream about
That seems to be exactly what they are dreaming about. Something like China’s authoritarianism minus the wise stewardship of the economy, plus killer drones,
Yes! I'm disappointed I had to scroll down so far to see this. The CNN headline isn't even accurate. The actual NASA statement is:
> "I’m going to open up the contract. I’m going to let other space companies compete with SpaceX."
SpaceX is behind schedule, but still years ahead of its competitors. No one is even in the same ballpark on the main metric that ultimately matters: dollars per kilogram to orbit. The main effect of this NASA statement, or of NASA sending a few dollars to SpaceX's competitors, is to give SpaceX a kick in the pants.
There seem to be massive differences between the two. Per the article, the Swiss system:
> People can use it to identify themselves to authorities and businesses... Use of the e-ID is voluntary
Whereas in the UK, Starmer proudly proclaimed that the "right to work" in the UK would require this ditigal ID, which is a rather creative use of the word "right".
I recently bought a cheap Chinese roomba clone. It comes with a remote control so you don't need to connect it to the internet. I do have to press a button to start it but it works great.
If you care about your privacy, choose products appropriately and/or take 5 minutes to protect yourself. Most people don't seem to care, which is their choice.
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