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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • People aren’t misunderstanding the issue. Third party cookie support is being dropped by all browsers. Chrome is also dropping them, but replacing them with topics. Sure, topics is less invasive than third party cookies, but it is still more invasive than the obvious user friendly approach of not having an invasive tracker built into your browser. No other major browser vendor is considering supporting topics. So they’re doing an objectively user unfriendly thing here. This is the shit that happens when the world’s largest internet advertising company also controls the browser.







  • someone playing music on their phone though the car audio (super common now) tapping the phone to ignore a call is just as much a crime as texting a novel to an ex.

    They are all crimes. Set up your music before you go, or use voice command. Ignore the call with voice command or just let it go to voicemail. Lol. It’s not hard.

    And you are kidding yourself if you think almost every person driving for a living is not at some level forced to use their phone by their company (I was)

    This is a great of the strength of this system: this company will find its drivers and vehicles getting ticketed a lot, and they’ll have to come up with a way to allow drivers to do their jobs without interacting with their phones will moving at high speeds.

    I would much rather have someone pulled over when driving erratically then the person getting an automated ticket 3 weeks after mowing down a pedestrian.

    The camera doesn’t magically remove traffic enforcement humans from the road. They can still pull over the obviously drunk/erratic driver.


  • I literally watched cops driving while on their phone everyday after it was made illegal. Nothing was done, Nothing changed, they hand out tickets while breaking the same rules.

    I mean yeah, fuck the police :) Seems like we’re in agreement here.

    Might kill someone is a precrime, a issue with these tickets in this case is that without the AI camera nothing would have been seen (literally victimless). If someone crashes into anything while on their phone the chances it will be used in prosecution is low.

    Using your fucking phone while driving is the crime. This isn’t some “thought police” situation. Put the phone away, and you won’t get the ticket. It’s that simple. We don’t need to wait for a person to mow down a pedestrian in order to punish them for driving irresponsibly.

    In the same spirit, if a person gets drunk and drives home, and they don’t kill somebody – well that’s a crime and they should be punished for it.

    And if you can’t handle driving responsibly, then the privilege of driving on public roads should be revoked.

    I don’t think texting while driving is a good idea, like not wearing a seatbelt. However this is offloading a lot to AI, distracted driving is not well defined and considering the nuances I don’t want to leave any part to AI. Here is an example: eating a bowl of soup while operating a vehicle would be distracted right? What if the soup was in a cup? What if the soup was made of coffee beans?

    This is such a weird ad absurdum argument. Nobody is telling some ML system “make a judgment call on whether the coffee bean soup is a distraction.” The system is identifying people violating a cut-and-dried law: using their phone while driving, or not wearing a seatbelt. Assuming it can do it in an unbiased way (which is a huge if, to be fair), then there’s no slippery slope here.

    For what it’s worth, I do worry about ML system bias, and I do think the seatbelt enforcement is a bit silly: I personally don’t mind if a person makes a decision that will only impact their own safety. I care about the irresponsible decisions that people make affecting my safety, and I’d be glad for some unbiased enforcement of the traffic rules that protect us all.


  • I’m definitely a fan of better enforcement of traffic rules to improve safety, but using ML* systems here is fraught with issues. ML systems tend to learn the human biases that were present in their training data and continue to perpetuate them. I wouldn’t be shocked if these traffic systems, for example, disproportionately impact some racial groups. And if the ML system identifies those groups more frequently, even if the human review were unbiased (unlikely), the outcome would still be biased.

    It’s important to see good data showing these systems are fair, before they are used in the wild. I wouldn’t support a system doing this until I was confident it was unbiased.

    • it’s all machine learning - NOT artificial intelligence. No intelligence involved, just mathematical parameters “learned” by an algorithm and applied to new data.



  • It seems obvious to me. Twitter has historically been used by public figures, and especially public institutions like local governments, transit agencies, etc, to make official announcements & statements. Of course having that on a centrally owned social media site was never good, but now with Space Karen making it actively hostile to users (and trying to prevent logged out users from seeing that info), it’s very bad. The sooner Twitter completes its inevitable collapse, the sooner those public figures & institutions will move to a better way to deliver those - Mastodon, RSS, webpages, whatever.

    IMO it’s in the public’s best interest for all the holdouts to get out now so we can move on.