I did something similar. Didn’t get me banned but got me inducted into the student sysadmin group instead. My highschool generally had one kid a year who did something notable enough to become an apprentice to the IT closet wizard. The hazing ritual was to deal with the fallout: respond to all the helpdesk tickets for ‘weird message on screen’ or ‘I can’t print’, etc, and then listen to the older apprentices tell their tale.

I guess I wasn’t as clear as I could be. I was not implying all gamers had good reaction times, pattern recognition and such. What I meant was that people who play games and consider themselves gamers are generally speaking striving to play those games better, and will often build some skills to pretty significant levels. Some of those skills will be relevant to ATC work.

To your point, this is true of many hobbies or professions and any hysteria against “gamers” being targeted with an ATC ad campaign is dumb.

And… also… Have you seen gamers?

The comments here seem somewhat strange to me for what is likely to be a “gamer” heavy demographic. There’s a lot of ‘I should stop flying’ or otherwise implying that people who, having games as their preferred hobby, will be bad at this. Instead, gamers tend to get really good at a few specific skills such as reaction times, pattern recognition, strategy and min/maxing, etc.

About the only thing I could think making this better would be to select for speedrunners.

That way we get livestreams for APLS - Awesome Planes Landed Safely - and also raise some money for a charity or two.

I think the best use case for AI is the initial search phase. Using AI to create news articles, code, music, videos, etc is just slop. But asking a question and getting a starting place can be helpful. I consider AI to be the modern version of the search engine.

Just be very aware that these models make shit up all the time. So asking a factual question needs to be reviewed before trusting the answer. Otherwise you get those glue pizzas.

The catalyst there is businesses (and to a degree governments).

I used to pay attention to my physical mail. Then it was all “junk mail” and the signal-to-noise ratio got hard to manage.

I migrated the important stuff to “electronic mail”, where I had a curated list of people and entities that sent me items, so I could focus on things that were important. Then my address/mailbox became common knowledge and that filled with “spam”.

I started using SMS/text for the important stuff. But that also became a common place to send me stuff I didn’t care about, so I used specific apps on my phone that had permission to notify me when something needed attention, and now my phone gives me so many notifications I just ignore them all.

Our attention is the prize, and it won’t matter where our attention goes: The businesses will follow.

The same will hold true for connectivity. If the current internet becomes a wasteland and we migrate to Mesh, then it’s only a matter of time before corporate interests take that over too; then knitted, or fabric, or the glob.

The solution will be protections for personal identity and privacy, which have been and will be fought tooth-and-nail by the companies because they want that info so they can be where our attention is so they can make profit. I think we can also fight the profit motive, but that’ll be harder than getting protections in law… so small steps.

Honestly curious: I’m not a battery or even energy person, but this is interesting.

The charge/discharge efficiencies and rates could just mean we build networks of mixed types? “Trickle” charge/discharge via a slower battery that handles more cycles and is probably way cheaper to build (that’s the premise of Na+, right?), but have those batteries back up a more expensive high-rate bank for when power is needed in a burst? Probably a switching problem at that point, which I imagine we already deal with having solar/hydro/fossil/etc.

A Na+ bank sized to handle regular use and charge a Lithium bank when underused so that one is ready for spikes seems like a way to go.

Please and Thank You.

I want better for us, and I’m fighting for it, but I have very limited personal power to enact change.

The way “we” looked at those “third-world” countries when I was a child feels like how everyone should be looking at us. Our squalor is not that of unclean water (but that is still true in places) or of systemic violence by the government (but that is still true in places) or of lack of reliable food (but that is still true in places). We have cellphones and internet, cars and roads, and air-conditioning, so we should be happy.

Our squalor is in the apathy and even antipathy a bulk of our fellow citizens have towards others.

The fix is education and awareness, but the means of enacting it have been hijacked. How do I reach someone on the west coast to be kind when I can’t touch them from the east coast?

There was a post recently, and I’ll link it if I can find it again, about Kevin and his truck, and how helping others builds community. Very wholesome. Community has been lost here outside of the uber-wealthy (they all know each other), or the “poor” who need it to survive. The “middle class” has lost the plot.

There’s nothing sweeter than the pain of catching up…

The large section is also just a low effort version. I’m sure this could have been inserted instead as a collapsed section, a comment, document metadata, .1 sized font, Alt text on a single pixel image, or any number of other ways to disguise the prompt.

It’s an arms race for defenders, and even someone paying attention might not notice. Not to mention, you don’t even have to open the document. If it’s in a SharePoint library, or attached to an email, there’s a good chance it’s in scope for whatever random ‘assistance’ copilot will attempt automatically

Had this stock started being included in normal people’s 401ks or pensions yet?

Some of my meager wealth is in that kind of place. And while I want nothing to do with SpaceX, I think it will be forced on me soon. I only get the choice of vanguard x, y or z.

That was my understanding of the long term scheme, and the goal of the various rule changes allowing this stock to be included in indexes early.

I think you missed my point.

• We conflate Privacy with Anonymity. I have no expectation of privacy in public, but this is another nail in the coffin for anonymity ; and I used to have an expectation of anonymity.

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When I grew up, I could roam the local mall without an expectation that I was being recorded in perpetuity. My movements were recorded, sure, but stored for only as long as needed to prevent shoplifting or other criminal activity. I was anonymous unless there was a reason to look into my actions.

This is a not a new thing and I doubt you ever complained about being caught on countless CCTVs before.

CCTV is <100 years old and I’m rapidly approaching half that. CCTV was a shoplifting deterrent when I was a youth. Now it’s a weapon and it’s no longer CC.

Modern cloud-based video storage is no longer owned and operated by a single business or person. It’s all Amazon or Microslop or Meta and they will happily sell access to law enforcement or palantir or probably anyone who asks with a large enough check.

Anonymity is the ability to be a nobody. In the 90’s, we could expect that we were nobodies unless we did something worth noting. Recordings of us were ephemeral and irrelevant; overwritten next week.

Now they will be forever, and machine learning, face recognition, and processing power to correlate multiple data sources means that things you do today can be used against you in 30 years. I hope you can see that.

It’s not really the glasses themselves that worries me, it’s the rest of the tech stack. The glasses just add new vectors to the problem.

The real issue in my mind is privacy and autonomy. I want to be able to walk around without the expectation that I’m recorded. I’m male and don’t have the same the impact from the creep-factor, and absolutely get it, but the implications are larger than dudes looking at women.

Big difference from a “I am in public and can be recorded” to a “I am in public and I should expect to be recorded”. Another big step to "that recording is on a mega-corp server and can be viewed, reviewed, used as training data, cross-referenced, and otherwise processed without my consent because the person recording me consented; I really think this is the the crux, as I can have a tacit approval to be recorded by walking to a store, but I haven’t given any approval for my likeness, my position, my emotions, etc to be recorded by walking down a street. A TV show using unsuspecting public will get people to sign waivers granting limited rights to their footage afterwards, or blur faces – or did – before retaining and publishing.

I walk into a grocery store and I can expect that they have a CCTV (note the CLOSED CIRCUIT part) system to be able to review what happened in the case of a robbery or whatever. The tech of my childhood meant that the store had a stack of VHS tapes, or maybe DVD/HD/SSD that rotated and could hold (lets way exaggerate) a decade of footage. A decade after I left the store, there was no record I was there – maybe a receipt if I used a card, but I don’t actually know the PCI retention requirements. With cheap storage and 3rd-party cloud-hosted camera systems, the business no longer owns the records of my presence, and has only a data retention ‘agreement’ with the provider. I didn’t agree to my footage being used for any purpose other than the one implicit for safety/loss-prevention by visiting the store. Any use beyond that should be unreasonable search and seizure, but it’s not being done by the government, so isn’t illegal or something I could sue over.

Very similar situation to Flock/generic-ALPR-esq cameras. The trend used to be that unless you were somehow a person-of-note that you had effective anonymity in public: It took resources to monitor an individual’s movements, facial expressions, actions, etc. It no longer does, and so all this is effectively captured and stored in perpetuity. The real problem is that it’s everywhere. Good luck finding a grocery store that doesn’t have some cloud-provider surveillance. Good luck finding a gas station that doesn’t. Good luck even driving to a specific store that isn’t recording you constantly because you pass several cameras on the way and some are specifically designed to track your movements.

Bringing it home to the current topic of ‘smart’ glasses. I haven’t consented to being recorded by random person walking down the street with Meta’s camera on their face. Meta has no ethical rights to my “content”, regardless of whether the owner of the glasses has agreed to give Meta a license to their video as part of setting up the glasses. Ethical vs Legal, but we can keep pushing back.

I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but this shit is pervasive and won’t stop until we force it.

I think this might be a good ground-roots way to sell the idea of privacy to folks that don’t get it.

Buy a cheap phone case or old phone or something that you can have destroyed by an angry recordee.

Walk around in public, obviously holding your recording device out, it doesn’t need to be on or actually recording, just the visibility.

Have a sticker on it saying “Ask me about privacy” or something, with a plan to point out the less obvious cameras if anyone does.

For bonus points, target some people who aren’t normally aware, like older white men, and help them to understand that it’s uncomfortable to be obviously recorded, but that they don’t notice when they are “surveilled.”

IANAL, I don’t think there’s any risk other than violence from the recipients, but they’re in public after all.

1 person doing this is annoying, 1k people doing this will be notable, 1m will kill public-facing-cloud-storage cameras and their ecosystems. Anyone want to help organize a flash mob to spend a few hours doing this in a city’s downtown?