I had a pleasant experience one-shotting a dashboard on top of a library designed for building dashboards. Because everything was abstracted away, the chatbot had relatively few places it could get into the weeds. If I'd asked for the same thing from scratch, I think the result would have been more inconsistent, and would have had more bugs.
So I can definitely see the value in a library for constraining the chatbot to some well-worn paths.
The tech's there. The genie can't be put back in the bottle, and it will only get cheaper and more invasive. Only question we have any control over is... do we want everyone to have it, or only govs and corps?
There's a second-amendment-like argument here, imo, that is very hard to push back on - because at least this stuff doesn't kill people. I want every cop to be surrounded by five or six recording devices that they don't control at all times - it's the least worst option.
(Obviously I'm not a fan of the "everying goes to facebook" architecture. I'm hoping we get past that).
The tech's also been there to put cameras everywhere, and to wiretap every phone, etc. We put guardrails in place to control how that tech is deployed.
Not sarcastic, but I probably didn't convey the subtlety of what I was trying to say in a one line comment. I was objecting to the defeatist "oh the tech is there, so we can't do anything about it" attitude. I tried to choose the examples I chose that the tech being there definitely has some consequences and significant privacy implications, but some controls exist too (like, wiretaps are still applied very selectively, there's been a growing movement against Flock cameras and scaling back of their deployments in some places recently).
We can't put the genie back in the bottle, but we can control how we react to it. As far as I'm concerned, I will treat people wearing smart glasses the same way I would treat someone shoving a smartphone camera in my face. I'll just refuse to engage with them.
(I think the precise form factor is something of a distraction. I'm talking about cheap, tiny, always-on cameras hooked up to giant hard discs in the sky, however they're packaged).
Bodycams that just record video: I'm fine with that. There's a clear societal benefit to it, and if you see a uniformed police officer, you presume your actions are being witnessed (if only by the human police officer). I'm way less skeeved out by a policeman carrying a gun than some drunk rando in a bar.
Bodycams that feature face recognition: Not OK, whether it's law enforcement or some weirdo at a night club. The former, because I don't want to live in a society where police log civilians' movements. The latter, because it's creepy with civilians do it, too.
> Bodycams that feature face recognition: Not OK, whether it's law enforcement or some weirdo at a night club.
Ok, but... you know it's inevitable, right? Shops are already doing it, the first weirdo doing it at a nightclub is probably going to be the doorman (transferring the old "do not accept checks from this man" mugshots to the digital realm), I don't know about other countries but the UK police are doing it (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/police-use-of-fac...).
One of the advantages of bodycams for the police is that the people they deal with get a bit better behaved when they know they're on camera. I'm saying we should have that advantage too. (This is "an armed society is a polite society" redux - a surveilled society is a polite society?)
Check out David Brin's concept of the Transparent Society. He's been banging on about this for a couple of decades, and he's a deeper thinker and more persuasive than I am. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society
I stress I believe transparency is the least-worst option available to us, not the most desirable option.
you're implying there is some kind of symmetry here, that facial recognition will empower individuals in a way to counteract the power given to governments and corporations.
I should try to compile my own database of everyone's location? I fail to see how it helps me in any way
You as an individual? Probably not, but you could lobby your local government to, for instance, require any such dataset taken from information in the public be subject to the freedom of information act.
This is all theoretical and pie in the sky stuff, just to be blunt. People are not going to organize like this in any meaningful way. It is going to be generally just bad for society.
We have traffic/crime cams all over the place. We’ve done nothing to flip that on its head. A little minor vandalism here and there and some bad press. Why would this be any different?
That's for children. Make the Pope a certification authority, and he can certify people he trusts, and so on, until the chain reaches you. When you commit a sin, your certificate gets revoked, along with its children.
It would give the web of trust a flair of biblical damnnation, and after your fall you could always seek a new certification authority more aligned with your values, like Milei or Putin.
When a world leader dies, the tree pruning would be almost apocaliptic.
Apple does positive scripting ("I understand that must feel frustrating, I had a similar issue once, I'm going to solve your problem"), but at least I can reach a human, even if that human talks like they've been brainwashed by a cult.
My ISP has actual techies answering the phone, and their approach is more "well that's a bit crap, I can have an engineer there by Thursday". I've only needed them a couple of times in a decade, but I've been left with a mile-wide grin both times. As long as that's true, I'm a customer for life.
The last time I called Apple the phone service employee hit me with “I understand your issue as I am also a student” when I replied that I wasn’t a student he then followed it up with “Oh, neither am I”
Yeah the support is scripted and annoying a lot of the time. There's always a song and dance like having you remove your VPN (mine is split tunnel but they don't care) to verify some failure case, loading profiles, etc. - but at some point when all avenues are exhausted they will escalate to an engineer and make detailed notes, and usually follow ups which might be with another engineer usually has a full understanding of your situation. A few times they've managed to fix these issues but it can take months.
For hardware issues too it's pretty good, though I've only ever dealt with the Genius bar, and never done a mail in of the product in question.
For software I've never really seen this kind of service at scale, e.g. with Microsoft. And for hardware, it's essentially chatbots in a loop these days which I experienced with Lenovo trying to get support for a laptop that wouldn't power on (never managed to get a human to support me and gave up).
Antibiotics. Some countries limit access via doctor's prescription (this has eroded somewhat with the rise of the internet), not using them as cattle feed additives, etc.
Regulated because of the common good, even though there is money to be made selling them OTC as cold remedies or whatever.
If my school's library had had Machine Code for Beginners, my career might have been very different. (I'm actually a bit annoyed; I didn't know that existed).
> If my school's library had had Machine Code for Beginners, my career might have been very different. (I'm actually a bit annoyed; I didn't know that existed).
It's actually very good. I remember reading it at age 11 or so, and coming away knowing much more low-level stuff about computers than even the 18yo in the final year of school who were literally studying the stuff.
Things like "each instruction is a number", and registers like the PC, overflow, etc.
I went through a period (and a forest of pages) trying to write an entire game in machine code alone (with a small basic shim to load it).
Same with me. As a 12yr old I failed learning Z80 on my spectrum with the one book I could find. I had a bunch of other Usborne BASIC books, but their machine code book(s) would've been the link I needed to bridge the gap to where I could understand other material.
There was a great story about a helicopter a couple of years ago and the author was basically hounded out of the SFF community. These days, for anything that's written it seems like there's a specially tailored mob waiting to pounce on it. Very hard to go pearl fishing in your own psyche in that environment - best to get a sensitivity reader instead, I wouldn't want to dip my toe in such toxic waters.
So I can definitely see the value in a library for constraining the chatbot to some well-worn paths.
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