I had the 7 pro for a while and then the 10 now. The cameras on those are not good. Not sure if hardware or firmware tuning is the issue, but yeah, I haven’t been happy with the quality regardless of whether I use the google camera app or others like OpenCamera. And yeah, especially concert photos which end up washed out and blurry way more that the 6 pro. And that’s with and without GrapheneOS since I used each device for a short while before the GrapheneOS was stable enough for my tastes for a daily driver. So I don’t think software or OS was the issue.

I miss my Pixel 6 Pro. Best camera I’ve ever had on a phone, especially for low light applications. Best concert photos I ever took were on that phone. It ran GrapheneOS pretty well, too.

Yeah, need to find a way to go after the government to stop using the tech rather than going after a single company. Eventually, Flock will just go bankrupt, the pieces will get bought up and either sold to a competitor or the VC that buys them will change the name and start a new company that’s basically the same and the executives from Flock will join that or go to competitors. There’s not much use attacking a single company these days. But it is good that attention is being brought to the technology in use and how the government is using it.

I know generally what alistral is, but I’ve never uses it. What does the "sex’ command do or what’s the joke about it? The description is blank in the documentation and I’m too exhausted from work to dig into the code repo, lol.

I mean all of their products are subscription based and this is only a 1 year subscription. They’re just giving away a free trial to open up a new market is all. Not really big news. If they were making it free for the life of the product, that might be a bigger deal.

But yeah, also F*** the SA government.

I’m not familiar enough with TPMS specifically, but with the general technology as I have some experience with older security card technologies that use the same techniques. There are a few issues with trying to do this at long range (even a few yards).

First you’d need extremely sensitive transceivers that would be difficult to protect from interference.

Second, it would require enough power to get the transmitter to send the signal far enough to be read. This has multiple problems. One is that, depending on the frequencies involved, you may end up creating a noticeable amount of heat or causing cancer if exposed to it for a significant amount of time. This might be more problematic for pedestrians and animals who stand between the transceiver and the cars for too long.

Next is time, again not too familiar with the specifics of TPMS, but in similar tech, it would require power to be supplied by the transceiver for sometimes as much as a half a second or so. A moving car might not be in the target zone long enough to power up the TPMS, especially on faster moving roads and highways.

What they might be able to do to mitigate this is to convince cities to embed the transceivers in the road itself or in curbs or something closer to the car. And if done at stop signs and traffic lights it would mitigate any time based issues. Though they might need to keep then far enough from any of the coils they install for traffic monitoring and triggering traffic lights. Not sure how much interference those would cause for this approach.

Again, I could be totally off and TPMS might not have these issues. But if we’re talking cars from the 80s, then I wouldn’t be surprised if they had some of these issues.

First, genetics are only a blueprint for the structure of the body. It’s not the final structuee. It’s like asking why a building collapses when the blueprints look sound. The blueprints might have physically impossible information for the location it’s being built on, or something could have interfered with the building process, or there might not be good quality materials to do the construction properly, etc. Identical twins often are not identical right out of the womb.

But let’s assume you could accurately create the exact structure out of the womb. The initial physical body might have some effect on your ability to develop intelligence or not (e.g. blood flow to the brain, etc.), ability to generate and use certain hormones that affect mood, etc. This might make the two copies have the same disorders like ADHD, propensity towards violence, or other things, but is every person with ADHD exactly the same? So, no even that isnt enough to create the same personality.

Then there are environmental factors, nutrition, radiation, pollution, etc., all of which could alter the brain in different ways over the person’s lifetime.

But personality has a lot to do with the neural connections and memories you create throughout your lifetime than just the brain you were born with and the physical environment you grew up in. Just look at twins raised in the same home. They can have significantly different personalities based on different experiences, different memories that were impactful, etc.

And personalities change over time because of all of this. So someone at age 30 and the same person at age 50 is often going to have somewhat different personalities based on all of this.

What might be possible, though it would take technology we may never have, would be to individually copy every single atom in a person’s brain with something like a star trek style replicator, and implant that in a cloned body that was as close as possible to their body at the age you copied the brain. This would include every single neuron and neural pathway, every single drop of hormones, etc. And somehow do this instantly or at absolute zero temperatures and then instantly bring them to normal temperature to prevent any damage to the cells. Of course that would be absurdly difficult and is only science fiction, of likely to ever be reality. Too many variables, too many ridiculous technological dependencies, etc.

Most important to humans?

Humans.

Really if all protections were removed, the soil, water, and air would be so badly polluted with heavy metals, radiation, etc., from large corporations dumping that we wouldn’t have the ability to grow enough food, probably within a generation or so. Long before climate change dealt its deadly blow. And the wealthy who survive that won’t have enough servants to keep them alive for too long.

Most important to the Earth?

That would be more interesting and it would be really difficult to pick just one. Probably something like Prochlorococcus which is one of a few ocean plankton that produce the most oxygen on Earth. That will die off much sooner than Humans from climate change as the ocean temperatures and acidity are rising more quickly than the air.

As a side note, one thing I think a lot of people miss from the movie Soylent Green,…

Well they did lay off a ton of developers in exchange for LLMs. I bet the LLMs are capable of writing secure code anyway. So it’s not even on my radar. But now knowing they also cut implementation of MTE means it’s even less secure. So either they are refusing to admit their mistakes, or they are bowing to the governments wanting a more hackable device, or both.

Google was being hostile towards open source anyway. So probably good that GrapheneOS skips this one. Maybe even more to a different line of devices that’s is not moving in such a proprietary direction. The last few Pixels aren’t even much of an upgrade and progressively keep falling behind on a lot of hardware, but the price keeps going up. They just aren’t what they used to be, a tech showcase for other companies to be inspired by. So, I’d actually be happy if GrapheneOS moved to another line, though I don’t know which would be ideal that actually allows unlocking and locking the boot loader without voiding warranty or actively killing the hardware out of spite but still has high end hardware.

Wish my company held off. So few with any experience left and “AI” not only isn’t going to replace an experienced engineer, only junior ones really, but the things I work on are proprietary and so “AI” has no way to understand them much less interact with them or deal with the proprietary devops, upgrades, migrations, etc. There’s basically 4 people left doing the jobs that used to belong to 20. Sure “AI” is a useful timesaver oncenin a while, but it can’t replace thinking, actually intelligent people, much less all of their experience that’s not documented anywhere for “AI” to even learn it.

Yeah and when teachers or employers use it to reject things outright, it’s really dumb. But if it’s presented as a probability to the user rather than a binary like most LLM results are presented to users, then it is useful. If something has a high probability of being LLM generated then it can cast suspicion and investigation can happen. Unlike how things like facial recognition are used to prove guilt without any investigation when the probability of a match is low, but no better matches were found and the police aren’t told it’s low probability because then the product would look useless in solving crimes for them which is what they want in a product, not an investigation tool. That’s not what they were sold.

Point being. It’s a tool. It’s a metric. And used as such it can be helpful if all of a developer’s contributions get flagged as high probability, then looking more closely at the code can be warranted. Though if LLMs themselves were configured to tell the user how probable that their answer is correct, it might not even be an issue needing investigation. It’s not the malicious ones that they’re looking to stop with these policies. It’s those unwittingly submitting bad LLM generated code with serious consequences. Like all those destructive things that happened at Amazon (and others I’m sure, just Amazon was in the news) when they started replacing senior developers with cheap contractors armed with LLMs and no experience. Even my company has been doing it. It sucks all that we’ve lost and how bad things have gotten.

There are “signatures” that can be detected in code just like universities detect it in student work, online stores detect it in reviews they compensate people for, and some employers detect it in resumes and cover letters. It’s bland, just like when it tells you to remove colorful phrases or adjectives that add emphasis from your text in an email. Things like that.

That said it doesn’t detect it all, and it does rely on the developer to be honest. But it’s also a good indicator when reviewers post questions to the developer and they can’t answer them because they don’t understand the code and things like that. Also, if the developer did not follow coding standards, which LLMs can sometimes have trouble with. And there’s always been malicious code submissions in open source software, so there are other ways.

Anyway, it’s more of a policy discussion at this point, and why LLM generated code is bad. I use them for manipulating data, figuring out syntax, and getting examples, but there are always problems with anything they generate, so I never would allow one to write any production bound code. I see use in the technology, but it’s not creative and it doesn’t understand what it’s writing so it can’t write code with consequences in mind. So it can write Jr level code, but not solid code, at least not without being properly trained on only well written code, and that proper training would be too expensive for an LLM company to actually do it.

Yeah, gotta keep your employees poor so they can’t afford to leave no matter how badly they’re treated.

Too bad LLM “AI” can’t pick up the slack which is the whole reason it was still around and so active.

Oh, yeah, but at least the courts would intervene back then. Now many of the courts have been corrupted and the ones that haven’t are bound by precedent which the supreme court no longer obeys and courts above them that are corrupted. So these specific interpretations are becoming more and more common and not just against poor people who can’t afford lawyers.

I got a smart TV because the dumb ones were more expensive. But I’d never do that with a monitor. A monitor is not meant to be interacted with directly. Just display what the computer says to display. The computer is all that should be running software besides basic firmware for adjusting overall settings like brightness and contrast which computer OSes don’t have enough information to do most of the time. But that’s it.

The current administration has stated that even for US Citizens, border entry suspends all constitutional rights. They’ve also said they believe this applies to allow warrantless searches within 100 miles of a border, which includes most major US cities, thus allowing ICE to search and kidnap basically anyone, not just immigrants. And they have stated that searching an electronic device is not a “search” as mentioned in the 4th Amendment and so you can’t refuse to unlock the device or “destroy evidence”. And that once you give them that access, that you have also “freely given” them access to your private social media, bank, etc., records and so those no longer require a warrant to access. And it’s “gun to the head” tactics because they also believe they can detain you indefinitely in the 100 mile zone without a lawyer or any other usual rights, because you aren’t being arrested, just an extended interview or whatever they call it. All in the name of terrorism prevention, of course.

Since they have corrupted the Supreme Court, this has been mostly upheld in various court cases so far. But any legal scholar will tell you it’s nonsense. But that doesn’t matter to authoritarians. They don’t work within the law.

The only way to do a truly full backup of apps and their data is to have root access. Unfortunately, many phones these days have “security” features that void the warranty and/or break apps like banking, Google Wallet tap-to-pay, etc. Or even some apps like games that rely on that for anticheat will break. And some security features make that last even if you relock the phone. So be careful to read what your phone has and what you’ll be permanently giving up.

I have a Pixel 10 and installed GrapheneOS which has some backup capabilities built in, but I can’t use Google Pay, some banking features, a bunch of games, the official UPS app, etc. But if I gave in and went back to Google Android it would all work. Samsung and other manufacturers are often not as generous.

Disclosure isn’t “cracking down”. I think it’s becoming common knowledge anyway or the FTC would never even go that far, especially the current administration.

Instead of spending money on improving the product or mitigating the impact technologically.