It's almost like the incessant marketing of standard optimisation algorithms as artificial intelligence has diluted the tech industry with meaningless buzzwords.
AI has been used to refer to all kinds of dynamic programming in the history of computation. Algebraic solvers, edge detection, fuzzy decision systems, player programs for video games and tabletop games. So when you say AI is this or that you are being rather prescriptivist about it.
The problem with AI and ML is more one of it being presented to the public by grifters as a magical one stop solution to almost any problem. What term was used hardly matters, it was the propaganda that carried the term. It would be like saying the name Nike is the reason for the shoe brand’s success and not it’s marketing.
So discredit the grifters, and if you want to destroy the term then look to dilute it by using it to describe even more things. It was never really a useful term to begin with. I’ll leave you with this quote
A lot of cutting edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough it’s not labelled AI anymore.
It’s not AI, though. They’re just using buzzwords, because what they described is functionally no different from AFIS. It’s just a poorly written algorithm.
I’m aware, but unfortunately I’m not big enough in the tech industry to create differentiating terms. AI is an extremely broad term ranging from literal if-else statements to LLMs and generative AI. Unfortunately the specifics usually get buried in the term
Ever since we let law enforcement use facial recognition technology, they’ve been arresting people for false positives, sometimes for long periods of time.
it’s not just camera problems and being poorly trained regarding non-whites, but that people actually look too much alike, especially when using the tech on blurry low-res security footage,
I used to work in security camera monitoring and I used to think I don’t understand why insurers will touch some of these companies with an electrified cattle prod.
They will be pretty high value asset companies with valuable stuff on premises that could be stolen, construction equipment, medical equipment, guns, cars, steel copper lead etc. and their security cameras would max out at 720p have a giant spider web on them without fail and would invariably be on some wobbly pole somewhere that was blowing around in the wind causing 300 false positives a minute. We literally used to switch those cameras off.
Why don’t they insist on equipment that didn’t cost the company $4.50 from Walmart?
The only cameras we used to work with that were actually any good were the number plate recognition cameras, but they were specialist and were absolutely useless for anything else other than number plate recognition. But boy did they get you that number plate.
In 2018, a man in a baseball cap stole thousands of dollars worth of watches from a store in central Detroit.
The AI was trained on a database of mostly white people The photos of people of colour in the dataset were generally of worse quality, as default camera settings are often not optimised to capture darker skin tones.
Mr Williams’ photo didn’t come up first. In fact, it was the ninth-most-probable match.
Regardless…
Officers drove to Mr Williams’ house and handcuffed him.
They arrested him in front of his five and two-year-old kids…
Ai with bad training data + lazy cops who didn’t learn how to use the tools they were given = this mess
Disgusting piece of craps! All should continue to open eyes, against google. They wont stop!
Spread the word to install firefox based browser, use different frontends to block youtube ads in browser, Invidious and use piped youtube apps on android to block youtbe ads: Newpipe
The best solution IMO is don’t let your smart devices have access to the internet. Put them on a VLAN, block them at the firewall, whatever method you prefer. Accessing your home network remotely is one thing, but your air conditioner doesn’t need to INITIATE a connection to the outside world.
That’s what I did 🙃 Unfortunately, some devices do not work at all without a connection to the manufacturer’s cloud, this also needs to be taken into account.
I have flashed all the bulbs and ceiling lights in my house and they work locally on FOSS firmware now 😉 It is not a big deal. I have very poor soldering skills, and I did this anyway.
Oh, I could make it worse if you’d like? That tool isn’t made for just the bulbs I got at Costco, it’s made for any device in the Tuya ecosystem. What’s Tuya? They’re a Chinese white-label manufacturer that makes smart devices that other companies can slap their brand on. They’ll throw you together an app too, but all of the API calls go through their infrastructure. Bonus, they also make security cameras that send footage to their servers, and smart locks too. They’re literally everywhere, but I’m in Australia so that’s where I’m basing this list:
I mean, there are still plenty of ways to have smart things that don’t communicate with the internet. Ikea’s stuff is all zigbee, they don’t have wifi at all. You can get one of their hubs to control from your phone, or they sell remotes with zigbee you can pair directly to control a set of bulbs. They never have to see internet at all.
Yeah. As well, if you want to upgrade to a Home Assistant setup down the line, all you need is a $50 Zigbee USB adapter. If you’re more tech-savvy then you can also buy bulbs from somewhere like www.athom.tech that come pre-flashed with open source firmware. Either ESPHome, Tasmota or WLED are available. These are wifi, but everything is local, and you can block them on your router without issues. ESPHome is what I have running on the bulbs I rescued.
Good link for that site. Currently shopping bulbs for my just recently arrived home assistant green and hard to find consistent information on best bulbs to be using. Love that these are flashed with open source already but I think due to the amount of bulbs I need and their location I’ll be better suited with Zigbee. Will definitely check this place for future devices as I build out the system.
Are you new with Home Assistant in general? I’ve got it running in a VM on a rack server, but those HA Green’s sure do look like a tidy little bit of kit. Ikea stuff works well with it Zigbee-wise, I’ve got some of it around. You can get their remotes working via HA to control other things too. Here’s the Blueprint I used: github.com/…/zha_ikea_tradfri_5button_remote_cust…
Thanks for the info! I am somewhat new to HA, my only experience with it was temporarily checking it out on a VM on my windows Plex server but at that time didn’t have my own place was just checking it our for the eventual move. I think I’m going to add Sky Connect for Zigbee and eventually Matter/Thread devices.
The newer version of Ikea’s Tradfri bulbs (they aren’t selling the old ones anymore) have thread/ matter support on the chips. They should be getting a firmware update soon to enable it. You can also check out the Integrations section on Home Assistant to find devices/brands that are private and work well. The Shelly integration is rated Platinum, and has Local Push: www.home-assistant.io/integrations/shelly/
Edit: Also, feel free to hit me up here or on Matrix (link in my profile) if you have any questions or just wanna chat about HA or other self-hosted stuff 😊
A long while ago, my first foray into smart home stuff was a Phillips Hue system. I used to use it exclusively offline, but I got deeper into smart home stuff and wanted to add some integration into my system. I don’t remember what anymore, but it meant setting up a Hue developer account, so I signed up. Gave them my email address. Stopped using the integration, moved, reset the hub, used it offline for years.
This February I logged into the hub for some reason. I think an accessory wasn’t working and Hue user docs said to log in or some such nonsense.
Five days ago, I got an email from Amazon. They told me that one of the batteries in a Hue switch was running low, and they helpfully provided me with a link to buy new ones. Their page for the device indicated that they were being updated with its battery percentage every 4-8 hours - and that I had authorized Alexa access to my Hue system in February.
I checked the Hue app, and it indicated no apps or services connected to my account.
Logged into the Hue website, dug into my settings, and there were a dozen app’s and services that had been “authorized” to access my account - none that showed up in the app.
Every smart device that has been on my network - devices that I never integrated with Hue (on purpose!) were all happily showing very recent access times to my data. Systems I don’t have accounts to anymore. I revoked access, of course.
Three days ago Amazon emailed me to let me know a different device needed a battery, and showed that Hue had shared the battery level of the device with them that day - 2 days after I revoked access.
Yeah… all their products are getting trashed, reflashed, or used with zigbee hubs I’ve built.
You should never fully trust ANY device on your network. Even if it’s not collecting your personal information and sending it off to who-knows-where, there could always be a zero-day exploit just waiting for someone to find it.
The main difference between the register article and this one is the register is optimistic that Google will stop. While as the comments in this chat clearly indicate alternative views.
I keep NoScript around because there’s been a few times where I clicked a bad link and NoScript blocking JS by default has saved my bacon. Plus, a lot of services like twitch serve ads through separate domains that I can block from running entirely with NoScript–the entire time people were complaining about Twitch trying to bypass adblockers, I never once saw a single ad.
I figured out I can send it to myself on Molly, and the metadata will be automatically removed, but surely there’s a better way to do this very basic thing?
Later, I’ll have access to my laptop that runs Linux, so I’ll see if it works there to do it in a more civilized manner.
No. That’s round 3. Round 2 is already announced - they are ‘restricting’ environment integrity to multimedia on Android webview. Of course, what they don’t say is that the feature is going to be developed and tested outside the view of the general public - since this doesn’t need to go through a public standardization like web specifications. Once they get that perfected, they will silently expand its scope outside webview and gradually into browsers with a new name. That’s round 3.
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