Obviously ~nobody has read this yet... But I did have a question based on the opening:
"If you wanted to create a tool that would enable the destruction of
institutions that prop up democratic life, you could not do better than artificial intelligence. Authoritarian leaders and technology oligarchs are deploing [sic] AI systems to hollow out public institutions with an astonishing alacrity"
So in the first two sentences we have hyperbole and typos? Hardly seems like high-quality academic output. It reads more like a blog post.
I haven't had much success yet with this. My ratings follow.
Reading and interpreting datasheets: A- (this has gotten a LOT better in the last year)
Give netlist to LLM and ask it to check for errors: C (hit or miss, but useful because catching ANY errors helps)
Give Image to LLM and ask it to check for errors: C (hit or miss)
Design of circuit from description: D- (hallucinates parts, suggests parts for wrong purpose. suggests obsolete parts. Cannot make diagrams. Not an F because its textual descriptions have gotten better. When describing what nodes connect to each other now its not always wrong. You will have to re-check EVERYTHING though, so its usefulness is doubtful)
>The 14th Five-Year Plan (FYP) aims to cut energy intensity by 13.5% and emissions intensity by 18% by 2025 from 2020 levels (Xinhua News Agency, 2021) . As of November 2025, China is unlikely to achieve the targets, as emissions intensity is projected to decline by only 16–17.
1% off according to dashboard analysis for 2025 5 year plan target. There's study from Q4 that PRC emissions has been stalled/trending, i.e. peaked for past 18months. Functionally they've peaked emissions before 2030 NDC commitment.
By showing only your provided data it seems. But when looking at the share of primary energy consumption from renewable sources it looks totally different!
If you look at the growth rate of renewables it should be pretty clear that coal will not play a major role in the foreseeable future.
Why is it not saying 18% of the needs are being met by renewables? That's exactly what it does
This is not energy output (production, usage), it is that plus an adjustment for the in->out energy efficiency. It would only == production if all energy sources in the mix has the same factor.
Because fossil fuels have higher in/out losses this is number is larger than usage. This metric is generally used to track decarbonization.
Using the IEA number you can see the hydro+solar+wind production is about 9.5% of the total, not 18%.
ChatGPT or you favorite LLM can explain in greater detail, just send it the plot image and ask.
The adjusted graph is a better reflection of "meeting their needs" than raw primary energy, since more than half of fossil primary energy is lost as waste heat.
If, for ethical reasons, fewer people were willing to take these jobs, then either salaries would have to rise or the work would be done less effectively.
If salaries rise, the business becomes more expensive and harder to scale.
If effectiveness drops, the systems are less capable of extracting/using people’s data.
Either way, refusing these jobs imposes real friction on the surveillance model.
If you want a deontological answer:
You have a responsibility not to participate in unethical behavior, even if someone else would.
Article Context-free raw #'s, no comparisons to traditional grocery stores AFAIK. Dad journalism.
You should not update on this article unless you have some outside knowledge of the industry.
I had AI look into it, it found a national report found that dollar stores had pricing errors at about twice (3.5%) the rate of traditional supermarkets (1.7%) but lower than convenience stores (4.9%).
> no comparisons to traditional grocery stores AFAIK.
So? The article is very specific from the beginning it was an investigation on two specific chains. That different stores may also do it does not invalidate the point.
> Dad journalism
Did you mean “bad journalism”, or is “dad journalism” a term with meaning (like “armchair psychologist”)? B and D aren’t that close on a typical QWERTY, but maybe it was a wrong autocorrect?
> You should not update on this article
Also here. I’m guessing “update” was meant to be a different word? I don’t understand what you mean.
> (…) a national report found that (…)
Which is useful information, but (again) does nothing for the article’s point. Because other stores do it, it doesn’t mean it’s not worth reporting that these ones do too. The article isn’t saying these are the only chains engaging the the practice. Furthermore, the point matters because the people who need to frequent dollar stores are the ones who are already cash strapped.
The article goes deeper than just presenting some numbers, it argues for why exactly this matters, why it happens, and why it isn’t being fixed.
"Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022" Is this a lot or a little? There no context for national chain
Seems to me that failing any inspection is bad. 4300 in three years and in half the country is clearly a lot. That’s almost four failed inspections per day, double the number of mass shootings (which is also too high and even one is bad).
Also, the paragraphs immediately following what you quoted provide more context. Over 50% error rate is obviously a lot, as is failing 28 inspections in a row.
> The article's thesis is that these stores are uniquely bad.
Is it? Seems to me the thesis of the article is how this broken system is punishing poor people even further: “As the cost of living soars across America, the customers bearing the burden are those who can least afford it”. Which parts specifically make you believe that the thesis of the article is that these stores are uniquely bad?
Why is this worth doing? What wrong with the status quo? The author does not give any examples of Oracle threatening people for using the JavaScript (tm) name.
The problem is FUD. Some guy at a company gets told he has to wait for legal to approve some open source project or initiative that happens to use JS in the name, because his boss heard there’s a trademark issue, and the enthusiasm fades and the idea gets sidelined. There’s probably been thousands of tiny little instances of FUD like that, which we’d never hear about, and which have led to good things not happening.
One clear instance of FUD we do know about is the spec itself is not titled with the name of the language it specifies, which is then its own source of confusion for newcomers trying to learn the web platform, and makes it harder for old timers to explain things, and is generally annoying. Complexity. Confusion. Doubt. Inaction.
Removing legal FUD from the world is a good cause. I don’t mind if it also works as a good marketing play for Deno.
This! I dont think people realize how many people fold like this. Almost nothing actually gets litigated. Litigation is a huge risk and very expensive. The profit incentive at companies means this fight is almost never worth it and its just easier to fold and use a competitor's technology.
This should be very familiar to people working with data in a lot of jurisdictions. I can speak to Europe but I think similar things exist elsewhere - data is less restricted in how and what you collect than it is how you use it. This makes a lot of sense, you should be able to have a basic record of ip addresses and access times for rate limiting, but that shouldn’t mean you can use it for advertising.
Similarly it seems reasonable that shops should be able to record for some purposes but not all.
I don't think "less restricted" is a good framing. How you are using it is the core, and you get to collect and store what's necessary for your legal uses, and use it for those uses.
You don't get to have access logs because there is no restriction on logging IPs, you get them because you argue a justified use of them, and thus you can have them to use them for it (and not for anything else).
I know what you mean but read this in context. You're less restricted in what you can collect compared to what you can do with it - any valid use case requiring video footage allows you to get video footage but that doesn't mean you can then do anything you want with it. The key is what are you using the data for.
I don't think it does, because it is completely unverifiable. It's like allowing people to buy drugs, but not to use them.
I'm not worried about people collecting IPs, I'm worried about people who collect IPs being able to send those IPs out and get them associated with names, and send those names out and be supplied with dossiers.
When they start putting collecting IPs in the same bag as the rest of this, it's because they're just trying to legitimize this entire process. Collecting dossiers becomes traffic shaping, and of course people should be allowed to traffic shape - you could be getting DDOSed by terrorists!
edit: I'm not sure this comment was quite clear - it's 1) the selling of private, incidentally collected information by service providers, and 2) the accumulation, buying, and selling of dossiers on normal people whom one has no business relationship that is the problem. IPs are just temporary identifiers, unless you can resolve them through what are essentially civilian intelligence organizations.
Don't the industry-imposed rules for handling credit cards work that way (restricting use of data you already have) though?
Like, I thought a big part of why some stores do loyalty cards is because they enable tracking things that they'd get their credit card privileges revoked if they tracked that way.
> 1) the selling of private, incidentally collected information by service providers, and 2) the accumulation, buying, and selling of dossiers on normal people whom one has no business relationship that is the problem.
But this is exactly what is covered - incidentally collected information cannot be used for other purposes. That's rather the point - you must collect things for a specific use case and you can't use it without permission for other cases.
> I don't think it does, because it is completely unverifiable.
It's no less verifiable than "don't collect the data", and hiding it requires increasingly larger conspiracies the larger organisation you are looking at. People are capable of committing crimes though, sure.
You forget store. This depends a lot on the type of data. Duration, specific laws related to it and protection are very different for randomised numbers vs medical as an example.
This is good. It means we have laws and rulings that understand the technology. That balance the need for business to protect their stores with people's privacy.
Free to record data but not free to process data... sounds a lot like books being stored rightfully but not analyzed by machine learning.
I have data on Google. Google has a TOS that says they can use my data. This could cover even future use cases, even though those future use cases I did not anticipate. So does Google have the right to use my data in this particular way?
There are all manner of things you can and cannot do with 'data'. For example, you cannot purchase a Blu-Ray, rip its contents and post them on the internet. This shouldn't be that "interesting".
I noticed that as well, it's a bit frustrating. I personally think if you're allowed to do something legally, you should be allowed to do it using technology.
It's seems silly to me that you can have a human being eyeball someone and claim it's so and so, but you can't use incredibly accurate technology to streamline that process.
I personally don't like the decay of polite society. I don't like asking a worker for a key to buy some deodorant. Rather than treat everyone like a criminal, why don't we just treat criminals like criminals. It's a tiny percentage of people that abuse polite society and we pretend like it's a huge problem that can only be attacked by erecting huge inconveniences for everyone. No, just punish criminals and build systems to target criminals rather than everyone. If you look at arrests, you'll see that among persons admitted to state prison 77% had five or more prior arrests. When do you say enough is enough and we can back off this surveillance state because we're too afraid to just lock up people that don't want to live in society.
Target the criminals. Yes, the criminals, according to the altruistic government that serves its people and never breaks the constitution or international law. According to its perfectly defined code. Someone who got an abortion in another state after rape, for example. Or said "children shouldn't be murdered"? but said it out loud at a campus. Run the tech of the most powerful trillionaires on the masses, the poor people and find out who is dissenting. Keep the prisons full. One man's prison is another man's pension. Make this system more powerful.
We are all potential criminals under tomorrow's government. Remember that!
If you flag the dozen or so people that come in to your business once a week to steal, you don't have to have as much surveillance in the store otherwise. Just check them out when they enter, very simple.
For instance, Costco has a much lower theft rate (0.11–0.2% of sales) compared to other supermarkets (1-4%) simply because they manage to keep criminal out through membership fees. Control the entrance, target the known criminals and we can go back to a high trust society.
First paragraphs pretty clearly read to me like the issue isn’t “processing it,” it’s the indiscriminate filming of everybody who enters the store without consent that’s the problem.
Security filming is common in Australia and not outlawed by this ruling. It is specifically the non-discriminate use of facial recognition technology this ruling applies to.
The specific difference is "sensitive information". General filming with manual review isn't considered to be collecting privacy sensitive information. Automatic facial recognition is.
The blog post makes this point about how the law is applied:
> Is this a technology of convenience - is it being used only because it’s cheaper, or as an alternative to employing staff to do a particular role, and are there other less privacy-intrusive means that could be reasonably used?
I don't really understand their reasoning behind the "technology of convenience" point.
Say I implement facial recognition anti-fraud via an army of super-recognizers sitting in an office, watching the camera feeds all day (collecting the sensitive information into their brains rather than into a computer system). It'd be more expensive and involve employing staff (both the "technology of convenience" criteria. From a consumer perspective the privacy impact is very similar, but somehow the privacy commissioner would interpret this differently?
Maybe that is the point the privacy commissioner is trying to make, that collecting this information through an automated computer system is fundamentally different than collecting this information through an analog/human system. But I'm not sure the line is really so clear...
In the KMart case, it would not have been interpreted differently if people were doing the facial recognition rather than a computer. The issue was indiscriminate use on everyone who walked in, without permission or proper notification. Which is only cost effective if automated, and a technology of convenience I guess.
But is a non-indiscriminate, privacy friendly solution possible? The problem is people walking in with a valid receipt for a purchased item, grabbing a matching item off the shelf, and wandering over to the returns counter and requesting their money back. The usual solution most shops use is locating the returns counter past the security controls (checkout counter). But more and more of these types of stores are putting their service counters in the middle of the store for some reason.
It's a false equivalence to equate humans (even "super-recognizers") with a computer when it comes to matching large quantities of faces with names/PII.
At some point the numbers get big enough that you wouldn't be able to get the pictures of faces in front of the people who would recognize them fast enough.
Everyone who enters almost any store is "filmed" with their implicit consent. Cameras are everywhere, and certainly are everywhere in every Australian court as well.
The root comment is precisely right. Deriving data from filmed content -- the illusory private biometric data that we are leaving everywhere, constantly -- is what the purported transgression was.
Is this from the 90s? Who doesn't expect to be recorded when entering a retail chain? How the hell does the government have the right to decide what this private company can do on their private land? If you enter onto someone else's property you should play by their rules.
People here might be interested in Zennioptical's ID Guard technology, if they wear glasses. Evidently it's not perfect, but it does at least partially work: https://youtu.be/HOBdJ6nU03o?si=E_a6rMPAz5AOwytm
Business opportunity: sell covid masks with patterns designed to thwart facial recognition on them.
Why are they covid masks anyway? Medical personnel wears them during surgery, and there were those photos of ... some asian people i think ... wearing them outdoors to protect themselves from air pollution in their city too.
> How the hell does the government have the right to decide what this private company can do on their private land?
Unless you think a grocery store should be allowed to grab you and sell your organs then you agree that this private organisation should be subject to some limitations about what it can do on its own land. The question is then where the line should be between its interests and the interests of those who go on the land.
You can be absolutist about this, that’s certainly a position, but it’s extremely far from mainstream.
Exactly. There is a limit to what a private company can do on private land, set by "the government" (here it'd be parliament). You don't seem to be an absolutist about this, so we both agree that the government can and should tell private businesses what they can do on private land. Then the issue is only where the line should be not whether there should be a line at all.
> How the hell does the government have the right to decide what this private company can do on their private land?
Because the world is bigger than just the wishes of private businesses. I don't think there is anywhere on this planet where you as a private business can do literally whatever you want, there are always regulations about what you can and cannot do. The first thing is usually "zoning" as one example, so regardless if you own the land, if it isn't zoned for industrial/commercial usage, then you cannot use it for industrial/commercial usage.
What libertarian utopia do you live in that would allow land owners to do whatever they want?
The authors largest bullet point is on author identification. What are the arguments against this and do people really feel they outweigh the benefits?
My view: I would think given how many code supply chain attacks we've see recently this would be be regarded as (at worst) a necessary evil. How much software used by large numbers of people does the open source community think will be done by anons?
Sidenote: The author implies SyncThing development was stopped due to author ID but the post linked does not say this and gives a completely different reason (forced updates)
Papers make specific conclusions based on specific data. The paper I linked specifically rebuts the conclusions of the paper. Gary makes vague statements that could be interpreted as being related.
It is scientific malpractice to write a post supposedly rebutting responses to a paper and not directly address the most salient one.
This sort of omission would not be considered scientific malpractice even in a journal article, let alone a blog post. A rebuttal of a position that fails to address the strongest arguments for it is a bad rebuttal, but it’s not scientific malpractice to write a bad paper — let alone a bad blog post.
I don’t think I agree with you that GM isn’t addressing the points in the paper you link. But in any case, you’re not doing your argument any favors by throwing in wild accusations of malpractice.
"If you wanted to create a tool that would enable the destruction of institutions that prop up democratic life, you could not do better than artificial intelligence. Authoritarian leaders and technology oligarchs are deploing [sic] AI systems to hollow out public institutions with an astonishing alacrity"
So in the first two sentences we have hyperbole and typos? Hardly seems like high-quality academic output. It reads more like a blog post.