This kind of thing made me imagine the creation of "digital towns" the other day.
Imagine an online community where you can only join on the recommendation of two other members, who you must have actually met in person, to participate. Meanwhile, you leave at least some of the activity publicly available to the general public so that interested parties can meet up IRL and join.
This could probably be implemented easily on top of existing online platforms like Discord, Reddit, etc. since it's really just a community building rule, not a community itself.
> I'm genuinely stunned that AV's do not have the ability to be "commandeered" by Police/Fire/EMS in a pinch, and I'm honestly surprised that regular citizens can't just hit a red button that signal "this is seriously an emergency."
The passenger of a Waymo can, but not anyone outside it. There's a very prominent "call for help" button on the screen when you get inside.
I've never actually tried it, but I would expect customer service to be able to move the car out of the way or push it to someone who can remotely pilot it.
Again, the main issue is that these things can cause problems with nobody is in the car. It shouldn't even be a debate. Emergency services should have a key that unlocks them and allows them to be commandeered. Everyone inside is being filmed all the time, so anyone going for a joyride is being watched, the car could be shut down remotely, and the person could trivially charged with a number of felonies, and then that access key could be removed.
If Waymo can't play well with emergency services, then they've got long term sustainability problems.
At least in SF, there’s both a phone number and a QR code on a sticker on the driver-side window, and per what’s linked from https://waymo.com/firstresponders/ it seems like that’s a dedicated phone line.
I wonder quite what the priority matrix looks like for support requests; I’d expect something like:
1. First responders
2. Human-initiated in-vehicle
3. Autonomous-initiated vehicle
But I of course don’t know.
Buttons are something that seem inherently obviously (both internal and external), but I’m also never sure quite how useful they’d be: a lot of the things that have gathered press have involved vehicles driving when it was unsafe to do so, and then any external button is of minimal use.
I also expect they have some level of concern about anything external having an abuse potential? (e.g., deliberately walk in front of an AV just to stop it in the road)
Something like “give first responders some mobile app which provides some level of direct control” feels like it should be doable (authentication there seems unlikely to be harder than the various “educational” authentication gates that Alphabet has in many products) — though of course that doesn’t scale with more AV operators, and thus maybe this just falls into the category of “this should be standardised” (by whatever SDO).
And some can clearly just leverage existing datasets — many jurisdictions have ways to publish things like “this road is closed from X to Y”, and you can imagine a slightly broader case of “close a radius of Z from point A” being something you might want, especially in the AV case (imagine a “police incident” closing an intersection, such as the one a Waymo drove through a few months ago — you probably want to close a bit beyond the interaction itself in all directions!).
And sure, to some extent things can be handled by AVs getting better at understanding their surroundings, but we’ll always have the question of whether they’re good enough, especially when they fail in non-human like ways.
Interesting, I can't say I've seen that sticker, but I've never looked for one there, either, as you're not supposed to use the driver's seat and it's always buckled up.
Maybe, but in MN, they just decided as a matter of the state constitution that this basically isn't allowable.
You see, the cops had a murder in a remote place. They got a warrant, and the warrant showed 12 people in and out of a small area near the murder, of which one phone went there many times.
They got another warrant, for that one phone, and traced it back to someone who is obviously the murderer. The courts decided to suppress this, never mind the cops got warrants at both steps, and their investigation was as minimally invasive as one could imagine for this sort of thing.
So it's not unreasonable to wonder just what we're protecting sometimes, as I understand that while the decision here doesn't technically ban all geofence warrants, it makes them nearly impossible as a practical matter.
Exactly, and to make sure that never happens again why not just arrest all 12 of those people until they prove their innocence? With enough constant surveillance we can be positive that no bad person ever gets away with anything.
Honestly, do you look at the justice system in the United States and think "You know the real issue here is that not enough people are being punished"?
> Honestly, do you look at the justice system in the United States and think "You know the real issue here is that not enough people are being punished"?
I have a family member who was murdered. I have a lot of sympathy for victims of violent crimes like this and a hard time understanding people who want to let the murderers go free, because I know what it's like living under the threat of one who kept a list of who they intended to kill next.
But look at how many people have been unjustly/incorrectly imprisoned for many years in the US, often based on poverty or racism. Would you be willing to jail 5 people for life-without-parole if you're 100% sure ONE of them was the murderer of your family member? What about two people?
I've never seen someone get sent to prison just because their phone was too close to a crime scene, there's always more to corroborate it because it's not much on its own, even if the MN case comes pretty close with only one person in a remote area with the dead body over and over who also coincidentally had motive, etc. Most of the famous cases of what you mention rely on humans identifying a person and DNA later exonerating them.
So I'm loathe to rule out the use of more accurate ways to pinpoint investigations when the status quo is someone who thinks they saw the person at the scene, when we know how unreliable that is.
That feels like throwing out DNA because there are many explanations of why it might be at a crime scene in favor of good old fashioned witness identification, never mind one is a lot better than the other, even if both of them have been misused terribly at times.
That's why I think we should want the cops to use methods that cause fewer people to get wrongly investigated, because it is a burden. It's true, your phone being too close to a crime scene doesn't make you a criminal, but it's probably a better reason for investigating you than traditional things like "I saw a guy who looked like that at the scene" which has much more frequently caused the harm you cite, and yet it's been a staple of courts longer than any of us have been alive.
I think in much the same way that your life has been touched by a murderer and it has influenced your opinion, if you were wrongly accused of a crime it would likewise have influence.
That being said, I'm sympathetic to your point here and I'm not advocating for eye witness testimony becoming the only source of truth. If I could somehow know for sure that this would ONLY be used for the worst of violent crimes it would soften my opinion, but I am very sure that the more normalized this sort of dragnet investigation becomes the standard of what "requires" it's use will get lower and lower.
If policing were entirely focused on violent and property crimes many of my opinions might change, but realistically I think we can agree that whatever investigative technique we are talking about will primarily end up being used to prosecute drug crimes, because that is much safer and more profitable for the police. Do you really want to be on a suspect list everytime someone thinks they saw a drug deal somewhere and you happened to be near?
I've heard it suggested that acetaminophen just come with a small dose of NAC alongside it to make it safer. I guess this would require a lot of regulatory work to approve, but given that 500 people a year OD, it seems like a thing we should at least consider.
Meanwhile, it's funny that it seems like acetaminophen should safer in more scenarios, but the other has a lot of overdoses with typical use, I guess that's why there's a gap between the two, because ODs are apparently a lot more common or at least more legible than problems caused by the other drug.
> I wish I better understood how ingesting and averaging large amounts of text produced such a success in building syntactically-valid clauses and such a failure in building semantically-sensible ones. These LLM sentences are junk food, high in caloric word count and devoid of the nutrition of meaning.
I suspect that's because human language is selected for meaningful phrases due to being part of a process that's related to predicting future states of the world. Though it might be interesting to compare domains of thought with less precision to those like engineering where making accurate predictions is necessary.
> judges have ruled 100s or 1000s of ICE detentions in various states illegal by now. None of that has stopped ICE from doing what it's doing.
This is a weird one because ICE has lost so many habeas cases, mostly by dropping them, only for the 8th circuit court of appeals (which covers Minnesota) to overturn that the other day:
So this is pretty weird now, legally, since a ton of lower courts have assumed things didn't work this way and the appeals courts are now saying they're wrong.
This is a case where a person who actually was illegally present is denied release on bond and the court sided with ICE. It does not address illegal detentions or deportations without hearings. There are countless other cases where people are detained despite providing evidence of legal status, of inhumane conditions in detention centers, of ICE directly ignoring court orders, of ICE agents on tape lying about people ramming their car and assaulting, detaining or killing them, of ICE releasing detainees without any of their possessions or IDs on the side of the road in freezing weather, and more.
> It does not address illegal detentions or deportations without hearings.
It certainly doesn't address all of ICE's legal issues, no, but it does say they don't need to give this guy a bond hearing:
> Accordingly, we find that the district court erred in holding that the Government could not detain Avila without bond under § 1225(b)(2)(A) and in granting habeas relief on that basis.
My understanding from talking to a criminal defense attorney who practices in MN about this is that this seems to give ICE broad powers to hold people without bond which many, many lower courts had rejected not wanting ICE to have such a broad power for all the reasons you mentioned.
I recompiled OpenSSL to make s_server -www return the correct, static XML blob for a .NET application that was buggy to make a reproducer for them that didn't rely on our product at all and which could be self-contained on a very barren windows VM they could play with to their heart's content and which didn't even care about the network because everything was connecting via loopback, so they couldn't blame that, eitehr.
Turns out there was a known bug in Microsoft schannel that had yet to be patched and they'd wasted weeks of our effort by not searching their own bug tracker properly.
I hate that so much. It's everywhere. An example is a bug with discord. They wanted me to restart my phone, reinstall the app, what are my versions, what phone am I on, what settings, etc. After all of that they go "oh that's a known issue." Whyyyyyyyyyyy. I get that multiple things can have the same symptom, but maybe start with that. Not like I signed any NDA so they aren't hiding it's an issue from the public.
puts on paranoid hat It could be to demoralize you so you subconsciously decide to not file a bug next time, knowing all the rigamarole you'd have to go through. takes off paranoid hat
> You keep ignoring the fact that what you just said applies to current medications used to treat depression and anxiety. They do not treat the underlying issue long-term
Those do cause improvement in self-reported feelings long term, i.e. they lower the baseline levels over a long period of time, rather than just for a short period right after you take the drug.
But you'd be right to say that they're not very good, i.e. that doesn't help your life very much. If there's an actual underlying cause, like sleep apnea, treating that will help a lot more.
Ketamine is a harder case, it really does cause improvement, but it lasts about two weeks. It also can cause psychosis, which is very dangerous. The s-ketamine the FDA approved for use in treatments is also via an inhaler, so it's both purer and via a different route than other a lot of other ketamine usage and it was approved because it actually showed a measurable effect in studies.
But it's really awful to use and if you find out that, say, sleep apnea was actually causing the issues, treating that will do a lot more good than inhaling s-ketamine ever did.
As you may have inferred, I write this based on personal experience.
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