I was running a little mitmproxy network test on some baby-tracking apps to see what kind of data got sent back home and man, realizing that everything I was doing on my phone was essentially being recorded and 'anonymized' by whatever definition of MS has for anonymization was really not fun
1) Don't click the link. Just say that the linked thing has already been done. List examples and talk about how the other options are better.
Do not allow the creator to be proud about the fact that they made something, regardless of where they are in their career. Only gatekeep engineering with as much disdain as you can muster.
I feel like any AI regulation passed wouldn't have enough teeth to rein in the NSA because not even the Fourth Amendment seems applicable to the agency. let's not forget the ex-post-facto legalization of mass wiretapping and surveillance [0] with both establishment political parties supporting it on 'national security' concerns [1]. whatever monitoring or testing they're doing today will be similarly hand-waved away in the name of security theater
this is just how the empire has always operated - we have always been at war with Eastasia
Well, they are, but if a surveillance state exists, then one thing that will save the ordinary citizen from its gaze is that humans have a limited amount of attention. A massive intelligence complex full of analysts can only process a fraction of the intelligence that a fleet of AI agents can handle. So now you have the worst of both worlds: the massive capabilities of modern AI at the behest of humans who have shown they can't be responsible with that capability.
State capacity has always been the bottleneck for authoritarian regimes. China can't keep track of who is even a citizen or not in many cases simply because having a national database doesn't get rid of the birthday problem + the limited number of common surnames + the administrative state's limited capacity to process data that until recent decades came in handwritten + a unsurprising amount of petty corruption that adds up. If you start with bad data there's no magic bullet. And the data is always bad to start with. The spectre of "birth tourism" only works on the Chinese side because through quotidian corruption someone without Chinese citizenship can be made into one by a civil servant of sufficient rank, which is also why it's not a real problem - not enough people actually have that level of connection within the bureaucracy. The US by definition cannot have an accurate database of even who's a citizen - thanks to repeated changes in citizenship laws from the 60s through the 90s that was then frozen around 9/11 as well as the lack of a coherent system that is accurate, immutable, and can act as an oracle. Home births were not just a western thing (although it certainly happens more often on a per capita basis out here, I'm in Nevada). SSNs are not indicators of citizenship, nor are driver's licenses. I spent most of my 20s in NYC where none of my friends who grew up in the city had a driver's license and the state DL/ID wasn't REAL ID compliant until after I left. We only have vaguely reliable data from Texas but ICE, the presumptive arbiter of documentation validity (not part of their mandate), has an error rate of 1% that they admit to, but that's after immigration court and appeals and administrative actions ameliorated their error rate down to 1%. At this point we are removing US citizens and rendering them stateless almost casually, almost as policy.
AI is trained on these flaws. These aren't flaws that can easily be fixed. The ramifications can be significant. Garbage in, garbage out. Records, however official, are wrong all the time. I have an entry in my "criminal record" from a clerical error that is attached to no charges but 4 days in LA County Men's where I had a seizure, which can be interpreted as the record being correct but incomplete or a giant screwup. What sort of process would it take to fix this if the AI decided on the latter? It doesn't affect me, but someone less privileged? Absolutely it will have consequences. Worst of both worlds indeed. People routinely forget that LLMs ARE NOT PEOPLE. Mistakes get compounded. Biases if not caught in time get baked in. There are multiple AI safety dialogues that should be happening but you wouldn't know it from the media, and it's the wrong one that is front and center. You can rotate keys, you can roll out patches, you can't open up the corpus and use a scalpel and cut out the errors and omissions and biases, and the latter aren't logged.
We don't have enough people who possess professional expertise in widely varied fields that nevertheless intersect in the conversation. This might be because there aren't many people that fit the descriptor, but these are the blindspots. Anyone talk to Orin Kerr lately?
also the 'humans' are just scapegoats for organizational and institutional pressure to shorten judgement time to the minimum amount possible. you set someone up for failure, they will fail, and if you put all the blame on them, allowing organizations and leadership to continue as they are then you're guaranteeing that it'll happen again
Americans have a hard time thinking about problems and issues without making it all about individuals. no systems-level thinking to be found for miles (and I say this as a somewhat regularly frustrated American)
The "it only counts as a search if we find something" reasoning out of the FISA courts is batshit insane, dodging the 4th Amendment like bullets in The Matrix.
Because they are watching everything, or most of it anyway, it would be really funny to know what kind of stuff they *actually* care about... and all the massive long string of crap that is considered incredibly abhorrent but just doesn't make the mark...
They actively care about (as in, act on in realtime) serious criminal activity. But I suspect they keep the legal yet embarrassing stuff in their back pocket for blackmail purposes.
who is they? the NSA is a military organization headed by a general or admiral, which handles codebreaking and networks security.
the FBI acts on and handles cybercrime and/or regular crime.
the NSA can absolutely come up with tools that they then share with other parts of the USG, in the same way that the Army can develop the M-16 and allow police departments to use it, but ultimately it's law enforcement pulling the trigger.
Then why haven't they caught all of the obvious foreign fraud rings that people on youtube keep uncovering? It's egregious. You would think with their total data access, AI, and Utah datacenter they could at least create a target list for the FBI.
My opinion is that those crimes are not relevant to their mission. Are they serious financial crimes? Yes absolutely. But no one actually gets hurt, it’s just money.
For the amount of financial crime that is likely being committed, versus the reports of actual prosecution, it doesn't seem like a very good track record.
The FBI, and law-enforcement in general, isn't the main customer. Spies who are unafraid of and who take advantage of illegal activity are the ones consuming NSA products. Epstein for example.
Hoovering up as many informational secrets as they can is likely one of their biggest businesses. Why have some company being the only ones that hold the recepie for some super strong secret steel when you can have it in your back pocket too.
The 4th Amendment in practice, as really any law, cannot preemptively stop the bad practices of actors working in bad faith. It's remediative, as in, the evidence it collects at least in theory cannot be admitted as evidence in court. If you look at indictments, informations, any initial charging document, you'll see at least some if not a deluge of blatantly inadmissible or dubiously obtained pieces of information that makes up probable cause. This is a feature of the system, and also why you don't plead guilty on the information alone (in state and federal felony practice I've seen 1 person plead guilty on the indicting information, he was pro se, this was 2013). Superseding indictments frequently look nothing like the original. Call it cynical, or pragmatic, but in 20% of the states - including some of the larger states like New York, Washington, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin etc. - it's not merely allowed and common for cases to end up with a plea that contains charges that have no factual basis linkable to the allegations first presented because we know what the game is and it's not about justice or public safety, it's about retribution, on someone lower on the totem pole. The evidence becomes secondary because the system incentivizes it. The 4th Amendment of course covers more than that, and if we simply reverted the interpretation back to the text we'd be doing much better.
Sadly it has been whittled down and have not caught up with tech - it's a lagging indicator at best. Things like the third party doctrine, automotive exception, pretext stops, etc. are things that should enrage anyone who cares about the most fundamental rights we have not just as Americans but as people, individuals, private persons, who are fundamentally equal to each other if not in circumstance but at least in substance. The courts sometimes even mis-states their own doctrine and usually in favor of the state. Why is there no good faith exception the other way? Any idiot can see that the plain view doctrine opens a pandora's box. We don't need the NSA for our rights to be handwaved away, that's already done.
The NSA does not testify in open court, and we can only speculate what they are able to really launder down into the criminal justice system. But considering that the state of the 4th Amendment have already made the system extremely coercive with limited recourse in so many "exceptions" that are no where near the intent of the framers of the Constitution and frankly tilts the ice more than any crooked lower league Russian Hockey match, it's likely not even necessary for them to jump in most of the time.
I suspect that the greater influence they exert is through the military-industrial complex in its modern day form. We're the only country that can just waltz in and invade.. what, 7, 8 countries? Has anyone been to China lately and have the connections to assess the state of their military and economy with clear eyes? Do people see the laundering of BS national security concerns into reputable papers and conspiracy rags alike? It's usually innocuous sounding, but no small part of the economic quagmire comes from the continued funding, justified by the agencies that are the constituency with a vested interest, of this pit of unaccountable money. We'll be paying for it either way, because not enough people care, unfortunately.
I think this is very true. the general consensus from NCPS techs we've talked to is that the most likely fatal injury to a child is spinal - their heads are extremely heavy relative to the rest of their body in infancy so the 'safest' seats tend to be the ones that distribute kinetics away or absorb it (like rear-facing seats where the sudden 'stop' pushes into the seat rather than having the baby's head fly forward)
that said, I've also heard that the US standards for car seats is piss poor relative to the rest of the world's. something about how they only test one head-on crash at 35mph and then extrapolate all the data from there. Germany's ADAC is supposedly the gold standard and I can see why - their tests are intensely comprehensive and granular, in the way you'd actually want them to be, and many of the seats rated safe by American standards fail ADAC: https://www.besafe.com/en/safety-tips/tests-awards/adac/
if there were to be a plane-oriented solution, the last place I'd trust it to be taken forward is in the USA especially given how easily corruptible safety-oriented institutions are here
I work in child car seat development and I can second that the main issue for our mechanical engineers is preventing neck injuries. Rearward-facing car seats really are a lot better on that front.
ADAC is indeed the main test, but even more difficult than getting a good ADAC score is passing the plus test[1], which focuses on neck spinal forces.
Can you guys produce easy to read installation and cleaning manuals and not something designed by legal department. I think I can handle complex stuff, but car seats are just next level.
ah yes! I knew I was forgetting something - the NCPS techs we talked to gushed about the AxKid that they had finally gotten imported to the US
I wish the Plus test included detacheable rear-facing seats too. we dropped quite a pretty penny on the Cybex Cloud T because of how well it scored elsewhere
The vast majority of the rest of the world simply doesn't use car seats at all. Even here in the US, in my very multinational city, I only see one demographic that consistently uses car seats at all, regardless of economic status.
I meant that I do not want to deal with taking a kid in and out of car seats, or traveling with car seats, or taking them in and out of cars, for more years of my life.
> I've also heard that the US standards for car seats is piss poor relative to the rest of the world's
How do you define piss poor? The stats show that the US minimum standards still reduce fatal injury risks substantially. And your comparison point for 'rest of the world' is a German automobile club, not a government regulation. Would the better comparison be to ECE R129 for the EU?
> something about how they only test one head-on crash at 35mph and then extrapolate all the data from there
You know that the information is readily available and you could avoid spreading misinformation with a 10 second search, right?
The US regulation, FMVSS 213/213A, does a frontal crash at 30 mph as well as a side crash test at 30 mph. For apples-to-apples comparison, the EU regulation does a 31 mph frontal crash test and a 19 mph side test. All of the governmental tests are done on a standardized test bench. The German auto club test is 40 mph frontal and 31 mph side, done in a regular car.
There are also organizations in the US that do testing and ranking beyond the regulatory minimums.
IMO it's not necessarily unreasonable to use standards/evaluations set by a private industry group for this kind of thing.
US automobile safety ratings/improvements over time are largely driven by IIHS (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety). It's a private group but is the standard yardstick manufacturers expect to be tested against and fills in a lot of gaps in NHTSA official crash tests.
It wouldn't be strange to see IIIS plus NHTSA criteria used colloquially to describe "US crash standards" when talking about cars even if not fully defined by regulation.
"UL Listed" products or the International Building Code (the base model broadly followed with modifications by each state) are also "national standards" but not set by regulation.
I mean, you're right about side crashes but I'm reading that the NHTSA didn't implement this until 2022. and regardless, if all that were true the infant mortality rates per capita from car crashes would prove your point
so what do those stats say vs Germany, Sweden, the EU average? all very easily searchable, no mechanistic theorycrafting required. how does the US fare? certainly not multiple times worse across the board, right?
> if all that were true the infant mortality rates per capita from car crashes would prove your point
Would it? How much of the statistics are attributable to a difference in standards vs the higher average speed and larger average vehicles in the US? Physics is a harsh mistress, both of those factors have a lot of effect on crash energy.
what's Germany's highway speed limit again? and how is their per-capita rate compared to other EU countries with, well, any speed limit at all?
you're also claiming a multiplier for fatality rates for car sizes. and there is a significant difference (https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/global-car-economy) but the fun fact is that all cars around the world are getting much heavier - the US isn't even the leader in terms of how much cars have ballooned, only in that the starting point was higher
but for changes like that, you can control for fatality rates across time, correct? what do those numbers say? have bigger cars led to increased fatality rates? the IIHS has that data. what's that trendline look like? and what about Europe? there's data for that here: https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2022... - page 10 seems to indicate a trend
Teslas started out at 40k USD in mid-2010s money promising more affordable options that we're still waiting on (even companies like Slate will probably eat them up when they're able to ramp and gain a fanbase)
Chinese manufacturers are starting far below even the base of contemporary economy ICEs, this is another game entirely
one of the biggest reasons why they haven't taken over the US is because our infrastructure is decades behind. for most people to get a fast charge at home means they either need a new house or an electrical upgrade whereas chargers are everywhere in Chinese cities (even fast battery swap shops). given how balkanized transport authorities are (State's rights-to-not-work-together being in effect here) I suspect EV growth will mostly happen in urban centers willing to spend a little extra money on electrification rather than outfitting their police departments with milspec armored trucks
Entering that into a CPI inflation calculator, that is $50k in 2026 dollars due to inflation.
A Model 3 today starts at $38, which is WELL BELOW the 2016 promise. Corrected for inflation, that's roughly $28k in 2016 dollars
They effectively overdelivered on that promise.
The complaint here, is that Chinese manufacturers, who are mostly in a death battle against each other and not profitable are even cheaper than Tesla and Toyota. In the long run, I suspect that picture will simply not be sustainable for those companies.
if the $4k difference in today's money is nothing to you, I've got a Venmo you can donate to. I'll even ship you a decade-old GTX 1080 that's still functioning :)
$25,000 was speculative in 2020 not a hard deliverable, but $35,000 was the main promise which was delivered. I'm not even an Elon fanboy. I think he's a white supremacist. But credit is due where credit is due.
I mean, this is just another case of Elon issuing totally unrealistic claims to pump his stock since it isn't a formal press release. but much like all of his rantings and ravings on Twitter and I'd rather treat them as concrete promises since they have realworld economic effects and wide-ranging consequences
The $35,000 figure was presented on stage in front of a massive audience in an atmosphere where the government was recently still handing out $5,000 subsidies for EVs in 2016. I remember seeing this presentation. This $25,000 figure was mentioned off handedly in an interview years later with MKBHD. I remember this very clearly. Going in front of investors at a formal presentation and speculating in front of a youtuber are not the same thing.
The $35,000 figure was viewed as ambitious at the time, but now both Tesla and numerous other auto manufacturers offer cheaper models.
> The complaint here, is that Chinese manufacturers, who are mostly in a death battle against each other and not profitable are even cheaper than Tesla and Toyota. In the long run, I suspect that picture will simply not be sustainable for those companies.
Citation needed. Yes, the many Chinese manufacturers are fighting each other... but I see no reason why they can't maintain prices. And I doubt they're all unprofitable, especially the big ones like BYD.
is this what happens in China's market? because my understanding is that China loves having an array of competitors. their entire strategy is just to 'build the stage' (via infra buildouts, workforce training, etc) for private enterprises to capitalize on which means rich fields for everyone. and the more that compete, the better it is for their economy. it's why there's something like six large smartphone makers all competing with one another (not counting the myriad smaller makers that exist) - how many large smartphone makers exist in the US?
But the companies are not profitable; their losses are being covered by the Chinese state. The question is whether this is actually an effective strategy long term.
The biggest obstacles to Chinese vehicle sales in the United States are political and they are tremendous. Whichever party is blamed for their entry will lose Michigan for a generation and car dealership owners across the country
It certainly wouldn't help them but I don't know anybody in Michigan that isn't a c-suite that really cares that much about someone not buying American cars anymore. Most mechanics will tell you to buy a Toyota or Honda here. In the UP half of the cars are Subarus. The majority of automanufacturing has long ago left and nobody is happy about the quality of big 3 brands.
30 years ago I would have agreed, but most Michigan buyers at best begrudgingly buy American now.
this is a really good point. dealership lobbying is so weirdly under-covered and yet affects so much of our lived experience - from crash safety, to pedestrian experiences, to lemon laws. when I worked for the state consumer protection agency many moons ago, we had a drag-out fight with dealerships in the state legislature trying to advocate for having at least a nominal lemon law on the books. the original proposal would have protected consumers quite a bit - but it was quickly defanged with enough money flowing into the campaigns for the right rural legislators who sat on the right committees. I imagine this is the case everywhere with our legalized corruption system
the US lost all credibility. Nobody gives a fish about what the US says anymore. I bet their military is on par with Russia. Certainly the men in the US won't fight for a country that hates them.
Dems have long lost dealership owners. Those owners are a powerful lobby, but they're not popular... not many people enjoy the process of buying a car and getting it serviced.
this is a classic confounder problem. I'm assuming the vast majority of parents who can afford 40k annual for their kids are relatively well off, have a lot of other disposable income, and the kid is never really lacking for any needs. put them in a public school and it's likely they'll turn out equally ahead for their grade
socioeconomic status (SES) is very often a huge confounder when it comes to anything from health issues, educational outcomes, and many other things. rich kids do better - the SES of the parents of Nobel Prize winners [0], young athletes [1], etc are all indicators of this
and all it took was two decades and millions of spend in anti-EV lobbying before they finally gave in, huh
(also kind of wild to me that an EV focused blog wouldn't mention this a single time since Toyota is (was?) arguably one of the staunchest and most stubborn anti-EV manufacturers out there)
Toyota was broadly right in their approach to EVs. They were pioneers in hybrids. They had excellent hybrid cars like Prius that have been around forever. Their low end cars are extremely fuel efficient too that making them hybrid does not really offer marginal benefits.
Now most companies have written off their crazy investments in EVs. Honda has discontinued Prologue and so on.
at first, sure, but they've since donated large amounts of money to climate-change deniers who fight hard against electrification and emission standards
They have also been slowly, but surely, moving all their vehicles to HEV/PHEVs (at least in Canada). For example, you can only buy a new Camry, Sienna or Rav-4 (most popular SUV in the world) in hybrid/PHEV form.
PHEV are going away across the industry and solidifying into pure EV or classical hybrid. the market for those who will pay more for the PHEV prefers EV
I am with Toyota on this one. They have done more to reduce carbon emissions than any other automaker. Hybrids, particularly plug-in hybrids, achieve most of the benefits of EVs without any of the tradeoffs, and they make far more efficient use of our limited supply of batteries.
Public policy should not insist on one technology to the exclusion of viable alternatives.
> Over the last three electoral cycles, Toyota has become the top auto industry financier of climate deniers[4]. It has helped to finance campaigns of 207 climate-denying congressional candidates, more than twice as many as Ford and nearly 50% more than General Motors, the only other automakers with federal political action committees (PACs)
> [Toyota] is bankrolling an army of climate denying lawmakers and lobbying aggressively against emissions and fuel economy standards
>and all it took was two decades and millions of spend in anti-EV lobbying before they finally gave in, huh
EVs are a stupid idea and will remain so for the foreseeable future. If you want to complain about their funding of climate deniers, complain about that. But don't criticize them for their justified dismissal of the EV mania.
I am disappointed Toyota is making EVs now. That doesn't mean I am a fan of the company; I don't even own a car.
you read the articles, correct? the ones where they are actively supporting climate-change denying, pro-January 6th Republicans who are actively working on repealing CAFE, emissions standards, and other climate protective standards?
also the accusation of 'vested interest' is very funny to me as someone who is proverbially hiding all his liquidity under a mattress (ie bonds) until this AI bubble pops and whose sources are 1) a non-profit and 2) a Union of Concerned Scientists blog
They were AMAZINGLY anti-EV a few years ago. They couldn't shut the heck up about hydrogen being endgame and even shipped a flagship car that used the technology to prove it. (It barely sold, you couldn't refuel it outside of the Bay Area and the entire program was eventually written off.)
> [...] since Toyota is (was?) arguably one of the staunchest and most stubborn anti-EV manufacturers out there
Wait till you hear about German car manufacturers. It's not even that long ago that e.g. Mercedes said that their target audience doesn't want EVs and they will never (!) give in to that market. Now look at them. All of them.
it's sunk cost on their hydrogen cell R&D - they want there to still be room for that instead of going with electrification but they have to diversify their portfolio to keep up with markets
> "Toyota in particular has been vocal that they are uninterested in making ZEVs available in California. [...] Toyota has invested in hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles [instead]."
To be fair that's true of most manufacturers. Nobody wanted to go head to head with the Tesla M3, except Hyundai I guess but then they discontinued the Ioniq 6 IIRC.
It's true in the US market. Europe and Asia are seeing a flood of smaller EV cars from Dacia, Renault, BYD, VW, Fiat and far more. The US is getting left behind.
except this establishes case law and creates a template for other states to pursue similar cases (which looks like it would include actual reports to labor agencies for monitoring)
> The settlement goes beyond compensating for past violations. Going forward, as part of the settlement, DoorDash must submit detailed data reports to DCWP every month for three years, which the agency will use to monitor the company’s compliance with the law and the terms of the settlement.
I was running a little mitmproxy network test on some baby-tracking apps to see what kind of data got sent back home and man, realizing that everything I was doing on my phone was essentially being recorded and 'anonymized' by whatever definition of MS has for anonymization was really not fun
reply