Interesting that he’s framing it as a balance between privacy and safety instead of privacy and security.
Flock cameras haven’t been proven to make anyone safer.
adespoton
joined 3 years ago
There are two acceptable ways to leverage technology (including AI) to increase profits: one is to maintain/decrease operational costs while maintaining service (this means enhancing existing delivery, not replacing humans with AI), and the other is improving service without increasing costs.
Everyone who goes for options 3 and 4 (replacing employees with automation and automating fleecing your customers) is after quarterly earnings at the expense of long term company profitability. This is essentially the VC vampire model, and companies rarely survive it for more than a decade.
I take it you haven’t shopped at a Best Buy? They do two things well: have department “experts” who will shadow you and let you know in no uncertain terms that they know everything there is to know about their department and confidently give you incorrect answers (they have supervisors monitoring them to ensure they are behaving in this manner) and sell you extended warranties.
Generally when I go to a store, I just want to buy a specific thing I already know I want to buy. I just want the salesperson to sell it to me. That’s almost impossible to do at a Best Buy. It’s not a salesperson issue; it’s a management issue.
Circuit City and Radio Shack… their customer support was probably part of their downfall.
I’ve attempted to shop at Best Buy over the past 30 years or so.
The problem is, no matter which era, none of the staff seemed to even understand my questions, let alone be able to answer them — this isn’t just electronics, but on ANYTHING in the store. “Does that washing machine have a direct drive or belt drive?” “What’s the theoretical maximum power of that amplifier?” “What are the manufacturing tolerances of that Monster cable you say is so much better than bulk electrical wire I can get at Lowe’s?”
I mean, even the Geek Squad guys just read the details off the packaging or off their reference document; no actual thought ever went into trying to help me solve an issue that would result in a purchase.
In the early 00s I made a fair bit of money as a side hustle fixing stuff that the Geek Squad had messed up.
I wonder if it would be possible to implement Firefox or Chromium in webassembly and run it on top of WebKit — it wouldn’t be as performant, but would be an extra layer of sandbox. You could theoretically do this in any app that uses WebKit too.
It’s true… it’d be replaced by a much LARGER attack surface.
both the iOS 26.6.1 and iOS 18.7.10 updates patch serious issues in WebKit, the engine that underpins Apple’s Safari browser. They land nearly three weeks after iOS 26.6 patched 90 issues. No iOS 18 update was released at the time.
How are people running their Macs exposed directly to the Internet?
In order to make this work, a user would have to:
- Turn on screen sharing
- Turn off the OS firewall block
- Set up NAT routing on their router to forward port 5900 to their Mac
Seems to me that anyone who could do this would know it was a really bad idea?
Especially since you can already tunnel screen sharing via Apple ID or FaceTime to connect without leaving the port open.
The machine is definitely Turing-complete, and definitely NOT trying to pretend to be human. It’s AI claim is for a cloud-based feature I don’t use that adjusts the cycle stages over time to maximize cleanliness and minimize wear on the contents based on personal usage patterns and detected content types.
The machine does do a few neat things like check water retention of the contents before starting the load (it weighs the contents, adds a known volume of water, drains without spinning and checks the weight difference and the dirtiness of the drained water). There’s no way I want it feeding all my washing data into a massive online data lake for AI analysis though, so I keep that bit disconnected.
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https://xkcd.com/927/