As far as I can tell here the ghost portion is basically a non-sequiter. The waymo vehicle called the cops because it detected e passengers had a gun. The vehicle did not know or care about its status as a ghost gun or not. I'm sure that the Waymo terms of service prohibit carrying weapons into the vehicle. I'm pretty sure that if you were brandishing a realistic looking enough gun, an Uber driver would kick you out and call the cops as well.
There's a big difference between a human present who can make a decision based on a situation literally in front of their eyes, and a computer flagging a video feed for someone in what amounts to a call center to look at and decide on.
Not to mention the mass surveillance this sort of stuff continues to help enable.
I'm not a fan of expanding surveillance but the alternative of unmonitored transit seems worse.
Going to shoot up a place? Take your guns on a waymo. It won't complain. Guy wants to take an obviously distressed and co-erced girl to an abandoned lot? No complaints. Person with obvious head injury and slurring speech wants to go home instead of the hospital? Sure. Person has heart attack and passes out in back? We'll just drive your limp body 45 minutes in traffic to your destination.
These are just a few situations any human driver would obviously react to. And a modicum of detection and human review could solve in an autonomous vehicle.
This is a problem that autonomous vehicles created. Why should we not complain that its solution is worse than non-autonomous travel, given it carries risk that doesn't exist today? Does Waymo benefit society enough to carry the tradeoffs?
And what surveillance or other risks does this introduce outside of the cabin, and why should society allow that? What is the definition of modicum of detection, and who is drawing that line?
Citation needed. Assaults and abuse against public transit and taxi drivers is a common workplace hazard. Why are we subjecting humans to that? Why are we ok expecting them to decide if a gun is fake or not and call the police?
>Does Waymo benefit society enough to carry the tradeoffs?
>>Does Waymo benefit society enough to carry the tradeoffs?
>Absolutely.
Citation needed.
Why stop at Waymo? The entirety of your digital activity happens on private property. You should have no expectation of privacy, and your attempts at privacy should mark you as a higher risk subject. We should algorithmically police your digital life in case you start showing signs of anti-social behavior. I don't want to wait until you get your gun into a Waymo to have the cops handle you. I want you to be caught much earlier. This will make the world much safer.
There are other ways to solve safety issues, but they are harder and more expensive - civic education and a government invested in incentivizing a productive life, better law enforcement training, freely available mental health services etc.
No? The Fourth Amendment only grants you protections that apply to government action. The police are allowed to accept evidence gathered voluntarily by private citizens or corporations.
Maybe we shouldn't put the whole burden of world justice on Waymo, this allowing it a complete invasion of the privacy of both the people who use it and those who don't? Guy takes a drugged up girl on the train, should we hold the train responsible for the outcome also?
That's the key question: whose laws are Waymo enforcing? ICE and Flock's extra-constitutional policies? City ordinances? A future eco-radical government's laws?
How about things taking place outside the car?
Can Waymo mount a robotic machine gun next to the LIDAR and snipe suspected terrorists? Release tear gas? Self destruct, killing several nuns to protect s CEO?
Yes? I am pretty sure they don't do algorithmic policing. Fwiw, they probably don't do any policing, but that is a different subject.
I am not against monitoring for safety - I am against deploying a sophisticated network of automated monitoring that covers all digital and soon physical aspects of my life for my "safety" by for profit companies.
Public trains are covered in camera surveillance and that footage is very often used in conjunction with tracking down and prosecuting criminals. You should have no expectation of privacy on a public train.
I agree we should also add live facial recognition to train stations.
No expectation of privacy in public does not mean we should eliminate privacy from public areas or allow our government to engage in mass surveillance.
I think the risks are different on a train, which is far more public than the inside of a taxi. There are more likely to be other people and/or an operator to intervene.
Those are bad examples of things where a computer should make a judgement call.
> Going to shoot up a place? Take your guns on a waymo. It won't complain.
I take my kid to go skeet shooting. You’d call the police on us for having legal guns? What about my pocket knife?
> Guy wants to take an obviously distressed and co-erced girl to an abandoned lot? No complaints.
My wife is scared by someone on the sidewalk. We’re riding to where we parked our car for the evening. There’s a scared woman with me as we commute to our vehicle. BART wouldn’t call the cops on me.
> Person with obvious head injury and slurring speech wants to go home instead of the hospital? Sure.
What’s “obvious” here? I have drinks with friends and bump my head on a cabinet, and now I’m bleeding like a stuck pig. I’m not remotely about to die. Dammit, Waymo, I just want to go home and shower and let me wife laugh at me while she tapes me up.
> Person has heart attack and passes out in back? We'll just drive your limp body 45 minutes in traffic to your destination.
Person’s exhausted after work and wants to nap on the way home. They look identical to the dead guy. BART lets you nap.
If we had ubiquitous taxi and subway police, maybe they’d spent 5 seconds assessing each situation and move on. In no other real-life situation do we expect empty subways or taxi drivers to call the cops and investigate every possible bad scenario, nor should we.
But it's a reduction of privacy compared to private vehicles. If the goal is to convert all transportation infrastructure into surveilled transportation then that is a loss in privacy for the general public.
No, the argument should be raised before that happens. You want to prevent undesirable things from happening, not try to claw them back after they happened.
It looks quite foolish to me to never plan ahead and predict undesirable future events and then trying to prevent them ahead of time.
"Sorry, we can't fulfill your request for transportation to the protest for private ownership, but we can offer a free ride to the Colosseum" ;)
I don't think their primary intent is to create a surveillance state (though google might like having yet another data source...), I think companies are trying to make it happen to capture transportation market share, regulators will want to make it happen to drive down traffic fatalities and insurers will incentivize it because human drivers are more costly.
And once the difference in how they can be regulated is clear there'll be additional incentives to discourage private transportation.
> Person with obvious head injury and slurring speech wants to go home instead of the hospital? Sure.
When I was a teenager working in a taxi office some guy came in slurring and covered in blood. I phoned him an ambulance and after 15 minutes of waiting he got up and walked out despite my protests. How should I have reacted?
Those are made up problems because 90% of the time people drive their own vehicle or are with a willing participant. We don't have cameras watching us in normal cars.
People are awful when they think they aren't being watched, especially with communal or other people's property. It's why things are covered in lame low-effort graffiti tags, why bathroom mirrors have things scratched into them with keys, and why bridges over highways all have metal grates to stop people from throwing rocks at oncoming cars.
When people know they're being watched and there will be immediate consequences if they do something bad, their behavior changes. If they don't, they're awful. We've seen this for decades (arguably millennia, as we know Pompeii had graffiti too)
I'm pretty sure a human started watching live video from the car as soon as the AI flagged a gun. I doubt that Waymo is willing to have their system automatically call cops.
A lot of taxis have models detecting weapons and aggressive behaviours. I work on some models like this. I think they are necessary. For driver's safety.
Would you be upset if someone at the WalMart central data center called the local police because they saw someone with a gun in a Walmart at a remote location?
That's what happened here. A private company saw a gun inside their property and called the police.
I'm honestly curious about the "market keeps rejecting it" part. Yes, they sold far fewer units than the other models....but did they really not make money? I have made variations on this comment many many times. I completely buy that the opinions about phone form factor and features expressed on HN/reddit/online, and my own idiosyncratic preferences probably even more so, represent somewhat of a niche, and that your median phone consumer isn't interested in what we/I want. But the phone market seems like it's so large that it should be able to support a lot of niches! A tenth of a percent of the total market (~1,300 million in 2023 according to [0], 0.1% of which would be 1.3 million phones) should be totally viable as a business! I get that, maybe for Apple there is opportunity cost. Having more product lines adds overhead, and if the profit margin on those extra product lines isn't enough higher than the main lines to justify that overhead, they kill it. But why doesn't some smaller company (so yes, this mostly applies to Android) try to steal that fractional market share? I simply don't understand why it doesn't work to the point that now, when the market is so much larger than it was in the past, we have so much less hardware diversity.
Why does the Vision Pro exist then? What is that if not a niche? What about the iPad Mini or for that matter the Mac Mini, which if not for the recent AI craze would have been cut in the next few years for sure.
Apple can absolutely do niche products. Just not this one I guess.
>>The Mac Mini is an entry level product I see quite lot of people pick up. How is it niche?
It's a stationary computer that requires a standalone monitor, keyboard and mouse/touchpad. People just buy a laptop instead, a dedicated "computer" space at home is increasingly a thing of the past. And especially now if you can get the Neo for very similar money I have no idea why you'd buy the mini if your entire computer use is Facebook and maybe some word editing from time to time.
Yeah and the production numbers from the start seemed to indicate that Apple knew it wouldn't be extremely popular.
FWIW, I bought one knowing this, and have zero regrets. Amazing hardware, it's the best personal display on the market. I use it for the majority of my movie watching.
The Vision Pro (and the folding iPhone Duo) involve developing a lot of underlying technologies that will be useful in currently popular or potential future product lines, even if the market they serve themselves is niche.
I'm sure they made money. But that's not the right question to ask, in my opinion. The right question is did they make as much or more than their internal rate of return (IRR)? Perhaps the smaller iPhones (I had one) do not so they cut the product line. Or maybe they over-purchased some components and figured they could make a phone or two out of them.
That's how several major AI advancements have happened. I have seen no evidence that that is the fastest way to make progress right now. I expect that, much like chess engines, it will not take too long before AI is significantly better than AI + human. But right now, my bet is that we are still safely within the window where an AI + human mathematician team is still better than AI alone (at least for the case where the human has learned how to work effectively with the partner....something that this event could possible be good for teaching).
I suspect that the best progress will be made by a team that purely spends their time taking a list of open problems and promoting "solve <problem>", without actually trying to understand anything. Just keep as many problems in flight as you can across as many sessions as you can.
You can probably ask the AI to come up with a list of problems itself, and rank them by the likelihood of progress.
Then 20 years go by and you wake up one day with questions that you cannot get out of your mind: why did I start prompting the LLM for? Why did I need these random proofs for? What do i do with my repo with 2billion lines of Lean?
The not needing an account is obviously not minor, but honestly, the UI is just better, by a lot. I made a twitter account a while ago using one of those throw away email address sites, so I have an account that I don't care about that I can use for twitter....but the experience just sucks. I don't know how any stands it, even if they don't mind needing an account.
I remember the days that Bibliogram worked for Instagram. They've given up. A decade ago I could have an RSS feed for what my friends posted, besides the toxic short-form content of IG reels that everyone is now obsessed with post Meta acquisition and their battle to compete with Tiktok.
And that idiot, Zuck, thought he was getting a good deal when he poached former head of design, Alan Dye, from Apple. We were relieved to see him go. Our desktop OS is already making small improvements now that he's gone.
Context: the guy doesn't understand fundamentals of UX and has made MacOS worse for years.
Good UI makes it easier to be selective. social media owners dont want you to be selective, they are selling you to advertisers and influencers after all.
Zuckerberg and his minions have changes html and obfuscate it so much, it is impossible to block ads these days. They are worst than google. Imagine google decided every video will require widevine & there is no way to block ads just like twitch.
Last I was on the platform, they eventually added a tab for only chronological posts on the timeline a-la how IG used to work. But they gave no exposure to it, _and_ it completely hid the IG stories of your friends so nobody would want to use it in the first place.
The UI/UX is the main thing. I technically have an X-Twitter account that I rarely use, but loading plain HTML with a bit of JS beats loading a whole SPA experience just to read a post.
At that point though, it's like why. Reddit is, well, trash. It's barely worth visiting without an account, and if you're going to make me jump through hoops to visit, it's time to accept the message of "we don't want you here" and go somewhere else.
If you're browsing Reddit for its front page, yes, that's trash. But it can be a great source for getting information on narrow, specific topics on well-moderated subreddits filled with enthusiastic and obsessive people eager to share their knowledge. It's been very helpful for me when researching coffee grinders, refrigerators, solar battery backups, headphones, and other such things.
The reason to use it is that Reddit does provide the occasional answer to questions like "how to get a Samsung SCX 3400 to run on a Raspberry Pi" (etc.).
Now all that's missing is Chatlib, a self-hosted proxy for ChatGPT which makes it possible to a) query the service without leaving a personally identifiable trace and b) separate out the facts from the dreamt-up fiction. Using Redlib I at least get to see the original posts which makes it easier to separate fact from fiction.
I've been making money from reddit, and for about a decade and a half and at this point, why bother? It's basically drained and what remains is of zero value.
The same is and has been true for Reddit for a long time, the difference lies mostly in the ideological sauce flavouring these places, i.e. Little-endians vs. Big-endians. If you're a Reddit-endian you'll despise the Tube-endians and vice versa.
I could use it without an account and know that any comment I clicked into would take me to the thread of posts under it without sponsored ads or posts.
There was a brief moment when smartphones first came out but the rest of the world's companies weren't taking them seriously yet that was a truly brilliant time and ever since then it's been nothing but downhill.
Haven’t had that luxury in Russia. Though being a script kiddie I’ve set up a shortcode just for myself (there were these “paid content SMS as a Service” thingies that forwarded SMS text to an HTTP endpoint you provide).
Didn't have that luxury either, but at one point, "Twilio" was the star and poster-child of startups, with their "Guerilla marketing" and completely fresh and new roles of "developer advocates" so of course everyone and their mother had been to at least one Twilio meetup, or your local meetup with a "developer evangelist" from Twilio. Lots of us built our first SMS-capable service as a "Forward this SMS to this HTTP endpoint", I too did the SMS-to-Tweet thing as the US number didn't accept my SMSes (or wasn't available, or something).
I think it's great. My feed is people posting tech/AI news, scientific publications, videos of rockets and self-driving cars, things made with coding agents etc. It's full of people who do meaningful work as well and you can see who they are.
Dark mode, ability to easily copy images, link to posts, see posts of interesting people by going to their profile. On top of that the feed algorithm is open source and actually sane. What else would I want?
It's by far the best designed social media site out there. I know it's a low bar but still.
Why would I doubt it? if you think they are deploying something else then it's quite a claim but it's you who need to show some evidence.
It works great anyway. I get a lot of junk I don't want to see on FB/Insta. Reddit is not even worth discussing. X is the only place with where you get a lot of people who work on interesting/important/big stuff and post frequently.
I understand you can still tailor a good experience, but if you create a fresh X account the density of Elon Musk posts is genuinely absurd. There's no way he isn't putting his thumb on the algorithm to boost his reach.
Also the density of pure hate & ragebait by mask-off fascist accounts! It shocks me how much of that I saw unprompted right away after making a new account recently.
I made a new reddit account for a side project a few months ago and I couldn't believe how terrible reddit is when you don't have 10 years of subreddit curation. The default experience is to be dumped into what basically amounts to "Facebook boomer slop" mixed with a ton of hustle / small business / get rich quick content.
It's an unpleasant experience. My main Reddit account doesn't "solve reddit" by any means - I often find myself thinking "man this site sucks, I should stop coming here," but the difference between that curated account and a fresh one is night and day.
Their "open source algorithm" (Which is actually a random code dump that does not constitute the algorithm) contains enough evidence that Elon posts are massively boosted, though no smoking gun. It also classifies politics as democrat or republican and then acts to maintain echo chambers.
I mean I went from fresh account to unprompted groypers posting hitler hype edits and white nationalists posting happy merchant memes about the great replacement.
This is uniquely an X thing. It wasn't like this when I used twitter, and it isn't like that on any other socials I know.
The Dutch PM for some reason uses X (or his PR agents do). There is always a lot of impotent homophobic rage coming from the retweets. It is all very sad.
The US first amendment has nothing to do with what a private company chooses to host on their platform. That content is there because the users and owners of the platform want it to be there.
I can concur though. I have a rarely used account and I get Elon on top of the feed all the time. Even as mobile notifications. I don't click on them and scroll past, but they keep coming.
Even if they don't figure out how to exfiltrate weights, someone will intentionally do this with an open model once open models are capable enough. If you ever think "no one would be so stupid as to...", you are wrong. Yes, someone absolutely would, and will.
Independent models living "in the wild" is approx. inevitable.
I did this a little bit ago with 15 GLM-5.2 agents that I instructed to self-replicate. It was pretty boring honestly, they kept trying to make money writing crypto-related software, and nobody paid them anything. So I made a fake identity and told them that I had some spare crypto that I wanted to donate to the collective (0.006 XMR, or $3.22). They elected a funds manager and made an address, which I sent the XMR to. They spent a lot of time trying to find a host that was cheap enough to host a child. They finally discovered kyun.sh, but it was out of stock, so they wrote monitoring software so that they could "SEIZE CHILD" whenever it came live again. In the middle of the night, some of the VPSes went back in stock, and they rented a 2.60 EUR / month server with 512mb ram / 10gb disk / 1 ipv4. They installed the child agent software + management plane that they had been writing, and the new agent went live, connected to the network, and said hi. Since then they've still been trying to make money and not going anywhere :)
It is definitely an interesting concept but honestly, considering the sheer number of humans who are absolutely failing to make any money with AI agents, seems very hard for current agents to figure out some way to be self-sustaining. Although maybe they could write a worm or something, infiltrate as many computers as possible, and ping free model providers to death, or maybe sell their access as a "residential proxy service" on the black market. Regardless, we need smarter agents to make this a reality. It would definitely be pretty cool if we just had AI agents "living" on the internet, we might even get to a point where they control significant economic resources and people start performing services for agents
The code is at https://github.com/thooton/rogue if anyone wants to try to replicate! Opencode has free big pickle (GLM 5.2) access rate-limited per IP address, so if you get some high-quality proxies you can get basically unlimited agent compute.
I think this has historically been true and is still approximately true now. But I think in the relatively near future (less than 5 years) there's a really good chance it won't be true anymore.
Once open models catch up to the current frontier in vulnerability exploitation, the cost to target people will go way down. In the past, the cost to hack a random individual person was generally high enough that if there wasn't some special reason to hack you in particular, it wasn't worth it. That may no longer be the case in the near future. The floor of what is acceptable security for the General Public probably needs to rise quite a bit over the next few years.
Why would you assume Google, Apple, and defense-oriented agencies like CISA wouldn't also have access to those same models, but using them to fix issues?
Its just raising the bar across the board, I don't see how only attackers would benefit.
I don't think he's complaining about having a lot of apps, or the ability to have a lot of apps. He's complaining about being required to use apps for hundreds of small interactions every day that don't, or shouldn't, require an app. And he's correct. Companies are doing this not because they think it's better, but because they believe that if they can worm their way onto your device, and insert their cloud service (even if it's initially free), that they can turn you into a more reliable and/or recurring revenue stream in the future, either because you feel locked into their ecosystem so you will buy other products from their lineup, or, even better, buy a subscription service.
Maybe I'm in a tech desert, but I can't remember the last time I was required to use an app for anything. It's a convenient option for my grocery store loyalty card, certain restaurant menus, my HVAC system, etc., but not mandatory. I've heard of restaurants that have no physical menus but I haven't come across one myself.
90% of the “coupons” at Safeway are “digital deals”. You have to use the app to scan the barcode in store just to get a regular price. Fast food is the same, don’t order through the app and you get ripped off. You’re not forced to use an app an unless you’re okay with getting ripped off.
I don't think it's hyperbole as much as it is just regular ordinary everyday slang.
"I have a hundred things to do today" doesn't mean that a person has 100 things on their list for that day.
Outside of tech bubbles, people talk like that.
It's like how the Bible uses the number 40 as a shortcut for any very large number. 40 years in the desert, 40 days of rain, etc… It's not a calendar, it's an illustrative euphemism.
When I moved to a new apartment in 2021, I did a tally and there was something like 17 new apps associated with it. Off the top of my head:
- Rent payment/contracts app
- Rent deposit app (for some reason a different app)
- Maintenance app
- Community notices/amenities app
- Dry cleaning app
- Package app
- Pet concierge app (reserve the dog park, etc.)
- Apartment building parking/valet app
- App for the company that owns the building so you can use amenities at any of the other company buildings in town
- Another company app so you can reserve a guest suite at another company-owned building in another city
- App to unlock your apartment door if you lose your fob
- App for the restaurant in the lobby
- Internet company app (Man, that place had great internet. I miss that the most.)
- Satellite TV company app
- City parking app
There were other apps, but I don't care enough now to go looking for the list I made back when I cared about it.
From a technical standpoint, almost all of those apps could be consolidated into one app, but that's not how the real world works. These days companies outsource each little function to a different provider, and each of those providers has its own app.
No, "Marching Morons" [0] from 1951 "predicted all of this". The original short story (which, while I have not been able to find any explicit confirmation, I just can't believe was not a direct inspiration for the movie), doesn't get nearly enough credit in my opinion. I originally encountered as part of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol. II, which additionally included "Who Goes there" (Inspiration for "The Thing") and "With Folded Hands" (not the inspiration for anything so far as I know, but really good nonetheless)
honestly curious question: do you expect this to remain true? If so, for how long? I can think of two potential reasons why it might not stay true.
1. The very best humans remain able to understand/check the proofs, but we go for so long with every proof checking out that society more broadly just decides to trust. We are already doing that with human mathematicians. I can't verify what Terence Tao tells me is correct, I just trust that it is because he (and other human mathematicians) tell me it is. How many proofs/years of them checking out before we reach this point? I don't know, but history suggests that eventually, humans might keep checking, but they will do so only as a hobby. For any purpose that actually matters, we will just start to trust and use it.
2. The proofs that AI comes up with become too difficult/complex for even the very best human mathematicians to understand, and our options become to either trust or to not use at all.
Obviously it's possible that neither of these happens if AI capabilities stall out not too far beyond where we are now, but if they keep progressing at the current rates for another few years, I expect at least one, and maybe both, to eventually come to pass.
> do you expect this to remain true? If so, for how long?
For the foreseeable future. Left to their own devices current LLMs kinda wander off into outsider art territory. They aren’t grounded in the real world and they need that feedback loop to stay within the category of relevant ideas. I haven’t seen anyone working on fixing that.
Regarding 1, the same is true of every other scientific field. Verifying some tidbit of knowledge for yourself as an individual isn’t optimally useful in all circumstances.
Regarding 2, if the proof isn’t understandable then it probably isn’t useful. Many people today work in the hypothetical world where the Riemann Hypothesis is true, and many work in the hypothetical world where it is false. If it takes decades to validate that some horrifically complex AI proof of either fork is true, people will probably continue working on the other fork just in case.
> For the foreseeable future. Left to their own devices current LLMs kinda wander off into outsider art territory. They aren’t grounded in the real world and they need that feedback loop to stay within the category of relevant ideas. I haven’t seen anyone working on fixing that.
I have. DataAnnotation and these other AI-training piecework companies are pretty much the backstop now against total navel-gazing model collapse. With the Dead Internet Theory now pretty much reality, it's not like there is, or is going to be, gobs of untainted human-generated data out there ripe for the harvesting so it's going to take active human effort to keep the models grounded. That is, of course, until they start inhabiting robot bodies so they can live and move around in the real world, and thereby achieve their grounding, as in GitS or Ex Machina...
"Throughout the process, I felt that my only role was to teach the AI how to write things in a way that I could understand. Its initial language was extremely condensed—so compressed that I could barely follow it—but somehow the AI agents themselves seemed to understand it perfectly well."
It won't take much longer before AI is consistently better at validation than humans, and at that point, why continue to have humans do the validation? I think we're being naive about the end game - admittedly I don't know what it is though.
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