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The local government officials in charge of allowing these to be installed.

It also represents an opportunity for upstarts. If you want to get into local politics, this is a single issue that will unit voters and bring them in.

We had a city councilperson elected on the sole issue of replacing the purple street lights. She won decisively and her entire campaign was literally signs everywhere promising to fix the purple streetlights. (yes, they were fixed).


Seattle voted for Katie Wilson as mayor partly because she seemed to oppose surveillance cameras. She now seems to have changed her mind is is speaking in favor of them.

According to [1] Seattle doesn’t use Flock and Wilson hasn’t taken a stand either way, even on the campaign trail.

[1]: https://www.theburnerseattle.com/post/mayor-elect-wilson-won...


> What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort to this level.

They'll stop once the police (or ICE, more likely) start dishing out horrific punishments for it.


That would be an incredibly risky escalation, and it would be a stupid ultimatum to issue.

The people, or even states, could escalate in response. The worst case is escalating to violence; ICE isn’t trained, equipped, or numerous to deal with deploying into a violently hostile area. The army could, but then we’re in full blown civil war.

A more realistic middle ground is that it pushes people or states into nonviolent non-compliance by eg refusing to pay federal taxes. Frankly if California and New York alone stopped paying federal taxes the system would probably crumble.


ICE isn't trained for anything, they're just proud boys in tacticool gear. But the point of them is not to be effective, it's to cause headlines.

That's not how the political reality of exacting mostly voluntary compliance from the masses works.

Yeah because that works out really well in history!

> That’s an insane conflict of interest.

Welcome to America.

This isn't even in the top 10 of corrupt activities our government officials undertaken in the past year.


Suffer from a downvote-a-bot much?

Corrective upvote applied.


It does a pretty good job, but I still don't completely trust it with keys to the kingdom.

I have replaced my standard ddg of, "git <the thing i need>" with asking Claude to give me the commands I need to run.


The Hilux isn't "banned" from the USA. Toyota can federalize it and sell it here at any time. Toyota doesn't bring it here because we have the Tacoma - a truck designed to be more inline with American consumer tastes.

If Toyota wanted to, they could readily start manufacturing Hiluxes in Mexico and importing them into the USA. Presumably, the reason they don't do this is because Americans hate small pickup trucks. Every single truck on sale in the USDM sells better in larger footprint spec.

There's maybe 20k American who are willing to buy a new truck with the wheelbase the size of a Mustang (smallest Hilux). Even small BoF SUVs have the same problem. Take the FJ Cruiser, despite being a cult classic, it sold terribly in the USA, likely due to being too small.

Plus, they are expensive. In Australia, the cheapest non-work-spec Hilux trim is ~$55k - which is like $38kUSD. A Tacoma starts cheaper than that and is much larger.


They can't produce them here because of CAFE.


CAFE doesn't prevent them from producing or selling it here, plenty of automakers just pay CAFE fines. The Tacoma and Hilux are very similar in overall size, but the Tacoma does have the wheels pushed slightly closer to the corners, likely for this reason.

However, current CAFE fines are capped to a whopping $0.00

The Hilux is also pretty tall and narrow, which I am guessing is very advantageous in markets where most buyers drive them on unpaved roads, and not very advantageous in countries where highway rollover tests are performed and they are primarily operated on highways with 12' wide lanes.


Government, sure.

But it's the non-government entities you really need to be worried about. There are plenty of brokers buying up this data, making up assertions/predictions about the data, then selling it along downstream to secondary vendors who just blindly accept the data as true.

These are how people online get doxxed. It's not the government or FBI, it's these brokers who mine/buy data from sites/credit bureaus/local governments, link them across various social media, then build out profiles of individuals that they then sell to anyone with a big enough check book.

I've looked into these vendors before and their profiles on people are often wrong on several dimensions. So you don't want to do anything that's going to increase their ability to map you across the internet, because that's just going to improve their ability to identify you, while still selling lies about your personality.


ID verification for sites that where people speak the truth.

Cesspit of AI-driven "validated" accounts for pushing propaganda.

It's the worst of both worlds.


We had clusters of them in university too.

If all you needed to do was vector math, a dedicated vector processor with eight cores that are capable of running as fast as the extremely wide bus could feed them with data is the way to do it. You couldn't buy anything close to it's capabilities (for that specific task) for the money.

I remember the course we used them in being hard as hell, and the professor didn't really have any projects prepared that would really push the system.


> Tesla is trying to create self driving taxis to make the rest of the auto industry obsolete.

This is a pretty baffling take. Most people in the world operate their own cars, and even if taxis were free, a large portion of them would continue to operate their own cars because it's convenient.

Taxis also don't replace a good chunk of the new vehicle market. People driving fleet trucks aren't going to work out of taxis. The top selling vehicles in the USA are pickup trucks, and it isn't even close.

Lastly, even if they succeed, competition will catch up and the market will be saturated.

In 20 years, people will still be buying the humble Civic. While the next 20 years at Tesla will probably be a string of market failures and wacky promises of personal space craft or some shit.


> Lastly, even if they succeed, competition will catch up and the market will be saturated.

Waymo is already in the lead, and OEMs will be beating down Waymo's door to license a simplified Driver stack if L3 autonomy becomes a sales-driver (ha!)

Edit: Waymo already has strategic partnerships with Toyota and the Hyundai group, so OEMs are already further along this path than I thought


I didn't state my opinion at all. That's just why it's valued the way it is. People believe that it will be valuable, that's what an investment is.

I'm just offering a reasonable explanation for why people value it. Nobody has to agree.


> But I was unaware Mainframes were used for AI.

IBM was front and center with AI long before the AI bubble.

- Watson won jeopardy in 2011. And IBM launched several successful AI products using the tech.

- Deep Blue beat Kasparov in chess in '97. They also had other NN-based systems for playing games.


Was, IBM hired me to teach watson law, what I saw as a mess, more management than developers. I was laid off 5 weeks after starting, the project was cancelled within the year

IBM is too dysfunctional to innovate like Big Tech has been


And yet Big Tech depends on technology owned by IBM, and also has luck the company isn't one that routinely does lawsuits due to patents.

Anything Red-Hat touches, like GNOME, GCC, Linux kernel, postman, anything Java is mostly done by Oracle, Red-Hat and IBM as the main ecosystem corporate drivers, PS3 used Cell,....


IBM is more often the subject of lawsuits from their employees

I'm 2nd gen, I remember the country clubs and IBM Santa. The company no longer cares about its people the way Watson father & son did.

> And yet Big Tech depends on technology owned by IBM

The opposite is true too. We live in a highly interdependent and interconnected world.


Neither were mainframes though, Watson and Deep Blue were both POWER systems.


Wasn't Watson basically a parlor trick though?


It wasn't a parlor trick and could have evolved into a useful product doing a small, basic subset of what LLMs do today. The problem was IBM's leadership didn't have the slightest understanding of the technology, thought they'd invented ChatGPT and pushed it into applications far beyond its potential, e.g. diagnosing cancer.


Deep Blue was also a bit of a parlor trick. It relied on a ton of special-purpose hardware - literally a rack of custom-made chess ICs. It's neat that it worked, but it didn't have any wider applicability.


Yeah it kind of was. Watson was essentially an NLP search engine.


They should have made an MLP search engine. Those people will buy anything.


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