There’s some kind of Jedi mindtrick with technology that causes people to hyper-fixate on the idea of futuristic miracle tools, and ignore the horrible real life results. If I sold hammers that magically transformed into an ineffective plastic toy hammer on 7 out of every 10 strikes, nobody would buy it. They probably would for the novelty, but not for practical use.

Boomers, morons, Rapturists, all want everyone to shut up and go away and to go back to the bliss they felt when they were an innocent kid. They think there are miracle cures like “blanket the world in security cameras so no one can misbehave” and “send the rapists back to where they came from” and all these other fairytale-spawned ideas.

The eye of Sauron, sending demons back to hell, none of it is real but their lead-addled amygdalas don’t care about long term solutions; they want results “RIGHT NOW”. They believe that paradise shall be lost unless they turn to the fairytale solutions they were promised at a time when they felt safe.

It doesn’t matter if they make sense or not. It doesn’t matter if there is an allegory to something done for evil or not; it’s being done for them and they’re the good guys so how could it possibly be bad?

The thing is it would be pretty disutopian to put cameras everywhere but you could use it to reduce crime, or at least a certain type of crime, but you would have to have actually decent software. But they don’t even do that.

The good news is that with this data it makes fighting charges based on flock data slightly easier.

Now, that’s a cherry on top of a shit Sunday, but at least there’s a little whipped cream between the shit and the cherry. (The whipped cream is the ACLU)

I was listening to a podcast episode that was talking about AI-based face recognition and how it’s being used.

The way it works, you take your shitty, off-center still from a security camera showing the suspect at an odd angle, and you feed it into the AI. The AI searches all the images it has access to to find people who look like the suspect.

Police take the results, pick up the person from that list that they think is the closest match, then they put them in front of a line-up, and ask the witnesses to identify the person who committed the crime. Once they have a positive ID, they use that to charge and convict the suspect.

The problem, of course, is that the AI is just finding people who look like the suspect. If they use the tool correctly, they would do some investigation to determine if there is any chance that anyone identified by the AI could actually be the suspect. Instead, they treat it like the AI identified the specific person they were looking for.

One example they used was a woman who was arrested. They arrested her despite the woman in the video not being pregnant and the woman they arrested being about 8 months along.

Surely they cannot possibly arrest somebody on charges of looking moderately similar to somebody from a 720p black and white CCTV camera. If it was a 4K full colour straight-on head shot and maybe but not the crap that convenience stores put up.

I used to work as a security guard, I don’t think any of the places I guarded had security cameras that would be good enough to stand up in court. Even the banks had crap low frame rate noisy cameras. The CCTV industry appears to be about 25 years behind the rest of the world when it comes to camera sensors.

They shouldn’t, but when has that ever stopped them? The (stupid) assumption they make is that the computer wouldn’t make a mistake, so they assume it found the exact person they were looking for.

Judges shouldn’t be issuing warrants solely because a face matching algorithm found someone who looked like the suspect, but they are probably as clueless about the technology as the police are.

Local police: “let’s just install four times as many to compensate for this error rate!”

I’ve been the victim of this. Got a speeding ticket, and I didn’t live within 100 miles of the location. I had to deal with a frustrating process of calling them.

The car wasn’t even remotely similar to mine. The plate was totally different as well.

Bunch of fucking bullshit.

I do not understand how u.s law works because it never seems to work the way that it’s supposed to work.

In any sensible society the way to deal with that would be to contest the ticket, go to your local traffic court, and show them that it’s clearly not your license plate and the license plate pictured is not registered to you. That should surely be the end of it.

Of course in any sensible society it wouldn’t be allowed to get that far because a system with a 71% failure rate, would never be deployed.

Roseville is the city.

I was confused because there’s a place named California City!

That’s a feature, not a bug. “Probable cause generator” someone called it.

The second feature is the ability to track and intercept dissidents in travel. Like no kings protestors, people traveling out of state to get an abortion, brown people existing, assassins of conservative talk show hosts…

So, slightly more reliable than polygraphs, repressed memories, and various other law enforcement innovations.

I applied for a job and they wanted me to take a polygraph test, reasonably confident that my eye rolling at that request was probably what resulted me not been offered a third interview. Though to be honest bullet dodge on that one, would you really want to work for a complete that does polygraph tests, they probably would have made take personality tests too told me I was a kinesthetic learner or whatever.

I’m pretty sure that if you showed me a license plate for one second and then took it away I would have a pretty good idea of what it was and would be able to subsequently identify it with greater accuracy then 29% of the time.