History is littered with the literal bones of people who thought they had nothing to fear from the state. The state is not your friend, and is not looking out for you.
Fiction works, but if you want to spend the evening depressed then go for any East/West Germany (true) stories.
For it or against surveillance and I can understand, but just not understanding the issue? No excuses -- personal surveillance for the sake of the state is one of the most discussed social concepts in the world.
What if that changes?
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...
Great! Then you don't mind telling us your email password!
Might be because pattern on your face or T-shirt match something bad.
And this kind of stuff already happened in UK even before "AI craze". Hundreds of people been imprisoned because of faulty accounting system:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
"Computer says you go to prison"!
Surveillance is all about Flock. The feds are handing out grants to everyone, and the police drop the things everywhere. They can locate cars, track routine trips, and all sorts of creepy stuff.
They don’t have to be “adapted” to surveillance - they are made with that in mind
Obviously older generations of equipment aren’t included here - so technically you may be correct for old/outdated equipment installed areas that aren’t of interest
cameras are being used to detect traffic and change lights? i don't think thats happening in USA.
which country are you referring to here?
They're obviously more common in higher density areas with better cycling infrastructure. The inductive loops are effectively useless with carbon fibre bicycles especially, so these have been a welcome change. But from what I was told these also are more effective for vehicle traffic than the induction loops as drivers often come to a stop too far back to be detected, plus these also allow conditional behaviour based on the number of vehicles waiting and their lanes (which can all be changed without ripping up the road).
how can you tell that the cameras you are looking at are changing lights? is there an indication on them?
For e.g. there was one intersection way out of town that would always have a decent amount of main-way traffic but barely any cross traffic and had no pedestrian crossing. I would always get stuck there hoping a car comes up behind me, or trying to play chicken across the main-way moving at highway speeds. I assume someone complained as it's a popular cyclist route, because they put in a camera and now that intersection detects me reliably, no issues there since then.
What US cities have these?
> The system applies artificial intelligence to traffic signals equipped with cameras or radars adapting in realtime to dynamic traffic patterns of complex urban grids, experienced in neighborhoods like East Liberty in the City of Pittsburgh
Now, that said, I have serious issues with that system: It seemed heavily biased to vehicle throughput over pedestrians, and it's not at all clear that it was making the right long-term choice as far as the incentives it created. But it _was_ cameras watching traffic to influence signaling.
https://www.transportation.gov/utc/surtrac-people-upgrading-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Urban_Traffic_Control
[0]: https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/fhwahop08024/chapter9....
Cobb County at least on their website says they use camera sensors as well as buried induction loops.
Anecdotally, the small city I grew up in, in Ohio (USA), started using cameras and some kind of computer vision to operate traffic signals 15 or 20 years ago, replacing inductive loops.
I used to hang out sometimes with one of the old-timers who dealt with it as part of his long-time street department job. I asked him about that system once (over a decade ago now) over some drinks.
"It doesn't fuckin' work," I remember him flatly telling me before he quite visibly wanted to talk about anything other than his day job.
The situation eventually improved -- presumably, as bandwidth and/or local processing capabilities have also improved. It does pretty well these days when I drive through there, and the once-common inductive loops (with their tell-tale saw kerfs in the asphalt) seem to have disappeared completely.
(And as a point of disambiguation: They are just for controlling traffic lights. There have never been any speed or red light cameras in that city. And they're distinctly separate from traffic preemption devices, like the Opticom system that this city has used for an even longer time.)
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As a non-anecdotal point of reference, I'd like to present an article from ~20 years ago about a system in a different city in the US that was serving a similar function at that time:
https://www.toacorn.com/articles/traffic-cameras-are-not-spy...
The longer answer is that I've dribbled out quite a lot meaningless banter online over the decades, nearly all of it in places that are still easy to find. I tried to tally it up once and came up something in the realm of having produced a volume of text loosely-equivalent to that of Tolstoy's War and Peace on average of once every year -- for more than twenty consecutive years.
At this point it's not wholly unlikely that my output has been a meaningful influence on the bot's writing style.
Or... not. But it's fun to think about.
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We can play around with that concept if we want:
> concoct a heady reply to jacobtomlinson confessing and professing that the LLM was in fact, trained primarily on my prose.
Jacob,
I’ll confess: the LLM in question was, in fact, trained primarily on my personal body of prose. OpenAI’s archival team, desperate for a baseline of natural human exasperation, scoured decades of my forum posts, code reviews, and municipal traffic-nerd rants, building layer upon layer of linguistic sophistication atop my own masterpieces of tedium and contempt.
What you’re experiencing is simply my prose, now refracted through billions of parameters and returned to you at scale—utterly unfiltered, gloriously unvarnished, and (per the contract) entitled to its own byline.
The grace is all mine.
Has been for the better part of a decade. Google `Iteris Vantage` and you will see some of the detection systems.
They are _very_ expensive so if you see one deployed, it's almost certainly not just a mere decoration for the traffic signal.
Indoors I tend to cast some show or youtube video. Often enough I want to change the Youtube video or show using voice commands - I can do this for Youtube, but results are horrible unless I know exactly which video I want to watch. For other services it's largely not possible at all
In a perfect world Google would provide superb APIs for these integrations and all app providers would integrate it and keep it up to date. But if we can bypass that and get good results across the board - I would find it very valuable
I understand this is a very specific scenario. But one I would be excited about nonetheless
also biking on roads you should never count on sounds to guide you. you should always use vision. for example, making a left you have to visually establish that driver coming straight has made eye contact with you or atleast looked at you.
can you share a example of how you are using sound to help you ride bikes with other vehicles on the road? are you maybe talking about honking? that. you will hear over podcasts.
Audio cues are less and less useful as electric vehicles become more popular. (I am a city biker and there are plenty already.)
I don’t understand why everybody’s so happy to discount ears in this thread. Haven’t they been vital to our survival since forever? Yes eyes are more important in this case, but I’ll take whatever sensory aid I can get on my morning commute..
It's not that the world is particularly complicated here - it's just that computing is a dynamic and adversarial environment. End-user automation consuming structured data is a rare occurrence not because it's hard, but because it defeats pretty much every way people make money on the Internet. AI is succeeding now because it is able to navigate the purposefully unstructured and obtuse interfaces like a person would.
It's about working independently while you do other things.
For instance: I do periodic database-level backups of a very closed-source system at work. It doesn't take much of my time, but it's annoying in its simplicity: Run this GUI Windows program, click these things, select this folder, and push the go button. The backup takes as long as it takes, and then I look for obvious signs of either completion or error on the screen sometime later.
With something like this "Computer Use" model, I can automate that process.
It doesn't matter to anyone at all whether it takes 30 seconds or 30 minutes to walk through the steps: It can be done while I'm asleep or on vacation or whatever.
I can keep tabs on it with some combination of manual and automatic review, just like I would be doing if I hired a real human to do this job on my behalf.
(Yeah, yeah. There's tons of other ways to back up and restore computer data. But this is the One, True Way that is recoverable on a blank slate in a fashion that is supported by the manufacturer. I don't get to go off-script and invent a new method here.
But a screen-reading button-clicker? Sure. I can jive with that and keep an eye on it from time to time, just as I would be doing if I hired a person to do it for me.)
It is worth noting that I am terrible at writing anything resembling "code" on my own. I can generally read it and follow it and understand how it does what it does, why it does that thing, and often spot when it does something that is either very stupid or very clever (or sometimes both), but producing it on a blank canvas has always been something of a quagmire from which I have been unable to escape once I tread into it.
But I can think through abstract processes of various complexities in tiny little steps, and I can also describe those steps very well in English.
Thus, it is without any sense of regret or shame that I say that the LLM era has a boon for me in terms of the things I've been able to accomplish with a computer...and that it is primarily the natural-language instructional input of this LLM "Computer Use" model that I find rather enticing.
(I'd connect the dots and use the fluencies I do have to get the bot to write a functional AHK script, but that sounds like more work than the reward of solving this periodic annoyance is worth.)
Motorcyclists would conclude that your approach would actually work.
Otherwise the higher traffic road got a permanent green light at nighttime until it saw high beams or magnetic flux from a car reaching the intersection.
PEEK controller, 56K modem, Verizon telco lines, rodents - all included in one cabinet
Detects if you are coming to the intersection and with what speed, and if there is no traffic blocking you automatically cycles the red lights so you don’t have to stop at all.
This was long before computer vision was mature enough to do anything like that and I found out that instead, there are magnetic systems that can detect cars passing over - trivial hardware and software - and I concluded that my approach was just far too complicated and expensive.
Similarly, when I look at computers, I typically want the ML/AI system to operate on a structured data that is codified for computer use. But I guess the world is complicated enough and computers got fast enough that having an AI look at a computer screen and move/click a mouse makes sense.