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chaps

5,452 karma · joined November 14, 2019

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chaps··on US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology
There's more than one definition of missile. Florida criminal code's just one place where a drone could be considered a "missile".

Florida criminal code:

  "790.19 Shooting into or throwing deadly missiles into dwellings, public or private buildings, occupied or not occupied; vessels, aircraft, buses, railroad cars, streetcars, or other vehicles.—Whoever, wantonly or maliciously, shoots at, within, or into, or throws any missile or hurls or projects a stone or other hard substance which would produce death or great bodily harm, at, within, or in any public or private building, occupied or unoccupied, or public or private bus or any train, locomotive, railway car, caboose, cable railway car, street railway car, monorail car, or vehicle of any kind which is being used or occupied by any person, or any boat, vessel, ship, or barge lying in or plying the waters of this state, or aircraft flying through the airspace of this state shall be guilty of a felony of the second degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084."
chaps··on US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology
Got it, a surveillance missile.
chaps··on US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology
I'm sorry but, in what way is a swarm of surveillance drones NOT a mass surveillance system?
chaps··on US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology
Kind of. Motorola (axon) effectively acts as an integration system for flock and about 20 other services. Motorola's stuff is IMO the bigger problem because it includes access to flock.
chaps··on US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology
yes, people tend to act differently. not the people they're trying to afect, just random people just minding their business. but it is not an effective deterrent to things like "violent crime".

• Meta-analyses (studies that average the results of multiple studies) in the UK show that video surveillance has no statistically significant impact on crime.

• Preliminary studies on video surveillance systems in the US show little to no positive impact on crime.

https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/images/asset_upload...

chaps··on Trying for 1 month but can't learn pixel art still
Speak for yourself, big-holes-in-ground are very valuable to me.
chaps··on Ask HN: How do you handle clients who don't pay on time?
I don't have much advice here because ever situation is different and the sensitivies of asking is different with every organization. What's worked for me is being absolutely direct and honest in the situation and the urgency of needing pay. Often times the other side doesn't realize how much it affects you, and shattering that illusion is what's needed. In other words -- you kinda need to make them feel like an asshole for not paying you. Sometimes it doesn't work, though. At some point you will need to raise it as a legal issue and begin refusing work.

Good luck!

chaps··on Unsubscribe from the Church of Graphs
Then you might be surprised to know that a lot of those numbers were exaggerated. If you're trusting people to tell you accurate things based on numbers that they won't share.... you're gonna have a bad time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/business/organized-shopli...

chaps··on FTC action against Match and OkCupid for deceiving users, sharing personal data
You're missing my point again.

My privacy problem exists with third parties AND internally within OkCupid. At some point, running NLP over messages necessitates that an analyst or ops person actually has to look at the underlying data at some point.

The 3rd party stuff just exudes something like a privacy "code smell" -- "orthogonality" doesn't really matter to my point because 1. these things don't exist in a vacuum and 2. stench has a way of permeating through layers, regardless of how orthogonal underwear is.

Like, do you trust that OKCupid staff didn't download user messages to their laptops?

chaps··on FTC action against Match and OkCupid for deceiving users, sharing personal data
We're talking past each other. You think the ends justify the means and I don't. Like, if there's a "Read" marker for a person viewing my messages, then I should have the same for analysts reading my messages, too. Like, when someone is running grep over everyone's messages, they're not just viewing that in isolation -- the context is what's important, and that requires actually reading the messages and their outcomes.

> For the platform to do that with an intent to improving matches was strongly positive, not negative.

Do you realize how much work that OkCupid has put into their product to make matching intentionally worse (through analysis!)? Take off your rose-tinted glasses!!

Edit: aaaand there's a new article about OkCupid giving facial recognition data to 3rd parties.

chaps··on FTC action against Match and OkCupid for deceiving users, sharing personal data
Hey, my point is that it's fucked up that I went on a date with someone who admitted their job was to read other people's messages. If you don't think that's fucked up, then we simply have a difference in opinion. I don't know what the rest of your post is about.
chaps··on FTC action against Match and OkCupid for deceiving users, sharing personal data
> I don't think there was anything fucked up about it, as long as it was all anonymized and at scale

I'm confused why "as long as" carries so much weight here considering the article that started this discussion. You seem to trust that they stopped their privacy fuckups with third parties. I don't know where your trust comes from.

chaps··on FTC action against Match and OkCupid for deceiving users, sharing personal data
You realize that you're responding in a thread about OkCupid deceiving users and sharing data with 3rd parties right?

  34. In response to this request, Humor Rainbow gave the Data Recipient access to nearly three million OkCupid user photos. Humor Rainbow’s President and Chief Technology Officer were directly involved in facilitating the data transfer.

  35. In addition to user photos, Humor Rainbow shared other personal data with the Data Recipient, including each user’s demographic and location information.
chaps··on FTC Action Against Match and OkCupid for Deceiving Users, Sharing Personal Data
You're funny.

I think the "only thing" that would make me cherry-pickable from their data is that I used an autoclicker to give everyone a 5 star... I have mixed feelings about doing that, but I got a couple (surprisingly nice) dates out of it that never went anywhere.

chaps··on FTC action against Match and OkCupid for deceiving users, sharing personal data
I once went on a date with someone who did research at OKCupid who told me that they were doing NLP-style analysis of peoples' messages that they sent to each other. Still not really sure what to think of the date itself, but it was a fucked up admission.
chaps··on Copilot edited an ad into my PR
How much has Microsoft paid you to sell your soul?
chaps··on Twice this week, I have come across embarassingly bad data
Like I said in a different post, there are legal reasons for why you would want the original data. Deleting the data from the dataset is negligent.

If you want something to blame, blame the system that allowed the data to be bad in the first place. You're pointing your finger at the wrong people and it's unreasonable of you to call them negligent.

chaps··on Twice this week, I have come across embarassingly bad data
When I say "raw", what I'm referring to is the preservation of the data's chain of custody. If I'm looking at the data with an intent to sue the respective government agency, then I have strong legal reasons to make sure that the data isn't modified. If I start from open data for example, the gov agency will have their data person sign an affidavit making this very clear and I will lose my case basically immediately.

  The issue imo is that a person closer to the point the data was collected or merged is probably better equipped with understanding of what may be wrong with it
You'd think so, but just like most other systems, systems are often inherited or not thought out, so the understanding is external and we can't assume expertise within.
chaps··on Twice this week, I have come across embarassingly bad data
Sure we should indeed expect that they do that. But look at enough data and you'll learn that those expectations are a path towards never-ending frustration. I've been there, spending >100 hours cleaning data... that never got published because I was too damn focused on the dozens of years of errors that many, many people created.

To be clear, I'm not saying that we should accept messy data. Just, reality is messy and it's naive to think we can catch and remove all of reality's messiness -- which includes the bureaucratic slop that led to the data being published in the first place.

chaps··on Twice this week, I have come across embarassingly bad data
In fact, the government agencies will argue that they have zero legal obligation to clean the data, let alone figure anything about the data, and that they're just giving you the data as-is. This happened to me on a FOIA call where I was trying to get data from the county state's attorney. They insisted they could only run a specific report and that they had no obligation to run any query, meaning I can't even get access to the data I need.

Clean vs not clean data is the wrong fight.

chaps··on Twice this week, I have come across embarassingly bad data
"What does it mean to clean the data?"

This isn't possible to answer generally, but I'm sure you know that.

Look -- I've been in nonstop litigation for data through FOIA for the past ten years. During litigation I can definitely push back on messy data and I have, but if I were to do that on every little "obviously wrong" point, then my litigation will get thrown out for me being a twat of a litigant.

Again, I'd rather have the data and publish it with known gotchas.

Here's an example: https://mchap.io/using-foia-data-and-unix-to-halve-major-sou...

Should I have told the Department of Finance to fuck off with their messy data? No -- even if I want to. Instead, we learn to work with its awfulness and advocate for cleaner data. Which is exactly what happened here -- once me and others started publishing stuff about tickets data and more journalists got involved, the data became cleaner over time.

chaps··on Twice this week, I have come across embarassingly bad data
"obviously wrong" is a never ending rabbit hole and you'll never, ever be satisfied because there will always be something "obviously wrong" with the data.

Messy data is a signal. You're wrong to omit signal.

chaps··on Twice this week, I have come across embarassingly bad data
Exactly. This is a big problem with "open data". A lot goes into cleaning it up to make it publishable, which often includes removing data so that the public "doesn't get confused". Now I have to spend months and months fighting FOIA fights to get the original raw, messy data because someone , somewhere had opinions on what "clean data" is. I'll pass -- give me the raw, messy data.
chaps··on Twice this week, I have come across embarassingly bad data
What...?
chaps··on Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies
Friend, it's truly great that you can do that. But you're missing the damn point.
chaps··on Twice this week, I have come across embarassingly bad data
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, yeah stop publishing garbage data, but as a FOIA nerd... I'll take the data in any state it is. I'm not personally going to be able to clean the data before I receive it. Does that mean I shouldn't release the unsanitized (public) data knowing that it has garbage data within? Hell no. Instead, we should learn and cultivate techniques to work with shit data. Should I attempt to clean it? Sure. But it becomes a liability problem very, very quickly.
chaps··on Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies
Friend, $3B is unfathomable wealth for an individual.
chaps··on Optimization lessons from a Minecraft structure locator
It took me a long time, too. Caution's the game. Collect as many hearts as you can in the beginning and as much gold. Perk shuffling is important, especially early on so you'll want to afford it.

My first win was with Luminous drill + ping pong = https://www.reddit.com/r/noita/comments/goas0k/reminder_ping...

chaps··on Optimization lessons from a Minecraft structure locator
If anyone's interested in this sort of puzzle, the game Noita is filled with them. A large chunk of the code's in lua and you can inspect it!

The final puzzle for the game is a cryptographic puzzle that's been unsolved for five years now. Folk have done just about everything imaginable to solve the puzzle.

chaps··on More common mistakes to avoid when creating system architecture diagrams
Once worked with a systems architect who intentionally disorganized their flow diagrams by just moving nodes in their flow to random places (hi Dan!). The only reason I can think of why he'd do that is to maintain job security by keeping the junior apps folk confused.
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