closeparen

It would be better if they specifically excluded advertising uses of call metadata, etc. I assume this is getting mixed in from their ecommerce efforts to sell the devices. But how do you expect them to play back the voicemail if they don’t have it? What would be the point of "please leave a message after the beep" if the audio is going to /dev/null?

It would be pretty spooky if your voice managed to come out the other party's telephone without ever having been collected into and processed by the telephone network. Taking audio from one place and transporting it to another is what we pay it for.

This text does not appear in the link. I do see:

>Call Logs: We collect information about calls made using Phones, including the phone numbers you call or receive calls from, the date/time of the calls, and the length of the calls. We also collect network quality metrics and other technical data related to call performance. Please note that we do not record calls.

The version of the privacy policy cited in the previous discussion cited that voice audio is collected for the purposes of forwarding it to the other phone.

There is no world where a totalitarian government’s law enforcement ambitions on some object-level question are thwarted by the same government’s enforcement of privacy law. Countries with GDPR that are thinking of rounding up and kicking out the refugees know perfectly well who and where the refugees are.

I have the right to my own senses, my own observations, my own memories. I have the right to photograph what I can see with my eyes, and to write down what I can remember. Unless enjoined by a specific duty of care (doctor/patient, attorney/client, security clearance, etc) I have the right to discuss my memories with others. This obtains even when using electronic tools and even when working in association with others.

I don’t intend to give up or accept limitations on these rights because you consider yourself to have “privacy rights” or ownership interests in my records, my memories, my perceptions, or the reality in front of me. I find the notion of the government or another person interfering in this process, the perception and recollection of reality, to be creepy and totalitarian by itself.

In 1984, it is not only that the government is aware of Winston, but that it routinely tampers with or destroys evidence of the past & demands to control the perception of the present. I do not think we should let a government do that, even for a good reason like “protect your privacy” any more than we should let it destroy general purpose computing “for the children.”

In high school I worked at a VAR that had partnerships with HP, among others (Cisco, Microsoft, etc). Our partnership gave us access to a special support line where a fluent English speaker picked up quickly, talked to you like you had seen a computer before, didn't enforce a script, and issued a return authorization with minimal hassle.

At that time, only Amazon came close on the consumer side.

Specifically, the Jones Act guarantees trucking and freight rail jobs by making it unreasonable to transport goods by water.

The GPTs are "it" because they were deliberately named in a way to discourage anthropomorphizing them. Anthropic does want you to anthropomorphize Claude, and they gave their model a male name. It's not that deep!

We have a lot of tools (starting with the internal wiki) which are normally only exposed to engineers through web interfaces; MCPs make them available to terminal agents to use autonomously. This can get really interesting with e.g. giving Claude access to query logs and metrics to debug a production issue.

It is obnoxious that MCP results always go directly into the context window. I'd prefer to dump a large payload into Claude's filesystem and let him figure it out from there. But some of the places MCPs can be used don't even have filesystems.

And the average commute duration is around 27 minutes. If you happened to live in one of the very few places in America where there even are 15 urban miles to cross, doing it at city bus speeds of under 10mph would be a catastrophic collapse in your standard of living.

Bus lanes solve for variability during peak traffic, but speeds even in free-flowing traffic are far from good enough.

Even in a dense city with no parking, it takes an unusually fast and frequent bus to compete with a brisk walk, and a heavy-rail subway to beat a fit or electric-assisted cyclist.

You stated that parenting goes out the window if a child encounters a screen at a friend’s house.

I dunno man, going over to friends’ houses to watch movies, play console games, later to show each other funny YouTube videos, and in high school to do computer-based writing projects, group presentations, and digital video projects are parts of my childhood I wouldn’t trade for anything. I hope my kids get those experiences with their peers.

The corporate security theater that kills me is insisting that everyone tap their badge on the reader next to an already-open door. Even in the presence of a guard, this merely ensures that everyone passing through the open door has some object, plausibly badge-shaped, to hold near the reader. Essentially any NFC card will make it beep. Only a valid credential will actuate the lock, but the door is already open, and the click is too subtle for its absence to alarm anyone.

There is a device you can deploy if you're serious about ensuring that every single individual in a moving crowd has a valid credential... a turnstile! Assuming you've calculated the appropriate number of them for the expected traffic flow.

I like to think of Claude as enjoying himself more when working with good tools rather than bad ones. But metaphysics aside, tools that have the functions you would expect, by the names you would expect, with the behavior you would expect, do seem to be just as important when the users are LLMs.

If the concern is time-wasting, even having upvotes or likes and sorting on them is plenty engaging. I spent thousands of hours as a teenager on Reddit, HN, and the old blue Facebook chronological feed.

Do you believe the research shows that screens in and of themselves are so powerfully damaging that being exposed for, what, a few hours a week at a friend’s house will cause them to require psychiatric medication?

So many questions. Are you campaigning against billboards in your city? Do you avoid taking your kids to any business that has digital signage? I assume you completely abstain from all types of movies and TV? What about radio or books?

What are you, personally, doing on HN?

Fascinating.

When I was growing up, we loved to lend the sheltered kids from the more conservative families media they weren’t supposed to have, like the Harry Potter books.

A physical realm that is safe for children to explore in their own is clearly preferable to one where it’s transgressive to let a child go outside without an escort.

It is plausible that the same applies to the digital realm.

If you’re going to hold datacenter operators to blame for the waste associated with non-optimized computation, then it would seem to follow that they get some credit for optimizing.

I don't think this shows that at all?

Your biometrics are in the secure enclave of your specific phone. Apple doesn't have them in a database.

The scanners were there before this.

I prefer to steer, but radar cruise control takes a lot of the frustration out of minor speed fluctuations in front of me on the highway. I don’t feel as much need to pass all the time.

You can develop locally if you want to, and lots of people do, but it’s community support. The environment that someone else is obligated to fix for you is the remote one (which they can do by blowing away the container and then you recover your state from Git).

It’s not as dumb a client as VNC, but it’s close. Basic operations like typing and scrolling will stutter and lag if your connection is less than perfect. VSCode’s client is really VSCode from a UI perspective.

Never liked Eclipse, but I’ve been forced to use VSCode over my preferred JetBrains IDEs because it is the only modern mainstream editor with a competent client-server mode. As in, actually rendering the UI locally while doing all the code indexing and intelligence on the server. Corporate world would much rather maintain disposable remote VMs than help you unfuck your laptop after whatever required security upgrade installs the wrong version of a scripting language and sends everything to hell.

The State of Illinois is going to lose its "business" already for other reasons. Do you think there is a reasonable privacy regime that prevents health systems from knowing where their patients live or using that information to site clinics?

A website where you can upload POIs to a shareable map seems like one of those things that's so obvious and so useful it exists almost under any economic arrangement of the advertising industry.

I get that data brokers and big tech are a much sexier topic, but this breach - like so many of the most pressing threats to our privacy - are mundane shortages of competence and giving-a-shit in the IT activities of boring old organizations.

Having seen this world up close, the absolute last place you ever want your medical data to be is on the Windows Server in the closet of your local doctors office. The public cloud account of a Silicon Valley type company that hires reasonably competent people is Fort Knox by comparison.