donkeyd

> isn't your email address firstname.lastname@gmail.com, as for most folks

I'm going to guess that for 'most folks' there's probably someone else with the same name and therefore this way of guessing someone's email address is far from reliable.

It's actually so unreliable that one email address I have receives mail for others who for some reason think it's their email. This includes plane tickets, accounts for phone contracts and order confirmations.

I agree that this might be a gap in the law, in theory. However, I've seen how many businesses work and they often don't have a process for randomly enriching production data from e-mails to the privacy department.

There's also the fact that the law does say that this personal data can only be use for the purpose of providing user data and must then be deleted. But we also know that there's little chance companies like this will do that.

It's a double edged sword, but I'm going to err on the side of danger and send in a data request anyway. My curiosity is much bigger than my fear of providing them my e-mail address.

> Does the full name have to be your legal name?

Pretty much. Only your person has rights, not the fake identities you created. They can actually request a copy of an ID or something comparable to confirm your identity. You might have a hard time removing your data, in some cases, when using fake names since then your identity can't be confirmed.

Thanks for sharing! I often call myself a flat bar, because I'm missing the one specialization for the T-shape. This description of the 'paint drip person' hit really close to home, so I think that that's what I'll call myself in the future.

Interesting, another project by Alexander Klöpping (coincidentally also OP). I guess this guy is the definition of serial entrepreneur. He's founded (and sold) Blendle, which is kinda related to this product, but before that he'd already started tons of companies. He's somewhat famous in the Netherlands as he's often invited to explain the newest tech stuff on TV.

> drivers might step on the accelerator for too long, increasing the risk of a crash

Wow, ok. So there's no actual issue with the accelerator pedal, it's just that people are too stupid to not correctly operate a vehicle and the need to be guarded from making mistakes by adding a warning to the software.

There's a lot of stuff objectively wrong in Teslas (see phantom braking, for example), but this isn't one of those things.

There wasn't even a payload, since the definition of that word requires it to be valuable in some way. We can just call it a load, I guess.

Also, most people use other tools like web-ui to run these models, which don't seem to apply any watermarks.

I have a single 4 star (passenger) rating. I don't know when I got it, but I think it happened when I was very drunk one time while abroad, so I probably earned it to. I personally always rate 5, unless there was something very wrong with the car or the driver.

> The people who suffer are going to be average users

I already notice this just with the blackout. Some stuff I find on Google is in private subs now, so I can't view it on Reddit. Sure, there might be ways around it, but regular people won't know that.

> not by typing reddit.com/r/binoculars

That's exactly what I did. Most of those subs have either a pinned guide or a wiki with recommendations and considerations. And often I do use search, because it's fine for simple things like searching for model numbers.

> If I am, doesn't that completely break down the moment a decent chunk of communities decides it must not be on reddit?

That's the point of it being a network effect, right? Like, when people collectively start using Facebook in stead of Myspace, so Myspace died?

> Am I right in this assumption?

No, I don't exclusively use Google to search Reddit and when I do, I explicitly mention site:reddit.com.

> And you would find that information the same way as you would on reddit if I'm not mistaken.

So, no, you are mistaken. Because I didn't even know those forums existed and they don't seem to show up on Google often.

Recently, I was looking for a monitor for example. Say I'd want to know more about the 'G95SC' entering 'G95SC review' in Google shows mostly review sites like CNET. I want to see regular people's opinions so I look on Reddit and see those. And I can do the same thing for 3D printers, cars, brake pads, track tires, laptops, android car stereos and pretty much anything else. In stead of having to find the relevant forums.

I have to disagree with this. Sure, it's different from 'all my friends are there' like on Whatsapp and Facebook. With Reddit it's 'all the info is there'.

I'm looking for a set of binoculars? Check the discussion on Reddit. Looking for some info in flashing Tasmota? Check the discussions on Reddit. Need some info on debugging my 3D printer? Same.

I've resorted to appending 'Reddit' to my Google searches whenever I'm looking for experiences people have with products or services, because it's a pretty sure bet for getting useful answers. It's also well indexed by search engines as opposed to Facebook groups and it has a much lower barrier for asking questions than Stack.

The only reason all of this content is there, is the network effect of those loose communities all being attached to the same domain and having a single account to interact with all of them. And of course, not having to search all over to find the best community / private forum for whatever thing you're interested in. As a man of many hobbies, Reddit is great and I really hate that Discord is starting to become the alternative, because searchability is crap and discussions are impossible to follow.

> Better ... than a system that's confidently wrong

If ChatGPT has taught us all anything, this should be it. It can be so confidently wrong while sounding believable, that I wouldn't be surprised if some kid has turned in completely hallucinated homework thinking it was a great essay.

> What I find mindbogglingly ridiculous is how emotionally charged all of the "the system must include LIDAR" proponents are.

> None of the arguments I come up against are anything but a surface level "well duh, intuitively more sensors equals more better" along with a litany of "you must like murdering babies".

A bit pot blaming the kettle there.

The thing is, the 'vision is enough' crowd often manages to pick a single use case, like seeing the difference between cardboard and plywood, that has nothing to do with Lidar and then asking, rhetorically, how Lidar would help with that. By opening a discussion in such a disingenuous way, you provoke the emotional response you seem to dislike.

If you want to have an actual discussion, maybe start by asking a genuine question.

> in order to have a machine that can make human-like decisions

Honestly, I don't think many people want it to make human-like decisions. We want it to make much, much better decisions. By your standard, we should just put two camera's on top that rotate on a platform that can only move about 180 degrees both ways. Also, remove radar and ultrasonics, because humans don't have those either.

I can't give you decent arguments for using Lidar. I'm not in that field, so I can only return my own gut feeling in response to yours and I honestly don't think that has any value.

Or phantom braking because it thinks a weird shadow is actually an object. Or not realizing the difference between a reflection on a guard rail and a road line marking (because of low sun) causing it to directly aim for a guard rail (something I personally experienced).

Sure, vision object detection is 'solved'.

You're applying US logic to European LE. Having worked in European LE I can tell you the following:

> geolocation tracking

Only real available ways are hardly useful and easy to avoid.

> sting rays

Really only useful if you already know something will happen or where (about) a suspect is.

> phone/internet/email/web history providers subpoenas

Take lots of time and are often barely useful for European LE due to the international character of the internet and many more reasons.

> doorbell cameras

Contrary to popular belief hardly any more useful than old school security cams and very often much less useful.

> face recognition

Mostly illegal for LE use in Europe: https://edpb.europa.eu/system/files/2022-05/edpb-guidelines_...

> national security mass surveillance

In most of Europe this does not (legally) exist and therefore will never be admissible in court.

> drones

Barely useful for catching criminals.

So no, LE, especially in Europe, does not have an incredible wealth of privacy intruding tools that can be applied willy nilly. But I live in a country where a cop needs to report removing their gun from their holster and every bullet is accounted for. It's a very different world from the US.

A law like this, in my country, would only be used in special circumstances for big time criminals, because the amount of work to actually apply it and the paperwork before that can actually happen is too big to apply in other cases. Maybe that's why I have less distrust towards laws like this, because I've seen how hard it is to actually apply them.

> it was logistically barely possible to spy on 100%

It still is. LE barely has enough capacity to fight every criminal, let alone watch 100% of everything everyone does online. And if you look at how tough a time social media are having at content moderation it seems like tools to automate this well don't exist yet. Just look at stories like this:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2013/10/15/n...

> the real issue is that it mandates having backdoors

I'm seeing this response in many replies to mine and I feel like this is because people don't understand how laws like this actually work. Especially because people in the US like to apply their mistrust of LE to European LE.

The Netherlands already has a law in place allowing police to hack citizens in case of specific crimes, comparable to this law in France. This does not require companies to create back doors, but allows LE to remotely enter devices of suspects if deemed necessary. This needs to be confirmed by a judge and therefore isn't applied very often, only in specific cases where there's no other option.

Fighting cyber crime without these laws becomes nearly impossible, because often a perpetrator is very good at covering their tracks and offensive hacking is a necessity to find a perpetrator. HN then has the tendency to say "for now", implying that this will soon be applied to petty thieves and the general populace, but this law doesn't allow that, has many safeguards and therefore that doesn't happen.

I doubt those use smart phones.

There's a Dutch TV show that regularly catches African fraudsters by literally using their camera's to take pictures of the fraudsters. Sure, they trick them into installing an app, but that's something LE can do as well.

Also, there are tools like Pegasus that pretty much do all the heavy lifting in hacking.

Having worked in law enforcement, seeing sentiment like this is just so depressing. On one side it's people saying things like this, while on the other side a large part is complaining about law enforcement not doing enough to combat cyber crime. These things go hand in hand.

If criminals can have limitless access to new technologies, but LE gets no new ways of finding criminals using new technologies, we might as well stop with LE all together. Just let criminals do whatever they want without anyone trying to stop them. That's going to be awesome!

Edit: The down votes were expected, but next to clicking that button I'd love an actual response of how people think things will turn out of criminals get the power of technology and LE gets nothing.

No, they won't. Also, define criminals. Plenty of crimes are done by people who are not professional criminals who spend money and time on opsec.

Have you heard of hacking? Most police forces have offensive hacking teams by now, it's not much of a secret. Also there are some quite famous tools that aid in this.

Wire tapping has been approved this way for ages the 'for now' trope is getting old, because in some countries laws do work.

No risk of investing money in studio time and equipment with the result being sub-par. You see what you pay for before you actually pay.

Good point, an important part of the resilience of the grid is the fact that there are hardly any significant points of failure.

All of that is correct, but I don't see how it's relevant to my argument that plugging a couple of cables into Europe is not a feasible solution and would take massive amounts of work in geopolitics, let alone the engineering to adapt the grid to make it possible.

In my country there's still a 0% tax (which can be seen as a subsidy) and there's still what we call the 'salderingsregeling'. That last thing allows people to deduct the KWH they produce in summer from what they use in winter. This can also be considered a subsidy, even though it's not paid by government. Both promote buying solar. The last part looks like we'll finally start to get rid of from 2025.

At completely different scales than providing an entire country's energy needs through two cables. The UK currently has more than 2000 power stations providing balanced electricity throughout the country. The international transport is also for balancing, not for providing an entire country's energy needs from another country.

You can't just connect 20 cable's from Africa to the European grid and expect it to work, that's not how the grid works. And I'm truly surprised that many people on HN seem to think it would.

Source: I work in utilities and one of my current focus area's is creating software to help expand the net to cope with the addition of new renewable sources and EV charging stations. And even that is posing a massive challenge on a relatively small and local scale. I couldn't imagine the impact of this fantasy of just plugging in some cables from Africa somewhere.

Edit: This incident is an example of how sensitive all this stuff is:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-27/green-shi...

I see the same problems. I don't understand why we're still subsidizing solar. I hope we can harness tidal movements in some way, seems like the most consistent thing we're not really using yet. I have no idea whether that's even feasible though.