needs to look closer at what’s on their screen

IT guy here. The number of tickets I could close with this as the root cause.

Any idea what year this was? Israel had “buggery” laws on the books up until the late 1980s, which I believe classified any homosexual acts as “sodomy”.

Thanks for the detailed reply. I totally see your point about people not calling 911 when there’s an actual emergency, or calling the wrong number, and that resulting in a delay to first responders being notified in a critical situation. Obviously not a dispatcher myself, but have spent some time working with them, and I would say that most of them would echo your sentiments. I’ve heard some funny stories though of people calling 911 for the most inappropriate reasons - lost dogs, car won’t start (was in caller’s garage, not like they were stranded in a blizzard or something). My favorite was an elderly man who apparently called 911 because his computer was being “hacked”, sounded like he got one of those scam calls. That one made me pretty proud of the security awareness training we did for county employees.

I think it definitely varies by county. I worked for an IT company that served a lot of county governments across a few states in the US, and a majority of them would try to discourage 911 calls for things that weren’t active emergencies.

Lots of counties had central 911 operations that coordinated for other local municipalities (ie the county 911 would dispatch a local city’s fire department), but non-emergency numbers usually went to the local municipality. Sometimes municipalities would have non-emergency calls roll over to the 911 center, but those calls were always tagged differently, and essentially moved to the back of the queue behind 911 calls. The goal was generally that if you call 911 you talk to someone immediately, whereas if you call non-emergency you can wait on hold for a bit if there were a lot of 911 calls.

Is that why I couldn’t figure out what was messed up at first? Same strain apparently…

Twisted Veins is my go to. Great quality and durability, much lower price than Monster. I have lived in 9 homes in the last 8 years, and the 4 pack I bought 8 years ago has held up perfectly. These things are outliving TVs, computers, Ethernet cables, you name it.

Not OC, but there’s definitely an AI bubble.

First of all, real “AI” doesn’t even exist yet. It’s all machine learning, which is a component of AI, but it’s not the same as AI. “AI” is really just a marketing buzzword at this point. Every company is claiming their app is “AI-powered” and most of them aren’t even close.

Secondly, “AI” seems to be where crypto was a few years ago. The bitcoin bubble popped (along with many other currencies), and so will the AI bubble. Crypto didn’t go away, nor will it, and AI isn’t going away either. However, it’s a fad right now that isn’t going to last in its current form. (This one is just my opinion.)

I described it to my dad like this: “They don’t need to listen to your conversations because they’re already able to simulate your thoughts.”

Kinda a stretch, but it worked for him.

I actually saw a video once where the argument was that phones aren’t listening. Rather, Google (and Meta and the like) have so many other data points on you that they don’t need to listen. Listening to you would be far less efficient and far less insightful than relying on their vast network of other data they have on you. Even if you don’t use a single Google product, you’re still not safe.

Reminds me of the story where Target knew a customer was pregnant before she did. They started sending her ads for pregnancy/baby products before she even knew she was pregnant, all because they had so much data on her.

In my opinion, this is way more terrifying and problematic than if they were listening to us.

I disagree with your opinion of the integration with Threads, but I agree with you that it should be up to the individual instances and/or users.

Meta is a horrible company and I want nothing to do with them, but the whole point of the fediverse is that it’s decentralized. Anyone can spin up an instance if Lemmy or Mastodon and choose what other instances they federate with. If we were to somehow ban Meta’s instances, we create a pretty sketchy precedent.

Agreed, they probably should have been ordered to stop a while ago.

That said, Apple is the largest company in the U.S. by a number of metrics, so the fact that the government would cross them at all is kind of a surprise.

Oof, right before the holidays too. What a blow to their sales.

I wonder if Apple will use the estimated sales losses as damages when they counter-sue the other party in the patent dispute. Apple is taking “preemptive” steps to comply with an order that is not in effect yet – perhaps it’s a long con to entangle the patent holder in a prolonged legal battle so as to devalue and acquire them.

I have “good” and was offered 9% in early October.

One good sign is that banks are lowering their rates for longer term CDs. I’m seeing 1 year CDs in the 6% range, but a 5 year CD is more like 2%-3%. This means that the banks expect the fed to lower rates in the next few years.

freedom to customize the shell

This is always the issue for me – I ssh into several machines for various clients every day. All of those clients have one thing in common: equally strict and inconsistent policies about what packages you can use from where and for what reason. “I like this shell better” would never fly, sadly.

Spoiler alert: they will

This was very well stated, and I wholeheartedly agree.

Agreed, we desperately need regulations on who has the right to reproduce another person’s image/voice/likeness. I know that there will always be people on the internet who do it anyway, but international copyright laws still mostly work in spite of that, so I imagine that regulations on this type of AI would mostly work as well.

We’re really in the Wild West of machine learning right now. It’s beautiful and terrifying all at the same time.