Looks like your average ad with a chat interface after you click it. For most online shopping, I consider this stuff annoying. Top of funnel is more sensible IMHO. Advise me on what product to buy, and help me make an informed decision, but I guess that is not where the ad dollars sit.
Antibiotics of all sorts, runoff, etc... There's no magic panacea. Thai and Vietnamese shrimp farms have been known to kill of swaths of mangroves. This you can find from a Google search.
On a more anecdotal basis, I've also heard that Norwegian salmon is fed quite a cocktail of antibiotics etc and some people for that reason prefer New Zealand or Scottish salmon. Again this part I have no evidence.
So anyway my point is that it's definitely not as easy as it seems unless I misunderstand what "land based" means, I just assume they're fish farms not in the open sea but somewhere in a lake or an artificially made pool.
The OCR stuff is quite usable. Their models perform good at some very basic tasks, so I use them to diversify. But their current model lineup is really terrible.
N=40. No idea why one would release such bullshit.
The worst part will be the idiotic news outlets publishing the stupid headline followed by the pseudoscience peddlers pushing peppermint oil supplements onto an ever-increasing boomer population by AI-generated Instagram ads. Lovely times we live in.
Even worse, the placebo group drank peppermint cordial. The researchers are arguing there is no peppermint oil in it because it's not a listed ingredient, but the listed ingredients have "flavorings". Which, I'd be shocked if it weren't peppermint oil.
Publish or perish mentality + difficulty funding a larger study is why this gets published. There's nothing particularly wrong with it as an exploratory study, the big problem is the lack of incentive to try to reproduce the results and publish the inevitable null result.
Can someone enlighten me why Flock cameras are worse than the average security camera? How is it such a big topic now when their large network suggests that they've been in operation for quite some time by now?
Louis Rossmann likes to point out that the "CC" in "CCTV" means "closed circuit." Traditional security cameras are displayed maybe in a security booth in real time somewhere, and then recorded onto an on-prem hard drive. When the drive fills up the oldest video is overwritten. They're only ever looked at after recording if there's a reason to look at them.
The Flock cameras, on the other hand, upload all data to Flock which stores all video forever. They also do image recognition to identify license plates as well as other identifiable information (they've claimed to not do facial recognition but the implication is they can).
They then make this searchable so any cop with a flock login can put, say, your license plate into a flock search and it will give him a complete record of all your movements all across the country.
Network effects. Massive difference between police having to go talk to a local business owner or private citizen and say "hey, there was a robbery here, can you please go pull the footage you got last night at 8pm and see if you can share it with us please?" and being able to do a one-click nationwide query.
You'd have to ask the guys putting flock cameras in playgrounds.
Flock apparently know how to sell this stuff to cops because not only did they film children's gymnastics they used the footage as part of their sales pitch to police:
They have not been in operation for quite some time now. The large network is not a product of a long and steady roll out, but instead significant financial investment - much of which coming from people who are on record saying that democracy is a flawed system and other authoritarian soundbytes.
Bob is the town mayor. The police want XYZ. The police request from flock a detail breakdown of everywhere that Bob went in the last 5 years (this example is after flock has been around a while) and then feeds that into AI looking for patterns. The police find a mistress. The police now get everything they want for the rest of mayor Bob's term.
Flock is a large panopticon used to control the population. It became apparent recently how Flock cameras would be used by a new administration to purge law abiding workers and residents whose only crime was their immigration status. Whether you agree or not with the policy of this purge, you still witnessed the frightening efficiency with which authorities could now track and enforce whatever policy would come down the pipe. It made clear through show of force the new threat to a free people.
If it were a single camera or location, there is much less ability to track and attempt to coerce a large population.
the best place to start, if you're legitimately curious, would probably be the many news paper articles and the many recorded city meetings where flock's controversies are brought up.
I was there before 2018, their reliability was never that good.
I still remember that they launched GitHub Actions in 2018 and back then I was thinking: They can't even make the website reliable, surely this will only cause them more problems.
Dropbox pulled the plug on so many good apps. They should have built the full office suite in the browser and eventually slapped an email service on it. As a competitor to Google Workspace, they would have a real chance. Storage as a Service is too little of a moat in the cloud age.
Mailbox, Paper and whatever the photos one was called (Carousel?). I agree. I was hyping them up as the next gsuite and they just dismantled all those apps and the momentum they built along with them.
Paper still exists - Drew refused to kill it. Been heavily underfunded for years and saddled with a codebase that assumed it would be >50 people forever, so still digging out of that hole - hence the apparent freeze on feature development for multiple years and separate mobile/desktop apps disappearing.
Yes, the photos one was Carousel. I'm still sad about that, in some ways it was better than even what Google Photos offers now. The big problem there was Dropbox chicken'ed out about picking a fight with Google Photos - since Google were giving away for free(ish) a comparable product to the whole Android install base, doing the same freemium model as always would've been a challenge with heavy competition for the free users.
Mailbox... was a botched acquisition. Ideologically they aligned, but no real plan for how to keep momentum and turn it into making money, and no real story about how Mailbox was better as part of Dropbox than separate. Even under the hood the infrastructure was all separate (except eventually for login).
A big missing piece of the story: Dropbox tried to be a multi-product company long before building the infrastructure for that. Which I think self-sabotaged many of these new products.
I’m guessing their “momentum” wasn’t on the path of building a sustainable business, particularly given the existence of Microsoft. From a market position standpoint, Paper could have become what Notion is now. Notion even released at around the same time as Paper.
Was it that Notion from early on supported Markdown compatibility, which is a distinguishing feature when selling to software startups? Was Paper too aggressively coupled to Dropbox storage, when Google, Microsoft, and Box already had a large share of that market?
They are not drying up because of AI datacenters and especially not because of European datacenters.
While man-made climate change is undoubtedly real, the yearly "our lakes dry up"-media cycle is not proof of it at all. Check if the return to normal in November will make the news.
I am aware and never claimed that. Though, the global push towards mega factories, data centers and whatnot does not help the situation. Lots of places here in Germany already struggle with having enough water, so the mindset to "lets just build a Tesla mega factory here" is something I never understood. Can't be that different for data centers. We should use our resources smartly, not for profit margins.
Your comment very much implies a strong link between the two however. That you then switch from data centres to factories is also a shift that is not related to the discussion at hand.
Personally, everything I've read on the issue indicates that the water usage, for a product that I hear mentioned daily by people in the street, is insignificant.
I have many qualms with AI, mainly about the politics of AI labs and its effects on inequality, and I am active in this field. But I see its environmental costs as a weak argument and don't use it, despite of how receptive people that I try to convince are to it: it uses much less energy, harms many fewer animals, and serves more of a purpose than animal agriculture, so I prefer to move my environmental actions towards that.
"Our lakes run dry" is a meme at this point. Apparently the doomers entirely forgot their kvetching about Lago di Garda drying out a couple of years ago. Memory-holed doesn't even closely describe this sort of behavior.
reply