“Don’t protect yourself or others, even peacefully. You’re obstructing the oppression.”

Has anyone here actually read the article? As far as I can tell, facial recognition is being increased in availability, but it was already in use.

Every police force in the country will be able to use live facial recognition vans, with the number of vans set to rise from ten to 50.

It’s also worth noting that in the UK for a very long time now any data that is not E2EE can be seized by the government from companies without the consent of their users if a warrant is issued. That’s obviously bad but nothing new.

It sounds like what’s actually new here is that the police is becoming more centralised and organised. Instead of a lot of smaller departments in local areas with lack of expertise, more centralised organisations will do the policing.

The article covers some pros and cons from different people’s perspectives.

• There might end up being more policing in cities and less in rural areas.
• There might be some downsizing of policies forces
• Police forces may be less accountable as they grow.
• Police forces believe they will be better equipped to tackle cybercrime.

Overall, to me, this seems like a generally negative move. I don’t want the police to spy on people, and I want them to be more knowledgeable about their local area and more accountable to their people. It does look like there might be more surveillance, and that’s bad too.

Please read don’t take headlines for granted.

When you log into Windows with a Microsoft account, your recovery key is often automatically uploaded to Microsoft’s servers as a backup in case you forget your password. Legally, this means Microsoft owns the key and must surrender it under the U.S. CLOUD Act.

I find that really quite shocking, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Given the legal and technical risks, the advice for business travelers is clear: do not carry data.

The US really is a hostile surveillance state.

For me I found out when I wanted them to fix something and they refused to honour the warranty because of the blown fuse.

As far as I know, this is illegal, btw. They have to prove that the error you are reporting is caused by user action. If your battery craps out, they can’t blame it on you rooting your phone.

Samsung has been blowing fuses in your phone when you root since at least 2015. I know because it happened to me. Never bought one again after that.

This is obvious. It’s literally trained off of English-speaking people’s online comments / posts and designed to give the most likely answer to a question.

Agreed, but recommended specs are >4GB RAM which should be achievable even with a really old secondhand computer or SBC like a Raspberry Pi.

Been using it for about 7 months.

After about 2 months I decided to completely move away from Google Photos and now I only use Immich.

This was a big move for me. I have over 90 000 photos and 1000 videos totalling over 200GB.

The performance is great even on spinning rust, though I am running it on a Ryzen 2700X and 32GB RAM. That said it’s only when the machine learning background tasks take off that that CPU horsepower is used. You really don’t need that much. The recommended specs are fairly small.

Since I first installed it, they’ve added an auto-OCR feature which is a godsend. I can search my entire library for text on a screenshot and it works really well.

Weirdly, the missing feature that really pissed me off on Google Photos and got me to move over was the lack of the ability to search for images not currently in any album. The search functionality is much better on Immich.

I think the only feature I’m missing from Google Photos is the non-destructive editor, and that’s coming real soon (the PR is already merged as of last week).

Micron: “But guuyyyyyyys… What about the money? We could be making so much more money!”

For second hand, user-to-user sales via EBay and Vinted are the cheapest, but it takes more effort and you could get scammed.

I’ve bought a few devices second hand at a second hand electronics shop. In the UK, this could be CeX, for example. With many of these you’ll get a limited warranty, and you can walk into a shop and ask to look at the phone and ask questions. You can ask if it is locked and return it if you can’t use it.

Why not buy the phone from the manufacturer directly so as to not give money to Big Bezos, if you’re going to buy new?

Or was this talking about used Amazon listings?

Explorer already crashes enough without this.

Why don’t they work on Explorer’s awful performance and constant hanging before working in another chatbot?

You know, useful software development work?

That’s a fair point. I think some of our interviewers have said that they don’t mind the candidate using a LLM, as long as they are up-front that they are doing so.

I’d say the kind of use is important. If they are using it as a form of advanced auto-complete, that’s fine. If they are using it uncritically, or to avoid thinking about the problem, I doubt I’d hire them.

We need engineers who can solve problems, not a salaried middle-man to an LLM.

Many of our candidates are from abroad, and we pay their VISAs and help them move here if they are hired.

You can offer in-person as an option, but I’m not sure most of our applicants would want to travel hours for an interview. Especially if there is more than one stage with deliberation needed in between.

Most of our applicants seem to be people currently in employment but who don’t like their job. They are likely doing interviews on the sly during work hours and likely don’t want to take a full day off or signal to their employer they are looking for a job.

All this to say I doubt forcing employees to do in-person interviews is a good option for most people, but I do agree it should be an option the interviewee can ask for.

Playing devil’s advocate: The reason companies feel the need to put these systems in place is most likely because many candidates cheat using chatbots.

In my company, until very recently, engineers were running the first and second stages of interviews (right after CV vetting) and I’ve heard many times in the last couple of years that my colleagues suspected candidates of using LLMs. There would be unnatural pauses, typing after every asked question etc.

Granted, I don’t think any have slipped through to being hired, as it’s still pretty obvious, but I can understand why companies may want to put safeguards in place.

Are they going too far here? Absolutely.

For us, we actually sit with the candidate in a pair-programming kind of setup to gauge their vibes, way of thinking and confidence as they solve coding problems that closely match what they would do on the job. That usually eliminates “seniors” that haven’t coded for 5 years or that got there by nepotism or sheer passage of time.

I went through the exact same thing with Dyson back in ~2018 worst interview process I’ve ever experienced.

It’s not particularly bad value for what they’re offering, which seems to be a component library and set of templates.

For a comparison, the company I work for are paying over a £1000 / year for MUI-X, which is a set of paid React components. It’s cheaper and more efficient than paying someone at our company to maintain our own component library.

Even a single engineer spending 10% of their time (as I used to) maintaining this stuff would cost the company over £5000 / year in manpower.

It’s effectively an alternative to plain CSS. Works well with component-based systems like React and Svelte.

I used it for a few years and thought it was pretty good. I still use it on some of my projects.

I don’t know why people are saying a 200km range is bad. Most people I know don’t drive more than 25km to work per day. Surely even 100km is perfectly fine for a daily driver.

My brother had an 80km range car for years and was perfectly fine.

Is it just that it’s not competitive at this price?

Who is this supposed to be? Charlie Kirk’s wife? If so that’s hilarious in a this-timeline-is-a-disgusting-joke kind of way.