the_sisko @ the_sisko @startrek.website

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Joined

2 yr. ago

someone playing music on their phone though the car audio (super common now) tapping the phone to ignore a call is just as much a crime as texting a novel to an ex.

They are all crimes. Set up your music before you go, or use voice command. Ignore the call with voice command or just let it go to voicemail. Lol. It's not hard.

And you are kidding yourself if you think almost every person driving for a living is not at some level forced to use their phone by their company (I was)

This is a great of the strength of this system: this company will find its drivers and vehicles getting ticketed a lot, and they'll have to come up with a way to allow drivers to do their jobs without interacting with their phones will moving at high speeds.

I would much rather have someone pulled over when driving erratically then the person getting an automated ticket 3 weeks after mowing down a pedestrian.

The camera doesn't magically remove traffic enforcement humans from the road. They can still pull over the obviously drunk/erratic driver.

I literally watched cops driving while on their phone everyday after it was made illegal. Nothing was done, Nothing changed, they hand out tickets while breaking the same rules.

I mean yeah, fuck the police :) Seems like we're in agreement here.

Might kill someone is a precrime, a issue with these tickets in this case is that without the AI camera nothing would have been seen (literally victimless). If someone crashes into anything while on their phone the chances it will be used in prosecution is low.

Using your fucking phone while driving is the crime. This isn't some "thought police" situation. Put the phone away, and you won't get the ticket. It's that simple. We don't need to wait for a person to mow down a pedestrian in order to punish them for driving irresponsibly.

In the same spirit, if a person gets drunk and drives home, and they don't kill somebody -- well that's a crime and they should be punished for it.

And if you can't handle driving responsibly, then the privilege of driving on public roads should be revoked.

I don’t think texting while driving is a good idea, like not wearing a seatbelt. However this is offloading a lot to AI, distracted driving is not well defined and considering the nuances I don’t want to leave any part to AI. Here is an example: eating a bowl of soup while operating a vehicle would be distracted right? What if the soup was in a cup? What if the soup was made of coffee beans?

This is such a weird ad absurdum argument. Nobody is telling some ML system "make a judgment call on whether the coffee bean soup is a distraction." The system is identifying people violating a cut-and-dried law: using their phone while driving, or not wearing a seatbelt. Assuming it can do it in an unbiased way (which is a huge if, to be fair), then there's no slippery slope here.

For what it's worth, I do worry about ML system bias, and I do think the seatbelt enforcement is a bit silly: I personally don't mind if a person makes a decision that will only impact their own safety. I care about the irresponsible decisions that people make affecting my safety, and I'd be glad for some unbiased enforcement of the traffic rules that protect us all.

I'm definitely a fan of better enforcement of traffic rules to improve safety, but using ML* systems here is fraught with issues. ML systems tend to learn the human biases that were present in their training data and continue to perpetuate them. I wouldn't be shocked if these traffic systems, for example, disproportionately impact some racial groups. And if the ML system identifies those groups more frequently, even if the human review were unbiased (unlikely), the outcome would still be biased.

It's important to see good data showing these systems are fair, before they are used in the wild. I wouldn't support a system doing this until I was confident it was unbiased.

• it's all machine learning - NOT artificial intelligence. No intelligence involved, just mathematical parameters "learned" by an algorithm and applied to new data.

Ah yes, the famously victimless crime of using your phone while driving. Honestly screw anybody who does that, they deserve to be ticketed each time, cause each time they might kill somebody.

I mean you still get served the ads that provide them revenue. But it's not like I'm assigning you personal responsibility for keeping them in business, or saying you're wrong or bad for staying. Just sharing why I want people to get off the platform quicker.

It seems obvious to me. Twitter has historically been used by public figures, and especially public institutions like local governments, transit agencies, etc, to make official announcements & statements. Of course having that on a centrally owned social media site was never good, but now with Space Karen making it actively hostile to users (and trying to prevent logged out users from seeing that info), it's very bad. The sooner Twitter completes its inevitable collapse, the sooner those public figures & institutions will move to a better way to deliver those - Mastodon, RSS, webpages, whatever.

IMO it's in the public's best interest for all the holdouts to get out now so we can move on.

Sphinx has warnings for these already. They're just suppressed and ignored :)

That's the marbling that you refer to when you describe steak.

That was a great episode actually, my only complaint was that he didn't seem to require serious therapy afterwards.

Same with O'Brien's mental imprisonment episode, though at least they tried to show the psychological damage there. He just managed to get over it at the end of the episode 🫠

Yeah, that's probably the best explanation. Or maybe she just knows her deep seated desires, and uses them to imagine how Fenna would be?

Yeah...Star Trek has never been particularly good at one-off romance episodes, and this is certainly one of those.

Yeah, I don't think that I enjoyed any shoehorned romance with Picard especially...

The episode also has Dax asking O'Brien to boost the top speed of Seyetik's ship to warp 9.5 to avoid a potential supernova, a prominent example of Star Trek supernovae being apparently able to travel faster than light. So there's that.

Lol now that you mention it, yes that is quite silly.

I also remember a moment where O'Brien reports that he increased the speed to warp 9.6, and Dax asks "wasn't the theoretical maximum warp 9.5" and he's just like "it was." Top tier O'Brien right there.

Street level is not the same thing as "among car traffic". For instance, there's a stretch of the N-Judah in SF between Embarcadero and 4th & King which is on street level, but in fact it is in an entirely separate right of way, where it is illegal for cars to drive. And unlike other places in SF where it's illegal for cars to be (like bike lanes, bus lanes, Market st), people actually respect that. So it's entirely possible to avoid the private car right of way. If you can avoid intermingling with cars, and you get signal priority, then you'll go faster than cars, because you're not stuck in traffic and you don't need to wait for the lights.

The issue is that in this segment, I haven't noticed much in the way of signal priority. The N, which is far more important than any private car on those intersections, has to wait when it really should just sail through intersections, because the signals knew the N was coming and changed ahead of time.

I know that this can be achieved more or less with BRT, but it seems absolutely silly to put in the rails without having a dedicated right of way, and yet that's what the majority of SF's above-ground light rail is. IMO, if there's light rail on the street, either it should be car free, or the railway should have curbs surrounding it to prevent intrusion from cars. Full stop.

For what it's worth, ENT is set around 2150, SNW around 2259, TNG starts around 2364, and PIC around 2399. In my mind, ENT is pretty far removed from the SNW/TOS era that you'd say is well covered. There's a lot of "untouched" canon to discuss, like the Earth Romulan war. So long as temporal wars are forgotten, I'd be excited to see more ENT stuff.

But I also agree that just going forward into the 25th century would be nice too. Ideally for me I'd prefer to see a clean break from the TNG/PIC nostalgia characters: just the next, next generation, with a new captain and crew.

I do like Jeri Ryan's Seven a lot, and would love a Captain Seven, but there's something to be said for just starting the new thing and building the next big dynasty of trek, rather than borrowing characters.

For your first part, that would make sense, except Nidell isn't supposed to remember anything about Fenna. I don't know how Sisko would expect her to think of Fenna as something she'd want to become, since she knew nothing about her. That was what made the line weird to me.

For your second part - agree on both actually! I haven't seen any particular DS9 specific community in here or elsewhere. Maybe we can be the change we want to see, lol. Maybe a new community or a weekly episode discussion or something.

With the caveat that this only applies to my city, San Francisco... I prefer buses. SF horribly mismanages its "trams"* where they run at ground level through the streets. They must follow all stop signs and traffic rules. They don't even get signal priority. So it's a quite jarring experience to get into a train underground, exit the tunnel to the street, and begin stopping every block and waiting at red lights.

Fact of the matter is that, if you're going to be treated like a car, it's better to be more maneuverable as a bus. Buses can avoid double parked cars, and have a fighting chance of squeezing through a gridlocked intersection. With a bus lane, they can use it but they don't have to, where's trams are trapped in a traffic lane (frequently the centermost lane) while idiots make (frequently illegal) left turns.

Muni light rail - K, J, L, M, N, T, F

The cable cars are quite different from trams, they hook into a cable under the ground to get "dragged" along, they're not moving under their own power. Makes them quite expensive to construct and operate, and you can hear the cable noises a block away even when there's no cable car nearby.

I mean they're also iconic and loads of fun to ride, but I think there's a reason people don't go installing new cable cars.

I see what you mean. The python ML ecosystem is... not far off from what you describe.

But please consider Python as a language outside the pytorch/numpy/whatever else ecosystem. The vast majority of Python doesn't need you to setup a conda environment with a bunch of ML dependencies. It's just some code and a couple of libraries in a virtualenv. And for system stuff, there's almost never any dependency except the standard library.

I mean with that attitude, we should only have shows set in the 32nd century! After all, time has moved forward, right? ;)

In all seriousness, that argument may have made sense when Enterprise came out, but now there's four seasons of characters, setting, and story, which could be expanded on as a sequel. "Prequel" depends on your frame of reference.

They probably know what it is, but it's a bad point if they're trying to paint DAGs as esoteric CS stuff for the average programmer. I needed to use a topological sort for work coding 2 weeks ago, and any time you're using a build system, even as simple as Make, you're using DAGs. Acting like it's a tough concept makes me wonder why I should accept the rest of the argument.

Can't say I have a strong feeling about Gradle though 🤷‍♀️

Can't speak for the whole country but my employment is at-will, meaning it can be terminated by either side at any moment with no notice.

It is considered polite and relatively standard to give two weeks' notice prior to leaving your job, but there's no requirement in any of the jobs I've had.

Of course, employers don't have that same "polite standard" of two weeks, it's not unheard of for people to be fired on the spot. Though it's definitely unusual. For broader layoffs, it's pretty common to get several weeks of notice and pay.