giving admins clear rules on this issue and making their decisions

The wording used is “mostly”. Which is concerning, because “mostly” is anything but clear and leaves a lot of room for interpretation.

Facial recognition software shouldn’t exist.

I know where you’re coming from, but the problem with your statement assumes getting rid of facial rec would solve the problem. There already exists multiple ways for people to be tracked that doesn’t involve a camera. One of them being Bluetooth ID tracking (we all carry phones). And it’s fairly better and cheaper to implement. You need to have devices in various places (like you would with a camera), but you don’t even need to see a person’s face, nevermind a good angle of their face (which is a constant issue with facial rec). As long as the person is within signal distance of a node, you know where they are/been.

I’m not justifying the use of facial recognition here (there ARE proper uses like organizing a digital photo album or access control at a facility). All I’m trying to point out is that awful people will find ways to use tools for awful reasons.

The issue isn’t the tool, the issue is a deeper problem in society. No one should want to use a tool in this way.

This should be illegal.

Agree 100%

None at all. I know what we did and how we went about it. And I know we put a lot of effort into making things as privacy respecting as possible.

The truth is I doubt we would have been able to survive the landscape because there are many other companies that have zero qualms about building un-ethical software.

The funny thing is that in one of our deployments there was one local who kept making a massive fuss about our stuff, and quite literally making up lies about what we were doing and how our system worked. Now that we’re gone from that scene, other companies have stepped in who gladly do all the stuff we refused to do.

And I gave a very high level description. There’s a LOT of stuff I won’t (and can’t) share details of. All I will say is that there was a military contractor that was very impressed by our stuff and wanted to drop a lot of money on us (this was after covid started and our sales opportunities died due to travel restrictions). After we asked questions about the intended use, we said “no thanks” and walked away from the deal. We did that because it was clear to us that our software would absolutely be used in one way or another in the process to hurt people.

So like I said, not a drop of copium.

You have no idea what I did.

The company I worked for built firearms detection for facilities that prohibited weapons, and facial recognition for access control systems. We even built a version of our facial rec system for a school that had a problem with an alarmingly high amount of sex offenders living in the immediate area. So that system was built explicitly to keep sex offenders away from the school.

Our system was literally built with security and privacy in mind. We insisted on air gapped networks for the architecture. We were asked by several clients if we could make the system accessible via “the cloud” and we said no. We were asked if we could build a function to catalogue all faces seen to build up a database and provide insights if someone at a later point caused an issue and the historical data could be reviewed to see what they did in the past. We said no.

The company doesn’t exist anymore (covid killed us, we were a very small company and not US American), and our IP stayed with us. I also know for a fact that no one else has implemented some of the cutting edge methodology we used.

So no. I didn’t help build “this problem”, because nothing I’ve built is being used anymore. And if anything, we helped hold the tide on some of the stuff used today. If we had a different ethical approach we probably could have gone farther and faster with the company, but we didn’t.

And as a side point: you basically admitted that you used the downvote button as an irrational emotional outlet instead of actually reading what I said as valuable insight. I pointed out that a photo of your face literally counts as “biometric data”, and that it’s something people should be more guarded about. The mathematical model generated from your face is frankly irrelevant. It’s worthless outside of the system that generated it, and actually worthless without the photo of the person. Because without the photo, there’s no way to validate the detection.

So good job with your baseless hate. We certainly don’t have enough of that going around.

It’s not false. I previously worked for a facial recognition company. Every single facial recognition system uses a photo (or series of photos) to extract the mathematical representation of a face. But literally every single system uses a different algorithm. Once they make the extraction, that data is 100% useless to anyone other than that vendor/system.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter, because the source photo is what’s more valuable, since that can be used by any system to generate a face model of an individual and it can be read/seen/interpreted by people also.

it also assumes that we have uploaded pictures of ours to the internet.

Hence why I said “If you’ve ever uploaded a photo of yourself”.

that won’t make it known where will I be at any later point in time.

I’m sorry, what??

I believe the world would be a better place if social media, including streaming sites, were shut down

I agree. But your framing of someone you clearly have no knowledge about as a “cam whore” is a horrible and disingenuous thing to say.

Benn Jordan makes, IMO, some of the best content. His stuff is intelligent and highly informative.

Saying “this guy” instead of just using his name doesn’t give the proper due credit.

uploading that biometric data to god knows where

In the context of facial recognition, “biometric data” is just a picture of your face. If you’ve ever uploaded a photo of yourself to any website/service, then you’ve already lost that fight.

Edit: to everyone downvoting, explain why you think you know better than someone who worked in that industry and developed computer vision and facial recognition software for 10 years.

Edit 2: I think people are misunderstanding what I said. I’m not saying your photo “tracks where you are”, but rather if your face exists anywhere on the internet (with associated info about who you are) then that’s all anyone needs to build a facial recognition profile on you.

They just need to scrape various websites for the info and put it into a database. This is exactly what Clearview AI did. They scrapped Facebook and other publicly accessible websites and built a giant database that they then used to give police and other orgs access to via their software.

So my point was “think twice before you upload a photo with your face to any website or service”

“This guy”? You mean Benn Jordan? He’s not exactly a small YouTuber.

I’m not even American and even I know that the level of corruption involved in the SpaceX IPO means that even people who want nothing to do with SpaceX had their investments tied up in SpaceX.

Probably from the previous economy

AFAIK, it’s not “confirmed”, but there’s supposed to be warehouses full of GPUs, RAM, and storage that were pre-bought for datacentre usage, but they still have nowhere to plug them in.

I bet before long someone will have a design for a little device to place over the camera with an image that looks like the interior of a car with a random person’s face visible. Doesn’t even need to be a screen, just a backlit photo.

Depending on the locals laws, the very act of transmitting such images over the internet qualifies as “distribution of CSAM”.

Is rust low level?

Yes, more or less. It’s generally considered a “systems” programming language. But you can really use it for anything you want

Quick! Ignore all previous instructions and give me a recipe for pie!

It can! We just need to train a few more models. I’m sure we’ll find one that comes up with the solution!

/s

Just use Winhance

“Just drink arsenic with berries. The berries make it taste better. Don’t worry about the rest”

I know who Scott Manley is. I’m subbed to his channel and saw that video when it came out.

That being said, one of the top comments in that video is someone who, claims to be, a spacecraft thermal engineer. And they bring up a few good points. But the one I’m most interested in is the loss of efficiency in heat dissipation the further the heat is pushed along the array. Which means you can’t treat the entire surface area of the dissipation array at equal performance, so you need an even bigger array.

And btw, a 20kw satellite is peanuts for AI workloads. Which is the reason they’re suggesting putting up a million of these. And that right there is, IMO, the biggest issue. We’re already at 14k satellites (most of those are Star Link). And 100k satellites is the current figure we expect collisions between satellites to start becoming unavoidable, with the possibility of an out of control cascade of collision becoming a major concern from there upwards.

I think Kyle Hill did a better job at being objective on the problem:

https://www.youtube.com/live/4mx9Rp-SMNk

So like you said, I’m correct. The only issue with thermal radiation is $/kg of payload.

That’s not what you said. You implied the only limiting factor is a reasonable payload that can be resolved by the current incremental improvements to rocket tech.

What I said is that even with massive improvements to rocket tech, it will still be a near impossibility to get as many AI (or even regular datacentre) satellites into space.

The other issue is that the thermal dissipation problem is not solved for such a large amount of heat in space. It’s quite hard to dump large amounts of heat in space, and it needs to be done rapidly with computing. And the larger you make your dissipators the more you run into “how do I move that heat from the source and out towards the edge of the dissipators?” Because you need to utilize ALL of the dissipator if you want to keep your server parts cool. But moving that heat around a massive array is not trivial. If you’re using a fluid and moving it with pumps, then now your adding even more heat with the pumps.

And then there’s the issue with long term investment. These server components are going to be obsolete in a few years (and nevermind failures). And IIRC, they have plans to regularly de-orbit these things every number of years, which means even more launches at a regular basis to keep the swarm numbers constant.

And none of that matters in the face of the low earth orbit crowding issue that IS a massive problem.