Get your mind out of the gutter!

Have you ever seen AR glasses demos where someone is inspecting an engine or repairing something? Imagine open source hardware projects being able to offer similar capabilities for any common household appliance. It would be amazing!

There’s infinite amazing and non-creepy uses for tech like this but it’ll never happen with unimaginative luddites everywhere!

WTF? Local models run on your local hardware without an Internet connection. Hence, they’re not giving any data to anyone except you.

Always assume you’re being recorded in public because you are. You’re not even talking about that: You’re talking about preventing normal citizens from being able to record in public. Yet government will still have that power. That’s exactly what’s going on with Flock cameras.

You can regulate sales of hidden cameras in your country, but you can’t stop their manufacture or general availability because they’re literally designed to be undetectable. Anyone can buy them online and they always will be able to.

I could design my own PCB with a tiny CCD and put together a case with whatever lens I want. In your scenario, would I require a license to order such a PCB? Like it’s a gun or something?

How would you even know that it’s meant to be a camera for recording people? It could just be an environment monitoring sensor or a security device that sounds an alarm whenever it detects motion.

You brought up the practicality of things… What you propose is highly impractical.

My stance is that there’s always going to be assholes. Trying to stop them ahead of time by banning technology won’t stop them but it will stop legitimate uses of said technology.

Regulations that would probably be fine:

• Require recording lights.
• Require shutter sounds.

…because those don’t halt the technology. They’re just mild annoyances for regular users. To me, that’s like “your car needs working headlights and tail lights.”

When I see people asking for “glasses + camera” to be outright banned my alarm bells go off. Both of these things already exist and there’s nothing stopping someone from strapping a cell phone or GoPro to their head. Banning such technology feels like burying your head in the sand because you saw someone doing something you don’t like with a technology you haven’t seen before.

I understand that. The way I see it is that the European style gives the government a monopoly on recording in public. That seems dangerous to me (an American).

I personally think it’s very important that everyone have the right to record people in public because I’ve seen people—in person—being intimidated by police to stop recording (them possibly committing a crime).

It’s a “WTF!” hands in the air situation. The police know that everyone’s allowed to record them but they just don’t care.

How does that work in Europe? You see someone committing a crime and you just keep your phone in your pocket? Because it’s against the law?

“Excuse me, sir… May I have your permission to record you beating this person to death? Thanks!”

When you’re out in public you’re in public! It’s literally the opposite of private.

Why would you expect to remain anonymous or private in such a situation?

Everyone has the right to record what’s going on, out in the open. You want to add shutter sounds and recording lights to cameras? Sure. That doesn’t violate anyone’s rights. But don’t go restricting people’s rights just because you think you’ll never have the need to record something happening right in front of you.

I can’t accept a world like this. No one has a right to privacy when out in public and especially not police who are on duty or government figures.

You’re just asking for a brutal police state with that attitude.

Note: Recording != Logging everything into a database. That’s an entirely separate issue.

Again, you’re assuming that the only thing with glasses and a camera that can exist will be sold and operated by Meta. This is not the case.

The only reason why there’s not much competition yet is the expense. Meta can sell the glasses at a discount because the wearer (and everyone/everything they look at) is what they’re actually selling.

Eventually there will be glasses running regular Linux that people can do with as they please. Then the real innovation will happen.

Don’t go out in public? Seems like you’re asking the impossible because a recording of any kind is a “face scan”.

The most direct way to antagonize food inspectors.

Ah, a true meme sommelier! As a shitpost epicurean we often don’t see eye to eye and this is one of those cases.

I find the smoothness to be an important feature for when I retire some day and work as a professional curator of low-effort-arts, as it will allow me to date the meme. It’s much easier than compression dating, which gives a rough estimate of reposts-over-time.

Your arguments are all against cameras recording people in public. That has nothing at all to do with AI. Local or not.

Local AI models do solve the privacy issue of everyone and everything being recorded, classified, and becoming permanently searchable for Meta and via any request they get from law enforcement, sketchy government entities, or anyone that’s willing to pay for it.

Back when Meta’s calorie tracking feature still existed (yep, they removed it so it wouldn’t compete with their fitness tracking investments and partnerships!) it used to say I burned 650-750 calories/night. Some days I burned over 1300 👍

AI can have vulnerabilities but so far nearly all of them have been related to fully automated systems. As in, you give a model the power to reach out to the Internet or read/write files anywhere it wants (i.e. break out of the sandbox), then you tell it to perform some long-running or infinite task like, “when a file shows up in this place, read it, then perform actions based on what was in the file.”

I believe we all call that, “a recipe for disaster” (LOL). That’s not what they are talking about when integrating AI into KDE.

There’s not really any inherent vulnerability in letting the user spin up a model to perform a task. Also, if it works like development IDEs, the end user needs to accept any changes the model is trying to make before anything at all happens.

Having said that, this is very new tech. It really could have some unforeseen vulnerabilities. However, all new tech has that problem. Any time you add a new feature to anything there’s always the chance of creating a vulnerability.

Burying our collective heads in the sand because we’re afraid of the potential for a vulnerability seems a bit weak to me. We already know how not to implement things! Just look at whatever Microsoft is doing and don’t do that! 😁

Local AI isn’t like Big AI! I mean, think about it: How much resources is ollama getting on your local PC/GPU compared to what say, OpenAI gives its models? The potential for vastly problematic issues is so, so much higher on Big AI infrastructure.

BTW: Ollama unloads any running models after five minutes of inactivity by default. It’s kind of annoying (to me) because it can take like 3-30s to reload the model (depending on how big it is) but for something like a KDE integration, I’d imagine they’d be using tiny models (e.g. models meant for embedding) that load and unload in just a few seconds. Especially for RAG/search functionality.

Not just perverts. Women have repeatedly caught police stalking them with hidden cameras. Journalists have caught police committing all sorts of crimes with hidden cameras.

Here in my home town, someone caught a local business trying to extort them with a hidden camera.

You’d think that with the possibility of hidden cameras being anywhere, evildoers would be a bit more careful. Nope!

Instead, they’re trying to be the ones controlling all the cameras and secret surveillance. If they’re the only ones that are legally allowed to secretly record people, then what you’ve got is a much more powerful police state.

Let me take a moment to state a universal truth: There’s no such thing as “too much regulation.” There’s just good regulation and bad regulation.

Want to regulate a category of technology that covers, “glasses with built-in cameras”? Ok! We’ll just mount the camera somewhere else.

Or perhaps you want to regulate cameras that have lenses too small to notice from say, a dozen paces? Well, that would ban cameras on smartphones.

Why not ban strapping smartphones to your head while you’re at it? That’s basically what these glasses are, after all.

Tell us: What, specific regulations would you be looking for?

There’s already options for visually impaired and we do not need AI sunglasses.

What an asshole!

Might as well say what you mean: “We already have canes for blind people.”

Fuck you! If a simple, cheap technology can vastly improve their lives, why shouldn’t we allow that to be developed? It’s not hurting you or anyone else.

Meta is already using tech to hurt people. By your logic, we should ban the Internet because of that!

Why does it need to be obvious?

In the US, everyone has the right to record what’s happening in public. Private settings are different, of course.

I know we’re talking about Europe here but I’m genuinely curious how it improves things to make it “obvious” other than annoying legitimate users and doing nothing at all to people who actually want to record people in secret.

Basically, it sounds like the pointless cookie warnings all over again.

Yep. And?

Just like today: You have no idea if that person has a hidden camera or a gun or anything else dangerous or what their intentions are.

Meh. They said the same thing about integrating semantic search into KDE. Yet I have turned that indexing off since forever and it never really changed much.

I guess I spent a lot of time tagging my files back in the day so I could find them better, haha. What a huge ass waste of time!

AI is so vastly superior for searching than all previous efforts combined, it feels like renaming, tagging, etc are just pointless tedium.