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gearhart

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I publish everything that happens in UK local council meetings on https://opencouncil.network

email me: hn@gearhart.co.uk

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Company as Code 6 months ago

This is incredibly cool.

Licensing it as AGPL-v3 throws up an interesting question - given the thing this produces is your company as code, if you use this does your entire company count as a larger work that would need to be open sourced? Or is there an explicit distinction between the "firmware" (excuse me) and the work product?

alpr.watch 7 months ago

Really interesting, thank you! They do seem very rare in comparison to ANPR, although maybe I'm not looking for the right thing. Durham, Plymouth and Wokingham are talking about Red Speed and Acusensus but given basically all 300 odd councils have discussed ANPR at some point in the last year, that's a tiny percentage.

alpr.watch 7 months ago

Interesting. I just ran a similar search for « ANPR » which I think is the UK equivalent, in UK local government meetings and it’s mentioned about 80 times a month, which from a cursory glance looks like it’s more than are being shown here. I didn’t look through them yet to see how many were discussions about adding new installations vs referencing existing ones.

Is the argument that Flock cameras are used for mass surveillance defensible, or just paranoia, and if it is real, does anyone have a good idea of whether the same argument would apply in the UK?

We use openwhisper for transcription which accepts a list of "words to look out for" which we populate with a short list of the names of all the people and companies most likely to be mentioned in the text, and then we do a spell checking pass at the end using Gemini with a much longer list, telling it to look out for anything that might be a misspelling.

It's not perfect, but it's taken it from being an issue that made all our transcripts look terrible, to an issue I no longer think about.

I imagine just using the second spellchecking pass with Gemini would be almost as effective.

The terrain isn’t difficult - straightforward hiking with no special gear required - but you can make it as easy or hard as you like by varying the number of days you do it over. Famously the UTMB is a race that does roughly the same route in one push over two days, which is definitely difficult!

Before chunking, run coreference resolution to get rid of all of your pronouns and replace them with explicit references. You need to be a bit of careful to ensure you chunk both processed and unprocessed versions in the same places but it’s very doable.

If you haven’t seen it, there’s a lovely overview of the idea in one of the SpaCy blog posts: https://explosion.ai/blog/coref

The BBC has a laudable goal of trying to be "balanced" which unfortunately is often poorly implemented as giving equal credence to both sides of an argument, even when doing so paints a wildly innaccurate picture.

If you look at the totality of the BBC's coverage, it's clear that the general consensus is that he did a good thing for humanity that hurt some powerful people, and he's been unjustly punished for it, but that there is a small cohort of people (including some very vocal, powerful ones who get headlines) who disagree with that opinion and think that he did something negative and was justly punished for it.

The trouble is that when you summarise that argument, you lose the "general consensus" and "small cohort" bits and you just get the two points, which together make a rather different story.

This is true, but not the primary story here.

Illegal immigration numbers are about 50k for the period, whilst legal immigration netted out (minus emigration) at about 500k for the period, and "natural growth" (i.e. births minus deaths) are about 45k.

The story here is that we're letting in a lot more legal, non-EU immigrants than we have been previously, most of whom are coming here on work visas, or as dependents / carers.

Whether you think this is a good thing or not is worth debating, but the media narrative that we're being "overrun by illegal immigrants" simply isn't a fair representation of the facts. Immigration increases are primarily driven by policy.

Sources: - https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/irregular-migration... - https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...

This is what Route2 is building.

It's not a pure-play software solution or an external policing force; it depends on large amounts of work done by analysts and cooperation from the companies themselves.

However, the motivation to drive internal actors in companies to care about tracking externalities has always been the hardest part of this problem, and that's starting to be solved for us by society and the market.

Disclaimer: I'm the CTO and we're hiring

Ink/Stitch 4 years ago

Looks like they could well have been CNC routed - if you turn them sideways they're a 2D design so it might be even easier than 3D printing them (and pretty!)

I just got a fabulous recipe from the uncanny valley of cooking. Almost viable, with just a few mistakes that would have made it both impossible to follow and, if followed as closely as possible, disgusting.

A glorious effort :) Reminds me of Douglas Adams' Nutrimatic machine:

The way it functioned was very interesting. When the _Drink_ button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic examination of the subject's metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject's brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

I agree with everything you say, but I have a more positive interpretation of where the current shitshow is going. We’ve found a new Wild West of opportunity in the internet and the first people to understand how it works and build something to take advantage of it have won the game. The winners we have now are incredibly simplistic - twitter’s model propagates attention and consequently hyperbole and controversy. Facebook’s model propagates bubbles and consequently groupthink and a lack of critical thinking. However, there are other models. Reddit and hackernews aren’t perfect but they do foster valuable debate. People as a majority group are starting to appreciate the benefits and disadvantages of the models that their platforms represent. Previously the major platforms succeeded because they were the first, or the most powerfully viral. Now that we have more mature platforms, I think the choice people are making between them is more reasoned and we’re getting better results. Facebook is losing mindshare to platforms like niche publishers, balanced news organisations, and forums like Reddit and hackernews. The internet had such potential, and what we’ve got now is not living up to it, but I think that we’re just slowly getting there and that dream is still a possibility.

Whilst it’s true that fewer and fewer consumers use RSS, it’s still a very powerful way for aggregators to source stories and drive readers to the original publisher. Think about it more as an api for building a “shopfront” for your news stories and the fact that most publishers still provide RSS makes much more sense.

I’m a huge proponent for paid news, but that’s a bit of a strawman argument. Reuters hasn’t made their rss paid, or removed all of their free news content.

It is sad that we’re losing a uniquely powerful mechanism for consuming news because we can’t find a business model that supports it. People Who consumed RSS news can’t just pay and get an equivalent experience. RSS allows filtering and combining news sources in ways that make them much more valuable, and can’t be reproduced just by paying for a single subscription to a publisher.

Webvan 7 years ago

Well, sort of - it was a really good start, but given that was his incentive structure he should have been slowly and steadily building a sustainable business and instead he went and blew what could have been the opportunity of a lifetime by not being able to say no to bad strategy pressure from overly-aggressive VCs. Good negotiator. Bad CEO.

You could also say that it was really good negotiation by the other side; if you're a board member of a startup during the bubble and all you get to control is CEO pay, then you did everything you could to incentivise him to behave sensibly, and the rest unfortunately was on him.

This appears to be deceptive marketing.

The technology that's being discussed here is just taking a hash of the image at the point when it's created and using a third party service and standard cryptography to authenticate it.

You can be sure that the image was taken using a company's app because the image hash was signed with their key when it was taken, and you can be sure that it hasn't changed since then because they know that a photo with that exact signature was once taken with their app.

Now, let's be honest, that's almost certainly the most sensible way to counter fake imagery - if you want someone to believe a photo is real, prove who took it and when using the same technology that's used to secure your bank account.

However, the implication in all of these overly-hyped articles about the products is that it's some kind of "war of the robots" in which they're trying to train software to spot changes and hollywood-esque "inconsistencies".

That's really unhelpful for two reasons: - it makes anyone even vaguely technical deeply distrust anything they say, since it's not a process that could come out with a reliable product (any ML algorithm like this can be gamed, and the whole point here is absolute reliability) - it implies that this process can be used on any photo and so you could identify that something was fake if it just appeared on the internet, that's not the case here

Here are the two companies, for reference: https://truepic.com https://www.serelay.com

edit: gus_masa made the same point rather more concisely

If you can't understand a contract you're signing, you aren't really signing it.

It's a very protective industry - you go through a lot of very expensive and time-consuming training and selection to get to be a certified lawyer, everyone in the industry has a heavily vested interest in making sure that there's a lot of valuable work that only certified lawyers can do.

No wonder, then, that they're resistant to automation - if you can bill $300 an hour for braindead work you can hand off to interns and just get checked by a lawyer before it goes out, why would they want to kill that cash cow?

The trouble is that quite apart from the rent-seeking cartel behaviour, it skews our entire legal system to much better serve those who can afford to pay for lawyers.

Perhaps the government ought to be supporting legal automation services.