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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • The key scandal to me — I live in NOLA — is that the city council had tons of debates and put in place a process and limitations on facial recognition to limit false positives. But the new cameras aren’t city owned. A private company sells the cameras to businesses. Then, if a crime happens, the police call the company and ask if they “witnessed” anything. Then, the company basically texts officers a location if they think their facial recognition software spots the suspect.

    And since we’re apparently the demonstration city (again) for a company, it’s no cost to taxpayers. Maybe that makes it no different from typical police work to you. But even if the product worked perfectly, and it likely doesn’t, I don’t like the idea of the NOPD secretly working overtime to find loopholes around laws and regulations.

    And that’s before you get to collecting evidence for trial. Defense attorneys probably won’t have a hard time getting these cases dismissed unless there’s tons of other evidence.











  • And it’s just historically ignorant and obnoxious. Basically all of the historic cities along the Gulf Coast existed before the United States. It was Spanish Florida, the Louisiana territory, and Texas when the US constitution was written. There’s a part of Louisiana called “The Florida Parishes” to this day because north of Lake Pontchartrain (which is actually a brackish estuary connected to the Gulf of Mexico) was part of Spanish Florida.

    It’s just dumb and, as you mentioned, I don’t know a single person who lives or makes their living along the Gulf Coast who was calling for this. If anything, it’s a pain in the ass for them because now it’s a culture war thing and they have to be conscious that inland morons care. Like if you’re a fisherman, how do you label your catch? Even people who run charter boats out of Venice for bachelor parties in New Orleans now have to contend with this headassery when making ads and web sites or whatever.



  • It’s probably less about making the kernel smaller and more about security and reviewing code. The less code you have to maintain, the fewer vulnerabilities even if it’s old code.

    I would doubt almost 20 year-old code is taking up a lot of space or presenting new vulnerabilities. And it’s obviously open source so if anyone needs it, they can always use an older kernel or maintain it. Sometimes, your oldest code is insane. I wish there was a budget for every company and government to pay retirees part time to go back over their oldest code that’s still in use. A lot of retired programmers would do it for fun and nostalgia. And to be horrified something they wrote 20 years ago hasn’t been updated or replaced.