Spotcrime just allows you to sign up for email alerts to crime nearby an address of your choosing.
I am generally of the mind even if it results in negative externalities, knowledge is good. So even if it on average increases fear of crime, knowing the reported crime nearby your home is a good thing.
The quality of the data matters. Over-policed minority neighborhoods don't provide the quality of data that supports rational decision-making. LA has a lot of problems with quality of policing.
"knowledge is good" is such a naive take. Trivial example: You only have knowledge of crimes committed by immigrants but zero knowledge of crimes committed by citizens. How is that good?
Having partial knowledge is good, even in your YOU'RE RACCIIISSTTTT!!!! example. Let's explain.
Consider you have to perform a task that in some way can interact with something in the environment. You have two choices of where to perform this task. In the first location there are 20 red things in the environment. In the second location there are 20 red things and 10 blue things. You know that 1 in 10 of the blue things have a negative interaction with your task. You know nothing about the red interactions with your task. You obviously choose the location with no blue things.
You're not modeling this adversarially and that's your fundamental error here. If you look at your "knowledge supplier" as an entity actively trying to deceive you and give you an incorrect world model you'll realize i'm right and you're living in a fantasy theory world
No. You are trying to change the rules to a different game and then use those rules to invalidate a completely unrelated point. Having bad information doesn't make the fact that partial information is better than no information. It just means you were deceived by the information and your attempt at making decisions was sabotaged. If you are so wound up in "everything and everyone is against me" you have a mental disorder. If you are just picking and choosing who you define as adversarial based on which information disagrees with your priors you are just close-minded.
I could see it being good if it helps you estimate crimes committed by citizens. If you know where the gaps in your knowledge/data are, you can attempt to account for them. And that’s better than nothing.
I think misleading information is obviously bad, incomplete information is not necessarily misleading though.
On the other hand, it might be better to remove incomplete information if it is actively being used to mislead people.
You're not modeling this adversarially and that's your fundamental error here. If you look at your "knowledge supplier" as an entity actively trying to deceive you and give you an incorrect world model you'll realize i'm right and you're living in a fantasy theory world
So, continue this train of thought - If only partial data is available, then no data should be available because the partial data might induce incorrect assumptions in the general populace.
Apply this to:
Vaccination / disease management
Housing availability ("if they only know of these areas, will those areas become swamped and drive up prices?")
Price of drugs / medical services, or even medical test results (how many more suicides "might" occur if someone gets a possible cancer diagnosis)
Climate change
or anything else.
I think you'll find you're quickly concentrating knowledge dissemination into a central authority who decides what is "right" and that is much more dangerous than incomplete information.
We're not talking about "partial data." We're talking about tendentious data that propagates existing known bias, produced by brutal problematic low quality policing. At the very least, people making apps based on crime location data need to acknowledge and flag such problems and inform their users of the dubiousness of LAPD and LASD data.
Surveillance tech and cop tech generally don't contribute to society because of these problems.
If you wouldn't trust RFK Jr. about vaccines, you should also be skeptical about what many PDs tell you. LAPD is just a particularly notorious example.
You might change the subject away from partial data, but the comment I replied to _was_ talking about partial data, and my rebuttal _is_ about partial data and the judgement of whether that partial data is worth releasing based soley on how we imaging people might react to it. Have you read "The Unthinkable"?
I wouldn't trust RFK Jr. about vaccines if I didn't trust his data. But establishing a body that was in charge of disseminating data about vaccines is in high likelihood going to be taken over by RFK Jr types. Such a body shouldn't exist. Such a body would write "Turtles all the way down."
> "knowledge is good" is such a naive take. Trivial example: You only have knowledge of crimes committed by immigrants but zero knowledge of crimes committed by citizens. How is that good?
That counter-logic is so fundamentally flawed b/c it rests exclusively on the prejudgement of others and prediction of their use of the data while "I", the good thinker, can determine that it is bad for "them" to have access to this data. That is just a very bad way to think and is precisely what RFK-types do all the time.
> even if it results in negative externalities, knowledge is good.
i can respect[0] that, perhaps the data should be available in some form; but would regardless call 'crime alert emails' a disservice.
[0]i'm skeptical of LAPD producing knowledge in this area, others have noted overpolicing etc. also this is tracking police activity/knowledge, not crimes directly (and tbf it's impossible for it to complete even with best effort)
I don't even know what magic buttons I need to push to get that template to correctly inherit the table format I wanted from pandoc, but it does. I tend to have other scripts though for more complicated tables though. So if I want a table to have a certain row highlighted a different color, I would write a Powershell script to run after the table was generated.
I was never able to figure out how to use LibreOffice to insert the table of contents and then export to PDF (although I can do it via the GUI).
I have a contact page on my business website. I get about 2 spam messages a day.
So far I have not taken the effort to better filter them. It is a nice check to make sure the site is still working at the moment given the low volume I get.
I should try to AI inject them though at this point with something silly, like I am more likely to respond if you email as a limerick.
I struggle to see how WFH, especially as that was far more common from 2020 to 2023 than 2023 to 2026
Rather than the post-covid slump we've seen globally
> WFH makes supervision, monitoring, and on-the-job learning harder
It makes it different. In many ways it makes it easier, if you have the right supervisors and mentors working in the right way.
The larger impact would be hotdesking. Going to an office and not sitting anywhere in your team makes collaboration harder than working from home.
The requirement to move job to progress in remuneration harms retention, and thus reduces willingness to invest in a junior, but it's the expectation to move job after 2-3 years.
Unfortunately I do not see specific discussion of how to make the lines a consistent thickness. It does have notes on how to sharpen your pencil and how to use a carpenters spline to draw smooth curves though.
Thanks for sharing! Today I discovered the Jibun Techo. Always great to discover products made by people who put so much thought and craft in. Not surprising the Japanese excel in this art.
Set the mood for today.
Unfortunately can't upvote.. your karma says 6666. May return when the spell is broken.
So not familiar with the caselaw around work product, but if you use an API tool directly and not the different chat tools, the queries are not permanently cached for anyone to give up in the end.
So basically if you use any of the CLI tools, there is nothing for OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. to give the courts.
Online ChatGPT (especially the free version), are apparently cached by OpenAI on their servers. (I am not sure if Claude Desktop caches the conversations locally or in the cloud as well, read the fine print if it matters!)
interesting angle - how are/would compressed context (i.e. the parts of the user-LLM transcription likely to be saved) be treated by the courts? Would this be considered hearsay?
It would be treated as evidence, and the defense would be free to argue that it carries very little weight. The judge or jury would be free to decide how meaningful it is.
Spam. It takes a minute in 2026 to create any app, any skill, any anything without any education that looks plausible that took five years ago a highly educated and skilled person at least months. Now it takes the highly skilled individual ten times the time to evaluate the vibeslopped spam it took the author to publish.
Some sort of eval. Eg TermBench, implemented in Harbor.
It’s an insane amount of effort to build shareable, reusable, comprehensive evals, hence why so almost all skills are stuck in the “vibes” phase.
That said I think it’s quite easy to skim/intuit these sort of skills and do horizontal gene transfer into your own vibes-based system. If you use the skills regularly you can construct a cheap personal eval that is a lot easier to maintain and use it to compare a new skill/plugin. Just things like “please write a paper on <my personal unpublished thesis>” is a good starting point here. You get a good feel for whether a skill is better than vanilla by running it a couple times and watching the failure modes.
Yeah, I think we're in a phase honestly where you shouldn't use anyone elses skills, and you should instead point your stuff at a repo with skills, have it really read it, and then ask what of value there is to potentially rewrite in your style based on your preferences.
I have a complex setup with a lot of things based around what I do. I don't know how anyone could reasonably get their head around any of it. It's a research project in itself.
So I tell people, please don't use it. Just point your claude code at it, and see if there's anything useful for you.
Agree, it's impossible to tell if someone else's workflow works with your codebase without actually trying it, which takes time/tokens. I've been thinking about how to make running quick, directional evals easier / more efficient to give more confidence in using / developing skills. Basically, how do we go from vibes to data?
I run a lot of a/b testing. But I'm not sure showing it actually communicates all that much. Since these are non deterministic systems, even showing you an a/b test from when i made the decision a month ago, doesn't really mean a whole lot.
I agree we need more clear indications of value, I don't quite understand how to legitimately do that in a fair, and honest way.
It actually does not -- and that is part of the issue. Consumers just see "oh gosh this looks very detailed" and superficially think someone must of spent quite a bit of time on this and it works well.
Skills are just prompts -- and most of what I am seeing are people using AI to write the (quite verbose) prompts. There should be a test, somewhere, that shows "my prompt does better than XYZ other prompt" for some model and some specific inputs. This is what is called a benchmark.
It may work well, I don't know. Just asking Claude "hey help me iterate on a paper" works pretty well out of the box too. Call me skeptical this actually works in any substantive way without seeing any evidence it works.
I agree writing a good benchmark takes time. How do people know if all these prompts they are writing are any good though? You could make an edit and it causes a regression overall. Or add too much info and it is just wasted space in the context window, or causes the model to go in loops between the different skills, or plenty of other errors.
I read it, right there on the OP. Tests and test results, including discussions of flaws with earlier designs and how they are improved here. What are you talking about?
It is institutional in the sense that Flock and the individual PDs have not put steps in place (either post auditing or pre not allowing bad queries) that prevent the abuse.
Post auditing is obviously not taken seriously by these departments, and Flock could build tools to do this out of the box (identify weird search patterns) if they wanted to.
I am generally of the mind even if it results in negative externalities, knowledge is good. So even if it on average increases fear of crime, knowing the reported crime nearby your home is a good thing.
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