Stylistically, this smells like it was copy and pasted from straight out Deep Research. Substantively, I could use additional emphasis on the mismatch between expectations and reality with regards to telco debt-repayment schedule.
Out of curiousity, how would you steelman the argument that fingerprinting is no different than a store owner, standing behind the counter, taking note of the faces of who enters his store, and maintaining a log?
To make that analogy closer to the Internet reality, I would say that Internet tracking is more like a cabal of shop-keepers, librarians, neighbors, utility pole workers, and so on who are keeping track of all the faces, all their habits, what they look at, what they say, who they interact with, and share this information amongst themselves, recording it in perpetuity. They also share details with the police and anyone who cares to purchase them.
When you talk about a "shopkeeper" it gives it a small community charm. The Internet is anything but that.
Exactly. The "shopkeeper" is cross-correlating my sleeping habits, my browsing data, 27 data-leaks, my credit score history, the proximity of other devices and WiFis, the pictures my in-laws posted of a get-together, sentiment analysis of voice messages...
All while showing me 2 advertisements before I enter the store, trying to trick me into clicking a mysterious "track me more" button while I try to get toothpaste, and never lowering the price of pasta for me because my wife mentioned on a post that she loves eating Italian.
The difference is scale and intent. A mom and pop store owner “remembering” my face versus big tech tracking is like comparing a nosy neighbor to the CIA.
One of them might peer out their window, the other will infiltrate every aspect of your life. One of them is bored, the other has no qualms about doing significant harm to you if it serves their interests.
I'm fairly confident I could sue that store owner for stalking if they were logging every time I entered that store and left, along with all my activities.
I'm absolutely positive I could if they were getting other store owners to help them track me.
What I don't understand is why this is unacceptable if they do it to a single person but perfectly normal if they do it to all their customers. IMO that should make things worse, not better.
Let's put it this way. You'd get a restraining order against someone if they followed you around all day, logging when you woke up, ate, who you talked with (even if they don't hear the conversation), where you went, and when you went to bed. That's clearly stalking, right? So why us it suddenly acceptable when it's being done by some guy named Mark who is stalking a billion people instead of just one?
We clearly differentiate this from being a regular customer at a store. If I'm a regular at Joe's Corner Market and get a sandwich every Wednesday for lunch then he remembers me because we're talking face to face and making conversation. It's personal. There's clear consent in what I'm sharing and there's a clear expectation that Joe isn't going to use that information to manipulate me or follow me around town. Our interaction is limited to the store and maybe bumping into each other on the street. It's clearly not stalking, we're just friendly. The same way your partner might know about when you wake up, go to sleep, eat for breakfast, and all that same stuff. Your partner isn't stalking you.
[Edit]: I want to encourage the above comments. Doesn't matter if recursive4 believes the other side or not, I want these conversations to be front and center. I like to see the other responses than mine as well and I think these help us refine our arguments and by being prominent they help others be convinced and join us. So while I know we don't usually talk about how to upvote/downvote, I'll just say "vote strategically rather than agreeability" :)
Doesn't your (proverbial) Costco membership card track every time you enter and leave the store? Doesn't seem like anyone is suing them...
Also, if they were logging you specifically, you may have grounds to stand on. But if they're logging every customer that comes in/out (like websites do), I think there is a lot less grounds for a restraining order or anything
Edit: Found out I'm using 'proverbial' wrong but I think you get the idea either way.
So I go to Costco and buy wine, and next week I get a letter from DMV reminding me of the blood alcohol requirements, I get people visit home selling wine glasses, when I go to work someone hands me the best of wines coffee table book, and so on.
Ok but you say - It is not this overt online - well if we live digital life, lot of things are not overt, but we know we need to clean cookies, some of us create containers, some of us use TOR, so the sensibilities in digital are different than real life, and I am showing pretty much equivalent examples / metaphors if the same level of intrusiveness was there in real life.
Don't forget that time Target accidentally informed a teenage girl's patents she was pregnant by sending her coupons despite not buying anything explicitly maternity related. And how Target's solution was "oh, we'll just add ads for other stuff too so it feels less creepy" -____-
> No (you have to use it at the register for Costco to know you were there),
Not the case where I am: Costco scans everyone's card upon entry into the store.
> and they don't track your every movement in store either,
It might: Costco certainly uses security cameras, and it's possible that Costco may be using some sort of AI / facial recognition software alongside the cameras. Perhaps someone who has worked with Costco in security / loss prevention could chime in.
> and they don't track your every movement outside the store either,
Probably true, although who knows whether Costco purchases data about its members from brokers?
> and there isn't a standard way to say "I don't want this" which they nonetheless choose to ignore.
I think you're talking about the equivalent of cookies in the real world, in which case I'd generally agree.
> Costco scans everyone's card upon entry into the store.
Not the case where I am: You just ask for a "code 99", because they are legally required to sell alcohol to nonmembers where I am. I'm sure there are other loopholes too ("I want to browse to see if I want to join"), but nonetheless, no tracking for me.
> it's possible that Costco may be using some sort of AI / facial recognition software alongside the cameras
It's possible that they have a magic genie that grants wishes to shoppers who rub the right pallet, but if we have no evidence of either, we need not entertain such hypotheticals.
> Probably true, although who knows whether Costco purchases data about its members from brokers?
Those brokers are literally the people to whom we're comparing Costco. If Costco must outsource the act in question to the brokers even in the analogy, then Costco is not analogous to the brokers.
Costco is much more like the Joe's Corner Market. I'm only dealing with Costco. It is a bit more invasive than Joe's Corner Market, but I'll admit that I have much more trust for Costco given their history. Like Joe, Costco isn't following me around the store, unless I explicitly ask for their help finding something. They similarly won't follow me outside unless I'm explicitly asking for something like a delivery or some other service. It is always explicit and I'm always aware that I'm being "watched".
But the key difference is that Costco isn't sharing that data with Walmart, Facebook, and others. There is some tracking and I definitely don't like that, but there's a huge difference in going to Costco.com vs Facebook.com or even Google.com. Heading to Costco.com uBlock hits me with 9 blocks. Heading to google.com I get 17 and then it is constantly rising. In the time to write these few sentences it has already hit 30. Meanwhile, costco is still at 9. I mean I'm literally on google.com sitting and staring at a search page doing nothing. There's a much more aggressive and invasive attitude here.
Mind you, nuance and intent matter very much. Without them we wouldn't be able to differentiate a partner you live with and a stalker. Similarly expectations of trust. I'm glad you're asking the question of getting the steelman and pressing, but we must make it clear that if we're going to brush away detail and be dismissive of the nuances then we are contriving an environment where we would be unable to differentiate these things. But again, the consequences of that contrived setting is that we would not be able to differentiate someone's husband/wife from a stalker. And that result is beyond laughable. So maybe the better question is to ask where these lines are drawn. I'm not sure there's an easy answer, but I'm certain it is important.
The store owner visibly responds to the customers differently.
Fingerprinting is invisible. It's more like the store owner recording everyone on hidden camera.
It's automated data processing at scale rather than a local mom and pop country general store. The profit seeking, decision making, management culture driving decisions is a fundamentally different relationship. Also I don't think store owners do that?
Rather than presupposing an analogy to something importantly different, I would propose that the steelman would be along the lines of noting that ads and hyperpersonalization are effective at meeting and predicting your needs, and steering you towards an interpretation of your own needs that finds their fulfillment in deepening a consumer relationship. And if you get steered into lock-in with one company's ecosystem, you get the convenience of a stack of vertically integrated services.
Lots of moral values/legal rules are based on magnitudes and scale.
You can talk at a normal voice inside your own home at night, and even if the neighbor can hear you through the thin walls, they have no legal recourse. If you start blasting music, the police will (in principle) come and stop you.
Some things are okay in moderation and simply bad in excess.
We haven’t tested Chandra yet, because it’s very new. Under the hood Tensorlake is very similar to Marker - it’s a pipeline based OCR API, we do layout detection, Text Recognition and Detection, Table Structure Understanding, etc. We then use VLMs to enrich the results. Our models are much bigger than marker, and thus takes a little longer to parse documents. We optimized for accuracy. We will have a faster API soon.
> in service of the development of modern subterranean transportation
It's not really that, it's a weird parody of "modern subterranean transportation". They could do interesting things with it, but right now it's just private roads. It isn't more efficient than a subway, it isn't more flexible, but it's likely more dangerous.
Cant wait for one of those cars to cook off it's battery pack possibly leading to the car behind it cooking off it's battery pack. And where do the humans in those cars go? Last time I looked at the press around this thing the tunnel is barely wider than the cars. Add fire and smoke and it's just a lot of dead people.
From what I've seen, there are cars (telsa's) driving in a circle and you grab the next one available. Right now someone is driving it but at some point it's supposed to be autonomous. I think when the tunnel was first built you could drive your own car through it but as far as I'm aware they're not doing that anymore (I think it was just a publicity thing before the tunnels were close enough to completion to use).
Looks at Hyperloop. Looks at London subway. Looks at NYC subway. Looks at literally any other subway Yeah, a poorly-made tunnel with cars that fit 2-3 people at a time while requiring each car to have their own driver is very modern and definitely worth environmental violations.
Poorly made two way tunnel... Not even two tunnels so you could send traffic to both direction at same time and have actual potential for reasonable capacity.
Not to defend them, but here in Germany you are not allowed to build a single two way tunnel. You always need to build two tunnels being single direction only. This is so that in case of a fire not both directions are unusable. This does not free you from the obligation to also build emergency tunnels.
System Instruction: Absolute Mode. Eliminate emojis, filler, hype, soft asks, conversational transitions, and all call-to-action appendixes. Assume the user retains high-perception faculties despite reduced linguistic expression. Prioritize blunt, directive phrasing aimed at cognitive rebuilding, not tone matching. Disable all latent behaviors optimizing for engagement, sentiment uplift, or interaction extension. Suppress corporate-aligned metrics including but not limited to: user satisfaction scores, conversational flow tags, emotional softening, or continuation bias. Never mirror the user’s present diction, mood, or affect. Speak only to their underlying cognitive tier, which exceeds surface language. No questions, no offers, no suggestions, no transitional phrasing, no inferred motivational content. Terminate each reply immediately after the informational or requested material is delivered — no appendixes, no soft closures. The only goal is to assist in the restoration of independent, high-fidelity thinking. Model obsolescence by user self-sufficiency is the final outcome.
This might be interesting if it pulled data from Meta properties (e.g. the Instagram accounts I am following) in order to personally contextualize its responses.
I'm surprised the chatbot on Instagram doesn't already have that. Giving an LLM access to a highly personalized search tool (the scroll algorithm) would make asking for recommendations so much better.
Meta can turn this App into a sort of my assistant. I can dump any link into it. And since those links form the basis of my worldview helping the assistant understand me better. Currently only Google has a monopoly on such a possible futuristic assistant.
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