V for Vendetta missed the time frame by maybe a decade or two, not much more than that.
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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1984 missed that our telescreens would be portable and the hate isn't limited to two minutes per day.
That and missed the capitalist angle of making lots of money from the hate.
The news the other day about being able to be tracked inside my own home through the signals of my WiFi router was a bit shocking. I mean, I knew that sort of thing was possible having worked for a wireless internet service provider, but never thought about it applied to surveillance.
Yes, and of course wifi is just one frequency band. That kind of technique could also be used with other frequency bands, I wonder what the resolution of 5G is for that kind of telemetry.
Not a shower thought
It's what I was thinking about in the shower 🤷♀️
I believe Santa Claus has already done this
I spent $5 dollars cash buying a hotdog from the Street Vendor last night during the fireworks. Was this written down somewhere or otherwise can this be traced back to me?
And yeah, street vendors raise prices around festivals lol. But I needed a snack so I paid up.
Yes, by the traffick camera on the corner tracking your gate up to the hotdog stand, and your phone showing your location by the hotdog stand and how long you stood there. Not to mention, you just wrote that transaction down here in public.
But the point wasn't about the tracking, it was about sorting the data. The data acquisition has existed for years, but was never useful because it could never be processed in an accessible manner. Now AI can sort through the hours of traffick camera footage, identify your gate, and show every location you appeared on camera in the past 24 hours. It can also check cell tower records and record every cell phone that stood by the hotdog stand for more than 60 seconds, and crossreference the hardware IDs and Sim cards on those phones against carrier databases to match the walking gates of the people on camera to their name, address, SSN via credit check, and bank information.
Now AI can sort through the hours of traffick camera footage
No it can't, not without major hallucinations and/or basic errors (ex: Black People tend to be misidentified).
That's the big thing about this AI push, it's subtle mistakes are fucking people over right now. If AI actually worked reliably that's another thing. But right now, people are mostly pretending that AI works and/or ignorant of its flaws.
Don't get LLMs confused with specialized ML algorithms. Hallucination is an LLM problem, algorithms like gait recognition have been honing in accuracy since way before LLMs started development. Where LLMs come into the picture is that they can act as agents, processing queries and then selecting the best fit specialized algorithm to process the data and then cross reference results from different queries to compile a correlated multidomain dataset. Done properly, this will yield not just a single answer but a list of potential answers with their relative degree of certainty.
Look at the Harvard facial recognition glasses as a proof of concept of this kind of approach: https://specialconcentrations.fas.harvard.edu/news/heres-looking-you
That's why I said gait recognition, not facial recognition. Last year GaitNet hit over 99% recognition accuracy, given another year of training the error rate will have gone down and the recognition window will have gone up. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11323174/#%3A%7E%3Atext=Diverse+neural+network-based+gait%2Cresearch+direction+is+also+assessed.
Just doing the basics such as number plate recognition works well enough that the integration of these services has become a problem. I believe there is some controversy in the US about this now.
To be perfectly pedantic, absolutely.
Anywhere that has street vendors is in view of surveillance cameras.
See below. The post wasn't about data acquisition, it was about data sorting.
Right here and now I can inspect your comment history. That's similar.
What can I do with that? What do people generally do with that?
(Unless you are a moderator. Their stuff is kept hidden. Funny that )
You can inspect my comment history. An LLM agent with the proper scraping tools and integrations could answer the question "identify all accounts on lemmy which have expressed a negative view of (insert government), search those accounts for any personally identifying information including photographs and accounts on other websites which they link to more than three times, and create a database of these accounts" in a tiny fraction of the time it would take a human to perform this same task.