At this point Meta has probably the largest collection of illegal videos of underage kids in private situations on the planet. Maybe followed closely by Google with their cams that record everything even if you think they're not. If there was any concern for kids, the FBI should be stopping them right now and taking the executives to jail.
Will we be in the same up in arms once Apple releases their AI Glasses?
How about if their glasses either...
1. Can not take pics or videos but its camera is just for AI vision?
or
2. All pics and videos taken through Apple's smart glasses the pics/vids of anyone not in your network (Apple already automatically list faces & sometimes names in your network under "People & Pets," and has done so for years & they are the privacy company) show as anonymous/randomized faces.
I own two pairs of Meta Glasses since 10/2023 and find them very useful to capture or record my own life experiences only. Tho I share hate for them because Meta makes trashy non-durable smart glasses that quickly become dumb glasses. A software update killed my 1st pair in March 2025 and then my next pair couldn't handle water splashes in June 2025.
I remember people with the Google glasses being called glassholes. The fact that companies are trying again and apparently succeeding tells you just how much
A) they believe in the idea
and / or
B) how much money there is to be made having people wear them.
Smart wearables as a general category of hardware have an awful rate of success, and hardware is much more expensive to get into than software. So, there's got to be a lot of money in the data consumers will be producing.
That's the part that scares me much more so than the random perverts using them in public for unsavory candid photos.
It's sad that the gap between a "glasshole" and meta glasses is just a branded frame. If anything Meta has significantly worse public reputation now than Google during Google Glass time.
> B) how much money there is to be made having people wear them.
Meta have been desperately searching for “the next big walled garden” for like a decade.
The prize is clear: whatever the next big mass-consumer hardware device is with an app store attached will leech hundreds of billions in fees and enjoy absolute control over everyone building on it.
If this really bugs you, get involved in your local politics and get a city ordinance passed banning the use of surreptitious video recording devices including smart glasses. No reason we can’t keep these off the streets.
4chan once tricked a number of people into microwaving their iPhones by claiming it was a new feature for fast charging. This probably isn't too hard if you've got enough friends or fans in on the joke.
Your reaction appears to be ignorant of the real use cases for these. A friend of mine is totally blind, and uses meta glasses. He finds them incredibly useful, as do others.
That's the only way this can be fixed. Socially shaming everyone isn't going to beat facebook. Laws banning them from doing evil things with the data will.
The use case for these glasses are to record everything, everywhere. That it's also helpful for people with vision impairment is a, positive, coincidence.
This makes me more sad than hopeful. Great they get use out of it, but there instead should be a medically approved HIPAA compliant device for this purpose built by scientists in the open for all to enjoy. Instead the disabled are coersed to give up all privacy of themselves and others around them both digitally and physically. And more importantly they have to give up their sovereignty over the means of their enhancement by it being closed off and eventually enshittified for customers yet opened up for exploitation by facebook and their corporate and government customers.
Sadly the disabled have no choice but to accept the status quo, and facbook gets to virtue signal while holding humanity back another cycle by not selling us an open platform that would actually help people at scale not just now but forever.
Where is Robert Scoble, the King of the Glassholes, the AR PR Torpedo, the Patron Taint of Making Everyone Disgusted to Use Google Glass, the Sexually Harassing Victim Blaming Shameless New Venture Plugging Non Apology Apologist, posting nude photos of himself in the shower, when we need him?
Larry Page on Robert Scoble’s Google Glass stunt: ‘I really didn’t appreciate the shower photo’:
>>But his latest defense puts forward an absurd definition of sexual harassment and effectively accuses women of reporting it to fit in with the cool crowd, while claiming he’s writing in “a spirit of healing.” There’s even a tasteless plug for his latest business venture. It’s one of the most disappointing responses we’ve seen to a sexual harassment complaint, which, after the past few weeks, is a fairly remarkable achievement.
I had a CT scan last year for some stomach issues they wanted to look at.
Doctor warned me up front that the odds the images find something that looks weird is high but not to panic because of how many false positives there are when looking inside someone’s body.
While I am happy to report they didn’t find anything serious, I do take slight offense to the following at the top of my results:
Last name, First name: Unremarkable
(Kidding of course but still got a chuckle out of me)
2.5 years in of regular PET scans. At this point, I’m almost humored by what gets flagged as suspicious by the radiologist - usually mosquito bites and stomach bugs (kids in daycare means I’m almost always sick). I have a scan Monday and two weeks ago had a re-excision so there’s a two inch gash healing on my back. This week I got three vaccines. And then tonight my toddler bit me hard enough to draw blood. I had asked the oncologist if it made sense to delay the scan because of the re-excision and he said not to worry because he’d know why there’s inflammation in that area. I’m thinking the bite and the shots will probably get flagged too. I just hope I don’t forget any other maladies or mishaps that might get flagged that I can’t explain.
How often are they finding actual positive hits on the PET? If its so unreliably with regards to false positives why do you continue to have PET scans done?
PET Scans feature areas with blood flow so tumors show up as hot spots for follow up. People who are maybe only feeling off or had one confirmed tumor can have a lot of small tumors spread across their body which will show up clearly on a PET scan.
When my brother was at the end of his run fighting cancer he felt a bit under the weather and managed to catch covid so everyone figured he was feeling bad due to that. The PET scan showed he had thousands of small masses converging into the large mass that eventually killed him by cutting off blood flow to his kidneys. His cancer was an aggressive blood cancer that had stood up to conventional and Trial Chemo drugs. There was no way to treat this but other cancers that are less aggressive can be treated at this point and would be treated differently than a single mass.
In a nutshell it’s that level of visibility that makes PET scans worth it.
PET scans are not really unreliable, they’re just very sensitive and lots of anomalies ranging from benign cysts to malignant tumors show up on them. It’s not always possible to differentiate them without other measures like biopsies, so that’s where the false positives come in.
Getting regular scans to track cancer progression is a different matter altogether, since most of the blips can be eliminated over time and there’s a history to compare against.
Badlands and Days of Heaven are definitely his most conventional films and thus good starting points. Badlands especially is a great film, Days of Heaven is a bit uneven in terms of plot and pacing, but the cinematography is beautiful.
Then you have The Thin Red Line and The New World, which to me feel like a transitional period between the more conventional films and The Tree of Life, which is the first film that is characterized through and through by Malick's extremely divisive style. I personally love The Thin Red Line, but I can see why it's not for everyone. (I would skip The New World.) All later films have a very recognizable style, for which I think The Tree of Life is the best starting point.
Long story short: I'd start with Badlands, then watch The Thin Red Line, then The Tree of Life. If you like the last one, watch any of his later films.
I recommend turning on subtitles for Tree of Life. There's a lot of random whispered voice-overs, and without subs you'll have no idea who is speaking, let alone what they are saying.
I’m a huge Malick fan and agree that The New World is his masterpiece. I still remember seeing it in the cinema 20 years ago and almost levitating out of there. Just a beautiful piece of work. I’m glad there’s just about room for Malick somewhere in the film industry.
Or dive at the deep end and watch Knight of Cups or A Hidden Life. You will either like it or not, frankly I don't think it matters what you'll see first, I love all of his movies even though I didn't understand Thin Red Line when I was 20. But Knight of Cups hit me hard when I was 36.
Best VP I’ve ever had would stop meetings with regular frequency and say, “maybe I’m the dumbest person here, but I don’t understand [insert something being discussed], can you help me get a better understanding?”
It was anybody’s guess if they really didn’t understand the topic or if they were reading the room, but it was always appreciated.
Full disclosure: after leaving tech, I’m back in grad school to get my LMHC so I’m obviously biased.
First, I just don’t see a world where therapy can be replaced by LLMs, at least in the realistic future. I think humans have been social creatures since the dawn of our species and in these most intimate conversations are going to want to be having them with an actual human. One of my mentors has talked about how after years of virtual sessions dominating, the demand for in-person sessions is spiking back up. The power of being in the same physical room with someone who is offering a nonjudgmental space to exist isn’t going to be replaced.
That being said, given the shortage of licensed mental health counselors, and the prohibitive cost especially for many who need a therapist most, I truly hope LLMs develop to offer an accessible and cheap alternative that can at least offer some relief. It does have the potential to save lives and I fully support ethically-focused progress toward developing that sort of option.
> I think humans have been social creatures since the dawn of our species and in these most intimate conversations are going to want to be having them with an actual human. One of my mentors has talked about how after years of virtual sessions dominating, the demand for in-person sessions is spiking back up.
Agreed. I used to frequent a coworking space in my area that eventually went fully automated and got rid of their daytime front desk folks. I stopped going shortly thereafter because one of the highlights of my day was catching up with them. Instead of paying $300/mo to go sit in a nice office, I could just use that money to renovate my home office.
A business trying to cultivate community loses the plot when they rely completely on automation.
It's also important to understand how bad LLMs actually are.
It's very easy to imagine that LLMs are smart, because they can program or solve hard maths problems, but even a very short attempt to have them generate fiction will demonstrate an incredible level of confusion and even an inability to understand basic sentences.
I think the problem may have to do with the fact that there are really many classes, and in fiction you actually use them. They simply can't follow complex conversations.
Yes, this should be required viewing in high school imo.
As someone who used to think I was generally “immune” to advertising, I have come to realize the influence goes so much deeper than “see ad on TV, go buy product” and is instead a much, much darker sense of “the only way to get rid of this anxiety is to Buy More Stuff.”
His more recent Can’t Get You Out of My Head is also fantastic about how we got from There to Here from WWII to present day.
My friend and I have started tinkering on our cars together.
He’s got an early 90s 525i BMW and I’ve got a 2000 SR5 Toyota 4Runner.
The engineering of my Toyota is so much simpler and easier to work on than his BMW. But his BMW has given us a lot more practice, if you know what I mean ^_^
That Tin Can device has infiltrated (in a good way, what a fun idea!) my oldest kids’ social circle at elementary school. Most of his friends are requesting one for Christmas and we’re planning on getting our kid one as well.
Really hoping the idea lasts, lots of good memories of dialing friends on our landline growing up and chatting casually.
Now if only it could replicate the dread of calling a crush’s house and her dad picking up the phone…
I just visited NYC for the first time a few months ago, and had the most amazing time, one hell of a city and I can’t wait to get back.
I could ramble for hours about all the things I loved about the trip, but one of the things that stuck out was all the young kids taking the subway by themselves or in small packs of friends out pretty late etc. They all seemed so much more street smart and independent than my own similar aged kids (we live in a quiet neighborhood in Seattle). I also grew up fairly sheltered in the suburbs where I had very little exposure to the “real world” as they say…
I’d be fascinated to hear more about what it’s like to grow up in such a massive city.
The subway systems is one of the greatest socioeconomic equalizers in NYC. During rush hour, you'll share a subway car with a homeless man, an ER doctor wearing scrubs, a fashion model wearing YSL, a finance bro, and a food delivery worker. It's an amazing city for people watching.
This product cannot be allowed to exist in the type of world I want to live in.
The power structure wants these to succeed in the market for so many horrific reasons and it will require some serious societal muscle to reject them.
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