Not a developer by trade. But incidentally, today I took my first stab at "vibe coding". I wrote a little gui program to streamline a process that I've been doing for years. The code is an absolute wreck. But the program works and does what it's meant to do. I wouldn't ever expect anyone to maintain it, but for what it is, I can't complain. The alternative would have been for the tool to have not been written at all. The level of effort was so low that a) it passed the threshold of it being worth my time, and b) if it needs to be re-vibe-coded over again, then no worries.
I love Linux. I've been using it for about 25 years now. I try to be a realist, and historically, it has always been my opinion that it is a less polished experience, suitable mainly for power users. But my opinion now is that many flavors actually do offer a superior desktop user experience for most use cases.
This might not be a popular opinion, but in my experience stock GNOME is quite the polished experience.
In the grand pantheon of my experience using operating systems, Snow Leopard-era macOS is probably my favorite, mostly due to how smoothly everything worked and the degree to which it got out of my way once I learned the ropes, but GNOME circa Fedora 30 was a close second.
I say stock because I also remember trying out Ubuntu-flavored GNOME at around the same time and the comparison was stark. It felt like Cannonical went out of their way to tweak the environment in ways that sound good on paper, but just added papercuts and made the overall experience less stable.
I also remember trying Manjaro at around the same time. On first boot, the welcome popup that was designed to come out of the taskbar instead popped out of the top left corner of the screen.
I may have misunderstood, admittedly I just scanned it, but if you or law enforcement have to scan the universe of apps/internet to find a picture before this is useful… it’s not useful. Your starting point is a needle in a haystack.
I thought you uploaded a picture you already had, it does the scanning, and a hit might look like “some rando posted a selfie at Zilker Park 20 minutes ago on insta and that car was in the background”.
Again, the example in the article is to find the vehicle being resold online. There are only a few popular websites where people sell vehicles secondhand in any particular area, and you can easily filter to the characteristics of the car you are looking for. To search all of them is a 15 minute exercise.
Although your example may be quite viable in a repossession scenario where the possessor is known but the location is not.
Right, see that is the example they went in depth on. I thought it was helping identify the chopshops and hideouts more directly as they indicated in the bullets.
This part still is the sticking point;
> When browsing Craigslist, I came across a regular car listing that showed a vehicle with buildings visible in the background. The listing claimed the vehicle was located in San Francisco. ...... Superbolt returned precise latitude and longitude coordinates that, when entered into Google Maps, revealed an exact match to the buildings visible in the listing photos.
How often do people find their stolen vehicles posted on CL/marketplace? Do police have resources to constantly browse hoping they see a similar picture of their stolen vehicles? How do they match it to the one they are looking for? Eg. if this was a cop, they may think, this vehicle matches the description of the stolen car. And this AI tells me the picture was taken at these exact coordinates (not super useful as this looks like a public place and I'm sure not where the vehicle is being stored). They still have to go out, meet the "seller", check the VIN or otherwise confirm it is the correct stolen vehicle they are looking for, then they get an arrest and recovery.
But, what if there are a dozen vehicles for sale matching said description. They now have to arrange to visit them all until they find the match or exhaust their options. How is this AI adding any value given with & without it the process looks the same; find listing, ask "seller" to meet, meet, evaluate. You don't need this AI to ask the "seller" to meet up and pretend to be an interested buyer.
FWIW, this looks like it could be a white VW Jetta to me. There are 118 in SF bay area right now just on Autotrader (granted, the hatchback is a further narrowing feature, but that's not super common either). No police department I've ever heard of has the resources to check on all these listings. If the thief stole it in SF but listed it for sale in Seattle or LA or anywhere else, how would anyone know? That's the haystack part, it's a big haystack.
Police probably do not care much unless you are in a small town. Insurance has a financial incentive to care.
> They still have to go out, meet the "seller", check the VIN
You do not have to meet the seller to check the VIN of a vehicle sitting on the street.
> But, what if there are a dozen vehicles for sale matching said description.
There might be a few vehicles in an area matching make/model/year. But it is trivial when looking at a photo to filter on further criteria... and once you look at the photo you can observe trim, exterior color, interior color, stickers, inspection sticker, etc, you will have a very high degree of certainty even on a common model.
> white VW Jetta to me. There are 118 in SF bay area right now just on Autotrader
Well yeah, because you only filtered on 2 of the dozen or so attributes that you might know.
Within a whole 500 mi of the bay area there are only 5 white VW Jetta Wagons listed. All you need to know is what year it is, to narrow it down to 2 or 3. If you know the trim, approximate mileage, any visually distinctive feature, etc, you are guaranteed a match. Even if it wasn't a wagon, it is not hard to filter down to a unique vehicle.
> You do not have to meet the seller to check the VIN of a vehicle sitting on the street.
You're assuming the vehicle remains where the photo was taken.
> Well yeah, because you only filtered on 2 of the dozen or so attributes that you might know.
Those were the only attributes that were apparent in the photo. I said I ignored Wagon because that was a cherry picked unique filter. If it wasn't a wagon, your analysis is the same as mine, >100 vehicles in the SF bay area (I only filtered on 100 mile radius). But again, why steal a vehicle and post it for sale in the same city you stole it from? Criminals already move stolen vehicles, this is all but obvious.
Basically, this helps you catch the dumbest of the dumb criminals. Someone that steals a very unique car and posts it for sale in the same area they stole it from and also leaves the car parked in the same place they took the photo. There's also a time element, if they hide the vehicle for a few weeks, then post it for sale it's more likely the initial active investigation has faded and the cops aren't actively hitting refresh on marketplace.
Glad you believe this is useful, I'll continue to disagree - it might have some value but it's usefulness is being exaggerated in the article.
Nice, I worked at one of those mom and pop computer shops in the late 90's. I built the computers, and I even went with my boss (the shop owner) to those shows a couple times. From what I remember, the show scene was pretty well declining at that point, at least in our area. I still remember the TV ads, though. "SUPER VGA! CD-ROM!!"
I can absolutely relate. I bought a series x at launch with the exact same idea, and have had the same disappointment. Minecraft and Borderlands have been about the only solid split screen titles on this whole generation. That being said, I do feel like I've gotten my money's worth out of the hardware. It just didn't play out like I was hoping. Also, I agree with the article's complaint about gamepass. I had ultimate starting when I bought the console in 2020. I don't remember what I paid at the beginning, but I think it was like $8/month. They lost me when they just upped it from $20-$30. I mean, $20 was already a stretch, but a 50% increase on top of that? Bye.
You know, this is true. And I've read any number of "you should never use dd, use this instead" articles over the years. But man, do I love me some dd.
dd is the software equivalent of removing the riving knife from a table saw.
Then again, I get very paranoid when I write software that has to delete arbitrary files recursively. One bad string gets in there and it's a very bad day.
I mostly agree. Tapes worked pretty well. The big advantage of CD's from my perspective was the ability to jump straight to a track. Rewinding and fastforwarding was quite annoying. But CD's skipped like crazy on any mobile application, especially on the early hardware. Of course mp3's solved this. And there was a nice time, albeit short, time where we downloaded music and felt as if it was ours to own. Granted, a lot of this was probably pirated, otherwise maybe you ripped a CD. But still it represented a great state of solid technology (they just played for you without any fuss) and reasonable ownership. Then along came streaming. It does, of course, have its advantages, but they come with many significant drawbacks.
Some of us never stopped. I never got into the whole streaming thing. My music collection today is a hard drive full of files, just as it was in 1999. No internet connection needed. No wondering if service X has song Y. I can load the whole library onto a phone, my car, wherever I want to play it. Peak music media.
This is a very different take than my own. I do agree with the author on one point. I think trying to pinpoint a specific range of years to define a generation is missing the point. It's more about culture and the experience of your upbringing than it is about a particular date. I was born in '83, and I couldn't identify more with GenX. I listened to all the same music, experienced the free-range childhood, share the ideology, etc.
That being said, I don't view it in a negative light at all. Whatsoever. I don't feel that the adults let us down. I don't consider myself a trauma victim. And I never felt alone. I, too, walked myself home from school and found my own snacks. And then I took off again. On my bike or on foot. I met up with friends or cousins and we lived a life I could only dream about now. We built forts, played in the mud, shot our bee bee guns. Rode bikes, used tools, fixed things. We crashed, we got hurt, we solved our own problems. We lived, we learned, we built confidence, capability, and self sufficiency. We had a freedom that makes me want to weep yearning for it now.
Our parents, mine at least, didn't neglect me. They trusted me. And they didn't trust me not to fuck up. They knew I'd do that. They trusted me to learn from it.
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