It terms of the energy that the human puts in, which is a pretty big factor in how people choose their modes of transportation

That and theBestPageInTheUniverse were formative

(I say, realizing that I remember nearly none of them besides vibes)

I mostly agree with you, so we’re probably not really doing much in this discussion. I’m trying not to be pedantic, but as my name will tell you, I find that to be a challenge lol.

I agree wrt how to regulate.
If disallow the govt from broad indiscriminate surveillance and disallow the govt from circumventing that rule by subcontracting it to private entities, then these companies and products that perform the mass surveillance would naturally become unprofitable and collapse. I would argue that such a product would be by its nature political, because it’s only practical use case was the furtherance of a political goal.

Cameras aren’t political, but the use of cameras for mass govt-level surveillance is political. So a system that does so (like the ones sold to the govt) is a political software product.

To me where it gets tricky is when private entities grow to government-sized proportions, and begin to use these same tools for similar purposes. I think that is also a problem, but it becomes harder to frame it.

Money changing hands

So this is why I’m trying to avoid using the term fascist, because it means something specific but nobody can really agree what that thing is. For the purposes of this discussion, I’d prefer to say “authoritarian”.

I wouldn’t call traffic cameras invasive because they’re only at (some) intersections. But it’s still kind of borderline.
A private citizen recording people in public and the government doing so are fundamentally different. I think that having the government subcontract away that responsibility to maintain privacy is an abdication of that responsibility and is an intentional act to move towards authoritarian on the part of the govt. Now if the private company intends to help the government do that, is immaterial; that is the only major use case for their product, so it is functionally a tool with an authoritarian purpose.

Is it such a dichotomy in reality? No.
But we need to be exceptionally careful when we see these gray areas

That’s a good point.

It makes me reevaluate how to categorize crime…
Does this mean burglary technically contributes to the GDP?

Like the fascist LLM example I gave, or a training simulator that is hard-coded to only present fascist ideology.

Right. That’s what we’re talking about.
But I think the bar is a little lower. I think it’s enough to be primarily useful for (eg) fascist goals. If it happens to have minor non-fascist uses, I don’t think that materially changes anything.
I don’t think that Lemmy is primarily useful for furthering tankie goals.

I think that privacy invading surveillance systems are primarily useful for furthering authoritarian goals, by intention or not. There are some nice alternative uses, but I think that the use case of primary importance is in service to authoritarianism, which makes it authoritarian software.

The genetic dynasty is one of the main reasons I didn’t watch the show

If you mean a complete absence of the electromagnetic force, then chemistry and physics are going to get very disastrous for us very quickly

Just because a product has a plausibly deniable use case doesn’t really mean that it’s not functionally political.

If someone creates a super invasive surveillance system and initially uses it for a seemingly benign purpose, that doesn’t mean the intention all along wasn’t more nefarious, especially if the system was practically irresistible for power structures and it’s use directly lead to authoritarianism. Like giving someone their first hit for free.

In a case like that, I would discount the benign use as a red herring, and say that the software is functionally political.

I mean, superpowers are already supernatural, so I don’t want to assume that all the rules of physics apply

The extension of the argument I’m making (and maybe them kinda?) is that it’s functionally the same as if the software were political.

You can make software that nearly exclusively benefits a particular political belief for family of beliefs.

So even if it’s not actually technically political, it can be functionally political, at which point the argument is splitting hairs.

My boy just forgot blind people exist and can function their bodies

It does, but it doesn’t handle encryption at rest. Everyone needs to be aware that the immich admin can see their photos on the disk.

You don’t even need reasonably powerful hardware, I do it on my raspberry Pi 5. It just takes a little longer, which isn’t usually a problem except for the first time you import your library.

The other person deleted their comment so I can’t really know what the argument was, but I would like to make a distinction:

While tools cannot be political themselves, tools can lend themselves to specific political purposes.

A tank cannot itself be fascist, but it can make fascism more viable. Surveillance software cannot be political, but it is easily abused by fascists to destroy political opposition.

What matters is the harm and benefits. Is the harm caused by the tool justified by it’s benefits? Or are the primary use cases for the tool to prop up fascism?
(I suspect that “authoritarianism” would be a better term to use here, but I’m continuing the theme of the thread)

Nextcloud is like Google drive, immich is like Google photos.
You’d typically prefer to look at your photo albums in Google photos instead of Google drive.

I’m running it on in docker and I’ve connected it to my NAS mounted as a network drive. I set it up a few months ago, do it’s better since then.

Don’t even worry about the hardware, I’ve got it set up on a raspberry Pi 5. It’ll take a while to do all the classification on your existing library, but new photos get classified fast enough. You’re unlikely to need to do a smart search immediately after you’ve taken the pic.

For clarity, I’m not on Windows (obv, raspberry Pi), and I’m not using docker directly; I’m running HAOS on my pi, and I’m using the immich add-on. I know it uses docker, but I can’t tell you the exact command to run.

I’ve been summoned

I don’t think I have a single clear memory of any news story ever. I have vague half-remembered snippets.

The best I can do is 9/11 but I was well into my teens at that point, and even then my memory of the news itself isn’t clear.

I remember what my local news anchor looked like. That’s absolute it.