skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Brazilian cities are building vast surveillance networks in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    https://archive.is/TlwQz From the article: [...]

    https://archive.is/TlwQz

    From the article:

    São Paulo is one of many Brazilian cities spending big on crime-fighting technology. As in other countries, police are investing in body-worn cameras and networks of microphones that detect the sound of gunshots. What sets Brazil apart from many democracies is its enthusiasm for face-spotting tech. Researchers for O Panóptico, a watchdog, count 560 active facial-recognition projects in more than 20 Brazilian states. These include police-run initiatives but also experiments in schools, for example, where cameras are increasingly being used to take attendance. They gaze upon some 99m people, more than 47% of Brazil’s population.

    The main impetus for the likes of Smart Sampa is Brazilians’ persistent fear of crime. Policing is largely the responsibility of states and municipalities. Their governors and mayors are embracing high-tech kit as a way of showing they are cracking down on insecurity. The spread accelerated during the pandemic, when cities bought cameras to enforce lockdowns and track public-health measures. Many were later repurposed for public security.

    It helps that high-resolution, internet-connected cameras are becoming cheaper—and that software capable of wringing insight from their footage is growing more effective. As well as governments, companies and individuals now deploy smart surveillance systems, says Erick Coser of Gabriel, a security-technology firm. Smart Sampa relies heavily on cameras put up by landlords, such as the firms that operate in São Paulo’s shopping centres or manage apartment and office buildings, who link their sensors into the system. Ricardo Nunes, the city’s mayor, says that already more than half the cameras in the network are privately owned.

    The authorities paint these developments as a success. São Paulo’s government says more than 3,000 fugitives have been arrested after being spotted by its system, and that the cameras have let them catch nearly 6,000 people in the act of committing crimes. The use of facial recognition has won broad support across Brazil’s political spectrum, says Rafael Ch of Signum Global Advisors, a consultancy.

    Yet privacy advocates and some security experts are alarmed. They question the effectiveness of the surveillance systems, and their fairness. São Paulo has been hauling people in on warrants later found to have expired or been withdrawn. A persistent worry is that face-spotting systems are not uniformly accurate when identifying people of different ethnicities. According to Agência Brasil, a state news agency, roughly 80% of wrongful arrests linked to facial-recognition systems in Rio de Janeiro involve black Brazilians. Though the country’s privacy and data-protection laws are some of the strongest in Latin America, public security gets big carve-outs. In other places that have invested heavily in surveillance technology, such as Britain, there are stricter legal safeguards.

    [...]

    Official claims about effectiveness also tend to ignore the fact that Brazil’s streets were growing safer before new crime-fighting technologies became widespread. Murders, robberies and thefts have fallen markedly since 2018. In São Paulo, robberies reached a 25-year low in 2025; its murder rate is now among the lowest of any large city in Latin America. One reason is that crime is changing: large organised crime groups are becoming less like street gangs and more like lawless conglomerates. They infiltrate legal markets, seize control of their supply chains and launder money through legitimate businesses. According to the Brazilian Forum of Public Security, a think-tank, gangs generated 147bn reais ($29bn) from fuel, gold, cigarettes and drinks in 2022, compared with only 15bn reais from trafficking cocaine. None of this is easy to capture with cameras, no matter how smart they may be.

  3. Comment on Big Tech is now targeting Native American land for data centers in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    The issues have cropped up on Indian lands nationwide. In the Pacific Northwest, the Yakama Nation went to federal court in May to block a clean energy project on a sacred site that would power a data center campus. Honor the Earth, a national Indigenous group, has kicked off a Stop Data Colonialism campaign featuring an interactive map tracking proposed data centers.

    But Oklahoma, which has 38 federally recognized tribes, “is really ground zero,” Ms. Morris said.

    Among the reasons tech companies find tribal lands so appealing is speed, according to the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines. While energy projects on nontribal lands can face permitting delays of three to 10 years, projects on tribal land often proceed more quickly because tribes wield sovereign authority to handle their own regulations and permitting.

    [...]

    Now all eyes are on the influential Cherokees, the country’s most populous tribe, with 480,000 enrolled members, whose 7,000-square-mile reservation is almost the size of New Jersey.

    Two prominent Cherokees — Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma and Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, both Republicans — are vocal data center proponents. Mr. Mullin, when he was still Oklahoma’s junior senator, called data centers a “game changer,” highlighting a Google hub in Pryor, Okla., that generates millions in tax revenue.

    So far, Chuck Hoskin Jr., the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, has been cautious, establishing a task force to study the environmental and economic impacts.

    [...]

    The Colusa Indian Community of Northern California, which has operated its own power plant and electricity grid for two decades, hopes to bridge the gap between skeptical Native Americans and outside tech giants.

    “There’s a mistrust of corporate America in general, and we share that mistrust,” said Ken Ahmann, chief operating officer of Colusa Indian Energy, which just opened a Tulsa-area office. “Our charter in this space is to help act as a firewall and a negotiating partner on behalf of the tribes.”

    The Colusa are now in talks with the Caddo, among other tribes, to build a power plant for a data center in Oklahoma by the end of the year.

  5. Comment on America’s enterprising spirit is booming after decades-long slump in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Jump-started by the pandemic, when a confluence of factors including mass layoffs and remote work led to a flood of business creation, and supercharged by the rise of artificial intelligence, start-up activity is booming after a decades-long slump.

    Americans filed 5.7 million applications last year to start new businesses, according to the Census Bureau, the most in the two decades the government has kept track. New business applications through the first half of this year continued to climb.

    [...]

    The strong run of business creation is one of the most surprising and welcome economic developments of the post-pandemic era. New businesses help drive innovation and productivity growth. Although many fail or remain small, some could develop into giants that spur job growth for years to come.

    [...]

    Data on the number of business formed each year lags, so it will take time to determine whether the increase in new business applications translates to a rise in real-world businesses and hiring. In 2023, the most recent year for which the data is available, half a million businesses formed, according to the Census Bureau. That was down slightly from the previous year but broadly consistent with an upward trend.

    [...]

    More recently, there are signals that A.I. is adding fuel.

    A recent paper from economists at the University of British Columbia and the Stockholm School of Economics found that generative A.I. was “spurring entrepreneurial activity” in the United States, both by giving rise to new ventures built around the technology and by making it cheaper to start enterprises.

    [...]

    According to a recent report from Gusto, a small-business payroll and benefits service, nearly 60 percent of founders on its platform who started businesses last year said they used A.I., and half said the technology made it cheaper and faster.

    The technology appears to be greasing the path for entrepreneurs, removing some barriers and allowing them to get their enterprises off the ground more quickly. Chatbots are effectively serving as virtual collaborators that can answer questions, carry out tasks and write code.

    [...]

    Census data shows that the rise in business applications has been driven by start-ups that are not likely to hire workers rather than by those that are. That, some economists believe, is more evidence that A.I. is eviscerating obstacles to entrepreneurship.

    Ernie Tedeschi, the chief economist at Stripe, a financial tech firm, said the government’s data, as well as an analysis of Stripe users, indicated a jump in solo entrepreneurs who might be using A.I. for tasks that once required human employees.

    [...]

    Other factors could be stoking the rise in start-up activity.

    The low-hire, low-fire labor market that has persisted for much of the past two years could be causing some unemployed workers to turn to other sources of income. The high-flying stock market and lofty home prices could be encouraging business investments. E-commerce platforms such as TikTok Shop could be producing a new category of third-party sellers. Swelling business creation could be a reflection of optimism in the country’s trajectory. It is also possible that A.I. is making it easier to fill out applications.

    3 votes

  7. Comment on Why socialists should embrace luxury apartments in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I think we can assume that older, less desirable apartments will rent for cheaper and some people will choose to live there to save on rent. It's no different than the logic for who is likely to...

    I think we can assume that older, less desirable apartments will rent for cheaper and some people will choose to live there to save on rent. It's no different than the logic for who is likely to own an old car.

    In locations with high demand, landlords will have incentives to fix up places like that until they don't exist anymore. But I don't see why we should encourage that, and I can see the logic for requiring some low-cost units in new, larger developments.

    4 votes

  8. Comment on European Parliament approves new rules for gene-edited plants in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    The rules governing new gene editing techniques for plants – called "new genomic techniques" (NGTs) – are being changed at EU level. Gene-edited plants will be divided into two categories, depending on the type and number of edits involved. Those with few genetic changes that could have occurred through conventional breeding techniques will be considered conventional plants, while the rest will have to follow the same strict rules as GMOs.

    The new law was adopted by the European Parliament on 17 June 2026 and will apply from mid-2028.

    [...]

    New developments in biotechnology have led to a variety of new gene editing techniques, encompassed in the term "new genomic techniques" (NGTs).

    The big difference between GMOs and NGTs is that GMOs are mostly made by inserting a gene from a different species into a plant, while NGTs allow targeted changes to a plant’s own DNA.

    [...]

    The new EU rules mark a shift towards regulating based on what the final plant looks like genetically, not how it was made.

    NGT-altered plants are split between two categories, with different legal obligations attached.

    • NGT-1 — This category is for plants with edits that could have occurred through conventional breeding. These will be treated like conventional plants, exhibiting a limited number and type of changes. Plants engineered for herbicide-tolerance or to produce insecticidal substances cannot be treated as NGT-1 plants.

    • NGT-2 — This category is for plants that have undergone more extensive or complex genetic modifications. These are covered by the existing strict GMO rules and will be subject to risk assessment, authorisation, labelling, traceability, and member-state opt-outs for cultivation.

    Neither NGT-1 nor NGT-2 plants will be allowed in organic production.

    3 votes

  10. Comment on A skeptical overview of AI and consciousness in ~humanities

    skybrian
    Link
    From the book manuscript: ...

    From the book manuscript:

    Moreover and more importantly, we won’t know before we’ve already manufactured thousands or millions of disputably conscious AI systems. Engineering sprints ahead while consciousness science lags. Consciousness scientists – and philosophers, and policy-makers, and the public – are watching AI development disappear over the hill. Soon we will hear a voice shout back to us, “Now I am just as conscious, just as full of experience and feeling, as any human”, and we won’t know whether to believe it. We will need to decide, as individuals and as a society, whether to treat AI systems as conscious, nonconscious, semi-conscious, or incomprehensibly alien, before we have adequate grounds to justify that decision.

    ...

    In this book, I aim to convince you that the experts do not know, and you do not know,
    and society collectively does not and will not know, and all is fog.

    1 vote

  12. Comment on Why socialists should embrace luxury apartments in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    In NYC, it seems like there's room for growth in outer boroughs like Queens? In San Francisco, there's aren't a lot of tall buildings in some parts of the city and perhaps the Marina Safeway...

    In NYC, it seems like there's room for growth in outer boroughs like Queens?

    In San Francisco, there's aren't a lot of tall buildings in some parts of the city and perhaps the Marina Safeway project will start a trend?

    4 votes

  13. Comment on Laser-boosted microscopes could reveal new drug targets, sharpen views inside cells in ~science

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Researchers at the University of California (UC), Berkeley report developing a contrast-boosting cryo-EM system that incorporates powerful beams of laser light to make tiny proteins stand out from the surrounding haze. “At the moment, we can see just a snifter of what we’re interested in,” says Michael Grange, a structural biologist at the Rosalind Franklin Institute who was not involved in the study, published online today in Science. With the laser, he says, “we can see more clearly.”

    [...]

    Despite a decade of spectacular advances in detectors, software and microscope design, cryo-EM still struggles with one fundamental problem: Below a certain size, proteins become nearly invisible to the microscope. Rather than strongly scattering electrons, creating dark and light patterns that directly reveal the proteins’ structures, they mostly shift the timing—or phase—of passing electron waves, encoding information that detectors struggle to capture.

    [...]

    In the new study, the UC Berkeley team used the laser-enhanced system to sharpen reconstructions of hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in blood. Hemoglobin sits near the lower size limit of what conventional cryo-EM can reliably resolve, making it a useful benchmark. Comparing experiments performed with and without the laser, they showed the added contrast transformed a blurry 4.46-angstrom hemoglobin structure into a crisp 3.09-angstrom reconstruction, with sharper detail and spatial resolution throughout.

    Not content to stop there, Carragher and her Biohub colleagues, with guidance from Müller, built a more powerful variant, adding a second, orthogonal laser to create a dual, criss-crossing phase plate. Described this week in a companion preprint posted to bioRxiv, the design spreads the lasers’ load more evenly, reducing aberrations and minimizing heating that could destabilize the mirrors.

    Last month, Carragher says her team combined images from dozens of exposures at different angles to create as-yet-unpublished 3D images of the mélange of structures within frozen yeast cells. “We know so little really about the molecular structure inside of cells,” says preprint co-author David Agard, a structural biologist at Biohub and UC San Francisco. “The phase plate, we’re really hoping, gets us over the hump.”

    [...]

    The challenge is that laser phase plates are not yet commercially available. Thermo Fisher Scientific, which holds the license for the technology, has not yet said when it will sell phase plates or how much they will cost.

    After spending 15 years working on the engineering and optics of laser phase plates, Müller hopes the company will hurry. “There would be nothing better,” he says, “than if one day somebody discovers a cure for something, and the laser phase plate has helped with that.”

  15. Comment on Hungarian president Tamás Sulyok signs constitutional amendment ending his own mandate in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    More recently that average is a lot higher. From this article: To get the average term down to 9 years, there would need to be one new judge appointed per year and that seems like too much...

    More recently that average is a lot higher. From this article:

    The average term length of U.S. Supreme Court justices is by far the longest among established constitutional democracies. With no limits on tenure, the average Supreme Court term since 1993 has reached 28 years — over twice as long as most peer countries — making the United States a notable global outlier.

    To get the average term down to 9 years, there would need to be one new judge appointed per year and that seems like too much turnover. Imagine if Trump were able to appoint 8 judges! Two new judges per 4-year term, resulting in 18-year terms, seems more reasonable, though appointing 4 judges still a lot of power for a two-term president.

    It seems like making it a fixed number of appointments per term instead of waiting for people to resign or die would be an improvement.

    7 votes

  16. Comment on Why socialists should embrace luxury apartments in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    https://archive.is/u1qjN From the article: [...]

    https://archive.is/u1qjN

    From the article:

    In response to struggling renters and frustrated first-time buyers, rich-world politicians are championing an ostensibly obvious solution: build more cheap homes. Yet if self-styled socialists such as New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani and Britain’s incoming prime minister, Andy Burnham, are serious about housing affordability, they ought to drop the platitudes for the evidence and embrace the construction of more expensive ones instead.

    [...]

    Above all, high-end developments unlock long housing chains. As higher-income households move into newly built units, they free up older properties, raising supply and slashing prices for middle- and lower-end housing through a process known as filtering. Numerous international studies underscore this positive ripple effect.

    One published last year tracked households that moved into a newly built 512-unit condominium tower in Honolulu, Hawaii. It found that the building created at least 557 vacancies in older and cheaper apartments across the city in just three years, with market-rate units more likely to release the largest chains.

    Filtering can also be widespread. A 2021 study in Helsinki using geo-coded population data found that every 100 new market-rate units in the city centre led to around 60 units becoming available in the city’s bottom half of neighbourhoods by income. An analysis across all homes in Sweden over several decades concluded that “new homes, even those initially primarily inhabited by rich people, lead to substantial trickle-down effects that also benefit the poor”.

    Other US studies highlight how market-rate developments benefit less well-to-do local residents by lowering housing costs. In San Francisco, a 2021 paper found new developments lowered the risk of eviction notices for residents in rent-stabilised housing. Even “luxury” developments in New York City — which Mamdani has criticised — have been shown to contribute to lower local rents and sales prices.

    6 votes

  18. Comment on Federal agents were told FBI will no longer investigate US Immigration and Customs Enforcement confrontations in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Federal agents around the country were told in recent days that the F.B.I. would no longer investigate confrontations with immigration agents — cases that sometimes yield evidence that could be used to prosecute Department of Homeland Security agents implicated in violent encounters, according to people briefed on the decision.

    [...]

    F.B.I. managers around the country received a written notice informing them of the change on Thursday, according to the people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal communications. The same day, some ICE agents around the country were notified by their F.B.I. counterparts.

    The guidance shared with them said that the bureau would stop investigating claims of assaults against Department of Homeland Security agents, the people said. Even though such investigations are intended to determine whether the officers were in fact attacked, they can provide a crucial means of gathering evidence implicating the agents themselves.

    A joint statement by the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security, however, denied that any such change was underway.

    [...]

    Under the change, responsibility for investigating cases involving federal immigration officers would likely fall to Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of ICE, effectively leaving the agency to investigate itself, according to guidance circulated among F.B.I. and ICE agents.

    8 votes

  20. Comment on Gigafactory in Sacramento will produce sodium-ion batteries for grid storage in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Startup Peak Energy launched in 2023 with a promise to bring the up-and-coming sodium-ion battery chemistry to American shores. Now, it’s building a gigafactory in Sacramento, California, that will be the country’s first to produce sodium-ion battery storage plants for the grid.

    If Peak Energy succeeds in its broader mission, it will introduce a new generation of batteries better suited for grid storage than the dominant lithium-ion chemistries, which are effectively hand-me-downs from electric vehicles. These sodium-ion batteries can run safely at a broad range of temperatures, company leaders say, meaning they can operate more cheaply and durably than the lithium-ion phosphate (LFP) cells that have become the go-to for stationary storage.

    [...]

    [..] The Sacramento factory will produce 40 times more [than a previous factory in Burlingame], 4 gigawatt-hours per year, when it starts its highly automated production, planned for the first quarter of 2027. Once assembled, the 100,000-pound containers can slip right onto the highway for shipment to customers.

    It’s a quick turnaround as far as factory buildouts go, made possible because Peak found a newly built shell to lease in an industrial park near the Sacramento airport, said Mossburg. The site already had power supply from the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, so Peak can drop in its manufacturing equipment with only minor upgrades to the structure and electrical service, he added. It also helps that the factory won’t be doing the highly technical cell fabrication, which takes longer to install.

    [...]

    Unlike the chemistries that ruled the grid storage market thus far, sodium-ion was ​“the first battery really purposely designed” for stationary storage, Brown said.

    “You sacrifice some energy density for massive improvements in safety but also very significant economic benefits,” he noted.

    7 votes