this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2026
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Privacy
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You don’t get it. The smart glasses don’t matter, man. The panopticon’s already built. What do you think the AI bubble is all about? Do you really believe $35 trillion’s in play over a bullshit generator that synthesizes pornography and tells you to kill yourself? All that compute is needed to integrate the data from the Flock cameras, the smart phones, the smart homes. It’s all connected, man, or it soon will be. Big Brother is here. You’ll never go unobserved, unrecorded, again.
People used to call me a creep whenever I raised concerns about mass surveillance. Like, obviously if I wasn't okay with that then I must have been planning something nasty, right?
Well this is precisely the scenario I was trying to warn about, and it's far nastier than anything I could have possibly done, even if that were my intention...
Written in jest and yet using CV at scale on GPUs initially used for LLMs make sense.
Yet... why do so? As I wrote just minutes ago in https://lemmy.ml/post/41546700/23280257 there is already very high quality signal that requires nearly no compute : your wireless trace. Google/Apple and your mobile provider or ISP and thus the government hosting it already know 24/7 where you are, how active you are, etc solely from your 5G/4G signal. Well OK for activity it's with the IMU but the point is this is basically computationally free.
You move around,
compare this with
this is ridiculously expensive to run. I'm not saying it can't be done (it's been done and it's not hard to setup) but... WHY would one do so when the first setup works more reliably and is orders of magnitude cheaper?
Obviously both can be combined but also both can be bypassed conveniently and extremely cheaply (leave your phone home, wear sunglasses and a hygiene mask) so even though a realistic scenario I'd argue it's not rational to not just rely on what already works for the vast majority of situations.
Tracking phones only does that. And Flock’s mostly just a license plate reader, so far. Those sorts of things are great if you’re a cop stalking your ex-wife, but are nearly useless if you’re trying to track down a masked man that shot the CEO of an insurance company then fled on a bicycle.
This feels like it's supposed to be tongue in cheek, but it's too close to reality tbh.
I wrote it humorously, but I’m only about 5% joking. Sure looks to me like Minority Report’s about to come true, only the precogs will be called Claude, Grok, and GPT, and they’ll first be tasked with finding Mexicans rather than murderers.
Fully automated drab earth fascism is here, baby.