partial_accumen

For the 2040s, if the pattern holds, local compute power will be come dirt cheap again, and there will be very few reasons to pay someone else to host your compute power remotely. Maybe it will be supercomputers on everyone’s wrist or something.

So, what prediction did Bezos make back then, that seems particularly poignant right now? Bezos thinks that local PC hardware is antiquated, and that the future will revolve around cloud computing scenarios, where you rent your compute from companies like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

This isn’t a new idea, and it certainly predates Bezos.

I’m older now, but throughout my life there has been a pendulum swing back and forth between local compute power vs remote compute power. The price of RAM going up follows the exact same path this has gone half a dozen times already in the last 50 years. Compute power gets cheap then it gets expensive, then it gets cheap again. Bezos’s statements are just the most recent example. He’s no prophet. This has just happened before, and it will revert again. Rinse repeat:

• 1970s remote compute power: This couldn’t really compute anything locally and required dialing into a mainframe over an analog telephone line to access the remote computing power.

• 1980s local compute power: CPUs got fast and cheap! Now you could do all your processing right on your desk without need of a central computer/mainframe

• 1990s remote compute power: Thin clients! These were underpowered desktop units that could access the compute power in a server such as Citrix Winframe/Metaframe or SunOS (for SunRay thin clients). Honorable mention for retail type units like Microsoft WebTV which was the same concept with different hardware/software.

• 2000s local compute power: This was the widespread adoption of desktop PCs with 3D graphics cards as a standard along with high power CPUs.

• 2010s remote compute power: VDI appears! This is things like VMware Horizon or Citirix Virtual Desktop along with the launch of AWS for the first time.

• 2020s local compute power: Powerful CPUs and massively fast GPUs are now now standard and affordable.

• 2030s remote compute power…in the cloud…probably

Thw issue youll run into is effectiveness at that small scale, sonyoull be tempted to share data with other systems like that, and eventually you’ll end up creating a different flock.

I wonder if a segregated system design could address this. Similar in-system segregation like a TPM for the actual detection/matching part of the system separated from the command and control part.

As in, the camera and OCR operations would be in their own embedded system which could never receive code updates from the outside. Perhaps this is etched into the silicon SoC itself. Also on silicon would be a small NVRAM that could only hold requested license plate numbers (or a hash of them perhaps). This NVRAM would be WRITE ONLY. So it would never be able to be queried from outside the SOC. The raw camera feed would be wired to the SoC. The only input would be from an outside command and control system (still local to our SoC) that and administrator could send in new license plates numbers to search against. The output of the SoC would “Match found against License Plate X”. Even the time stamp would have to be applied by the outside command and control system.

This would have some natural barriers against dragnet surveillance abuse.

• It would never be possible to dump the license plates being searched for from the cameras themselves even by abusive admins. The only admin option would be to overwrite the list of what the camera is trying to match against.
• The NVRAM that contains the match list could be intentionally sized small to perhaps a few hundreds plate numbers so that an abusive admin couldn’t simply generate every possible license plate combination effectively turning this back into a blanket surveillance tool. The NVRAM limit could be implemented as an on-die fuse link so that upon deployment the size could be made as small as needed for the use case.

Shut off and leave your phone at home, buy a pay-as-you-go to bring with you for emergency contact /coordination

Leave the pay-as-you-go phone powered off too, and only power it up if you actually have to use it. If you have to use it once, you need to get a replacement for a future event.

I’m thinking perhaps something like Meshtastic transmitters and receivers should be used for coordination instead.

Well sure, if you’re in a time crunch that makes sense. Additionally, you did attempt to shop elsewhere, but in your case it was such a specialized opening you only had one choice from all the retailers available to you. I imagine, had there been multiple to choose from, you would have examined the choices more closely, right?

Was that the only refrigerator store close to you, so even if there were other choices that fit manufactured you wouldn’t have been able to lay your hands on one?

I feel like the problem here is that you get people who are curious or like the other features the fridge has and just get what they can when theirs goes out. And while, sure, those people learn not to do that again,

Part of what makes us intelligent is learning from others. I guess I would expect buyers to do even the most basic research on a large dollar figure purchase which would likely expose them to the headlines about Samsung putting ads on fridges after the sale.

Do people actually just walk into an appliance store and just drop more than $1k on what they see on the floor without researching reliability, warranty, or other features from articles and news sources?

This is the same Samsung that sold fridges with giant LCD screens on them, ostensibly to help the buyer, but then later turned that expensive screen into a billboard showing ads to the fridge buyer in their kitchen (source). Samsung has shown who they are. Anyone that buys an AI fridge from them will have no one to blame but themselves.

I’ll go one further:

• Assumes the bulb is in reach. When I read the problem I assumed the bulb was in a ceiling fixture out of reach. Nowhere in the text description did it specify the physical location, except “in the other room”.