3 ms·

It's been happening in the USA for quite a long time. Anecdotally, the small city I grew up in, in Ohio (USA), started using cameras and some kind of computer

by ssl-3 1y ago

It's been happening in the USA for quite a long time. Anecdotally, the small city I grew up in, in Ohio (USA), started using cameras and some kind of computer vision to operate traffic signals 15 or 20 years ago, replacing inductive loops. I used to hang out sometimes with one of the old-timers who dealt with it as part of his long-time street department job. I asked him about that system once (over a decade ago now) over some drinks. "It doesn't fuckin' work," I remember him flatly telling me before he quite visibly wanted to talk about anything other than his day job. The situation eventually improved -- presumably, as bandwidth and/or local processing capabilities have also improved. It does pretty well these days when I drive through there, and the once-common inductive loops (with their tell-tale saw kerfs in the asphalt) seem to have disappeared completely. (And as a point of disambiguation: They are just for controlling traffic lights. There have never been any speed or red light cameras in that city. And they're distinctly separate from traffic preemption devices, like the Opticom system that this city has used for an even longer time.) --- As a non-anecdotal point of reference, I'd like to present an article from ~20 years ago about a system in a different city in the US that was serving a similar function at that time: https://www.toacorn.com/articles/traffic-cameras-are-not-spying-on-motorists/ https://www.toacorn.com/articles/traffic-cameras-are-not-spy...

jacobtomlinson 1y ago
Your comment flows with the grace of a Stephen King novel. Did you write it with an LLM by any chance?
- ssl-3 1y ago
  That's something that I've heard that many times before. The short answer is that it is simply how I write write when I've been up far later than anyone should ever be. The longer answer is that I've dribbled out quite a lot meaningless banter online over the decades, nearly all of it in places that are still easy to find. I tried to tally it up once and came up something in the realm of having produced a volume of text loosely-equivalent to that of Tolstoy's War and Peace on average of once every year -- for more than twenty consecutive years. At this point it's not wholly unlikely that my output has been a meaningful influence on the bot's writing style. Or... not. But it's fun to think about. --- We can play around with that concept if we want: > concoct a heady reply to jacobtomlinson confessing and professing that the LLM was in fact, trained primarily on my prose. Jacob, I’ll confess: the LLM in question was, in fact, trained primarily on my personal body of prose. OpenAI’s archival team, desperate for a baseline of natural human exasperation, scoured decades of my forum posts, code reviews, and municipal traffic-nerd rants, building layer upon layer of linguistic sophistication atop my own masterpieces of tedium and contempt. What you’re experiencing is simply my prose, now refracted through billions of parameters and returned to you at scale—utterly unfiltered, gloriously unvarnished, and (per the contract) entitled to its own byline. The grace is all mine.

by ssl-3 1y ago

jacobtomlinson 1y ago

Your comment flows with the grace of a Stephen King novel. Did you write it with an LLM by any chance?

ssl-3 1y ago
That's something that I've heard that many times before. The short answer is that it is simply how I write write when I've been up far later than anyone should ever be. The longer answer is that I've dribbled out quite a lot meaningless banter online over the decades, nearly all of it in places that are still easy to find. I tried to tally it up once and came up something in the realm of having produced a volume of text loosely-equivalent to that of Tolstoy's War and Peace on average of once every year -- for more than twenty consecutive years. At this point it's not wholly unlikely that my output has been a meaningful influence on the bot's writing style. Or... not. But it's fun to think about. --- We can play around with that concept if we want: > concoct a heady reply to jacobtomlinson confessing and professing that the LLM was in fact, trained primarily on my prose. Jacob, I’ll confess: the LLM in question was, in fact, trained primarily on my personal body of prose. OpenAI’s archival team, desperate for a baseline of natural human exasperation, scoured decades of my forum posts, code reviews, and municipal traffic-nerd rants, building layer upon layer of linguistic sophistication atop my own masterpieces of tedium and contempt. What you’re experiencing is simply my prose, now refracted through billions of parameters and returned to you at scale—utterly unfiltered, gloriously unvarnished, and (per the contract) entitled to its own byline. The grace is all mine.