Sorry, this is russell's teapot falacy.
"the burden of proof lies with the person making an unfalsifiable claim, rather than on others to disprove it"
If there is evidence this is related to cameras, then the onus is on companies making these cameras and claims to provide the data. Not on others to prove that they don't stop crime.
There's a reason you always start with the null hypothesis.
You didn't ask for data... You asked: "In what way do cameras make life harder for regular people?"
That requires a specific example, which you were provided with. This reads to me as a pithy response that doesn't want to wrestle with the ways this can be misused.
By this same argument ANY police makes life hard for regular people because they sometimes fuck up, so let's just get rid of police too. What's the worst that could happen.
The general sentiment in the thread is that this is too powerful a technology in the hands of unqualified law enforcement. In the same way that I don't trust federal law enforcement in the post-Snowden era, I don't trust local law enforcement with mass surveillance tools.
Luckily we don't have to use the poor as a crutch for this argument. Public camera networks capture everyone sleeping on the sidewalk, regardless of their income level.
I think his comment about "why dogs might provide actual neighborhood safety" is a good reminder that the thing that makes communities safe is "knowing your neighbors." You don't get safety by building a castle with a moat and a million cameras. You get safety by building a community with context that can respond without having to just "react" to the 6s version of "what happened".
I'm reminded of prepper forum discussions. Where some do little more than hoard supplies, weapons and gadgets yet don't network and build communities. In an actual societal breakdown scenario these isolated individuals will become loot drops for others who actually band together.
I agree that there is a parallel between governments and corporations multiplying surveillance and preppers impractically multiplying gadgets. I perceive both to be responding to some sort of psychological issue relating to control or insecurity, not to be practically pursuing resilience.
A government with aggressive surveillance ambitions but a decaying police department and justice system looks to me very much like the guy with a mountain of guns and ammo but no parallel investment in something like battlefield medicine. Whatever you're telling yourself about the reason for what you're doing, it is manifestly not correct, at least going by other investments I would expect to see and find neglected.
It's not that they'll be able to call on one another - you can't guarantee who else will be around after The Bad Event (whatever it is).
It's that they don't have the basic strength of building alliances in the first place - something every kid is supposed to learn through the joys and pains of playing together. Bullies are not generally the popular ones, but neither are the loners.
To put it another way: castles can't survive siege forever. They are a delaying tactic until outside help can arrive.
"The Dauphin, whom of succors we entreated,
Returns us that his powers are yet not ready
To raise so great a siege. Therefore, great king,
We yield our town and lives to thy soft mercy."
-- Henry V, Act 3, scene 3
Heh, I never thought about that but its so true. If society breaks down on the extreme level they anticipate the smart thing to do is probably join a super tight-knit community with lots of young people - maybe the furries or the Amish.
If society breaks down it will be too late to join such groups for nearly all outsiders. Unless you bring very valuable skills or other attributes to the table.
The time to build your community is now, before things get so bad every helpless individual is looking for a group to save them.
I wonder whether The Walking Dead ever did episodes with a surviving Amish community among it's many spinoffs. Potential problem for them is being outgunned by any aggressive community nearby.
And the cameras can provide them with solar panels.
I’m lucky to live in a walker-friendly neighborhood where most homes aren’t walled off by privacy fences. I’ve found our communal strength in talking to neighbors about the cameras that feed and feed off our fear in isolation. It’s a choice.
yeah, it doesn’t a lot of thought to realize that societies thrived when they were… social. this has been repeated throughout history.
the people who go off into the woods as uber survivalists or whatever die alone and forgotten from an infected toenail or something equally as stupid while the society full of people down the mountain thrive and people remember each other.
its wild to me how many people are suckered in by the never ending fear mongering that prepper businesses push on them without ever thinking it through.
Many may find it unintuitive, but one of the best things you can do for the actual security of a neighborhood is to design it for pedestrian and "loitering" friendliness.
This is extremely salient. Check out Phoenix, AZ sometime in street view. It's a brutalist grid of wide roads (even in "residential zones") where every property is lined in a six-foot block wall. As a result, sight lines are excellent for drivers (encouraging high speeds) but terrible for homeowners. Kids can't reasonably roam free, neighbors rarely meet, and everyone is viewed with suspicion. Most of my neighbors are really decent people, but I see them so rarely we might as live in different cities.
Vietnam is extremely safe because there are communities everywhere. There are old folks watching young folks. One viet friend said there's an expression "rice-powered cameras" which refers to people that start filming when something is happening.
I need you to reread my comment, and then paraphrase what you think I said, for me. Cause I don't get how this is someone's response to my comment in a million years unless it's like intentional rage bait, or something.
It feels like the only reason to label one side of the political spectrum "reactionary" in this way is to poison the well for anyone responding to you.
Where as, pre-labeling things as being politically one-sided is very reactionary, and seems to be what you're doing here. It's also not limited to just one side of the political spectrum. I would argue that Conservatives tend to be even more reactionary than liberals. See: All the legislation to prevent children from eating from dog/cat bowls in schools when there's no evidence of this occurring.
This is really cool and impressive... but relatedly...
Has anyone figured out what the minimum specs for Quake are?
I feel like the first thing everyone does with a computer is to determine whether or not it can run quake, and I'm just wondering what the like, most simple computer that could exist is, that could run quake?
You can find a lot of discussion about what the minimum specs for Quake are. Famously, it needs a decent FPU, and the Pentium was a convenient early CPU with a decent built-in FPU. It was significantly faster than a 486.
…But people have managed to run Quake on the 486.
And the myth people tell about Quake is that it killed Cyrix, because Quake performance on Cyrix was subpar. But was that true? And if it was true, was that because the Cyrix was slower than a Pentium, or was it because the Quake code had assembly that was hand-optimized for the Pentium FPU pipeline?
Anyway. “Most simple computer that could run Quake” is probably going to include a decent FPU. If you are implementing something on an FPGA, you can probably get somewhere around 200 MHz clock anyway. At which point you can run Quake II.
My perspective from being a teen doing lan party stuff at the time: Quake ran slow on them, but it was far from the only thing that ran slow. Cyrix was well understood to be the value brand for general office apps and such, but not up to it for more demanding computing, and for having random compatibility issues here and there.
Ultimately what killed Cyrix is they just couldn't offer enough of a discount vs intel to matter, especially with all the lock in stuff intel was doing with Dell, Gateway, etc.
Intel Inside was a successful marketing campaign as well. If you were around back then I bet you can imagine the jingle/chord immediately.
I had a Cyrix 6x86 when Quake first came out. My disappointment at how poorly Quake ran on it was significant, especially because pretty much every other game at the time ran well on the Cyrix. The FPU performance in Quake was doubly handicapped on the Cyrix: not only was its FPU slower than the Pentium's to begin with, Quake's code was indeed hand-optimized for the Pentium's FPU pipeline. Fabien Sanglard's writeup of Michael Abrash's optimizations for Quake goes into great detail: https://fabiensanglard.net/quake_asm_optimizations/
Cyrix was physically incapable of pipelining FPU instructions. Without Pentium Quake would have had to wait two more years for commodification of CPUs delivering similar floating point performance.
Quake needed March 1994 Pentium 90-100 to deliver ~smooth 25fps. Cyrix released similarly performing 6x86MX PR200 in May 1997, AMD K5-PR166 January 1997. Quake was unfeasible till ~1998 at the earliest to be able to sell playable game.
Yes but also no. The problem with fixed point arithmetic is a lack of dynamic range compared to floating point. Floats are great at representing both large numbers with limited precision and small numbers with high precision, but with fixed point you have to make a choice based on which kind of number you're trying to represent. Meaning you need to use a mixture of 8.24, 16.16 and 24.8 fixed point types (and appropriate conversions) depending on the context of the calculations that you're doing.
It's possible to write a game engine with that limitation, but there's no easy natural conversion from Quake's judicious use of floats to a fully fixed-point codebase. You'd have to redesign and rewrite the entire engine from scratch, basically.
The PS1 doesn't an FPU but got a version of Quake 2, so it's possible. That said, it was somewhat different from the PC version, so it could be argued that it's not the same game.
I can't speak on Quake, but I was a level designer on the failed effort to port Unreal to PSX.
My understanding from talking to the coders at the time was that Unreal's software renderer was a huge advantage as a starting point. They were able to reuse a lot of the portal rendering stuff as setup on the R3K cpu, but none of the rasterization. That had to go to the graphics core, which was a post setup 2D engine that in addition to the usual sprites, could do tris and quads.
We had a budget of about 3k polygons post clipping, and having two enemies on screen would burn about half of that. The other huge limit is the texture cache was tiny, so we couldn't do lightmaps. Our lightning was baked in at vertex level and it just was what it was.
I imagine the situation with Quake was comparable. The BSP stuff would carry right over, but I can't imagine they got lightmapping proper working at the time. They'd also need some sort of solution for overdraw, as Quake's PVS was a lot more loose than Unreal's portal clipping.
The PS1 version uses a custom engine based on technology built for the game Shadow Master, the previous title by Hammerhead Studios. It was a technical tour de force for the original PlayStation.
I want to look at this from a different perspective… a single-precision floating-point multiply is pretty simple, no? 24x24 bit multiply, which is about half as many gates as a 32x32 bit multiply.
Maybe I would prefer to rip out the integer multiplication unit first, before ripping out the FPU.
As other had said: the only 'deal breaker' here is FPU.
Q1 is playable but not on any modern understanding of that word on a system with Am486DX4/100 with 16MB RAM and S3 Trio64V+. You can disable sound effects for a couple FPS more.
Mostly you would be fine because the level design in Q1 heavily tends to the closed spaces and corridors with only a glimpses of the outside and a rare halls and caverns. That being said the Necropolis would be a test of strategic thinking for turn-based FPS and Ziggurat Vertigo is unplayable.
I honestly don’t remember what the frame rate was, but it definitely improved when I upgraded to a Pentium 100. I distinctly remember a buddy giving me some RAM (2x4MB) which allowed me to play on the 486. I was so happy!
The DX2s _were_ a significant improvement over the 486DX, but I’ll admit, I might be remembering the excitement of getting to play Quake at all! The framerate may have been 15-20 fps and I just dealt with it,
The minimum requirements, on the box, were apparently Pentium 75Mhz. 8MB (DOS), or 16 RAM (WIN95).
I think the problem, is that cameras don't prevent you from getting stolen from.
I know many people in the same city as me who get things stolen off their front porch, and have cameras.
On the flip side, I have basically never worried about being stolen from, and I have no camera.
The secret? All the places I've lived, have their front door in an inconvenient spot. For example, up stairs, or along the side of the house. Getting a camera doesn't make you safer... Cause all you have to do to thwart it is wear a mask. And thanks to the pandemic, literally everyone has one of those.
Saying "The West has deindustrialised" is incredibly disingenuous. The west's consumerism has driven a race-to-the-bottom for pricing of products in China and India.
Who do you think would need to be given equal time on conservative talk radio?
What would be the other outcome of the change to the rule that I am proposing? Also I am not even against the rule being applied to talk shows, I just want to see it applied non-hypocritically.
So you see general entertainment TV shows as the same as literally conservative radio? If a conservative radio show gave equal time to Jasmine Crockett who would even listen? If Hannity gave equal time to Joe Biden, probably hours of equal time, who would even want that? Or take it seriously? That's like a Mosque giving equal time to a Rabbi. That's not the spirit of the rule. Late night entertainment shows were getting around the rule by claiming they were news shows that are exempt.
> So you see general entertainment TV shows as the same as literally conservative radio? If a conservative radio show gave equal time to Jasmine Crockett who would even listen? If Hannity gave equal time to Joe Biden, probably hours of equal time, who would even want that?
(As far as the FCC is allowed to consider within First Amendment boundaries,) What makes Stephen Colbert's show "general entertainment" under the assumption that Hannity's show is "conservative"? Put another way, what makes Hannity's show not "general entertainment" yet makes Colbert's show "general entertainment"?
(I'm not trying to distract from xracy's comment [1] about selective enforcement.)
No, it's calling out a red herring. It's a valid response in a discussion to say that your comment is not contributing to the topic at hand. Especially when your comment is not really comparable.
I find it fascinating that USAians can not see that their two political parties are barely any different from each other. Trump is as vile as the previous lot, but with zero attempts at hiding it.
Anyway, we have a saying: you can not wake up someone pretending to be asleep.
This is the account's M.O. You can see my response above, but basically as far as I can tell they're deeply conservative, and they try and position themselves as a like "rational centrist" by doing this "both sides" Dance.
The giveaway that you've noticed, is they never actually condemn the existing administration without also comparing them to Obama (and for reasons beyond me, specifically Obama and not say, Biden, Bush 1/2, Clinton).
big hint: how many computer-literate people do you know that would put their whole-ass name as their HN handle, in 2026? none i'd professionally associate with, thats for sure
Having an excuse for why you still haven't filled out the fourth-quadrent "unknown unknowns", doesn't make you "better".
It's entirely possible to dislike BHO for racist reasons, just like it's possible to think both he and the Bushes are literal war criminals for consistent reasons.
I think GWB is a war criminal who had a better understanding of North/South migration than BHO. I still think both of them, and about anyone who supports DJT for any reasons, are pretty vicious.
And, like I said, literal all folks who like DJT and dislike BHO are birthers of various stripes. That's my lived experience. Maybe you're some kind of unicorn, who knows.
If there is evidence this is related to cameras, then the onus is on companies making these cameras and claims to provide the data. Not on others to prove that they don't stop crime.
There's a reason you always start with the null hypothesis.
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