It's also why people start parroting the phrase "the purpose of a system is what it does". Look at where we are right now: a precipice before this becomes widely used in all forms of policing. We still have a chance to police the police's use of the AI.
The purpose of using AI to identify suspects in criminal cases is to ease the burden of manual searching for a suspect (or insert whatever the purpose of statement you want). Ok, but we're getting false positives that are damaging people's lives already in the early stages. And I don't want to hear "trust me bro, it will get more accurate" as an excuse to not regulate it.
At a minimum, we should enshrine the right to appeal AI and have limits on how it can be used for probable cause.
This isn't even the only recent case of this happening. There was another case of mistaken identity due to AI. [0] Sure 4 hours isn't the same as 5 months, but still this guy wanted to show multiple forms of ID to prove who he was! The bodycam footage was posted a few months back but never got traction here.
Like if the police officer can't read numbers, they can't do breathalyzer tests on people. If the AI can't be used responsibly, then it can't be used at all.
I wonder to what extent propaganda played a role in disbelieving their claims. US propaganda is very strong on the US being the best, having the most advanced technology, and that nations like Russia and China are inferior to us. So it's totally plausible to me that agents in the CIA would fall for that same propaganda: this technology doesn't exist, because, if it did, we would have invented it.
Propaganda can galvanize, but propaganda can also lull.
> You need it to encode or decode past dates to unix time or other time standards.
Which you need to do if
> You do not need it to "interpret" past dates.
you want to interpret past dates. Mainly you need a historical record of the offsets. Or you're trading inaccuracy of duration measurement from one or two days out of the year to every day of the year by not keeping track of historical offsets or taking them into consideration.
It is absolutely not esoteric for a user to want to know, for example, an accurate duration measurement between a past departure time in one zone and a past arrival time in another zone. (inb4 the user is supposed to somehow anticipate all possible datetimes and calculate these durations in advance in case they need them)
> Combining these two concerns with insanely different scopes is precisely the issue with the tzdb.
I'm laughing so hard at what I just visualized. "Oh, no you only use this zone library for current times, use this other library for past times".
Then someone gets this crazy idea to use just one library and realizes it's quite ridiculous to need a DNS client to pull in the records when they have this other library that has the historical and current zones in a few text files. So then they drop the DNS client and just start using tzdb. It can even work for future dates and times too!
As soon as you create a timestamp, it becomes a recording that needs to take historical zone information into account when interpreting it.
Rule Morocco 2026 only - Feb 15 3:00 -1:00 -
Rule Morocco 2026 only - Mar 22 2:00 0 -
Rule Morocco 2027 only - Feb 7 3:00 -1:00 -
Rule Morocco 2027 only - Mar 14 2:00 0 -
Rule Morocco 2028 only - Jan 23 3:00 -1:00 -
Rule Morocco 2028 only - Mar 5 2:00 0 -
Rule Morocco 2029 only - Jan 14 3:00 -1:00 -
Rule Morocco 2029 only - Feb 18 2:00 0 -
Didn't know that it was moveable! It's actually a great example of why storing future datetimes in UTC is wrong. Future dates should always be stored in local time with appropriate zone information and then converted close to the "decision time". Otherwise, it may represent the wrong local time by the time the dated information is supposed to take effect!
That's part of the reason that Morocco does a time shift during Ramadan - moving sunrise an hour later in the day so that there is more time before dawn to have breakfast. It's daylight savings but for the purpose of more pre-dawn time than afternoon-sun time.
> Rabat – The Ministry of Digital Transition has announced that Morocco will suspend daylight saving time and return to GMT on Sunday, February 15 at 3 a.m for Ramadan 2026.
> Astronomical calculations expect Ramadan to begin on February 19 in Morocco. The Ministry of Islamic Affairs will confirm the official starting date after the sighting of the crescent moon.
> Morocco suspends daylight saving time exclusively for the holy month of Ramadan, as it affects the fasting time.
> The ministry emphasized that 60 minutes will be added to the official time at 2 a.m. on Sunday, March 22, following Ramadan.
> ...
> The North African country decided to adopt the daylight saving measure in 2008 during the summer season. The decision’s goal is to increase competitiveness of the national economy through reducing energy consumption and also the time difference between the country and its regional and international trading partners.
> Under the measure, Morocco switched the clock every summer to DST, GMT+1, and returned to the old standard time, GMT, for a period when Ramadan fell in the summer.
> In October 2018, however, the Moroccan government adopted Draft Decree 2.18.855, adding 60 minutes to the standard time in the country year-round.
> The decision stirred controversy and frustration, with Moroccans protesting the move. But it has since become a normal part of Morocco’s preparation for Ramadan.
I immediately envisioned having my feed reader as a FireFox shortcut and being able to navigate to YouTube videos from that.
Another thing is that I've found certain old movies can only be streamed from weird websites - as in https://weirdstreamingwebsite is the only licensed entity to have it. I could either buy a VHS (which is what we did) or stream it. But since a physical copy might not be available, the only option would be to use that weird website to stream it. There is no app!
Yes, at least in the US, being a litigious freak gets results.
Weird trick to get unblocked: follow the standard three-email procedure to sender support, then send a fourth email ccing buscond@microsoft.com telling them to unblock or next step is attorney general.
The thing about a lot of attorney generals is they LOVE to smack down a big corporation like Microsoft for the little guy.
Your intuition is way off, like dangerously off. But your comment is a great example to show a smug lawyer at Microsoft when they try to say there is no basis for the claim that these blocks against legitimate senders are defamatory.
This has been affecting reputable senders who take spam reporting seriously, including MXRoute and Discourse.
> No reports probably means your reporting system is broken.
"No reports" can mean a lot of things. There is no "probably".
The "you" in "your" is Microsoft because under a certain volume of email, they don't even send reports. I regularly test the abuse contact address for my server because of this exact unfair assumption - that it must be my fault. I have never once gotten an abuse report notification from Microsoft, but I have gotten a bounce message saying that I'm blocked because I apparently send spam! Btw, this was in reply to an email from a Microsoft user.
Worse, I figured I'd just disallow any email from a Microsoft property - if an outlook (or hotmail or live or anyone else) sends an email, I can just bounce it and tell them to use a different service to reach me since I can't reply. Nope! Microsoft won't surface the bounce message to the user.
So, I am barred from replying to Microsoft emails. I am also barred from informing the sender that their email won't reach me.
It's defamation - the sender is always going to assume that it is my fault if I didn't reply even if the reason I "didn't reply" is outside of my control.
> So putting that together, it seems like a small ISP screwed up and let spammers go wild, and Outlook blocked them for it. I can't really fault Outlook for that.
Yes, in your imagined scenario, you can't really fault outlook. In the real world, however, outlook is very much to blame.
have a fkin boring substack, write abt your car (whimsy typo, not cringe like "doggo")
reply