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Products I Wish Existed

blog.eladgil.com

211–220 of 434 posts

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#211
> The rise of machine learning and machine vision as analytical tools opens up the door for a new contractor to emerge to challenge incumbents, and also to provide new applications not available in the pre-ML world.

Actually, I was thinking of building detection system for taking down protests. Currently, government has a need to identify muslims, illegal immigrants and violent college students. Looking at whatever video is there, it seems you can find them with 60-70% accuracy. For taking down protests, I figure something like automated human warnings or high intensity sound could work. It can generate list of people found and match them against existing database, give proximity of where they might live. Long term, you can track movements and other uniquely identifying data. All stored in cloud so for every camera you install, accuracy should improve.

I wonder if some kind long range radar would be able to detect protestors like activities.

For the attention economy, someone needs to build a prioritization system. Something that can jam all notifications and only allow higher priority ones to go through, scheduling, hiding things I probably don't care about.

example - taking care of unread emails by building a sorted list of them and removing junk based on how you interact with top ones.

> Digital neighborhood watch

Could be useful for various purposes like keeping away people on restraining orders with facial recognition, it should notify police with proof or observing fires, violence, and keeping away certain people you don't want near you.

Human sounding warnings will scare off a lot of low noisy actors.

Edit: Surveillance state = bad. I get it. I am against it too but are you not minority when most of your country doesn't care?

If there is a market need for a product, what do you use for determining whether it is correct or not. You can kill people with knives or ropes (more people killed than security cameras) but that doesn't make those two unethical or wrong to supply. You can defer to legality but that is not a good vector probably. Ethics are subjective and based more on intentions than other variables.

Just a genuine question, what if you are minority in a democratic state? Should you have power to impose your will on others despite whatever they voted for? If someone is harassing me, I can legally remove him. Harassing someone is wrong but what if protests turn into harassment or destruction of your private property, should you use legal system to stop protests? Should you think about the whole country of billion when making a decision that is against you in terms of favorability?

Is selling anything to state a crime now that they can use for violence or suppression of protestor? What makes detection systems so bad compared to other things people call 'ethical'?

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "SaaS-ification" of security cameras should also worry us. Ring — not its customers — controls the videos taken with their cameras, creating a video surveillance network that the police can access without needing a warrant. They've partnered with 400 police forces to give them access to that data [1]. Although they claim to let customers deny police requests for footage, their terms of service allow them to hand…

In the UK, you can't lawfully film another persons dwelling, in that you would break the law by having any of a neighbours property in view.

No, this is wrong. There is no law that explicitly prohibits filming the public realm (e.g. the pavement) or incidentally capturing your neighbour's property.

There is a code of practice: the Surveillance Camera Code of Practice (SCCoP). There are also requirements to follow under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA).

The consequences of not following the SCCoP, the GDPR, and the DPA may result in regulatory action being taken against you by the Information Commissioner's Office as well as private legal action by the affected individuals, but it is not per se against the law to film those areas.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#213

> 4. ADT 2.0: Digital neighborhood watch. That this is not only a market, but a "wish" which seems to get traction even here on HN confirms to me that the old joke "1984 is not a manual" is more relevant than ever, and scarily not only in regards to the usual suspects, corporate and nation states, but people themselves. Can anyone explain to me why anyone would advocate a profit-driven, systematic eradication of soul…

I agree with your overall point. However: > low-impact black-swan events like serial packet thiefs? I live in Seattle. Package theft is a white swan event here. Everyone I know has had packages stolen. Most people are forced to come up with some strategy to deal with it: get things shipped to work, use Amazon lockers, get a camera on your porch and make sure to bring the package inside as soon as it shows up, etc. Yo…

I think we should address the root of the problem. Why are package delivery companies just leaving these packages outside, unattended anyway? Of course they're going to get stolen in a city. Any city. That's beyond absurd and they should be held liable for their missing packages. I don't leave a thousand dollars in cash in an envelope on my porch unguarded. How about properly securing valuables first before blanketing the neighborhood in surveillance that you know doesn't work? This would possibly require an act of congress, literally, to force carriers to accept liability for their actions. As is, by having a package delivered, you're tempting people to steal it and hoping that human nature will not prevail. It's hard to have empathy for such a negligent action that's so full of ignorance about human nature.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#214

I want a single service I can plug a bunch of creators and/or genres/interests into and get alerted about available new content. I don't care about book tours or interviews or someone leaving the band or twitter drama. Just tell me when one of my favorite authors releases a book for sale. Tell me when the album is out. Tell me when the game is on Steam. I don't care about your broken Kickstarter promises or your deve…

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/It... would be a good place to start

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask that to one of the ~6 million victims of burglaries per year (2.5 mil burglaries/year). How are those black swan events? How are they low impact?

What can a start-up driven cloud mass surveilance do in that regard what a 1950-tech alarm system can not? Why not look into the countless measures other nations with far less crime or individuals have successfuly done which coincidentally also are not opening an attack surface for sinister activities as large as Alaska?

>What can a start-up driven cloud mass surveillance do in that regard what a 1950-tech alarm system can not?

One word: tranquilizer dart

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#216
post #2

+100 "I would love to see the following analysis: A map of repetitious tasks, spreadsheets, and manual data extraction by function in the Fortune 500. Budget breakdown of current software spend, by function, by line, in the Fortune 500. A view of what Accenture, CapGemini, and Deloitte keep building over and over for large enterprises. Undoubtedly a subset of these custom consulting projects can be turned into SaaS s…

FWIW, robotic process automation (RPC) is very hot these days, and it's always a bespoke service - unless two companies happen to use the exact same software, and follow the exact same business logic. The RPC consultants, often titled AI / ML consultants, make money hand over fist traveling from site to site and implementing some automatic procedures. Same with chat bots. The past 2-3 years there's been an explosion…

Just a small correction (sorry if I sound pedantic), I think you meant RPA instead of RPC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation

I noticed that since I worked at the RPA team of my current employer. :-)

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your overall point. However: > low-impact black-swan events like serial packet thiefs? I live in Seattle. Package theft is a white swan event here. Everyone I know has had packages stolen. Most people are forced to come up with some strategy to deal with it: get things shipped to work, use Amazon lockers, get a camera on your porch and make sure to bring the package inside as soon as it shows up, etc. Yo…

Fair enough, but as you literally state yourself, the security system does not even help . I repeat, it does nothing. > I literally have video of the dude grabbing shit off my porch, but can do nothing about it. The only thing all this security theater does is aiding super convoluted scenarios where your neighbors system informs you to take your package in, if you have one currently out, and are fast enough, and are…

>Fair enough, but as you literally state yourself, the security system does not even help. I repeat, it does nothing.

Because it's a single system and not part of a network. If it were part of a network then, theoretically, the thief could be tracked back to their car/home and arrested. Hackernews loves to jump to the dystopian when it comes to public surveillance but somehow has a blind spot for the utopian possibilities. A sufficiently broad and technologically advanced public surveillance system would essentially eliminate crime in public. Why steal a package off a porch if you're going to be immediately identified and then automatically tracked via camera until it's convenient for the police to arrest you?

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#218
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine if it uses facial recognition to tell you when the guy is next entering the neighborhood. Dystopian, but it could work. And if it misidentifies the person?

Hey, he probably deserved to be beaten up anyway.

Yeah, as long as the AI consistently applies the same biases humans do, everybody's happy right? /s

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#219
post #2

+100 "I would love to see the following analysis: A map of repetitious tasks, spreadsheets, and manual data extraction by function in the Fortune 500. Budget breakdown of current software spend, by function, by line, in the Fortune 500. A view of what Accenture, CapGemini, and Deloitte keep building over and over for large enterprises. Undoubtedly a subset of these custom consulting projects can be turned into SaaS s…

* I'd love to see that as well * At the same time: - A LOT of companies are uncomfortable making some of this data SaaS / external. I'm not saying they're right, but it's there - A LOT of companies are unique, or strongly believe they're unique, and that they need bespoke / highly customized software. I'm not saying they're right... ;) - I'm a techie, so it's taken me a decade to realize that implementing a new backo…

" that implementing a new backoffice suite by a consulting company is one third or less technical / IT project; and two thirds or more business process / transformation project"

It's at least 50% sales.

Re: Products I Wish Existed

#220

I want a single service I can plug a bunch of creators and/or genres/interests into and get alerted about available new content. I don't care about book tours or interviews or someone leaving the band or twitter drama. Just tell me when one of my favorite authors releases a book for sale. Tell me when the album is out. Tell me when the game is on Steam. I don't care about your broken Kickstarter promises or your deve…

I've thought about this some too. Almost like an "alert for anything" type service. Defining the schema seems tricky though.
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