Guerrilla London bus ads mock Kylie Jenner’s Meta glasses campaign

> I'm not a fan of rules that aren't concrete

Then you are going to have a hard time in a society filled with other humans, or living with a legal system that takes human complexity and grey areas into account in so many different ways.

Outside of a parser or a maths class, rules are rarely that concrete.

(Reading your other comments, I am sorry that your experiences have lead you to be so scared going about your day to day life that you think recording every interaction is a necessary thing to do. I'm afraid you're not going to find a lot of people who agree with that, and many who will find the idea very intrusive, though I suspect you're far from the only one in your position.

FYI if you go down this route, in some countries it is a legal, not just social, requirement that people be notified that you're recording them, particularly when it comes to audio, see one-party or two-party consent jurisdictions etc, while recording of direct threats may be legit, blanket recording of all interactions or of other people's conversations, as a precautionary measure, may not be)

There’s no way this would work, or work more reliably, than the translator apps we have on phones. In order for this Babelfish sci-fi interface to work, the other party has to be aware and pause their speech for the translation. If they can’t hear their translated message they’ll speak over it. Either that or you have some kind of deafening that passes-thru the translated voice in realtime, and then you lose their emotion, emphasis, and tons of other information that doesn’t fit neatly into the standard monolingual worldview of tech.

Even the “conversation mode” built into Google translate or the iPhone app is useless. I can only imagine it working in the sterile environment it was probably designed in: a conference room with two people trying there hardest to make it work.

I live abroad and travel a lot for photography. Whenever I’m using a translator app, it’s typically a chaotic situation like haggling with a taxi driver, a meal with a group of strangers who invited me to eat with them, lots of background noise. The mode that everyone defaults to, without fail, is to use their own phone to speak or type a message and then hold it up in front of their interlocutor’s face. Sometimes they mix in some fragments of English or I know some fragments of their language. It’s lossy but it works.

I can’t imagine a wearable that would perform better. A notepad that can magically translate little messages is about as far as I would want it to go. Tech is pretty awful at intermediating human relations.

> Please stop using ad hominem attacks, this is not the appropriate forum for such remarks.

I feel quite strongly about people nonconsensually filming other people in public spaces. The proliferation of guides about disabling the indicators of active camera on smart glasses make me even more hesitant to normalize or condone such behavior.

> I assume that would be considered sexual harassment in most jurisdictions, which local police should concern themselves with, especially if it's happening to minors.

Stealing an Amazon package from your porch is also illegal in most jurisdictions yet police won't do anything with a video from your Ring doorbell showing some generic young-dude-in-a-baseball-cap-and-a-hoodie taking it away. They are only interested in such videos when investigating (what they consider) serious crimes.

> especially if it's happening to minors

You want minors to wear Meta glasses and film all the time? I shudder imagining growing up in such dystopia.

> I'm at a loss for why you brought up the FBI.

Sorry, that was a snark about how people who support installing smart doorbells and Flock cameras everywhere imagine police would react to a video showing someone stealing a bag from their car or a package from their porch.

What a balanced viewpoint!

On one end, we have a megacorporation that has been proven to engage in: willingly sharing private user data with random third parties; accepting and running ads for foreign state actors targeting another country; creating one of the most sophisticated tracking regimes in the world; collecting oceans of data to build profiles on everyone, user and not; enabling a genocide to be coordinated on their platform; using their money and power to influence legislation in their favor; knowingly designing their platforms to be incredibly addictive, including deliberately discussing how to get children hooked; and a practically endless list of other things.

On the other end, we have HN commenters. They are really angry and that they want to undo some of the damage described above. They are pretty jaded about how elegantly Meta has been able to exploit addiction, network effects and the human mind to keep people complicit.

To me it's obvious that #2 is the true evil. They obviously won't succeed because wealth controls our reality, but just for daring to question the status quo, they are authoritatian elitist sheep with superiority complexes. True freedom is when the world's biggest companies get to do whatever they want, slavery is when people to use their democratically elected governments to oppose that. Can you smell all that freedom in the air?

It'd be fun to adapt copyright law to cover people's physical form. Imagine a huge class action suit against Meta for enabling such copyright infingement.