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And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

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Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#211

Post by k__ »

decimalenough wrote: post #118

> But it is easy to see why some people feel this might open the gateway to messages which, at best, are irrelevant If you're in South Korea, you can expect to get around half a dozen emergency notifications every day . Typical contents include "it's cold, so dress warmly", "roads are icy, so drive carefully", and "Mrs Kim, 79, suffers from dementia and was last seen in Seoul wearing a black coat". You can set your p…

Just a few days ago, I received one because of "the odour nuisance is no danger for the population"

People were calling the emergency hotline because the wildfires 200km away got so big that their smoke engulfed the city.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#212

Post by Muromec »

boomlinde wrote: post #210
decimalenough wrote: post #118

> But it is easy to see why some people feel this might open the gateway to messages which, at best, are irrelevant If you're in South Korea, you can expect to get around half a dozen emergency notifications every day . Typical contents include "it's cold, so dress warmly", "roads are icy, so drive carefully", and "Mrs Kim, 79, suffers from dementia and was last seen in Seoul wearing a black coat". You can set your p…

I saw a video about a fatal oil drilling accident where the resulting investigation found that an operator had ignored the alarm which indicated the underlying issue because there were other alarms sounding for things he'd been told to ignore because they were benign. This is apparently common enough cause of problems that there is a term for it (other than "crying wolf"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue…

This also how a part of how a certain flagship got promoted to a submarine recently.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#213

Post by everyday7732 »

nerdsniper wrote: post #155
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment. Do you know why there aren't more granular controls? On my phone in the US the toggleable alert options are: Extreme Threats Severe Threats AMBER alerts (child abduction alerts) Public Safety Messages State and Local Tests

I would have thought so too, but it turns out that the USA seems to have the exact same problem! Millions of Texans were woken up at 4AM to an "EXTREME" level alert because one police officer was shot when he went to serve an arrest warrant to a suspected burglar at his apartment at 11pm earlier the same night. The officer recovered and was back on duty 5 weeks later. This shooting happened in one of the most remote…

What are they expecting a Texan civilian who gets this alert to even do? This is baffling.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#215

Post by khafra »

everyday7732 wrote: post #213
nerdsniper wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have thought so too, but it turns out that the USA seems to have the exact same problem! Millions of Texans were woken up at 4AM to an "EXTREME" level alert because one police officer was shot when he went to serve an arrest warrant to a suspected burglar at his apartment at 11pm earlier the same night. The officer recovered and was back on duty 5 weeks later. This shooting happened in one of the most remote…

What are they expecting a Texan civilian who gets this alert to even do? This is baffling.

I mean, it is Texas; it's not unreasonable to expect thousands of heavily-armed people to form a posse and shot a few dozen people unrelated to the situation.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#216

Post by xpct »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #202
xpct wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of it as, we've had a hurdle where computers were too slow to organize the data humans produced, but have since crossed it. LLMs and CV also enable analysis of fuzzy data, which hasn't been possible before. This makes me uneasy, to say the least.

I asked Claude to analyze and datamine all of my eleven thousand HN comments, plus my reddit comments, lobsters comments, mailing list emails, stackexchange content, etc. With this database it managed to create an entire dossier about me. It could psychologically profile me, and it had a better and more complete view of me than my literal psychologist. We identified things like weaknesses, social engineering suscepti…

I completely agree. I've done a similar experiment on this rather young HN account and it was already able to deduce some things that I never explicitly stated. It probably doesn't require much more than a megabyte of someone's Slack messages or emails to build a profile on them, and there's much more data out there than that. People can be linked by their footprints in big tech products, or more crudely by techniques like stylometry, which is fully accessible to foreign governments. LLMs will likely enable even more aggressive techniques for linking people's public data, let alone to analyze it.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#217

Post by khafra »

decimalenough wrote: post #118

> But it is easy to see why some people feel this might open the gateway to messages which, at best, are irrelevant If you're in South Korea, you can expect to get around half a dozen emergency notifications every day . Typical contents include "it's cold, so dress warmly", "roads are icy, so drive carefully", and "Mrs Kim, 79, suffers from dementia and was last seen in Seoul wearing a black coat". You can set your p…

Every government should only put people who have worked in a SOC in charge of these systems. There's no way to take the cost of useless alerts seriously unless you've spent some time tuning them and living with the tradeoffs.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#218

Post by Gareth321 »

blooalien wrote: post #79
jameskilton wrote: post #3

A good article, but missing one very important word: trust. Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing. Said society also finds it incredibly important to remove or nullify those who aren't trustworthy because "a rotten apple spoils the whole bunch ". Trust is hard to earn, and easy to lose, and it only takes one person exploiting the trustwort…

> Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing. I was taught as a child that most people deep down genuinely want to be "good people". If only I had known what an absolute lie that really truly was, I'd have chosen a very different path for my life. Going out of my way to be a "good person" to the best of my ability was a total waste of a life th…

I have also taken the black pill on society and trust. While I choose to remain true to my moral code, and attempt to improve the lives of those around me, I acknowledge that this is not rewarded in modern society.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#219

Post by Ntrails »

> I'm not bothered about the contents of this latest message from the UK Government. Given the overstretched fire service and the imminent threat across most of the country, my personal opinion is that it is proportionate.

I'm not bothered by the desire to send an informational message to the populace, but the alert is absurd. Sirens going off from a million phones for text that needed to be disseminated within O(day) not O(minutes) - this was patently an inappropriate delivery mechanism.

I have, of course, turned the damned things off on my work phone now too so I shall be blissfully ignorant when the nukes fly.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#220

Post by soco »

boomlinde wrote: post #210
decimalenough wrote: post #118

> But it is easy to see why some people feel this might open the gateway to messages which, at best, are irrelevant If you're in South Korea, you can expect to get around half a dozen emergency notifications every day . Typical contents include "it's cold, so dress warmly", "roads are icy, so drive carefully", and "Mrs Kim, 79, suffers from dementia and was last seen in Seoul wearing a black coat". You can set your p…

I saw a video about a fatal oil drilling accident where the resulting investigation found that an operator had ignored the alarm which indicated the underlying issue because there were other alarms sounding for things he'd been told to ignore because they were benign. This is apparently common enough cause of problems that there is a term for it (other than "crying wolf"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue…

And because of this, no browser of mine is allowed to send notifications, and also no app by default - they have to prove themselves useful first. Sorry fellow developers working on notifications, your work goes to the drain (mostly).
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