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I remember reading in the news that Pokémon Go was quite popular in Palestine.

If GP has access to this dataset it would be interesting to know how sparse is the data in that area.

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If the data was spatial - shapes and layouts of buildings and streets and such - that dataset is no longer current.
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Deeply sickening that modern society is such that we have to make room in our brains for objectively outlandish connections like these. That a children's cartoon and game about cute little companions has to in any way be involved in the same sentence as the flattening of a city and genocide is just... pure insanity. The world has truly, collectively, lost its fucking mind.
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"The world has truly, collectively, lost its fucking mind."

What time you have in mind, that was really better?

(I believe the 90s were at least way more optimistic)

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> What time you have in mind, that was really better?

Don't think there's ever been a time in human history that would qualify as good, but I will take better: any time pre-COVID. We have completely gone off the rails since the pandemic.

I don't really feel like elaborating.

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> in any way

You can connect any two things into a sentence regardless of the state of the world. This is way off of where the problems actually are.

Edit: Some people have downvoted this without giving a reason, but I'm going to double down. Any time you have disasters or large crimes, you can connect them to children and children's things. Thinking there's anything to learn about the specific fact that you can make that connection is a mistake. It's letting the real problem spill over in a way that misleads your common sense. It's an inherent part of bad things happening that they also affect children. No matter what state the world is in.

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> Any time you have disasters or large crimes, you can connect them to children and children's things.

This time you have an actual connection, the state of the world notwithstanding. If you factor in the world however, with this many wars, I'd say it's pretty much linked, regardless of the way you assembled words to make it look like it doesn't, and doubling down doesn't make it less distant from reality.

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It's silly to compare an arbitrary connection to a non-arbitrary connection and as if it makes the former arbitrary. You're doubling down on a category error.
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> And now there are detailed locations of our cities.

The Pokémon Go data is for small little islands around their points of interest (pokestops).

It’s not a detailed city map. The data is extremely sparse and only covers little tiny bubble around their sparse in game POIs.

The way it was represented as some sort of high resolution city map or world model was quite ridiculous.

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The Pokémon Go data is for small little islands around their points of interest (pokestops).

That's not the impression I get from the TV ads.

The ads they run show people walking along sidewalks and through forested paths and through parks in AR mode.

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The controversy elsewhere in these comments is over whether it’s recording, and the server is slurping up, the video footage, during AR mode. We know they do so on the “scans” they have you do, where you walk around something taking video, but I don’t think there’s proof that having AR on = uploading to the server. Should be easy to prove one way or the other by observing bandwidth usage.
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No, because they are different things for different purposes.

Visual navigation is prone to degradation. Keeping the "map" updated requires constant visits. (I know because my team worked on the patent for a method for updating said maps.)

Also Pacification bot would be run by the military who most lilkey have GPS.

Finally, For ground based bots, SLAM is actually more useful, rather than pre-built map based navigation.

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Don't worry about pokemon go. Worry about the lidar unit on top of the UPS truck.
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Kill bots are used right now in Ukraine, including ones with no operator in the loop (too slow)
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Details?
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If you want to kill some redacted that are sitting in a trench inside the killzone but don't want to risk your own life, the ground drone with a machine gun (remote operated as of now) goes there. It was April this year when the news were saying a position was taken over by remote drones alone. With news being Ukrainian propaganda you can of course take it with a grain of salt, but it's probably at least somewhat true.

Ground drones however are targeted by the FPV drones (wired or radio controlled), so the new thing is to have a thing with automatic targeting to shoot those. Then again, I at least heard about using something open-cv (yes, some of those run actual linux) shaped on the FPV drone itself, as it really helps with the amount of jamming going on.

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I thought that was still human-in-the-loop? The drone's onboard computing identifies a potential target from a distance such that EW isn't effective, the human confirms it, and the drone moves in closer to attack. At this point jamming doesn't matter because the drone already has its orders.
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  “We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” says Kokhanovskyy. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.”
Because there are never any civilians caught in the middle of two warring armies, right? I think the ICC will be getting real busy soon.
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That alone doesn't cut war crime definition to get attention to ICC and isn't really different from the usual aerial bombing. You drop the bomb from a plane or 100 of them somewhere around the densely populated area and don't know who they kill, as there is no connection to the drone.

Civilians dying in an armed conflict doesn't cut the definition of warcrime by itself. Deliberate targeting and intentional destruction of civil infrastructure that supports life or something like it is.

Then of course there is stuff that ICC isn't getting busy about which is clearly above the threshold -- the regular drone safaris in and around Kherson (city with pre-war population circa quarter million people) happening for the last few years.

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“We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” says Kokhanovskyy.

Everything! Everything! Like all the deer, all the rabbits, all the decoys! Obviously we trust Kokhanovskyy

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> ICC will be getting real busy soon

How likely is your opinion to change in the light of the information that, according to the article, it's Ukraine who uses these drones?

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I think the ICC will be getting real busy soon.

The ICC judges have less real-world power than a Pop Idol judge.

The ICC only works if every nation plays by the rules. Fewer and fewer do these days.

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I love how Western media will just print anything the Ukrainian government tells them with zero confirmation.
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The article is from 1 day ago, talks about something that happened two years ago, and includes this quote

> “We tried it,” says drone-maker[…]. “It’s a test. We never implemented it [more widely].”

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> And now there are detailed locations of our cities

That has already existed for decades.

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Optimistically, it sounds like the USA data could be used to assist USA domestic defense drones, fighting against an invading foreign nation.

Pessimistically, maybe democracy's days are numbered

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> Pessimistically, maybe democracy's days are numbered

that was in the cards in the early 2000s when the Patriot Act got passed, mate.

now they just have the muscle (drones) to back it up.

welcome to the cyberpunk dystopia

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Dunno - if you look at the graphs https://ourworldindata.org/democracy the long term trend over a couple of centuries has been towards democracy, though with a bit of a reversion over the last 15 years or so. A lot of the bad has come out of Russia which is struggling a bit these days.
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The real cyberpunk dystopia is going to be a lot less glamorous than it is in the stories- mostly just unending poverty, war, and death for the vast majority of us.
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Yep, the autocracies of the past only resolved when the ruling machinery needed something from the population. They needed farmers, workers, soldiers, etc.

There are clear parallels in the modern world of societies when the ruling machinery doesn't need those things from their population - petrostates. The people in these states tend to be viewed as subjects, not citizens. That's where we are headed

A corporate council of emperor kings with armies of pacification bots. The tiny sliver of window we have to ensure this doesn't happen is rapidly closing and there seems to be no movement toward ensuring that this doesn't culminate with the entire power of this new revolution in the hands of a small class of near demigods.

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Hopefully they will let us live comfortably like pets as sterile creatures that will slowly die out and not be replaced. This could limit human misery in the future.
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story broke yesterday that Ukraine deployed its first fully AI system, no human interaction, and it scored its first kill

i think killbots are absolutely a possibility, and very soon.

rightwing pundits and meme makers are already unironically quoting Zechariah 13:8

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