this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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Last July, San Jose issued an open invitation to technology companies to mount cameras on a municipal vehicle that began periodically driving through the city’s district 10 in December, collecting footage of the streets and public spaces. The images are fed into computer vision software and used to train the companies’ algorithms to detect the unwanted objects, according to interviews and documents the Guardian obtained through public records requests.

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[–] [email protected] 109 points 7 months ago (5 children)

So instead of spending X dollars to ensure people have homes, we spend X++ dollars to evict them from their spaces?

[–] [email protected] 72 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Sure, it’s like how NYC spent $150 million to bust people evading $105,000 in subway fees. Absolutely anything to avoid legitimately helping people.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago

The suffering is the point. They want the threat of homelessness to keep the masses in line.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (8 children)

That is a stupid issue with Mayor Adams, but NYC legitimately spends millions on housing the homeless. The city has to get you shelter. It's the law.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (4 children)

NYC has less than 5% unsheltered in contrast to San Francisco which has 30% unsheltered homeless per night. the driving force of this is the freezing winter in New York, which presents a hazard habitating outside. New York has to choose between making sure everyone gets a warm place, or they get to pick up the dead bodies.

California has a particularly high per-capita homeless population despite efforts toward housing. A large factor is NIMBY homeownership in which HOAs are determined to preserve property values and are a strong lobbying force.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago

How else would the mega rich be able to buy up the property and rent out the spaces for normal people to finance?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It's literally cheaper to provide the unhoused with healthcare. Not just for them, but for housed people and all taxpayers. But we (as a society) don't. At this point I feel it's literally about cruelty, and punishing them for their "life choices". And you think we'll just give them homes!?

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[–] [email protected] 103 points 7 months ago (1 children)

quite ironically in this context, san jose is named after st. joseph -- he of the legal dad of jesus fame -- who was once famously told there was no room at the inn and had to make do in a stable.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Sounds about right for American-christianity.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

Only if you're charging a luxury room price for the stable.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 7 months ago (3 children)

And help them right ? RIGHT ?

[–] [email protected] 33 points 7 months ago (1 children)

If only we didn’t live in a dystopia and that was what this was for.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

One can only dream i guess.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

San Jose's homeless is a very mixed bag. some wanting to be perpetually homeless, some actual recently loss home and is savable, some on the streets due to drugs (friend had a story where homeless asked for a burger, but refused one from a burger joint nearest by (implied wanted money for drugs)).

Weeding out whose helpable isnt an easy task, because not all homeless share the same reason on how they got to that lifestyle.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (1 children)

They’ve already been using it to give probably cause and as evidence that all black people are the same and therefore guilty. I’m referring to facial recognition

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (8 children)

In terms of legal precedent this may be a good thing in the long run.

The software billed as "AI" these days is half baked. If one or more law enforcement agencies point to the new piece of software the city deployed as their probable cause to make an arrest it won't take long for that to get challenged in court.

This sets the stage for the legality of the software to be challenged now (in half baked form) and to set a legal standard demanding high accuracy and/or human assessment when making an arrest.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 7 months ago

this brave new future which we live in fucking sucks

[–] [email protected] 34 points 7 months ago

Every year California is becoming more like Night City. Cyperpunk is supposed to be a dystopia, not an aspiration.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 7 months ago (2 children)

When housing becomes a for profit business, this is the result. It's happening in my city in Canada as well.

I have a homeless community sprouting up behind our cul de sac and it gets bigger each spring. It likely disappears in the winter, I've no desire to walk through the uncleared snow to find out. And a few blocks away people are camping out on sidewalks everywhere, it's becoming an epidemic, in a city that was once very affordable.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Being homeless is like the software piracy equivalent of housing. You're not paying but rich people are "losing money" since homeless people aren't paying them $4000+/month therefore it's a crime.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

Do you really think the concerns about encampments are all from rent seeking landlords?

Here in Minneapolis it's the number of murders, gang violence (territory), rape, and human trafficking.

Second tier issues are overdoses, fires, sanitation (which doesn't sound like much until you see the people with fingers and toes rotting off), and crime rates increasing as they try to make enough money to feed their drug habits.

It's a very complex issue. Much more complex than "the landlords are upset people aren't paying rent".

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

Tulsa Oklahoma is full of homeless encampments and this is supposed to be one of the cheaper states to live in. Yet landlords want to price their places like the bigger cities. It is scary to see what cost to rent in this town compared to the pay being offer for jobs. Its wonder there isn't more homeless.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 7 months ago

Is it done to give them home quicker? Is it?

*sigh*

[–] [email protected] 23 points 7 months ago

We're all shocked that New Technology X is used to target and oppress people

[–] [email protected] 23 points 7 months ago

"unwanted objects"

[–] [email protected] 22 points 7 months ago

The rates of suicide are going to skyrocket

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago (7 children)

the accuracy for lived-in cars is still far lower: between 10 and 15%

Sounds like the tech isn’t terribly useful

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago

Maybe it's to help them.

Don't tell me, I like the illusion.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago

From the screen grabs, Since when is a legally street parked RV a homeless encampment? Looks like picking low hanging fruit for campaign talking points.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago

This sounds like a real opportunity for false positives as opposed to, I dunno, engaging with the community?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago

They start out identifying the various "races" probably. I'm a brown person and would like to keep reminding everyone that different races do not exist in the sense that it is not a scientific term with any meaning. A term with proper meaning is "species" and there is only one "homosapiens".... it's not just Juantastic who lives under the bridge, it's all of us. We are all a single family. Anyway, would you let your brother or sister or parents or relatives go live under a bridge and hungry? Nah right? What if they were thousands of miles away and didn't have a place to sleep in? Still nah! You would do whatever to try to help! So why are there homeless people in every city and why do we not help Gaza and Ukraine people? Right? We need to do a better job!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (2 children)

This might actually get struck down on constitutionality. How does one confront their accuser in court if the accuser is a trained neural net?

And that’s without even touching on the fact that ML is stochastic in nature, and should absolutely not be considered accurate enough to be an unsupervised and unmoderated single-point-of-failure decision engine in contexts like legal, medical, or other critical decision-making process. The fact that ML regularly and demonstrably hallucinates (or otherwise yields garbage output) is just not acceptable in a regulatory sense.

Source: software engineer in biotech; we are specifically disallowed from using ML at any level in our work for the above reasons, as well as potential HIPAA-related data mining issues.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (6 children)

I don’t know much about jurisprudence, but wouldn’t the neural net be a tool of the person that brought the lawsuit.

Like if you get brought in due to DNA, you don’t have to face the centrifuge that helped extract your DNA from the sample?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

Holy Mackerel! Could this be any more of an extremely boring dumb and awful cyberpunk dystopia? Good God!

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