Technology Thread

[cmvideo75]

I'm reading some interesting science and tech facts at the moment and some of these are wild. Like this one...

Pokémon Go players spent ten years building a robot navigation system without knowing it

Niantic just announced their delivery robot deal. When they sold Pokémon Go to Scopely last year, they kept all the data. 30 billion images from player scans over 10 years. They used it to build a navigation system that now guides delivery robots through cities in LA, Chicago and Helsinki. The pokéstops weren't random. They were placed specifically to get photo coverage of urban areas.

This happens in other companies too, google reCAPTCHA did the same thing. Every traffic light you clicked was labeling data for self-driving cars. Millions of hours of unpaid work.

Did you play Pokémon Go back in 2016? Feels weird knowing what those walks were actually for

Could we rely on future games or navigation systems?

 

[Eranys]

I'm reading some interesting science and tech facts at the moment and some of these are wild. Like this one...

Pokémon Go players spent ten years building a robot navigation system without knowing it

Niantic just announced their delivery robot deal. When they sold Pokémon Go to Scopely last year, they kept all the data. 30 billion images from player scans over 10 years. They used it to build a navigation system that now guides delivery robots through cities in LA, Chicago and Helsinki. The pokéstops weren't random. They were placed specifically to get photo coverage of urban areas.

This happens in other companies too, google reCAPTCHA did the same thing. Every traffic light you clicked was labeling data for self-driving cars. Millions of hours of unpaid work.

Did you play Pokémon Go back in 2016? Feels weird knowing what those walks were actually for

Could we rely on future games or navigation systems?

That's nuts. What a brilliant ploy, though. I have to respect the wild success of that. That game was fucking everywhere. I had employees playing it in their breaks. I talked to a couple people that said it was the only thing that got them out of the house and moving around. Crazy.

 

[cmvideo75]

That's nuts. What a brilliant ploy, though. I have to respect the wild success of that. That game was fucking everywhere. I had employees playing it in their breaks. I talked to a couple people that said it was the only thing that got them out of the house and moving around. Crazy.

It is absolutely brilliant if this was their plan from the start. To use the game to map out a network for their larger business plan? Amazing because that Pokemon game made then $$$$ while building their bigger goal. Maybe they realized how valuable the data was once they started gathering so much of it and pivoted this way. Either way, super smart.

 

[cmvideo75]

The UK has a proposed law that is being debated right now in Parliament to let AI companies use copyrighted materials (like songs, books, etc) to train their models. It looks pretty likely to pass. Elton John, Paul McCartney, and a bunch of others are threatening to sue the government if this passes.

But meta exec Nick Clegg says....
Nick Clegg argued that requiring AI companies to ask artists and creators for permission before using copyrighted material to train AI models could effectively “kill” the UK’s AI industry.

Speaking during an event promoting his new book, the former Meta executive said modern AI systems rely on enormous amounts of data, making it impractical to individually request consent from every copyright holder before training models.



That is EXACTLY 100% the point of copyrights to begin with. They are there to prevent cocksuckers from stealing your work, repackaging it and selling it for their own. These tech assholes think what they are doing is not stealing. It is stealing at the highest level because they have technology that can steal entire databases at unprecedented levels.