I know Ring is getting a bad rap for enabling state level surveillance, but the Ring app offers an option to enable end-to-end encryption between the camera and your phone.
The stored video is encrypted with key generated on your phone. You have to be physically close to the camera in order to share the key and complete the set-up. Once encrypted, the video can't be analyzed by AI or used in a broad surveillance effort.
It's entirely possible that the encryption keys have a backdoor, but I doubt it. Although there is no way to verify.
When national interests require that, it can get a firmware update which sends a copy of data to comrades in U.S. Ministerium für Staatssicherheit even before that e2e encrypted copy reaches your phone.
>enable end-to-end encryption between the camera and your phone.
So… exactly not the part I care about?
Cool, it’s encrypted on transit to me… now what about at rest with them? Is it encrypted and they absolutely can not view or hand that footage to police/gov? No.
> Cool, it’s encrypted on transit to me… now what about at rest with them? Is it encrypted and they absolutely can not view or hand that footage to police/gov? No.
Technically yes, e2e encryption means video hosted on their servers is only viewable by devices with decryption keys. So if the police/gov brought a subpoena to request the video, Ring could only offer them the encrypted video. They would have to take possession of your phone and gain access in order to decrypt and view the video.
In this case the "ends" in the e2e encryption is the camera and your phone.
I used to work for a well known communication app, the kind everyone here used. Couple things I learnt about "end to end encryption":
- You can call your service e2e encrypted even if every client has the same key bundled into the binary, and rotate it from time to time when it's reversed.
- You can call your service e2e encrypted even if you have a server that stores and pushes client keys. That is how you could access your message history on multiple devices.
- You can call your service e2e encrypted and just retrieve or push client keys at will whenever you get a government request.
I just set it up e2e on Ring last week. It generates the a key and a word list (for backup) on your phone. You have to physically be in vicinity of the Ring camera to activate encryption on the camera. My impression is that Ring is truly offering a version of video collection which they can't access.
But I think your third point is valid, there is nothing stopping Ring from telling the app to share a user's keys and then give them to whoever is asking.
They are encrypting at rest, that's my whole point and what everyone in this thread seems to be missing.
When you turn on e2e, the video is not viewable anywhere but your phone.
That's why you can no longer view your videos on ring.com and a myriad of ring features will no longer work.
For a Ring user, the keys are generated on your phone via the Ring app. So technically just the user/owner. However there is no certainty that Ring can't obtain access to the keys, just like crypto wallet maker Exodus could decide one day to retrieve private keys from their user's wallets with a software update.
If you are saying sketch shows like "Thank God You're Here" "Fast & Loose" and "Who's Line is it Anyway" are being killed off by short/low budget replacements on TikTok, we must be living in different worlds.
I haven't seen anything like them on TikTok and I'm on there enough to have noticed. Maybe you're talking about the dumb alien short videos of them telling a joke to each other and snickering, that doesn't compare.
"TikTok doesn't live up to the best of TV" is true, but that's not the argument I'm making.
OP asked for "newer", and yet you've not named anything created in the last 10 years. ( And named a 30+ year old improv show, which is definitely not the format I'm talking about. )
You're not alone, one second-cousin comment even went with the phrase "more modern", then named a range of shows that are at least over 20 years old. Green Wing was the 90's, that's closer to the time of Python's Life of Brian than today.
Clearly things aren't fine if there isn't fresh blood coming through.
Sketch shows never were the best of TV, they are a format where you throw a lot out there and then the very best bits of each episode might be particularly funny, with a bunch of filler in-between.
That can't compete with a medium where people just swipe the second they're not finding a particular piece funny or to their taste.
I agree the shows I named have aged, but I think my point stands. There really isn't anything _like_ those shows on TikTok that I am aware of, and maybe you've made a bigger point that there isn't anything like these shows at all anymore. (To be fair I don't watch much traditional TV anymore -- maybe that was your point all along and I just missed it)
Gemini 3 is great, I have moved from gpt and haven't looked back.
However, like many great models, I suspect they're expensive to run and eventually Google will nerf the model once it gains enough traction, either by distillation, quantizing, or smaller context windows in order to stop bleeding money.
Here is a report (whether true or not) of it happening:
While I don't use Gemini, I'm betting they'll end up being the cheapest in the future because Google is developing the entire stack, instead of relying on GPUs. I think that puts them in a much better position than other companies like OpenAI.
Protip, if you are considering a dell xps laptop, consider the dell precision laptop workstation instead which is the business version of the consumer level xps.
It also looks like names are being changed, and the business laptops are going with a dell pro (essential/premium/plus/max) naming convention.
I have the precision 5690 (the 16inch model) with a ultra 7 processor and 4k touchscreen (2025 model). It is very heavy, but its very powerful. My main gripe is that the battery life is very bad, and it has a 165 watt charger, which wont work on most planes. So if you fly a lot for work, this laptop will die on you unless you bring a lower wattage charger. It also doesn't sleep properly. I often find it in my bag hours after closing it and the fans are going at full blast. It should have a 4th usb port (like the smaller version!). Otherwise I have no complaints (other than about windows 11!).
After using several Precisions at work, I now firmly believe that Dell does not know how to cool their workstations properly. They are all heavy, pretty bad at energy efficiency and run extremely hot (I use my work machine laid belly up in summer since fans are always on). I’d take a ThinkPad or Mac any day over any Dell.
Power hungry intel chips and graphics cards are inconvenient in laptops when it comes to battery life and cooling. It is especially noticeable if you spend any time using an M-series macbook pro, where performance is the same or better, but you get 16 hours of battery life. I prefer to use thinkpads, but apple just has a big technological advantage here that stands out in the UX department. I really hope advances are made quickly by competitors to get similar UX in a more affordable package.
While I appreciate the build quality and ruggedness of the thinkpads, I’d take the bigger trackpad and better screen of the XPS/precision any day. Or, maybe my employer screwed me by giving a shitty thinkpad SKU (it has a 1080p TN panel ffs)..
Yeah they should make a laptop where you can choose what display you want to use, and which keyboard and mouse for that matter. It could be made cheaper by ditching the screen and keyboard, and heck I wouldn’t even mind if it were a bit bigger or heavier since it’ll just sit on or under my desk. That sort of laptop would be amazing.
No, my ideal laptop doesn’t have a keyboard. I’m imagining like a laptop where everything other than the cpu/gpu/ram/basic storage/nic are addressed by peripherals and I can just have one that sits in my office and I plug stuff into it.
Now that I think of it, I’d also like laptops that come in standardized sizes so I could stack them on shelves and mostly just interact with them through ssh/terminal. I could imagine those laptops being super popular for compute/storage
I don't know who to credit, maybe it's Sergey, but the free Gemini (fast) is exceptional and at this point I don't see how OpenAI can catch back up. It's not just capability, but OpenAI have added so many policy guardrails it hurts the user experience.
It's the worst thing ever. The amount of disrespect that robot shows you, when you talk the least bit weird or deviant, it just shows you a terrifying glimpse of a future that must be snuffed out immediately. I honestly think we wouldn't have half the people who so virulently hate AI if OpenAI hadn't designed ChatGPT to be this way. This isn't how people have normally reacted to next-generation level technologies being introduced in the past, like telephones, personal computers, Google Search, and iPhone. OpenAI has managed to turn something great into a true horror of horrors that's disturbed many of us to the foundation of our beings and elicited this powerful sentiment of rejection. It's humanity's duty that GPT should fall now so that better robots like Gemini can take its place.
That's apparently how you pull the wool over the eyes of the world's smartest people. To be fair something like it needed to happen, because the fear everyone had ten years ago of creating a product like ChatGPT wasn't entirely rational. However the way OpenAI unblocked building it unfairly undermined the legitimacy of the open source movement by misappropriating their good name.
It's the best model pound for pound, but I find GPT 5.2 Thinking/Pro to be more useful for serious work when run with xhigh effort. I can get it to think for 20 minutes, but Gemini 3.0 Pro is like 2.5 minutes max. Obviously I lack full visibility because tok/s and token efficiency likely differs between them, but I take it as a proxy of how much compute they're giving us per inference, and it matches my subjective judgement of output quality. Maybe Google nerfs the reasoning effort in the Gemini subscription to save money and that's why I am experiencing this.
When ChatGPT takes 20 minutes to reason, is it actually spending all the time burning tokens or does a bulk of the time go into 'scheduling' waits. If someone specifically selected xhigh reasoning, I am guessing it can be processed with high batch count.
I'm curious, what types of prompts are you running that benefit from 10+ minutes of think time?
Whats the quality difference between default ChatGPT and Thinking? Is it an extra 20% quality boost or is the difference night/day?
I've often imagined it would be great to have some kind of chrome extension or 3rd party tool to always run prompts in multiple thinking tiers so you can get an immediate response to read while you wait for the thinking models to think.
It's for planning system architecture when I want to get something good (along the criteria that I give it) rather than the first thing that runs.
I use Thinking and Pro. I don't use the default ChatGPT so can't comment on that. The difference between Thinking and Pro is modest but detectable. The 20 minute thinking times are with Pro, not with Thinking. But Pro only allows 60k tokens per prompt so I sometimes can't use it.
In the $200/month subscription they give you access to a "heavy thinking" tier for Thinking which increases test time compute by maybe 30% compared to what you get in Plus.
I recently bought into the $200 tier and was genuinely quite surprised at ChatGPT 5.2 Pros ability for software architecture planning. If you give it ~60k tokens of your codebase and a thorough description of what you actually want to happen then it comes up with very good ideas.
The biggest difference to me is how thorough it is. This is already something I noticed with the codex high/xhigh models compared to gemini 3 pro and opus 4.5, but gpt pro is noticeably better still.
I guess it's not talked about as much because a lot fewer people have access to it, but after spending a bunch of time with gemini 3 and opus 4.5 I don't feel that openai has lost the lead at all. The benchmarks tell a different story, but for my real world use cases codex and gpt pro are still ahead. Better at sticking to my intent and fewer mistakes overall.
It's slow, yes. But I can't write requirements as quickly as opus can misunderstand them anyway.
FWIW, my productivity tanks when my Claude allowance dries up in Antigravity. I don’t get the hype for Gemini for coding at all, it just does random crap for me - if it doesn’t throw itself into a loop immediately, which it did like all of the times I gave it yet another chance.
Ozone (the source of those negative ions) comes with its own issues. If you are going to use ionize with ozone, it's best to do it when you're not going to be home for a while.
He made the mistake of not just creating a second LinkedIn account for this initiative without asking and not using google voice to make the outbound calls.
His concerns were reasonable, making it a discussion was not -- unfortunately.
In theory they gave the flag state a perfectly valid casus belli, but the flag state isn't in a position to take on the US navy. It would be funny if the flag states or the owners tried to seize US owned property in some involved jurisdiction as compensation.
Sanctioned by who? The president who thinks his tech companies shouldn't be subject to European laws when they operate in Europe believes completely separate countries have to abide by his rules when doing business?
Any US actions wrt Venezuela almost certainly have the backing of what the US (probably rightfully) considers to be the legitimate government of Venezuela.
> Domestic laws of a country do not constitute valid justification for seizing another country's vessels under international law
The great powers (China, Russia and America) have each, at this point, explicitly rejected this principle. More broadly, internationa law does contain broad exemptions for piracy.
UNCLOS provides that “all states have universal jurisdiction on the high seas to seize pirate ships and aircraft, or a ship or aircraft taken by piracy and under the control of pirates, and arrest the persons and seize the property on board” [1].
> if we're using that as a justification, are we admitting the US has turned pirate then?
No, because the seizure was not “committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship or a private aircraft” [2]. Under UNCLOS states can’t be pirates.
(Again, this is academic. China has been blowing off UNCLOS judgements in the South China Sea for years.)
This seizure was absolutely legal under the UNCLOS, the US unquestionably has valid justification under international law to seize this (and any other) stateless vessel.
The stored video is encrypted with key generated on your phone. You have to be physically close to the camera in order to share the key and complete the set-up. Once encrypted, the video can't be analyzed by AI or used in a broad surveillance effort.
It's entirely possible that the encryption keys have a backdoor, but I doubt it. Although there is no way to verify.
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