My real dog has the same feature, so you’re at least doing a good job mimicking nature, heh.
How many squirrels have you had to chase/escort out so far?
There was a recent HN comment about this that I think illustrates the point well [0]:
experimentation is an act on the world to set its state and then measure it. That's what learning involves. These machines do not act on the world, they just capture correlations.
According to the local cops break ins in my area are mostly just kids going into open garage / garage side doors / back doors that are left open and stuff to steal is out and obvious and so on.
I figure just the sense of hassle / unknown of "who knows how this dog is" might be enough of a deterrent.
Sat in bed for a minute pondering my sad and mostly likely odorous fate. Finally walked on furniture to the bedroom door while the skunk was apparently chewing my leather shoes, set a trail of cheese leading out the sliding door and sat in silence and darkness on the stairs overlooking the cheese trail.
Eventually it came sniffling out methodically gobbling cheese right back out to where it belonged.
Got a locking screen door after that...and a new pair of loafers.
What’s awesome is living somewhere that crimes of opportunity don’t even happen. There are still places where people don’t lock doors because they don’t need to.
Yep. I grew up not ever locking our doors, and I still don't. I even usually leave the keys in my cars in the driveway, especially in the one that the neighbors all know they can borrow if needed. I do have a dog who will bark when anybody unknown approaches the house, though.
When I lived in the city for a few years, I did lock my doors, but I left my car unlocked. I would relatively frequently come out to the car in the morning and it was obvious that somebody had rummaged around in it. But I didn't really care, and it was better than having the windows smashed, which did happen in that neighborhood.
I chased a person out of my garage in broad daylight who ended up being a porch pirate.
A dog and a sign send different messages, and the message of the sign is “the resident is afraid of being robbed”.
EDIT:
I want to make explicit that I am comparing something that gives the impression of a dog without a sign vs a sign with no other evidence of a dog. I am explicitly not commenting on the message sent by a sign combined with other evidence of a dog, just “fake (but, for the sake of argument, convincing) dog” vs. “dog sign”, each alone, as deterrents.
Installed security cameras, they still came onto the property.
So, next I installed a sign "BEWARE OF THE SECURITY CAMERA", and didn't work, infact one guy broke into my car and simply just covered his face from the canera.
So then I installed a cheap security light next to the sign that would light up when they entered.
That worked.
The light still works as a deterrent because the light makes them visible to a potential occupier. They'll fear real, immediate confrontation/violence, not some lazy policeman looking 5 minutes at the picture before moving onto something easier such as kids dealing weed.
I don't know... you setup deterrents, as a bluff and it took a while before one worked.
Might scare the neighbors away too though, but that’s not always a bad thing.
When I sold security systems, I learned that one of those lawn signs alone that says "Protected by XYZ Security" has a deterrent factor. Cameras (even if they're fake or deactivated/unmonitored) also have a pretty significant deterrent factor. See https://www.angi.com/articles/do-security-signs-and-decals-s...
Oh! On a technical note, I was watching a TV show recently (Better Call Saul...?) where someone broke into a persons house undetected. When the home owner found the person and asked how they got in so easily, the person stated that they "Cut the phone line", and that was apparently all it took. Know if there's any truth to that?
But, the real truth here is that most criminals are pretty unsophisticated and won't even bother cutting phone lines or other cables. Most break-ins also happen through the front door, so, although it sounds great (and it is actually pretty great) to have contact sensors on every window and blanket the whole place with motion detectors, it's not really necessary. If anything, you only really need sensors on the first floor, because in spite of how the movies sometimes depict these sophisticated, cat burgler types, it's mostly just thugs who bash in or take a crowbar to your front door. That's also why advertising exactly what company your security system is from isn't a big deal: they don't care. They see "security system" and just move on to the next house.
A few more tips:
- Best place to hide valuables is in the kitchen pantry. Master bedroom is the most common place, but who is gonna think to go through your snack food.
- A lot of burglaries happen in the winter in the late afternoon or early evening when it is starting to get dark out, but before the homeowners get home from work.
- Your house is only as strong as the weakest link. Fancy locks can be bypassed by breaking a window. Design your security system to handle low level burglars (who probably don't know how to pick a lock), not foreign spies. For most people, this also holds true for online security.
Your kids and your houseguests, that's who!
>I can get from the second-story floor to the front door in 1.2 seconds. Can you?
Perhaps we have a natural experiment, since California recently accidentally leaked a bunch of details about gun owners in the state: https://www.newsweek.com/gun-owners-personal-info-leak-outra...
Maybe in a year we can see if those owners experienced higher or lower than expected breakins.
I have a <1 year old male golden retriever and I was surprised to learn that he has a very strong guard instinct and will not STFU with his loud, deep barking any time he hears a strange noise, or some stranger is walking by.
That said, this is a feature, not a bug. "Early warning system" was in the top two features I was looking for in a dog.
They also have repeatedly cornered plumbers, electricians and HVAC folk. When we're expecting someone, we lock them up in the bedroom.
Maine Coons are cats.
It means "cute but ordinary".
“He was just looking to waste somebody!”
I cringe any time I read my local neighborhood watch Facebook group and some internet tough guy comments with “They (criminal) better not show up at my house!”
Or it’s already locked in a precision drone strike on your location.
It scores exactly zero geek cred, but it works if you're renting and don't want to go the full-blown home automation route.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/67/66/1b/67661bbc78344ddcbd32...
or
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=far+side+cartoon+usual+barking+fre...
My 50lb, German shepherd looking village dog jumps on grandma? Grandma breaks a hip. My parents 3lb Shit-Poo jumps on Grandma? Cue the cooing.
Similarly with barking. Not saying it's true for all owners, but generally once you start training alot of other behaviours get cleaned up as a side effect.
The local police received complaints that a dog was being mistreated, chained on the same spot for days.
Arriving at the scene they found out that an elderly couple were using a Rottweiler statue for keeping burglars away from their house.
OP's fake dog is a great improvement over that one!
[0] https://g1.globo.com/mg/sul-de-minas/noticia/2019/05/09/pm-e...
Back then it was not uncommon for car alarm installers to advertise their work on the driver's side windows of the cars. "Protected by Viper!" Stuff like that.
I remember the first time I saw a car like that. It was in the parking lot of an amusement park. I threw a bunch of road trip crackers on the car, and let the seagulls have a party.
They didn't seem to care about the computer voice: "Warning! This car protected by Viper! Stand away from the car!" -bloop!- -bloop!- -bloop!- -bloop!- -weee-awwww!- -weee-awwww!- -weee-awwww!- -booo-weeep!- -booo-weeep!- -booo-weeep!- -fweeeeeeeep!- -fweeeeeeeep!- -haaaaaank!- -haaaaaank!- -haaaaaank!- -haaaaaank!- And so on.
Second, say you solve the above and decide to deploy the gun. You don't have a lot of time, and you don't know if the approaching boat is a pirate or a local fisherman who wants to sell you a fish. Make the wrong call, and bad things happen.
Say you solved the permit/registration issue by hiding the gun and then you deploy the gun. Bad things happen. Ok, it might have been justified and might have saved your life, but you are still probably going to jail for not declaring the weapon.
(My thinking being: pirates generally use speedboats, and a harpoon gun is plenty good at shooting holes in fiberglass and/or destroying outboard motors; and so pirates wouldn't want to get near your boat if you had one. But this sort of setup is not really useful for shooting at people — especially people less than 50ft away from the boat, which puts them in a "blind spot" for aiming, and especially not people who have already boarded — and so it would be irrelevant when docked.)
Is your argument that death is preferable to jail?
My argument is that a method of defense that carries a jail sentence if it succeeds is suboptimal.
We're talking about a handgun not a artillery peice, "deployment" is taking it out of a biometric gun safe, 5 seconds max. Also you wouldn't open fire on someone just beacuse they are near your boat.
Where do you aim the gun? At them? At the deck?
They see you are holding a gun, get a different look on their face, and one starts to reach under the seat.
What do you do?
Remember you are in a foreign country and don't speak the language, don't know the customs, cannot read the body language, ...
Criminal doesn’t mean stupid - and you’re not going to bother with a risky target when there are other, less risky targets nearby.
1) If there is a dog on the boat, maybe there's people too.
2) Plenty of other boats, why bother killing a dog and make lots of noise?
Exactly. A lot of people seem to forget that a gun discharging is even louder than a dog, so a would-be amateur pirate would be solving a small problem by creating a much bigger one.
People have guns in rural areas everywhere. There are some exceptions like China where guns are very uncommon but if you are traveling through Eastern Europe, or Africa, or rural parts of south Asia you are going to encounter a lot of people who have guns.
There isn’t a gun culture like in the US in these places though, so you’ll have to know what to look for.
Companies that provide armed security for cargo ships for example will keep the weapons on a boat at sea in international waters, transfer them to the cargo ship at the beginning of their security detail, then take them off with another boat before the cargo ship proceeds.
I’m sorry.
Maybe back in the third world they pick up on their humans’ stress. There, they’d definitely attack at any opportunity.
If a rat were in your living room, you'd not want to go in there. Rats will almost never actually harm you, probably less than a dog. You can easily scare them out. But it's terrifying when one dashes across the room. It's biological/instinctive.
Yet an unknown dog in an unknown house that's actually aware of you and mad about it? No way. Off to another target.
Wow, just like my real dog!
- Birds
- Packages being delivered
- My neighbor, who he knows well, working in their back yard
- Me banging a door closed too hard
- A neighborhood cat taunting him on the sidewalk
- My kid dropping a toy on our hardwood
- ??? (He was barking at a closet door)
- Anytime I touch the hook where his leash hangs
- etc.
Still, love having his big bark around, even if when someone actually broke in he’d immediately befriend them.
At the same time, he likes it when trees drop little pieces of fruit or seeds, like mesquite beans or pine cones. So on windy days sometimes he gets into a loop with a tree where he
* stiffens up and barks at a tree for shaking its leaves
* cautiously approaches the tree, sometimes growling
* snatches something the tree has just dropped and runs away with it
* runs around in circles with the tree debris, pausing and play bowing wvery now and then, batting it around with his paws, etc.
* ... cautiously approaches the tree again
(He's pretty suspicious of wind-related movement generally— he'll also yell at flags and banners sometimes.)
To my dog, those are not false positives.
Anyway, improvements can be made, I'm fairly sure there's off-the-shelf "is this a person" detectors out there.
I laughed a little. Sometimes the job needs to be done quickly and in a familiar way, I suppose.
I’ve long thought that this could / should be a simple home security system. Glad to see somebody did it and that it worked for them!
I got the fake TV lighting source generator on Amazon probably 15 years ago - really looks like someone is watching TV in the room.
That’s ok, the original version can also be triggered by small animals and cars.
The speakers were quite pathetic, so we figured out it was a recording pretty quickly. And so we took to running past the house again and again, triggering the barking noise to our delight.
A few weeks later, the system was removed.
To be fair, actual dogs have a lot of false positives too, so it's not too dissimilar.
Actually I might buy one myself.
Being in the background of someone else's holiday photo isn't a problem, but you can't just post publicly identifying photos of people where they are the subject of the photo if you do not have consent.
[1] https://www.ifolor.ch/en/inspire/image-rights-in-switzerland
But seriously, that's not how GDPR works, people are using it as a replacement term for privacy. GDPR is aimed at companies, not individuals running a blog. You could still sue just under regular civil law.
Small college town. Nice, lots of bookstores. Retired professors. Food co-op etc
Once excellent school, now on the skids. Student population in decline.
Local student-housing management companies, slumlords, etc, are alarmed. They're losing money.
Solution. State-subsidized housing of low income families and ex-prisoners.
Nice college town now has riots and shootings every night. Burglaries of nice retired professors' homes skyrocket.
Town builds new triple-sized police station.
If I knew everyone I could possibly see sneaking around my house, it's pretty simple to go talk to their parents/ siblings / spouse to get them straightened out. If I didn't know, it doesn't take long to gossip my way into likely suspects.
It's another responsibility we offloaded to the state, and it is now impossible to recognize people on the street, and so there's an infinite set of people each thief could exploit. This isn't bad per se (see witch hunts and mob rule), it's just a modern exploit.
But in all seriousness, all forms of crime have just about monotonically decreased throughout all of human development. To say that "modern society" has an increasing problem with burglaries due to a "lack of self respect", there's no evidence it's true, and there is evidence to the contrary.
Before you point out the bump in some crime types in recent years, let me remind you that recent years have not been typical, nor easy on our generally monotonically-improving social safety nets. Compare burglary rates in America from 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010. Lower, lower lower.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/me...
What I'm referring to is far more subtle than some direct link between social media and these behaviors, but even in the cases of direct links such things exist... for instance consider TikTok trends like "devious licks"[1] which had students vandalizing and stealing from schools on video, including in upper class neighborhoods and at good schools.
I am /very/ well aware of the overall trend of crime decreasing in aggregate. However, I am also aware of the shift I'm noting above, and I'm aware that some crimes are now simply under/un-reported. Property crimes are definitely on the rise /in aggregate/ in some areas of the US, and can be most directly linked to shifts in enforcement. Car-break ins and bike thefts in particular in cities like San Francisco are associated strongly to the refusal of the law enforcement in the area to actually enforce the law.
We have a large number of social ills, and aggregate decreases in mental health, happening in the West, and I see this as being in the large linked to lack of self-respect and self-esteem. People with self-respect and self-esteem don't go and hurt others and destroy things, they create and produce. Lack of self-esteem is a significant driver for depression, which seems to be on the rise, along with many other related issues.
No, they haven't.
Most of them may have decreased, but it hasn't been even approximately monotonic.
> Compare burglary rates in America from 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010
I like that you use a a few decades of decline from the well-known peak of a long surge as your proof of a monotonic decline over the entire history of human development.
In practice it'll be things like poverty, lack of other opportunities, etc. Give people an education, gratifying jobs, a purpose in life and crime will drop.
But that sounds too much like socialism.
I agree with everything but the first word of this sentence, "give". The challenge is that you cannot "give" someone self-respect, purpose in life, or gratitude. These are things which must be internally developed by people through their life experiences. The best we can do as a society is improving early childhood development and parenting, but once someone is an adult, it is exceptionally difficult to impossible to change someone's direction absent any desire to change on that person's part.
The people doing these things are generally young adults or adults. Someone is not breaking into my garage to steal my tools because of "poverty" except in the most abstract definition. Generally, it's to feed a drug addiction, a drug addiction the person acquired due to self-medicating for ennui and depression or other mental health issues, mental health issues that may be partially caused by environment or genetics (we don't know, social / psych science is not there yet), and contributed to by the state of society and a complete lack of self-respect (someone with self-respect wouldn't stoop to theft).
The opposition to your mode of thinking isn't "oh no socialism", it's about complete elimination of accountability, respect, ethics, and root cause analysis as part of the process. You cannot "give" someone an improvement in their internal state. Or as the saying goes "You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink."
Get a real gun. Then go to a tactical trainer who has served in the military ideally in a small arms instructor capacity - they're all over the nation - and inquire about home defense courses.
And don't get a "handgun", get an AR-15 "pistol". That is, an AR-15 platform, a stabilizing brace, and a shortened barrel. If you're unsure what all this means, don't worry, your local firearms dealer will almost certainly know and understand if you come in and ask for those things. If a break-in occurs, you'll be too nervous and too frightened to aim well with your standard 9mm handgun. An AR-15 with a stabilizing brace and a shortened barrel with a vertical forward grip is sturdy, you can brace it against your shoulder (obviously), and it has sufficient power to stop an intruder.
At the end of the day, you and only you are responsible for your own safety. Even if you live in a gated community, you cannot count on your local security or law enforcement to arrive quickly enough to save you. Remember the old adage. "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away."
> I set up a fake dog that barks if my surveillance cameras are triggered while I'm out of town on vacation.
Also owning a gun actually increases your chances of homicide at home.
https://time.com/6183881/gun-ownership-risks-at-home/
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/do-guns-m...
