We're on the same side on this issue, but to your last point... We have our own Dianne Feinsteins.

This isn't even a partisan issue. The US, the planet, would be a far better place if we did away with our current gerontocracy. We have technophobic dust-wheezers trying to make sense of a world they don't understand and are terrified of. Every time we laugh at the latest "series of tubes", we need to step back and realize they're 100% serious with nonsense like that.

I will not ever pass off something written by AI as my own (yes, I really do use hyphens, oxford commas, and negative parallelism and have done so for decades before evil AI was anything more than a SciFi trope, as easily verified by my comment history prior to 2022). I check any non-trivial stats against primary sources. I don't even bother asking AI to calculate something for me, because it really really sucks at math.

In this case, though, I apparently also sucked at math and readily admit I and I alone screwed up that simple multiplication. FWIW I was able to work my way back into how I got that number: Instead of just doing 28*384, I calculated the average of 31.8 (rounded down) using Wired's raw numbers. Interestingly, their math also doesn't quite work, since they claimed 28 as the average of ~1.6 million images for 50200 cars. 333312=28*31*384, and for some stupid reason I used both 28 and 31.

Any completely stupid shit I say is 100% my own damage (barring a primary source actually being wrong).

Apologies: I have no idea where 333312 came from. The real number is 10752 - But that's still three orders of magnitude higher than what any on-device AI is going to be capable of anytime in the near future.

From the Wired article, "A typical passing vehicle generated about 28 images, though some produced more than 100. The camera uses different exposures to capture both the license plate and the wider scene, then scans the images, selects and crops useful frames, and sends them with other data to Flock over the cellular network."

If Flock wants to pay for the bandwidth and tokens to upload every image, who am I to stop my enemy from burning money?

As for doing it locally as some have suggested, there's a much more fundamental technical limitation here: Flock cameras have 0.4m^2 of solar panels, worth roughly 2.8kWh per day... in Death Valley. DeepSeek 4 Flash (currently one of if not the most efficient high-capability models) burns roughly 260Wh per million tokens. Somewhat conveniently, it resamples every image to be exactly 384 tokens. Per Wired, Flock is capturing very close to 100k images per day. 100k*260*384/1M comes out to very nearly 10kWh, a factor of four too high. Even then, even if Flock were willing to make each installation a giant multi-meter solar array, nobody's pushing 28*384=333312 tokens per second outside a data center. An RX4090 can handle... 12.5 (there's no suffix there), and that's assuming aggressively low-bit quants.

You'll notice we "liberated" Venezuela's oil reserves for absolutely no goddamned reason, shortly before we started a war with Iran for absolutely no goddamned reason.

Those two seemingly random instances of the US Executive merely being woefully incompetent make the real reason pretty clear. And in case we needed any more evidence, crude is still over $100/bbl.

Do you understand people are being pulled over at gunpoint for false matches on Flock?

To repeat myself for the hard of thinking, "I'm not suggesting that as a way to specifically avoid detection". There's no practical and legal way to really "hide" while driving a car you own on public roads. I have no interest, positive or negative, in whether or not Flock helps catch actual criminals - That detail is completely irrelevant to the fact it's a blatant end-run around the fourth amendment.

Sure, the local police will recognize my car instantly. And if their first response when they see me is "oh, it's that jackass with all the weird bumper stickers" rather than fucking shooting me... Hey, that wasn't the intent, but I'll take it!

I'm not suggesting that as a way to specifically avoid detection; rather, as a way to poison the data with 99% irrelevant matches. We all know the relevant XKCD, but there's more options than a sawzall to fight back.

As an aside, the full Wired article is freely available. I can't say if there's any additional information in the 404 Media version (because I'm also not signing up), but the Wired writeup is pretty solid.

Aside from giving us solid data on how badly Flock is behaving vs what they claim, there's one extremely useful detail this dump reveals: Flock sucks at correctly identifying the interesting parts of its targets.

Time to absolutely wallpaper the front and back of our cars with bumper stickers that look like faces and license plates. Let 'em burn police time chasing down "8008135" stickers to the point nobody even checks the alerts anymore.

You can buy hundreds of styles of tiny and well-concealed "spy" cams, no questions asked, for a pittance online.

I hate Meta as much as the next geek, but everyone focusing solely on smart glasses is completely ignoring an entire world of intentionally discreet form factors. Hell, I have a smoke detector in my kitchen with a camera pointing straight at the front door. You'd never even know it was a camera without taking it apart, the lens just looks like an indicator LED. Granted, my use is 100% legitimate, but there's absolutely nothing stopping me (or more importantly the pervs) from putting the same thing in a bathroom, bedroom, or random public spaces.

Smoke detectors, clocks (both digital and analog) and (non-smart) watches, phone chargers, pens, belt-buckles, various jewelry, stuffed animals, tie pins, rocks, fake dog poop, sticks, keychain-sized flashlights... Not to mention there are literally dozens of brands of "smart glasses" that can do the same, and the vast majority couldn't care less if the user blocks any indicator lights (if they even have one in the first place).

I'm in no way defending any of that as used to invade other people's privacy (if anyone needs "privacy" in my kitchen, they can GTFO), but smart glasses are merely one highly-visible form among many. And they're not even price-efficient for that purpose, who's paying $300+ when $20 would do, if all they want is to secretly creep on people?

I think you responded to someone else's comment.

Bitcoin isn't a currency in the sovereign sense, but it is an intangible commodity. It's value is defined by supply and demand. As long as someone is willing to pay $76k (or the equivalent in goods or services), it's "worth" $76k regardless of your personal opinion of its legitimacy.

I don't personally consider art less than a century old "worth" the millions it sells for, but someone does, and that's all that matters.

I see the future of movies as being AI-generated, with viewers providing scripts, actors, directors, and whatever else they care about, either their own or rented. You'll choose everything and the AI will generate it real time. You'll be able to adjust parameters on the fly -- funnier, darker, more introspective, more action -- overall or per actor. You'll be able to talk to the characters, provide real and misleading clues to detectives, tell the AI to throw in a car accident or a broken sidewalk just to see the characters react to it and change the story for a few seconds.

It will certainly be possible within 50 years. Might be possible within 25 years. What it will do is destroy top actors' salaries. Why rent some famous actor's visage for $5 when you can make one up from scratch or pick some new actor for $1?

You'll also be able to remake old movies. There are stories about famous movies who had to settle for an actor because their first choice was unavailable or too expensive; so change to their first choice, see how it changes everything. They'll be out of copyright and cheap, and probably have a dozen businesses offering their own take on the same actor.

It's going to relegate live actors to stage work, which may or may not be live streamed. The days of $10 million acting gigs will be over. And actors won't be nearly as insufferable pontificating on things they think they learned from roles.

Is your Google broken? The EFF has an entire tagged section on exactly that.

Since we all know you're not going to bother checking, I'll give the tl;dr: They're quite opposed to it.

Or a wallet.
Or a phone.
Or nothing at all.

Yeah, there are racists involved here, but they're blue, not black.

It's an "honest mistake" by the AI; it's gross negligence by the lawyer, for completely failing to do his actual job and confirm what his research tools spit out.

More to the point - "Hallucination" is an awful description and doesn't mean what most people think it does. If you force a human to answer a question regardless of certainty, you'd get the exact same behavior. High-confidence answers are easy; small medium-confidence details are likely to be in the ballpark but maybe a bit off; at the bottom of the barrel, however, you're going to get responses that amount to little more than works of plausible fiction.

I'm not saying this as an AI apologist, but this is a human problem. No human would read Harry Potter and think we could easily settle all court cases IRL with liberal use of veritaserum. For a lawyer to file a motion to do so means that lawyer needs a new and exciting career in fast food preparation.