How's it going to 'replicate it on every vulnerable system it can reach' when big, fat American AI requires several terabytes of RAM, a few million dollars of GPUs and hundreds of kilowatts of power to run?

That ain't gonna run on my dishwasher, no matter how insecure it may be.

The whole thing is simply ludicrous slop to justify regulation to keep competitors out of their market so they won't go bankrupt.

Trump is basically a 1990s Democrat.

Many people are simply too young to remember when Democrats got elected by saying they'd keep jobs in America, keep foreigners out of America, and Bomb for Peace.

PSyop.

There are trillion-dollar IPOs at stake here and it's clear that they can't justify that price if everyone can just run local open-source Chinese LLMs instead of big, fat American closed-source LLMs. Therefore they need a Narrative to ban open-source LLMs and force everyone to use theirs.

It's so lame it's sad to see anyone actually falling for it.

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?

Person, the reason the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... -- has the NULL HYPOTHESIS as "no correlation", is because OF THAT. Your senses LIE!!!!

Fucking take your left and right hand, and 3 buckets if water of different temperatures. Let's say ONE is HOT, ONE is COLD, and the final is LUKEWARM/GOLDILOCKS.

Put your left hand and right hand into C and H, respectively. Wait. Minute.

Put both in the lukewarm.

Do your hands agree on temperature?

No. Fucking pay attention to your mental biases. That's why science is a DISCIPLINE OF MIND.

FFS.

"This ALPR mass surveillance â" the indiscriminate, continuous collection and retention of location data on every driver, regardless of suspicion â" should not exist. But because it does..."

Because of all those who predate upon those with lack of critical thinking skills.

"Wake up to reality" is the double-think that they say is dumb when they pejoratively call people "woke."

"Woke" is just a word for "slave that doesn't know its place."

With all this rushing to improve AI engines and whatnot? It's the uptime/reliability that's concerning me as much as anything else.
I've seen ChatGPT Work have multiple outages just in the short time our office started using it. And even when they claim systems are running normally? You can easily get timeouts trying to complete relatively simple requests in systems like Co-Pilot, at least using the free edition.

If I ask my co-worker to complete a task, I have a pretty reasonable assumption he's going to do that. If he fails to complete requests several times in a short time-frame? Then it's likely he'll get in trouble for that, even potentially resulting in his termination. AI should be held to an even higher standard since it's a machine.

What happens when everyone is counting on AI to do necessary parts of daily workflows and then it has an extended outage? That's like your whole workforce going on strike.

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.

> The AI movie experience is slowly improving, but is still terrible. You can make a very short 5s shot that's QUITE convincing...so long as there's a single subject...really closeup.

That's simply not true. I watched a ten-minute AI-generated Star Trek video on Youtube last week which was better than any offficial Star Trek show of the last few years.

And the guy made it at home on an Nvidia GPU in his PC using a Chinese video model.