The idea that 'philosophical' means 'vaguely trippy visuals' seems weirdly common. In fairness to the people doing the visuals sometimes it's because what is being passed of as 'philosophical' is stupid; rather than because they are; but the latter case is also pretty likely. No idea what Lennon said in this case so can't comment on the likely cause.

He seems weirdly untroubled by the fact that he, voluntarily, turned his project into a tech demo for facebook in exchange for some imagery deemed abstract enough to accompany 'philosophical' parts of an interview.

There's definitely potential for it to have been installed because it was stupid cheap and promised possible benefits with no downsides; but I'm less clear that you attempt to override a city council decision by invoking a 'public safety emergency' without any apparent basis in either fact or law to keep them up just because they are stupid cheap and have no apparent downsides.

This whole sordid story is the one shaking down after someone became concerned enough to get the city council concerned enough to get them taken down; not during the initial justification process where they were just cheap and quick and seemed all upsides. The level of initial enthusiasm requires no special explanation; but at this point dude is actively sticking his neck out to save them; which seems like it does require correspondingly more explanation.

Even if you actually like "AI" Schmidt is sort of a dismal option. This is the "my plan would be to use AI to clone tiktok" guy with a career that's genuinely impressively uninteresting for someone of his educational qualifications. Who gets a PhD from a real school just to turn in 40+ years of pure suit?

I certainly wouldn't bet on 100% squeaky clean behavior from Flock; but it's probably also worth looking at his relationship with the local cops and their relationship either with the vendor or with other entities that have an interest in the flock data.

I don't think that this is particularly uncommon; but going by the City of Troy's budget; it looks like the cops are kind of a big deal. Over a quarter of the budget(~27million out of 90 million); and the chief, deputy chief, assistant chief, and police captain all make more than the mayor; you have to get down to the 27 sergeants to draw approximately equal to him. This in a 50k person town that apparently saw enough serious-enough-for-custody crime last year that they managed to keep 'prisoner meals' down to $787. A significant amount of money and the significant political clout of being the organization best placed to both feud with the mayor over whether or not his administration is doing a good job on crime and public safety and potentially do a bit of making it so in terms of how they handle, or slow-walk, the sort of highly visible but petty-enough-for-discretion public nuisance stuff. Municipal government isn't usually a 'coupe' situation the way nation states are; but there's a not entirely dissimilar 'bad idea for the nominal head of government to be on bad terms with the security forces unless there is huge public support for cleaning house' dynamic.

Doesn't mean that they are necessarily outright paying him off or leaning on him, plenty of people have an authentic fawning enthusiasm for authority figures; but not exactly a surprise that you'd see a mayor freak out about threats to a pet program that either he liked, the PD liked, or was part of some 'cooperation' or 'fusion center' thing that sounded important and had cool acronyms and gave everyone on the force a periodic break from taking calls about moving violations and uppity teenagers to go play with some regional partnership's 1033 program toys; thought outright kickbacks from the sleazoids at flock, or intermediary reseller, certainly aren't wildly implausible.

>"The Resin Identification Code(RIC) mark was deliberately chosen to look like the recycling symbol without actually being the recycling symbol. That's clearly a problem with the mark."

Is it? The only reason to need to know the type of plastic is for recycling. And plastic can be recycled. Putting the number inside the symbol makes perfect sense to me.

Tires have a speed class rating number on them. That indicates the max safe speed for that type of tire composition before it will fail. It doesn't mean it WILL be driven that fast, or that it SHOULD be driven that fast, or that there is anywhere it can be driven that fast in your area, or that it is otherwise a safe speed to drive.

Arguably worse. It's certainly not like a lot of the third world is as it is because of virtuous and competent leadership; but going from lousy to lousy is frankly mid-tier when it comes to incompetence and corruption. Starting with all the advantages of a functional society and leaving it a husk is a whole other level. Same deal in public health. Any idiot; and most competent and hardworking people, can do a bad job with what they don't have; but can they destroy a world class research base or reintroduce diseases that have been trivially controllable for decades? Can you cash in with even less shame than the robber barons of the guilded age who, in their weakness, skimmed off a bit to do highly visible face-saving good with rather than buying extra NFTs?

Obviously the intention is a 'for me but not for thee' arrangement; but I'm curious how anyone thinks they could run a business if 'first amendment' were actually authorization to do absolutely whatever so long as it's a speech act. That would effectively negate teeny little details like 'contract law', 'trademarks', 'copyright', and similar.

Obviously impunity is fun if it's only you that gets it; so the idea that you have a constitutional right to any and all lies is fun if only you get to advance it successfully; but if you try to advance an internally consistent argument for why fabricating the markings that indicate recyclability is a first amendment matter you more or less can't avoid negating any restrictions on packaging elements. I'm sure you'll see the humor when a competitor is producing copies of your packaging and your suppliers are just lying on their datasheets and bills of lading and you are getting invoiced for amounts unrelated to prices you thought you had agreed on.

>"The mark was originally intended to inform waste processors what polymers a plastic item was made from. But the public reasonably assumed anything stamped with the symbol was recyclable"

Then the problem is education, not the mark. Every product with the mark is ABLE to be recycled (methods do exist), but that doesn't mean it can be or will be in your area. I don't recall running across anyone who thought having the symbol means anything more than the number inside it is the type of plastic. And if you remove the mark, the already confused people are just going to say "oh, plastic" and put it in their container [incorrectly] just as before.

My biggest issue with the mark is that the number is often way too small or malformed to read. Where I live, only #1 and #2 are accepted (along with paper/cardboard, glass, and metal cans) and sometimes it is nearly impossible to see the number. Even so, by volume, I almost always have more recycling than non-recycling waste.

>" ... 'cause now I'm craving peanut butter and jam sandwiches."

Well, you can certainly buy a hell of a lot of PBJ sandwiches for just one of those SSD's. Probably way over a lifetime's worth for one of those servers.

>"The companies are pitching the hardware squarely at AI and hyperscale workloads, where storage is rapidly becoming a bottleneck alongside compute."

And where, apparently, price is no object. I wish they would focus on that crap and leave normal business and consumer-sized parts alone so we can afford them again.

>"Kioxia claims the denser configuration can dramatically reduce power consumption"

So the AI datacenters can just buy more of them in the same space and still strain all the grids as much so consumer electricity prices continue to rise.

>"The announcement also highlights how quickly enterprise storage capacities are escalating"

While consumer-grade storage capacities are stagnant or even REDUCING just so people can get by.

I wish this bubble would burst sooner than later.

In the USA, a billionaire can and will backdoor your union and make it toothless for the rank and file. An environmental change is needed. The 'system' itself is against the people. To speak more plainly: There is no way to alter the system from within the system as the basic law of the land is bendable to a person's will.

As best I can tell the target market is the ignorant and/or confused; even by the standards of openclaw enthusiasts.

If you want 'local' those specs are going to be a fairly harsh limit; I suspect it is not for nothing that they avoid anything that even resembles a benchmark or a performance claim; while if you aren't doing the bot stuff locally the fact that the hardware is sitting on your desk is getting you basically nothing in security or privacy vs. having an EC2 nano instance or whatever VPS is cheap spilling its guts to Sam Altman on your behalf.

Depending on who they are rebadging this thing might even be a perfectly fine low end mini PC, if you want one of those; people have been making them for years with whatever why-care-more CPU occupies the bottom of Intel's range; and they can be entirely suitable if you just need a generalist appliance and don't really want to play embedded ARM just to get the thing running; but it is absolutely being insinuated that it's suitable for things that it is not; and that it offers benefits that it won't in the expected configuration.

My thoughts exactly. How exactly is this "local" and they clearly say it is using ChatPGT and other cloud services? It is just making queries to AI data centers. You can do that with any computer already. You can even do it semi-anonymously through something like Venice.

And "it is on 24/7"... so what? So is my Linux desktop computer at home. And interacting with it through Telegram??? Why? Wouldn't just a plain, direct web interface make more sense?

Clearly I am not the target market for such a machine, but I really don't understand who the target market is and why.

So you ship a bottom of the barrel computer and call it an "AI computer" because it can interact with assorted APIs over the internet; then you try to talk up the 'local' and 'privacy' aspects despite the fact that this is running basically nothing locally because it's an N150? Cool story.