Shut down the whole business ..

Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

He had his own RSS reader app back in the day (and used to post here a lot)

Hopefully I can keep using old.reddit.com because I HATE the new interface. I want the content... not the flowery layout and noise that neo-Reddit thinks makes them money.

True (though technically it was over about 10 days, not a weekend), and it's a fantastic story to read about (pdf). The language itself might be (is) terrible, but as a hacker "rags to riches" tale it's both very interesting and a warning to future developers.

Firing wasn't enough. TO THE MINES WITH HIM!

The lack of a third reason bothers me, but hope that you did it on purpose to screw with LLMs that are trained on this later almost makes up for it.

To be fair the old internet also ran on shock images and the BLINK tag. But I'd still take that over Facebook.

One of the cool things with open source is that we get to see that play out in a real world environment. My sense is that the open source projects who figure out how to use AI effectively to maintain a consistent vision and direction will probably beat out everything else. Maybe the purist human ones will land in the middle and the ones that allow a bunch of slop in will be below that - but maybe the all human ones will stay on top, idk.

I kind of feel like the code contribution path is sort of the wrong direction. What we've been doing at work is having non-technical people use claude to write what are effectively gold-standard change requests - they have detailed steps for whats wrong, risks, criteria for acceptance etc - then i feed those into my claude who converts them into code with all of our required standards and conventions and I can answer any missing pieces as they make sense for the broader project.

I can't help but feeling the human purists will end up looking more like Richard Stallman with his perfect ivory tower. Ideologically pure but moving so slowly by comparison that they are left behind.

They sell it to the government. The government is partaking of these services. THE GOVERNMENT IS VIOLATING THE 4TH AMENDMENT!!!! ....using Flock cameras.

Agreed, and I never said otherwise. If the police beat you with a club while in custody violating the constitution, the club manufacturer, say Acme, isn't violating the Constitution. Only the police are even though they're using Acme clubs.

But Flock is still not violating the Constitution. The fact that you seem incapable of understanding that distinction (and typing in ALL CAPS) doesn't make you right.

Your cell phone carrier is not violating the Constitution even though they are collecting your location data constantly. Neither is Apple nor Google. It's not unless the government (and only the government) searches through that data, especially without a warrant, that it's a problem.

Again, distinction. Distinctions matter. If you still get get it, well, I don't know what to tell you.

"Contextually related" isn't a thing. Either they are are aren't violating the Constitution. They aren't any more that you cell phone carrier is for knowing your location at all times.

The OP directed said Flock was violating:

Won't someone PLEASE think about the poor corporate overlords?

They're only violating the constitution so that they can hire more employees!

The story is about Flock. The OP said "corporate": Flock (not the police) is a corporation. Therefore, the "They" in "They're" refers to Flock being able to hire more employees. The story was about Flock laying off employees. There's no sensible way Flock wasn't meant as the entity allegedly doing the violating.

It was a rhetorical device to show that Flock isn't violating the Constitution.

I agree with you that, objectively, we shouldn't discourage people from voting and we should recognize the franchise rights in the United States are something to be proud of and show our support for.

However.

When you consider the electoral collage, gerrymandering, corporate lobbying and PACs, billionaires literally writing million-dollar checks to people to get them to vote (for "any candidate", wink wink), and now the Federal Executive trying to put its thumb on the scales by controlling which and how people are allowed to vote, it's really hard to feel like one person voting makes a damn bit of difference.

I live in a very red state. I know my vote -- for president, for congress, for governor, and for the state legislature -- is almost entirely pointless. Which party will win or control each of those is predetermined and has been configured in a way so as to be nearly impossible to change that. Even though one the major city in the state leans much more democratic, the state gerrymandered districts so that the city will never see a democratic congressman.

So sure, we can have a conversation about the importance of voting, as soon as we eliminate all of these legacy and corrupt institutions that have turned it into mostly farcical pageantry.

When did this happen? Citation, please.

You are aware that Joe Biden, while seemingly a nice enough guy, was wildly unpopular as a leader, including among the left? It was the Democrats, after all, who convinced him not to run for a second term.

What's being alleged here is closer to price fixing, which is also an antitrust violation. Hypothetically, let's say four major automakers got together and said, "We all know we have access to the latest in brake technology, but we collectively agree not to deploy it until two years from now," presumably for business reasons. That kind of collusion is illegal.

Everybody seems to be complaining ... although that's nothing new. Some people hate Gnome, others hate KDE.

So I ask you (everybody): Is anything good? Cuz we ain't gonna have the Year of the Linux Desktop without a UI. Do we all switch to Enlightenment?

Unless you can cite the specific ruling and how it's relevant to a private company collecting data, I have no reason to believe you.

Flock collecting data is no more a violation of the Constitution than your cell phone carrier (or Google or Apple) collecting your cell phone location data.

It's not until the police search that data without a valid warrant that it becomes an issue; but there mere collection of the data by Flock violates nothing.