You start out doing it to others; but the empire always comes home in the end.

I assume that this would have been too banal, or he's about a generation too old to remember it immediately; but it really sounds like he could have 'solved' the same problem to the same degree with milkdrop or one of the other popular music visualization options from the glory days of winamp; but thought 'AI' would make a more interesting 'making of' story.

1. The vehicle is only at the preorder stage; they're not shipping any as best as I can ascertain. Pricing isn't listed, either.

2. The vehicle is only available as an SUV/Pickup. While the modular design has merit, there is no sedan available.

3. The website makes no claims regarding privacy, except in its privacy policy regarding the website. The closest indicator is the absence of an infotainment system, but that doesn't mean that it lacks a telemetry module; there is no specific indication that it lacks one.

4. If it's not shipping yet, it will likely still be subject to forthcoming laws regarding kill switches; they have made no claims to the contrary. ...So, while I would LOVE for Slate to be the starting point, and I'd even switch to an SUV form factor to get it AND pay double the cost of a Camry for it...I don't think it's really reasonable to have a "put your money where your mouth is" stance when the vehicle is not available for purchase, is only available in one form factor, and where the company makes no claim to lack a telemetry module. I'm open to a solution, but a Slate gives me zero confidence that it is, in fact, that solution.

That can be rectified.

Even on a stock Google Android phone, one can at least SOMEWHAT mitigate data collection by not-installing certain apps. To my knowledge, Meta doesn't get data if you don't install FB/IG/WA. Also, one could leave their phone at home and drive somewhere if tracking was undesirable; while by definition, one cannot avoid that if the car itself is doing the tracking. Even if tracking is unavoidable on the phone, 'airplane mode' can assist in certain contexts.

Also, crazy as this is, there are still 'dumb phones' that exist, which may still involve selling location data or call logs by the carrier, but don't have the sensors or software to do the level of tracking that stock smartphones do. Some people do opt to get those instead.

The fact that they're in vehicles, without buyers being meaningfully informed, where even customers who do opt out of data collection still get their data collected, and don't have an 'airplane mode' available to them...nor a simple "remove this fuse" stipulated in the manual to negate the telemetry parts at a hardware level, nor a manufacturer that specifically sells a 'no telemetry' model (one CAN get a Fairphone with LineageOS out of the box; I haven't found a 2025-model car sold in the US that is analogous). While mass transit in the EU might be the extreme-but-possible solution, that's simply not the case in the US outside of some metro areas, so car ownership is a necessity, even more than a smartphone is.

Smartphone tracking is bad, but there are solutions, even if they are hard. Vehicle tracking is worse, because it's way more expensive to get that wrong than getting a Graphene install wrong.

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.

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.

It's $10 for one person, but take 1 million people, and it's $10 million

Right, that's why this makes sense for Gmail. The spreadsheet says make the free tier extraction percentage number go up, and they value noncomplying users' time at zero. The math should is different for company-internal email.

The operative question should be, how much do you want to spend on employees sorting email instead of writing code or whatever you hired them to do? Because that's how you're buying your disk storage savings.

Different places have different considerations - as I mentioned above, my employer now clearly values reducing litigation risk over my productivity. In the past at startups, my decision was to give folks huge quotas and treat it like any other capacity management problem for scaling/budgeting.

There has to be some limit, and if someone somehow bounces off of it nobody thinks it unreasonable to tell them to fix it. And anyway there's usually a reason like a misconfigured something that infinitely-spams about whatever it is upset about. Otherwise they can worry about work instead of email management make-work.

Should be a knock-off for $500 soon enough.

Of course it'll be a little rough around the edges, and the solar panel won't work, and instead of growls it makes Bart Simpson jokes, but I'm sure it'll be fine.

...except for the 2015 version, every other version of Unreal Tournament can be spun up and made to work perfectly?

Same.

Also same...but something tells me that if Bitwarden were to do that, there would be a Vaultwarden fork the next day.

Even if there wasn't, browser-only access is annoying but serviceable, and it exports well enough to move to something else.