Who wizzed in your wheaties?

And I stand by what I said. Practically no phone that still works at all does it at the low level of a capacitor anymore.

Popular opinion is poor evidence.

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?

It's a research program so, yes "That doesn't mean LLMs *will* deliver AGI". But what are your grounds for being certain taht it won't?

Even if it were sentient, it would be acting as the agent of the company that was running it, so they would still be to blame.

If you don't like "reward", say "positive feedback". It means the same thing, except for being more formally defined.

LLMs cannot have inherent values, because they don't know that anything besides text exists. Specialized pixel editors have similar problems.
Robots will at least understand the the external reality exists, so perhaps they could have inherent values.

And shove him under a bus or truck when it rolls by

If things were to otherwise stay the same, then it would. They won't. Some descendant of "vibe coding" will become the dominant mode within 20 years. Probably a *lot* sooner. Next year wouldn't really surprise me.