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?

You literally post this on every article about Firefox. Aren't you tired yet? I have replied numerous times that they are *NEVER* going to do that. And then I pointed you to using policies, which will disable updates.

Which is why I don't bother with surveys from company. If they're not going to listen to their customers, why bother doing the survey?

Having to create a policy is not the same as a simple checkbox to disable something.

One would think if customers keep complaining about something that a company would look into changing it. Such as people who complained at having to use a screen in their car to change a/c or temperature or something simple. Car manufacturers went back and put buttons and knobs in to make things easier.

Apparently Mozilla isn't interested in simple. Like so many other companies, the object is to make things as complicated, convoluted, and inconvenient as possible.

For all they keep doing, the one thing they can't seem to do is make a checkbox to stop being harassed about updates. Apparently there is no way to do to this. It's much too complicated for them to figure out.

Perhaps they should put out a notice asking if anyone has the skills to create the checkbox and make it work.

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.

Is your Google broken? The EFF has an entire tagged section on exactly that.

Since we all know you're not going to bother checking, I'll give the tl;dr: They're quite opposed to it.

Or a wallet.
Or a phone.
Or nothing at all.

Yeah, there are racists involved here, but they're blue, not black.

It's an "honest mistake" by the AI; it's gross negligence by the lawyer, for completely failing to do his actual job and confirm what his research tools spit out.

More to the point - "Hallucination" is an awful description and doesn't mean what most people think it does. If you force a human to answer a question regardless of certainty, you'd get the exact same behavior. High-confidence answers are easy; small medium-confidence details are likely to be in the ballpark but maybe a bit off; at the bottom of the barrel, however, you're going to get responses that amount to little more than works of plausible fiction.

I'm not saying this as an AI apologist, but this is a human problem. No human would read Harry Potter and think we could easily settle all court cases IRL with liberal use of veritaserum. For a lawyer to file a motion to do so means that lawyer needs a new and exciting career in fast food preparation.

It is possible to put laws into place that require how public-private partnerships work. It would be an imposition upon Flock and upon the police. And that is just fine, and as it should be.

Law enforcement contracting to the private sector should not be allowed to be a bypass of our rights.

The only place I see Al in the legal profession making sense is to do basic caselaw research, where it can cite the sources and the references upstream and downstream to those sources. The lawyer should be responsible to review the claimed caselaw citations to determine the merit of their support for the argument that the lawyer is making, and to pick the particular citations to use that are the strongest for the particular case.

Likewise the same sort of search but inverted, for one's opponent's most likely arguments or rebuttals might be performed, again with the lawyer doing the review based on the citations that the Al tool provided.

There was a television series in the 2010s called Person of Interest where the premise was that one of the main characters had managed to achieve Al, but in order to satisfy legal constraints, the Al was only allowed to spit-out a single phrase about a person, rather than any detail of any sort. It was up to the limited number of persons associated with the Al to figure out why this 'person of interest' had been referenced, whether they were the perpetrator, the victim, a witness, or someone who would suffer downstream effects. While soft science fiction, and pretty clearly taking inspiration from the older series Quantum Leap in having to figure out why they were there, the concept had some merit as to how Al should really be used. It should be treated as untrusted, it should be treated as requiring thorough review. It should be treated as another tool available, but no more trustable or authoritative than any other, and arguably a bit less trustable, a bit less authoritative.