Seriously, if you want to be far better educated about this issue, listen to the All-in podcast. These guys know way more than everyone else in the media is telling you. The latest horseshit is the so-called "whistleblower" who worked for AI company for a mere six weeks and suddenly knows everything. He also had zero activity on his X account before spouting off. Oh, and by the way, before going to work at the AI company, he worked for an NGO whose sole purpose is to bork AI.

Then there's the Hugging Face issue. Oh, did they forget to tell you that Hugging Face left API keys in public repositories? Yeah, didn't think so.

This is all FUD designed to do two things. One, to gin up support for yet another unaccountable government agency. The big two or three will have regulator capture and no new startup will ever be able to get off the ground. If you like the FDA taking ten years to approve a new drug that can save lives, wait till you want to get a new AI model approved. Does "never" work for you? The second reason is that China is definitely behind much of this FUD because they are going full-tilt on AI. You want China to have superior AI to the rest of the world?

There is no way in hell that Flock ever comes out of this as a viable company. No amount of "Flock solved this crime" edge-cases are ever going to be enough to overcome the consistently bad PR. Probably the ONLY case that might save their bacon is if they recorded the election being stolen.

"Ambitious European" that's cute. Ambitious Europeans don't have a great track record.

Those of us who have lived longer than the last few years know that this kind of thing has happened many times. Every time some new technology gains traction, the luddites get all chicken-little. Try finding yourself a typist or a research librarian. Try finding someone who knows how to make a fax machine. Try finding a door-to-door salesman. So many tasks that used to be performed by humans no longer are. It happens over and over throughout history. The same is true of AI.

Back in the 1980s, if you were in college and had an assignment, you went to the library. You tried to find what you needed in the card catalog. Maybe you found something that might help. You go to the stacks to look for it. Lo and behold, some asshat has checked out the one book you need and it's not due back until after the assignment is due.
Along came the internet and search engines. Now you could Google things. The information was never checked out. You might also find more information than you thought you needed and you didn't have to wade through some 400 page tome to get to the meat. Fortunately, the internet is not some thing that's controlled by government who would restrict its use if it could.
This was the second stage of the democratization of information access. Printed books were the first stage. Of course, the more mature it got, the more bit rot there was. Information became dated and superseded. You also had to hack through a jungle of advertising.
AI is the third stage of the democratization of information. Now, you can ask a question and get good answers with sources. You can ask followup questions to really drill down. You can build things and AI is the best collaborator by far. It doesn't get tired. It doesn't tell you that your ideas or questions are stupid. It doesn't engage in gatekeeping by demanding that it get paid a king's ransom or condescending to you by saying that you're trying to stand on the shoulders of giants even though a human saying that is probably not that great. It doesn't stab you in the back and try to steal your idea.

But what about this potentially bad thing or that terrifying thing. Son, you've been watching too many movies and listening to entities who want to keep you in your place. Everything, and I mean everything, ever devised by humans can be used for both good and nefarious purposes. If you deny yourself the best tools out of fear, someone else will happily use them and you will be left behind. The key is to make sure the doomsayers don't get to bork the tools. Case in point, there was a brief attempt to charge people money to send email. The word sabotage came from hand weavers trying to prevent automated weaving machines from displacing them. It didn't last, of course. The people opposed to AI and data centers are the modern-day saboteurs. They are the people who need a reality check instead of a paycheck.

When you have built something useful. Then maybe we'll talk. Anything. Anything at all. Until the, STFU.

These TV ads for Yrefi are just as ludicrous. They're pitching to "accredited" investors, whatever the hell that means, it give money to a company that is pitching mortgages to people who can't pay their existing mortgage. So, let me see if I understand this. Give us your money so we can loan it to other people who can't pay their loans. When the lendee goes BK, they take the house and tell the investor "Sorry, but your investment is now in the toilet." What a racket.

Getting a warrant isn't all that difficult. I've seen them get issued within an hour of determining a need for one. It sets a paper trail that has be defensible to a judge and later in court.

But that's just one use-case. If law enforcement were the only people allowed access to flock information, that would be one thing. These devices don't only get turned on when law enforcement gets a warrant. But nobody knows who has access to the information. Nobody knows who's made copies of it. Nobody knows who has the analytics. That's the scary part. These things aren't like cellphones. A cellphone's primary function isn't to track people. Flock cameras have no other application.

For a number of years, I used a UK-based Subversion host to manage a software project. The company went bankrupt and I lost all access to the server. So the entire change history was gone. At least I have the current version locally.

It wouldn't be so sacred if native Hawaiians got paid a lot of money. Apparently, having the TMT on Spanish territory means people would have to pay the Spanish government to use it. I guess that makes it "sacred" to them too given that they're going to have to pay for a whole lot of new "citizens".

But here's a question: is the TMT sitting in a warehouse somewhere waiting to be installed? If not, what's the big deal?

Wait, I've got a solution. Let's move it to the Bear's Ears.

Right. Dry that one out and you can fertilize the lawn.

When my father was starting out as a young physician in the late 1950s, he had a meeting with the president of Chemical Bank to get a loan. The guy told my dad that the reason rich people are rich is because they watch the pennies.

People have gotten so used to renting every aspect of their lives that they have no clue why they feel poor. In this case, people keep their OnStar subscription even though they probably never use it and as good as cellular coverage is, the reason for having it is pretty much gone. Once SpaceX gets they tech into phones, there will be zero reason to have OnStar. But people are clueless. Wasting money on subscriptions has reached epidemic proportions.

The real concern is what happens when OnStar is totally obsolete. Is GM going to cheerfully give up all that free money? Hell no. They're going to find another way to nickle and dime their customers.

When I bought a new Toyota last year, I got a trial subscription to not just SiriusXM (which sucks, btw, compared to Spotify) and a one-year trial to their digital key nonsense on your phone (which also sucks, btw). I never started paying for those things.

There will come a day, not too long from now, when you won't be able to own a vehicle outright. You will only be able to rent it and every cool feature will be on a subscription basis.

I don't think I've ever googled something and it came up with anything that wasn't .com, .org, .edu, or .gov. Are search engines, and now more importantly AI engines able to scour other domains for information?

Here's my question: the AI doomsayers, particularly those in government, are demanding guardrails for security. In other words, mere mortals shouldn't be allowed access to sophisticated hacking functionality. Okay, but what if you want to use those tools to look for vulnerabilities in your own systems so nefarious entities won't be able to hack them? Will you have to go to some supposedly trusted government agency to have them tell you whether or not your systems are secure (for a nominal service fee)? How do you know you can trust them? Because they're the government?

That's the question. Is it truly that some plastic CAN'T be recycled or is it more likely that they aren't because it's too expensive or time consuming to do so and there's no market for it? Places like California love to stroke their own egos when they have 27 different trash containers for every conceivable use-case and then it's out-of-sight-out-of-mind. Just like everywhere else that uses one recycle container.

We used to stick AM radios next to those early computers to give the illusion of sound for games.