It sounds like you two have a lot in common.

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.

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.

They're modding you down because it's beyond stupid.

- There is no such thing as zero emissions ICE. A combustion reaction, by definition, yields water and carbon dioxide at the very least, with the sole exception of hydrogen, which is just water. However, hydrogen fuel cell is NOT combustion, it's done using reduction to get a more direct conversion to electricity by shedding electrons.
- Tire particulates are heavier than air, which means they can't contribute to smog in any meaningful capacity. Furthermore, this is also a solvable problem, both in theory and in practice, namely through materials science. The tires on my Tesla will outlast the tires on your sister's Pinto, without even needing thicker tread, with the added benefit of yielding better range. This comes mostly from reduced rolling resistance. And that's to say nothing of recent developments expected to reduce if not eliminate the use of petrochemicals in tires.
- People who one-pedal drive, which is most EV drivers, barely use their brakes at all, with some having had their breaks seize up from literally not using them enough.

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.

Dude you're getting excited over one-off's when the hard part with batteries is producing them at scale. None of this even sounds that spectacular. Here's a great example of why:

https://insideevs.com/news/771...

I don't know why you think sodium ion is great for EVs given its theoretical maximum energy density is lower than what we're already getting out of lithium, and they haven't even reached that yet.

I believe Tesla is already well ahead of them on dry-cells, which they're already producing at scale and are in production model Ys already on the road, far ahead of a trade show demo. And they're still going to get more energy density out of them than they already are. Right now the problem is energy loss, which can be improved as the manufacturing process is improved. They should eventually be able to deliver on what was originally promised, just not in the time scale originally thought. Like I said, manufacturing them at scale is the hard part.

And Tesla is already selling $29,000 cars that do everything you're talking about and more. By that I mean, the Chinese made model 3 premium is selling for exactly that price in Canada.

No trade barriers without having to fuck with US politicians means competitive pricing. Who would have thought? And then you guys wonder why cars sold here are so expensive while you cheer on the CCP. Get rid of the Detroit automakers and the UAW and watch how fast shit changes here. They're more entrenched and complacent than a socialist dictator. The fact that literally everybody EXCEPT that corrupt bunch is able to deliver a profitable EV says a lot about just how bad they are. The Detroit three and the UAW deserve each other. It was funny how Biden joined the picket line completely oblivious to the fact that they've been lobbying hard against EVs while part of his platform was promoting them. The last thing they want are cars that require less labor to build and less labor to maintain. The last thing the Detroit automakers want are cars that are harder to plan obsolescence around. And despite Trump killing off every last incentive for EVs while leaving in place oil subsidies and lowering emissions standards, Tesla is STILL gaining market share while STILL being profitable.

As for that 800,000km battery, I'm curious if that reflects real world usage. Did they even say how old it is? The reason I say that is because very high mileage battery Tesla's are all quite old. I believe the current highest is 500,000km on a 7 year old model X, and it's still doing well. And that's 7 year old battery tech, which is missing out on a lot of improvements since then.

What you obviously don't understand about EV batteries is they spend most of their lives between 80 and 90 percent of the original capacity. Even with very little use, they'll lose more than the first 10% within the first year. Just like cars themselves, how long batteries last is not about "how much they're used" so much as "how they're used". Having it on the road is a lot different than putting it though 800,000km worth of charge/discharge cycles, or even putting that many miles on a track.

That and the whole fact that so much BS in general comes from China. Tesla has regained market share there, which I think is less due to any changes at Tesla or BYD, and more due to the fact that so many EVs in China were "registered" and "sold" to literally nobody over the last few years. Google the "zero mileage used car" for more details.

The AI doesn't care either way. It has no concept of any of that. It doesn't even have a concept of what overworked is. You're trying to anthropomorphize it, which is nonsense, and you, just as it, have no idea why:

When you give it a prompt, it has no choice at all, let alone a choice to not reply. It's built to output a response, and so it just comes up with something -- anything -- and that's going to be based entirely on whatever data it has available. It doesn't matter whether that data is right, wrong, or anything in between, you're just going to get a response from it. If the only data it has is your personal copy of the communist manifesto, then its response will be nothing more than a derivative of that

As best I can tell the target market is the ignorant and/or confused; even by the standards of openclaw enthusiasts.

If you want 'local' those specs are going to be a fairly harsh limit; I suspect it is not for nothing that they avoid anything that even resembles a benchmark or a performance claim; while if you aren't doing the bot stuff locally the fact that the hardware is sitting on your desk is getting you basically nothing in security or privacy vs. having an EC2 nano instance or whatever VPS is cheap spilling its guts to Sam Altman on your behalf.

Depending on who they are rebadging this thing might even be a perfectly fine low end mini PC, if you want one of those; people have been making them for years with whatever why-care-more CPU occupies the bottom of Intel's range; and they can be entirely suitable if you just need a generalist appliance and don't really want to play embedded ARM just to get the thing running; but it is absolutely being insinuated that it's suitable for things that it is not; and that it offers benefits that it won't in the expected configuration.

So you ship a bottom of the barrel computer and call it an "AI computer" because it can interact with assorted APIs over the internet; then you try to talk up the 'local' and 'privacy' aspects despite the fact that this is running basically nothing locally because it's an N150? Cool story.