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

yeah, people have been calling out specific trades on Twitter for months.

This is just an excuse for the Establishment's AI Control Grid.

"We must completely destroy your Liberty for your Safety."

People better wake up fast.

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?

> How can it be abused? I don't get it.

Really? You can't imagine a single way that a corporation or the government could abuse the ability to identify, track, and instantly locate any person at any time for any reason? Nothing at all, huh?

> yet I never heard of one case of a street camera being used to hurt someone let alone end lives

https://www.businessinsider.co...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/cou...

https://coloradosun.com/2025/1...

https://www.dailyjournal.com/a...

https://www.americanpartisan.o...

Those examples took basically no effort to find; now imagine if they want to target someone ON PURPOSE, like a civil rights leader, or to harass/round up people who participated in a protest.

Or just be a creep and stalk their ex or random women;

https://www.theguardian.com/co...

Oh, also the system is hilariously insecure, so it's not just cops, corps, and spooks who can use it.

https://stateofsurveillance.or...

=Smidge=

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.

Correct.

The current war and upcoming $1000/mo typical residential utility bills is what's driving me. And the math on a Carrington Event.

I know of three other people who are off-grid capable in my network of high hundreds of households.

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.

But also he doesn't really age, or at lesst he deages on occasion.

Maybe we'll get James Bond and the Philosopher's Stone.

OpenLibre already had grammar checking. It was free, didn't require a lot of hard drive space (a few MB at most?), and ran locally and almost instantly without needing a high price graphics card.

In fact we've had that ability for over a decade now.

> Let's make LibreOffice and the free desktop AI-native!

Fuck you, Keith.

=Smidge=
/TexMaths is also an existing LibreOffice extension

Okay so, thanks for tacitly admitting half your argument was bullshit by pretending it didn't exist when directly challenged. I'll take what I can get,

Most of Norway sees an annual high in the 10C/50F range. The highest seasonal temps in late summer is in the low 20C/70F range. Most of the country is at or below freezing most of the year.

Yes, they are driving them in the cold. You are doing a lie.
=Smidge=