Not sure why this was modded flamebait. I don't see anything grossly inaccurate and any editorializing isn't exactly couched in fantasy.

That largely depends on what the contract actually says, and how the data is 'federated' within Flock's own systems.

It sounds like Flock's business model was to build the massive data-collection system, but since that's expensive, it used contracts with government entities to pay for the build-out. The contracts with each of the entities might well be for the services delivered to them, but since many municipalities have separate contracts for how real estate (and installing something on a light pole counts) then Flock might be maintaining their own contracts separately for the physical placement of their cameras.

So Flock gets agencies/government to pay for the services of license plate data collection with one contract then uses another contract for Flock to pay for the rental for pole space. If the contract to provide data to the polity lapses or is terminated, that doesn't necessarily mean that Flock's permits to maintain equipment on poles is also terminated as they're separate contracts. Granted, operating the cameras is on Flock's dime now, but if they continue to harvest data then they might find takers for that data even if not the original municipality or other agency who paid for the cameras.

The thing that our current interpretation of the Constitution lacks is where the dividing line between one's self and a third-party sits when it comes to the sanctity of one's person, papers, and effects. At the time that the Constitution was written there was no photography, let alone videography, mass-processing of records automatically, etc. Someone had to physically observe someone in public in order to know what they did, and could only repeat with their words what they saw rather than demonstrating it. We don't have good law for 3rd party collection of volumes of data about people and the ability of said 3rd party to provide that data to the government. A ruling, law, or amendment that puts protections on requesting information and establishes some kind of checks and balances system that applies to the government in all its forms is needed. I don't know what the threshold should be either, but clearly right now when we have stories where the justification for a search is, "ASDFG" then something needs to change.

Yes, limited local AI models certainly are going to be a standard feature in the future.

I run both local and cloud AI. There is still a huge difference, because my local machine has to use smaller and quantized models. It takes considerably longer for lower quality results.

Just waiting for Rust#

Remember when the Chinese destroyed that satellite in space a few years ago (2007 - geez, it's been a while) to "demonstrate their capabilities"? We NEED systems in space to defend/retaliate against that kind of stuff.

This isn't Reagan's "Star Wars" that was ridiculed. It's the new realpolitik.

Oh my, that's going to be easy. All I need to do is take the entire use case of phones (there's almost nothing a phone can do that someone might not want to do while using these glasses as a display), and union with all AR applications, and union with whatever applications that Meta intends to develop to attract people to the camera-less version of the glasses.

So here's a few: reading texts/emails without having to look down, following a map, playing games, surfing the web (which might include posting to Slashdot), and answering a "what is this thing I'm looking at?" query.

local LLMs aren't there yet and probably won't for the forseable future for ordinary people. If you want to run a full model like DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, you need something like half a TB of RAM.

The open-source LLMs are a different threat: They enable a service industry independent of the large players. I could today get some venture capital, rent a few racks in a hosting center, install a bunch of beefy machines and offer the same service as Claude or ChatGPT, just on an open-source model. The differences in benchmarks are becoming irrelevant for 95% of common use cases. And if I can offer that service for $19/m while OpenAI wants $29/m then OpenAI has a problem.

And IMHO this is the chinese strategy: Undermine the US AI industry by breaking its business model.

Has everyone gone insane or are we witnessing a major PsyOps ?

Since AI isn't magical, for it to be able to "kill all humans", it would have to be able to acquire the means to do so. Which means that these already exist. It means someone is able to do it right now. And we're chill with that, but worried about AI?

No doubt a bunch of autonomous weapon systems linked into a C&C could cause considerable bloodshed. Given that most of the existing weapon systems of that kind are essentially suicide drones, it'll still be limited damage.

Human-killing virus? Still need a means of creating and delivering it.
Nuclear war? We have humans in the loop.
Drive us all insane with AI-slop TikToks? A few percent of humanity still don't use that.

So what is the actual scenario ? When someone shouts "AI will kill us all", why don't we ask them "how, exactly" ?

the vast, overwhelming usage is to produce non-consenting public recordings of people and leak them to Meta for further data mining.

I wonder where we find stats to resolve our disagreement. (I assert it's a rare case, but I'm pulling that "fact" out of my ass. Alas, I think you're also pulling the "overwhelming usage" claim out of yours, too.)

does anyone at all really buy into the idea that guys are following around the women of Walmart to video them?

I do buy into it, but I don't buy into any allegations that it's typical or a significant fraction of users.

I know people who own guns but never shot anyone. I know people who have internet access but never pirated any movies. I know people who have very fast cars but don't get speeding tickets. You'd really be surprised at what so many people don't do, even though they could.

Then there was a case of some perv recording a woman in a shopping centre.

And then there was the case of the Satan-worshipping, D&D-playing Judas Priest fan, who was caught backtalking his mom!

The two different terms you used kind of look like they apply to different things. "Privacy rapist" appears to refer to the person using the product, but "pervert glasses" appears to refer to the product itself. (Maybe you wanted to call the computer a privacy rapist, but I'm going to ass/u/me that you wanted the more mainstream usage of calling the perv who uses the computer a privacy rapist. Please complain if I got this wrong. I only bring up this pedantry, because I want to distinguish computers from their users.)

Computers can be used for lots of things. They can be used for copyright infringement, for example. But I think Slashdot would be in an uproar if we banned computers due to fact that some people use them to infringe copyrights.

But if someone wants to gargoyle up, such that their cameras are on their face instead of on their lapel or hidden in their clothing or hat, the cameras are objectionable because that user might be recording other people.

If we look at it in terms of the user's intent, instead of worrying about what the equipment is capable of doing, this looks like a pretty inconsistent policy.

That said, I'm not going all the way to saying this view is wrong. As a defender, a potential adversary's capabilities are what's important, and you can't trust anyone's intent. So if you're worried someone might record you, it might really make sense to ban all cameras, not just cameras operated by known pervs.

But why don't we have that attitude about equipment's capability to infringe copyright? Shouldn't we ban all computers, since someone might do the wrong thing with them? I guess it comes down to this: because we aren't the defenders in that situation; MPAA is. Seriously, they really did try to ban betamax due to fears that some people might use it wrong. And they bought a whole law (DMCA) to try to ban lots of uses of computers, which they thought might sometimes be precursors to copyright infringement. So maybe this is a rules-for-thee-but-not-for-me thing.

I'm seeing an attitude toward wearable cameras emerge, that policy should be oriented more toward the the innocent maidens than the drooling gargoyles recording the maidens for later fapping. Well, sure, WHEN I PUT IT LIKE THAT! But what if we describe the gargoyle more fairly? Someone at an in-person office meeting, where maybe they wanna see peoples' names with their faces like they did on Zoom. Or someone recording some cops beating a handcuffed suspect. Someone playing games like Pokemon Go. Someone following a course on a map. Or...

What I'm getting at, is that perv glasses might be useful for more than just perving. Maybe they're really great at perving too, but I can think of plenty of harmless applications for them, and I'm not even very visionary or creative.

I don't like that we're looking down on some tech, rather than its abusive users. I'm not particularly attached to wearable cameras and wouldn't ever likely be in the market for Meta's products (any of Meta products, ever) anyway, so it's easy for me to just shrug and let the fascists have their way on this particular issue.

But I sure as fuck don't want to see this toxic attitude continue to spread to other tech. Because if we allow that, then MPAA is going to ban all computers unless they're running MPAA-certified AI lawyers, always spying on us like the pervs that they are. And even that is just the tip of the iceberg on the smackdowns this attitude will unleash.

Wearable cameras aren't evil.

Now put it on a pole and call it Flock, then it's evi-- no wait, that's a problem with the camera's user too, isn't it?

This is for fun, not "production." If someone hacks up something and got to play with pretty lights for 10 minutes before getting bored and building something else, that's great. And if they learned any engineering, that's a bonus. It's ok to stack your legos however the fuck you want to. I don't fucking care if a kid in 1982 did the "wrong" thing on his TI-99/4A or VIC-20. Been there, done that, got a 40-something year long career out of it despite my youthful unorthodox amateur whims.

Use python on quasi-embedded systems all you want to. Whatever figuratively gets you off your ass, is a good thing.

> One thing I noticed about modern Linux is if you "cat > file" and then press CTRL-C it overwrites with a blank file

That maybe a shell-ism. In bash if you ' >file ' with nothing else, you end up blanking the file (and updating the date/time on it) without ^C even being involved.

You're not supposed to sell it. (Does anyone sell euros?) You're supposed to spend it. But hardly anyone takes it.