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.

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.

"One time" is far from reassuring. Sometimes the AIs get it right. However, if I am sending an AI to it, it's too complex for me to figure out at first glance. I am typically sending it complex projects with a lot of steps to figure out. AI is a nice upgrade from Stack Overflow and a powerful tool. However, in order to justify the AI-washing layoffs, it has to be a lot more reliable than "one time." I get failures daily.

I have not been impressed with Claude's unit tests. They're usually stupidly verbose. I've thrown away entire batches of code when I see they take a simple function and start unit-testing the Java getters and setters...even worse, they don't clearly indicate they're doing so...and it looks like actual business logic until you look closely. I would love to have Claude write acceptable unit tests. That would save me time and help me make more robust releases. It just fails pretty reliably on those.

AI is not useless, we just have to be realistic. It's like self-driving cars. Someday I am sure they will be great, but they're not really great now. They are still an experiment to play with, not something changing our lives.

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.

These are purpose built single occupant DCs. It doesn't get any stickier than that. Google doesn't even visit their DCs when a server fails. They just power it off remotely and power up a warm spare.

I have to scrutinize pull requests much moreso than ever before. I have a handful of coworkers who like to let Claude do everything...which honestly isn't a concern if they test it and write the tests themselves and understand what it does. However, I have had to reject several PRs because they were having AI writing the tests AND the code. Obviously AIs are prone to write unit tests that justify their behavior, not the actual intended function of the code.

There's a temptation to let Claude do everything...but when I've tried it, I had to edit it heavily. Usually the code it produced was unprofessional or didn't even resemble working. However, it did help me out a few times with libraries I've never used before. I just am very careful about writing my own unit tests and verifying end to end. Additionally, I've been lazy and just pointed Claude at a stacktrace and ask it to tell me why it was failing (a project I'm unfamiliar with). It failed 100% of the time. In fairness, so did I...they were tricky bugs...I had to contact the author and have him explain what he intended to do. It's ability to understand code is really lacking....whereas that should be it's greatest strength.

I am an AI realist. I give it credit where it works and complain where it's overhyped. I have multiple AI evangelists on my team. For them, it's a religion...do everything in AI...AI is all powerful. To me, it's a tool in my toolbox.

The difference between us is that I see AI as it is today....their vision is AI as they imagine it...based on sci fi books and movies. In their vision, Claude is smart and knows what it's doing and will guide you to the promised land with a layover in nirvana and bliss. All hail AI!!!!

The disturbing part is they seem to have noticeably regressed and believe Claude over their own judgment.

I'm obviously against yet more AI-fueled surveillance dystopia hell; but when the people whining work for fucking facebook; and know what that company does, it seems like a "all who draw the sword will die by the sword; dumbass" situation.