This article reminded me to check deflock.me where I found that in the last 90 days my city finally got a Flock camera. There’s only one but I’ve been driving by the damn thing every day on my way to work without realizing it.

I’d like to know whose responsible for it; City, County, or State but regardless I now have a decision to make.

No but at least the data isn’t being immediately uploaded to Meta / Google / Apple or whatever for storage and processing.

If they are Open Source it also opens the door for some kind of control device that a person could have that broadcasts a “Do Not Record” signal that could in theory prevent Open Source glasses from recording in your presence. That kind of thing will never happen with Commercial / For Profit glasses.

We need an Open Source version of these glasses. It’s the only solution that will work.

There are multiple systems for handling drone swarms in the pipeline right now. Some of them are nearly through testing and will start production and deployment later this year. Leonidas and de-shorad are two examples.

The idea of putting Cameras on City Vehicles and using AI to find problems, including Code Enforcement issues, is a good one IMO. The problem, as the article notes, is what that data is going to be used for in the future. We used to call this a Slippery Slope argument but the past 10 years have proven that if data is harvested that it will eventually be misused; it’s some kind of parallel to Godwin’s Law that I am going to coin as “Flock’s Law”.

In this specific instance Flock’s Law tells us that the authorities will inevitably start scanning the photos / videos for people in order to track movements, the Police will be in the database stalking people, and you’ll start getting tickets for over-filling your trash can.

Meanwhile all people really want, and what won’t happen, is someone to come by to get that absolutely jungle of a lawn mowed, fix a broken sidewalk, replace a missing street sign, or move the damn boat / camper / trailer / junk car that has been parked in the street for the last year.

The only way to stop or reverse this is to get conservative capitalists out of our government.

So basically everyone including the Democratic Socialist Mayor of Seattle.

…so the next actionable step is to vote for and support socialists…

On the east Coast the formerly fiery Mamdani has gone silent on this issue since becoming Mayor.

I can find examples of this kind of thing from all over the United States. I’m using Mayors Wilson and Mamdani because they directly refute the idea that “Socialists” will stop this. They clearly will not.

My S26+ is decent and it was a nice upgrade over my S22+.

Foldable flip phones are an overly complicated solution to a nonexistent problem.

They solve the same problems as the original folding phones. They allow you to keep you phone in your slacks or skirt pocket without destroying the look of your outfit or the screen of your phone.

Slab phones are a disaster for pocket-ability. Yes you can shove it in your back pocket where it looks like ass, breaks your ass when you sit down, and breaks the screen or the phone itself if you sit down in the wrong way or on the wrong thing.

Folding phones solve those problems.

Sam Altmen made a comment on wanting to see basically compute sold as like a utility to people.

Meh, that idea is as old as Compute itself. In the early days, basically the 50’s into the 80’s, you had dumb terminals that only provided a connection to the actually powerful centralized hardware. Think mainframe although it went by different terms at different times.

Every decade or so someone like Altman regurgitates the concept and to date no one has been able to make it widely successful. For example Microsoft has been chasing it since the NT4 days when they licensed multi-session technology from Citrix and rebranded it as “Remote Desktop Services”. It’s still in use today by corporations but outside of particular industries with high demands for secure remote access you’ll almost never see it.

So the idea and actual implementations of it have been around for decades but it never catches on because it’s always more expensive, less performant, and less flexible than hoped for.

With that said if you cock your head and squint we kinda sorta reached it with all the browser and app based online services like e-mail, listening to music, etc. Kinda. It breaks down though in the exact place that it always has…when you want to create something more involved than a text document. Suddenly it’s back to it being more expensive, less performant, and less flexible than doing it on local hardware.

I live in Wyoming so I understand rural, however we are not the only folks with a “real” use for trucks. Plenty of reasons for a townie to own one.

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Then I mentioned the Uniphone S22

At least that one is flip phone so it’s closer but it’s still not running Linux, has a worse camera, no earphone jack, no FM radio, half the RAM, far less storage, worse CPU and so on.

Is all of that worth $350 $250? Depends on your use case I suppose but it’s absolutely not the same product.

but this product already exists for around $150 just with a crappier OS.

Qin doesn’t make a flip phone, they don’t use Linux, a worse camera, a shitty DAC, no headphone jack, and they’re all loaded with Google Apps / Spyware.

They aren’t the same product at all.

It had vaporware startup written all over it.

It can’t be “vaporware” when they are actually releasing products for purchase.

Irrelevant. Ali Rabii’s comment is public and available to read.

XBOX hardware is fine. It’s what they’ve done with it that’s the problem.

IIRC that chart only shows US Government investment / spending. A lot of other countries, such as South Korea, are spending on this and even here in the United States large sums are being spent on it by Venture Capitalists.

The “actual funding” line is wildly out of date since there’s several Fusion Companies that have spent more than that each in the past few years.

and now the courts are saying “fuck you”

It’s one Court and unsurprisingly it’s the Court located right there in town. I strongly suspect that the Third Court of Appeals is going to have a different take on this mess.

At least where I live you can’t wash away a deed restriction like this by transferring the property a couple times.

What specs? I’m in the market for 32Gb of DDR4…

Roku’s slide into corporatism kinda hurts. I really liked their product and their lead developer came from the Amiga Universe.

Is the recommended ONN streamer (see above) as good as the Roku at all the same shit?

I honestly don’t now. I haven’t owned a Google Streamer since the Asus days.