The fun part is that these cameras are not owned, operated or property of your local jurisdiction. They are hardware/software as a service. IANAL, but I think Flock would have to sue you.

I have not personally de-flocked anything, but my local area doesn’t have any that aren’t tied to a business parking lot.

If some show up, I can’t imagine a 5 minute walk with a hat, face mask and a can of spraypaint wouldn’t be sufficient to disable one without risk. Might need a stool.

Agreed. For anyone not already following Louis Rossmann, he’s a right-to-repair guy on an anti-surveilance arc and is always posting good information that will make you seethe.

His city tried to buy Flock cameras and he organized enough resistance that they cancelled… but then they are trying again a while later, assuming the scrutiny is off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MiLiQ6olkI

Ring will do the same thing.

Microslop, Meta, Google, et al will get their hands slapped when they are too proud about how they are fucking you, and then will issue a retraction, but only long enough to let the anger die out before doing it again more quietly.

I hear that. My local ABC store doesn’t scan my ID, though I don’t see a future where they don’t eventually scan every time; and my local grocery store scans occasionally, but not always.

I can’t just not buy age-verified products, though, because sometimes it’s cold medicine or a prescription. **

Back to the original thread, this is not a Discord problem, this is a privacy problem. We need to push back on data capture in general and tell legislators that privacy is important to all people, even those who buy booze.

** could we make little sneaky stickers that obfuscate the barcode enough to prevent it scanning? The cashier would likely revert to visual inspection without the data retention: face matches photo, age is good, override.

so… you do want face verification for online interactions?

edit: In-person, for a “regulated” substance - it seems reasonable to require that proof be checked as part of policy, regardless of appearance. There’s no storage (in most cases) and the cashier is the only one who looks at the ID and they are supposed to do it to keep their job. The only place I’ve seen recently where your ID is actually tracked is stuff like sudafed, where buying too much makes you a potential meth maker.

Online, the rule has been “trust me, bro” forever. There’s no person testing you, aside from maybe a paywall to ensure you have a credit card as an age check. Steam is doing the online equivalent of minimal validation and minimal retention that the booze store is.

This is hardly OMGVALVE.

Perfect. And then later, “I hope you enjoyed your glue pizza. We don’t have enough fuel to reach Paris or return to land. This plane has no emergency beacon or flotation devices and is about to “land” in the ocean. Sorry for the inconvenience!”

I wish him to sleep in a bed made by AI. Eat a meal made by AI. And then take a flight in a plane made and piloted by AI.

Does that make this better? A translated French search query would be ‘joining video call isn’t working’ and that will return results for every conference tool known to man.

Call it something like FVC (la France VisioConférence) , or some French play on the way that sounds, which would be a uniquely searchable term in this domain.

This is not a hill I’m dying on, but it’s terminally short sighted and a bad user experience to name your product the same thing as a microslop trademark. They are the worst for this already with their multiple active variants of office 365 tools like outlook and their xbox name nonsense.

Oh, I have a great idea for a new car company. Lets call it ‘Car’! Then people can have a Car Car, or maybe even a Car Car 2026… oh or a Car Truck when we branch out. (future google search: replace car truck 2028 oil filter)

Came to comment this. I know there are only so many letters, and so many combinations of 4-8 of them, but can we quit naming new things with the name of an old thing?

Finding any details about France’s Visio is going to be a cluster.

I’m 90% on-board with disliking these, but I can see uses for ‘Augmented Reality’ glasses. I just wish they worked the way they do in Sci-fi and video games.

Lots of interactions we have on our phones could be done hands-free on a HUD

automatic translation of text or voice when traveling navigation/directions and similar guidance, like automatic subway/train maps instant access to biometric data trends like heart rate, glucose levels and more

I’ve also been part of a pilot to get a HUD to provide AR data to a manufacturing operator, showing things like line speed, temperature and other kinds of data they would otherwise have to go to a computer for. This was around the google glass era, though, and the devices were too pricey to justify and the tech wasn’t there yet.

I do think these devices need to be more obvious. We called them glassholes when google was starting this wearable computing trend and people were using them inappropriately; and we’ve seen how any internet-connected camera like Ring and Flock can be abused.

The concept of the personal HUD is useful, but it still needs workshopping to make it socially safe. Also, the ones like the Meta/Rayban glasses are just pervert tools. No AR, just a camera has no value other than creeping.

I’m certainly not a microslop supporter, but…

They designed a system that recommended that the average user use full disk encryption as part of device setup, and then provided a way that Grandma could easily recover her family photos when she set it up with their cloud.

This was built by an engineer trying to prevent a foreseeable issue. The intent was not malicious. The intent was to get more people more secure by default, since random hacker couldn’t compell ms to give them keys, while still allowing low tech literacy people to not get fucked.

It’s been a while since I installed a new Windows OS, but I’m pretty sure it prompts you to allow uploading your bitlocker key. It probably defaults to yes, but I doubt you can’t say no, or reset the key post onboarding if you want the privacy, and now it’s on you to record your key. You do have to have some technical understanding of the process, though, which is true of just about everything.

That all said, if a company has your data, it can be demanded by the government. This is a cautionary tale about keeping your secrets secret. Don’t put them in GitHub, don’t put them in Chrome, don’t put them online anywhere because the Internet never forgets.

The big difference is that smart phones and centralized internet are somewhat useful. Smartphones at least. Centralized internet… meh, but maybe a dependency.

AI is useful in only very niche and intentional cases. A ‘generic’ LLM is pretty bad at almost everything.

If ‘AI’ had been sold more like: “Give us a year of data samples from your production line and we can use ML to optimize time and temperature based on current weather patterns…” (real world use case I was working in on 2019) etc. then they would have really made the world better. Instead, I have crappy clippy constantly reading my email and suggesting words I wasn’t going to type*.

• I don’t understand how corps accept the idea that their internal emails are no longer internal, since everything is sent to chatgpt/copilot/gemeni/etc as it’s created. Shouldn’t Legal have thrown a tantrum over this?!

Big tech boss tells delegates at Davos that broader global use is essential if technology is to deliver lasting growth

Let me rephrase:

“Smart” entitled person says our product is not showing value, so we need to force people to use it more than we already are after years of cramming it down their throats.

I really like this comment. It covers a variety of use cases where an LLM/AI could help with the mundane tasks and calls out some of the issues.

The ‘accuracy’ aspect is my 2nd greatest concern: An LLM agent that I told to find me a nearby Indian restaurant, which it then hallucinated is not going to kill me. I’ll deal, but be hungry and cranky. When that LLM (which are notoriously bad at numbers) updates my spending spreadsheet with a 500 instead of a 5000, that could have a real impact on my long-term planning, especially if it’s somehow tied into my actual bank account and makes up numbers. As we/they embed AI into everything, the number of people who think they have money because the AI agent queried their bank balance, saw 15, and turned it into 1500 will be too damn high. I don’t ever foresee trusting an AI agent to do anything important for me.

“trust”/“privacy” is my greatest fear, though. There’s documentation for the major players that prompts are used to train the models. I can’t immediately find an article link because ‘chatgpt prompt train’ finds me a ton of slop about the various “super” prompts I could use. Here’s OpenAI’s ToS about how they will use your input to train their model unless you specifically opt-out: https://openai.com/policies/how-your-data-is-used-to-improve-model-performance/

Note that that means when you ask for an Indian restaurant near your home address, Open AI now has that address in it’s data set and may hallucinate that address as an Indian restaurant in the future. The result being that some hungry, cranky dude may show up at your doorstep asking, “where’s my tikka masala”. This could be a net-gain, though; new bestie.

The real risk, though, is that your daily life is now collected, collated, harvested and added to the model’s data set; all without your clear explicit actions: using these tools requires accepting a ToS that most people will not really read and understand. Maaaaaany people will expose what is otherwise sensitive information to these tools without understanding that their data becomes visible as part of that action.

To get a little political, I think there’s a huge downside on the trust aspect of: These companies have your queries(prompts), and I don’t trust them to maintain my privacy. If I ask something like “where to get abortion in texas”, I can fully see OpenAI selling that prompt to law enforcement. That’s an egregious example for impact, but imagine someone could query prompts (using an AI which might make shit up) and asks “who asked about topics anti-X” or “pro-Y”.

My personal use of ai: I like the NLP paradigm for turning a verbose search query into other search queries that are more likely to find me results. I run a local 8B model that has, for example, helped me find a movie from my childhood that I couldn’t get google to identify.

There’s use-case here, but I can’t accept this as a SaaS-style offering. Any modern gaming machine can run one of these LLMs and get value without the tradeoff from privacy.

Adding agent power just opens you up to having your tool make stupid mistakes on your behalf. These kinds of tools need to have oversight at all times. They may work for 90% of the time, but they will eventually send an offensive email to your boss, delete your whole database, wire money to someone you didn’t intend, or otherwise make a mistake.

I kind of fear the day that you have a crucial confrontation with your boss and the dialog goes something like:

Why did you call me an asshole?

I didn’t the AI did and I didn’t read the response as much as I should have.

Oh, OK.

Edit: Adding as my use case: I’ve heard about LLMs being described as a blurry JPEG of the internet, and to me this is their true value.

We don’t need a 800B model, we need an easy 8B model that anyone can run that helps turn “I have a question” into a pile of relevant actual searches.

In the nicest possible way, and only judging from this post, you are part of the problem. Hear me out:

They don’t actually need you. Either party. There’s a solid base of voters who are going to vote blue or stay home, or vote red or stay home. If you require being courted, then you’re either effectively random, staying home, or lean towards one side over the other.

You’re possibly upset that none of your choices are good. That’s pretty true. ‘both sides’ have reasons to not vote for them. You need to help fix that: pick a side, whichever one you lean towards, and go make the choices better.

Local politics (the ones at the precinct, county, state levels) decide how we choose our candidates in the larger races by deciding who represents us on those larger stages internally to the party. Example: the general public was not polled for the dnc chair election, it was only people put into dnc leadership, who were voted for, several steps down, by people at the precinct level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Democratic_National_Committee_chairmanship_election

Is there corporate bullshit here? almost certainly. Can it be overcome? Only if people are paying attention and care to get involved. Voting only in November elections and expecting the candidates to cater to you specifically will not resolve the problems.

The candidates don’t need to work for your vote. You need to work for better candidates. Or shut up and vote for the least harm.

And this is why Digit wanted a clarification. Let’s make a quick split between “Tech Bro” and Technology Enthusiast.

I’d maybe label myself a “tech guy”, and forego the “bro”, but I could see other people calling me a “tech bro”. I like following tech trends and innovations, and I’m often a leading adopter of things I’m interested in if not bleeding edge. I like talking about tech trends and will dive into subjects I know. I’ll be quick to point out how machine learning can be used in certain circumstances, but am loudly against “AI”/LLMs being shoved into everything. I’m not the CEO or similar of a startup.

Your specific and linked definition requires low critical thinking skills, big ego and access to “too much” money. That doesn’t describe me and probably doesn’t describe Digit’s network.

Their whole point seemed to be that the tech-aware people in their sphere are antagonistic to the idea of “AI” being added to everything. That doesn’t deserve derision.

Yeah:

“The most hurtful thing (Trump) said, which is absolutely untrue, is he called me a traitor, and that is so extremely wrong,” Greene said, “and those are the types of words used that can radicalize people against me and put my life in danger.”

Despite her vitriol having put tons of other peoples’ lives or at lest livelihoods in danger, she seems to want to change when it’s aimed at her.

fucking traitor (to the US).

Not just the primaries! My city is pretty purple. We tend to vote republican by a slim majority in larger races (think 51/49), but in the mayor and city council race that just happened, the republican mayor won at like 66/33. Vote every chance or you cede your power to the people who do.

The fix is to start local. Bob’s right: that school PTO experience will be on the candidate’s bio when they run for mayor, even if they are the karen-est karen, and it will sway a few people. That ® mayor has power over a huge amount of how the city is run and many of the things people are locally unhappy with are a direct result of them electing a rich asshole. If we elect Dems locally, we might be able to sway people to our side when the situation gets better under our leadership.

We individuals have the power but it’s got a bit of a lag-time to it. Become informed about how the DNC structure works (best done by joining your local precinct, even if you do nothing more than joining a few meetings). The precincts vote for who runs the county, the counties vote for who runs the state, the states vote for the nation and it’s all based on head-count of participants: a large precinct by population might only have a relative few people engaged and will not have as large an impact when voting in upstream elections. If we’re mad at DNC leadership or the options we have for congress/president, the fix is to ensure people at the precinct-level are the right ones.

This comment is a direct response to anyone saying “both sides”, “dem’s are still corporate shills”, or similar defeatist comments. The “spineless dems” currently have power at the top of the party, but we can fix that. It will take work. It will require time, and that time will be hard to justify with little immediate result. This is the battle we need to fight right now, though. It just needs to be constant and not only complaining online and voting every 2-4 years.

While I believe that this is accurate, as a broad stroke and specifically of the DNC itself, any individual democratic politician is not necessarily corrupt and playing a foil. Especially as you get more and more local.

Don’t let cynicism prevent you from voting for a local candidate for mayor or city council, for example. It’ll take time to see if Mamdani is what he claims to be, but it’s not unreasonable for someone who is mad at the current situation to run for office with a real intent to improve things.

The way we fix things is by getting the local orgs to throw their weight around. Those precinct orgs get votes in the district and district vote in state and state vote nationally. If you’re mad right now or were mad in 2020, then get involved. Find your local democratic organization and become the change. Under our Representative Democracy, we don’t always directly elect our leadership, but we do get to elect the people that elect the people that elect the people… Gotta start at the bottom and ensure that first step has our values in mind. Right now, too many people only get involved every 2-4 years and are mad at the results.

“President” and “Senator” are important titles, but so is “County Chair”. Doing this and pushing the Democratic party further left will be more effective than sending a protest vote for a third party every 4 years, but you can do both.

It seemed somewhat topical to me. Google’s censorship is the same trend of enshittification that Yar is talking about.

There are tons of other comments talking about the censorship issue. Using this moment to plug open source software is not unreasonable.

We can learn a few things from the French. They seem to have good ideas about how to protest for sure.

A question: How do you think you get to the point where the quiet majority feels confident enough to show up in force? To ‘disrupt the system’?

We Americans, by our own devices, have become a very insular people. We have social media, which puts us all in our little bubbles and cellphones, which distract us from the actual people around us. We sit in despair about rising prices and the tragedies inflicted on ourselves or our neighbors, our world. We watch our rights get eroded.

These protests are a symbol that we are not alone. That there are others out there that are also mad. These protests burst the bubble that technology has trapped us in. Read through the comments with this in mind: How many people were surprised at the turnout being larger than expected. And for each of those, there’s a comment indicating it could be larger. As we come to terms with how many allies we have, we gain collective power. Sure, we have it now, but we’re not willing to wield it yet. Building the confidence that you will be one among many is the key to wielding that power. Ten people protesting will be intimidated by the local police. Ten thousand will intimidate the police instead. Ten million will intimidate the government.

I write actual responses to throwaway comments all the time. I don’t do this for Auli or Fresh, I do this for those that might agree with you on the surface. This protest was not intended to make immediate change. It was intended to build pressure, to unite the people and to show support for the cause. When we show up and make a scene, we provide a shield for those who are not as willing to be in front to join in. When they join in, we grow and are able to pull in even more. Every thumbs-up from a car is someone who is on our side, but due to life commitments or fear did not attend… this time.

Edit: Followup: If you want faster change… do it. What’s your idea? Build a movement and implement or shut the fuck up. You might find that it’s hard to find other people willing to risk their safety and arrest to block a street, or to risk losing their job to strike with only a few people involved. When we have the numbers to make the system fear what we could do, we will win, even if we never have to do it.