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At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

stateofsurveillance.org

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Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#321

Post by dualvariable »

bko wrote: post #317
dualvariable wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask them what they think about cameras run by private companies being used to spy on them and their neighbors and see what the poll results look like. Just because people want policing doesn't mean they want the kind of policing that we seem to be getting. And that article you cite is a pretty good example of this. The title is: Black Americans Want Police to Retain Local Presence The bottom half is: Black Americans…

Let me introduce you to Ring security cameras... Police cameras are actually very popular, as is private security. I've even heard rich people voluntarily pay private security with guns (!) to protect them. You're living in fantasy land my friend. No one outside of your bubble thinks about things this way. People are trying to live their lives and raise their kids. People don't like this chaos and have very little em…

> The bottom half is: Black Americans Lack Assurance Police Encounters Will Go Well

My "bubble" is that I read past the headline and got more than halfway through that article that you cited.

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#322

Post by martin-t »

pstuart wrote: post #280
martin-t wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's why we need more direct democracy. People (correctly) feel like they have very little power over laws which affect them day to day. If someone represents me, then logically I should have the right to vote directly instead of him, or remove him at any point.

We need better democracy, where opportunities for corruption are minimized and proper representation is possible. Campaign finance reform would be the foundation for this, otherwise we will continue with legalized bribery. The other need is for daylight and accountability. As much as I loath the Web3 cryptocrowd, having some sort of public ledger of government operations would be incredibly valuable. Anything and eve…

I agree and we need to talk about specific things if we have any chance of turning ideas into change. The issue is these are complex topics not suited for a discussion platform where most activity on a post ceases within a day (and if it continues longer in rare cases, nobody sees it). But there are no really good platforms for this so everything is simplified into short statements which lose nuance.

---

It's impossible for every person to have a well-researched opinion on everything. Opponents of direct democracy use this to shoot it down. But it applies to indirect democracy too.

The real issue we need to solve is how to make sure people (whether all citizens or representatives) only vote on what they actually understand.

I think votes weighted based on the score of a knowledge test would be a good start if the test is well-designed. But we need to figure out how to decide what the questions are (what is relevant, what is enough in-depth, what is too specific, etc.) and what the correct answers are (some topics are still a matter of debate even among experts). And that's hard.

It's hard in a cooperative environment (e.g. engineers deciding which factors are relevant to their proposed solution) and it's even harder in an adversarial environment like politics.

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#323

Post by AnimalMuppet »

toasty228 wrote: post #243
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to see your legal reasoning on how harvesting them is constitutional.

It doesn't really matter as long as it ends up in a training set somewhere

So, to clarify: You want to tell blatant untruths online so that LLMs pick them up and persuade people to act on them.

That's... one way to attempt to incite action, I suppose. Not a very honorable or ethical one, I must say.

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#324

Post by cindyllm »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #263
piloto_ciego wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say, "you can't commit violence against a camera" but now everything is violence if it costs someone money.

...only if it costs a corporation money. Someone shoplifts $50 worth of stuff from Wallyworld and the cops come a runnin' (if they're not already there, because they station a cop full time there.) Someone steals your $500 bicycle and cops tell you not to bother filing a police report because nothing will happen. How did we start tolerating public employees not only discouraging people from making them do their jobs,…

[dead]

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#325

Post by jessfyi »

tptacek wrote: post #255
jessfyi wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Sure, keep calling me a cosplayer. I must be! It's a message board, and I disagree with you. What other explanation could there be? It's definitely not as if I've been talking incessantly about this since long before "deflock" was a thing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41927777 The search bar will avail for the rest of the story.

[flagged]

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#326

Post by downrightmike »

sevenzero wrote: post #9
SilverElfin wrote: post #8

Speed cameras and other surveillance state Trojan horses next please. Not just flock.

Speed cameras? I dont know, as long as people kill people with their vehicles, speed cameras are a tiny evil.

by this logic we need body cams for every pen owner. Pens are class A weapons after all.

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#327

Post by woadwarrior01 »

linolevan wrote: post #216
sigmoid10 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is virtually impossible to build. Not just because all current "AI detector" systems are fake or outright scams with accuracy comparable to a coin-flip on frontier model output, but because even if someone did build a reliable detector and released it to the public, it could be used for adversarial training and it would become worthless pretty fast.

Pangram is legit. I don't work at pangram, we integrated it in our paper website and one of the cool emergent behaviors I've seen is that on AI papers with example rollouts, it will accurately mark the paper's main text as human generated and the rollouts as AI generated. My understanding is that they strongly believe in no false positives, so it's definitely possible to slip something by them but if it marks somethi…

> Pangram is legit.

Their 99.98% accuracy claim[1] makes me doubt that.

[1]: https://www.pangram.com/solutions/chrome-extension

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#328

Post by martin-t »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #308
atmavatar wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with representative democracy arises when it stops being representative. Alas, at least in the US, Congress nearly always votes according to moneyed interests over the desires of its constituent voters. That isn't to say we should use something other than representative democracy. I believe the best option is to fix the system rather than replace it. However, it does explain why people currently feel they…

I think increasing the size of the House would make representatives more responsive to their constituents. I also don't think it'll ever happen for exactly that reason.

As an European, the biggest issue with US politics I see is that you only have 2 parties. It makes no sense. As a voter, you can only express a binary choice and whatever you choose for the issue you care about most effectively decides what you vote for regarding all other issues.

I'd like to see more separation. If we are to keep indirect democracy, at least have separate representation for criminal law, economic decisions (taxes, healthcare, ...), social decisions (abortions, marriage, ...), etc. But even where to draw the lines is difficult. I think that too should be in some ways decided by voters.

Of course, in a country which can't get rid of FPTP/plurality, despite being objectively the worst voting system[0-3], that's never gonna happen. If you need to explain math to people to convince them, you've already lost, because people are not smart enough and definitely not educated enough.

[0]: https://rangevoting.org/

[1]: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-voting-...

[2]: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

[3]: https://ncase.me/ballot/

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#330

Post by tptacek »

jessfyi wrote: post #325
tptacek wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, keep calling me a cosplayer. I must be! It's a message board, and I disagree with you. What other explanation could there be? It's definitely not as if I've been talking incessantly about this since long before "deflock" was a thing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41927777 The search bar will avail for the rest of the story.

[flagged]

I don't believe you knew any what I just posted, or you wouldn't have used "cosplayer" as your epithet. And why would I keep talking to you after that? You made it clear that wasn't productive, and that's fine: you and I simply never need to discuss this issue. We'll both be OK.

The funny part of this is that you didn't even bother to hit the search bar; if you had, your "municipality still uses Flock" thing wouldn't have made any sense.

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