281–290 of 354 posts
These horrific things are multiplying exponentially in my (rural GA) environs. There are a dozen of them along every conceivable cycling route I could take, and far more if I drive somewhere. If you think this is a city thing meant to deter urban crime, the explosive proliferation of Flock cameras in quite rural and suburban areas may shock you. I find them in the darndest of places, near but not on county lines, adj…
Benn Jordan, you mean. Good video.
These horrific things are multiplying exponentially in my (rural GA) environs. There are a dozen of them along every conceivable cycling route I could take, and far more if I drive somewhere. If you think this is a city thing meant to deter urban crime, the explosive proliferation of Flock cameras in quite rural and suburban areas may shock you. I find them in the darndest of places, near but not on county lines, adj…
These things proliferate where people trust the government or see the government as a means to the end of getting one over on whoever is bad for them. So the Nth generation group of townies that run any given rural shithole will happily slap them up, the government represents them as far as they're concerned. And meanwhile in some snooty inner ring Chicago suburb that fancies themselves "progressive" (but in what dir…
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What LLM can I get and feed hundreds of hours of video into that will give me the position of a specific vehicle alongside when that happened? An LLM isn’t going to help you here, but basic Computer Vision and a SQL database has been a solution _if you have the cameras_. I wrote a license plate reader as a university project using OpenCV almost 20 years ago.
If you were able to write one 20 years ago, I dare say an LLM could whip one up super-fast. Or just search the internet and tell you where to find one. One of the risks of LLMs is that a lot of tasks go from "an expert could do this easily given a few weeks" to "anyone who thinks to ask an LLM can do this easily and get results the same day"
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In your conception, the only reason any drug store is able to stay in business is because deodorant thieves are getting hard time? If enough people are stealing deodorant to put them out of business, I think there are some big social problems that jail time isn’t going to fix. Frankly, i’d 100% of the time rather bare the cost of shoplifters thru slightly higher prices than thru paying ~$100,000 year each incarcerati…
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NYC is quite safe compared to most US cities. It is still more dangerous than most major cities in the developed world.
I did a quick check here and it has a lower crime and a higher safety score than London and Paris. https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Uni...
So when it comes to concerns of safety, I’m going to trust the recorded homicide rate much more than whatever metrics feed into numbeo’s index. And NYC has a homicide rate nearly three times as high as either London or Paris. That’s much better than many cities in America, which can surpass 5 or even 10 murders per 100k residents a year, but it’s still more dangerous than most European cities and substantially so.
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Again you are pointing out the similarities while conveniently ignoring the things that have changed. It has been a continuous gradual slide. The publicized flock examples make clear that the nature and scope of the queries that can be run against modern systems are far beyond what was possible in the 90s. The databases are also far larger. You are the person arguing that because you're allowed to pick up a pebble it…
Where's the basis for the claim that Flock was the first nation-wide ALPR aggregator? The source mentions that Flock aggregated data on a national level, but doesn't say that it was the first to do so. In fact it doesn't really offer any tangible thing that differentiates this from the decades old systems that predate flock. It's more like trucks are have been mining gravel from this pit for decades, and the courts h…
I am not singling out flock here. I am merely observing that a given behavior having been deemed legal or constitutionally protected in one context does not necessarily translate over to another. Your previous line of argument justifying that the practices of flock et al are legal depends on such specious reasoning.
It's legal for any random citizen to build one of these surveillance networks, right?
Correct, at least in the US you can record people in public pretty much at any time.
We need some way to address the low level crime in the US. If you look at cities in east Asia, they're both much larger than typical US cities and much safer. It -is- possible to have safe large cities. The fact that we don't is a choice.
Don't we? Crime rates have been dropping for decades. https://usafacts.org/answers/what-is-the-crime-rate-in-the-u... But if the choice is between liberty and safety, then Americans are supposed to choose liberty, that's why America is what it is. Ben Franklin famously said, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
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Having been in Texas last month these cameras are all over your state. I saw them everywhere from the smallest city to houston https://imgur.com/a/P7WxKpU
They're all basically turned off by law, just not removed
To go from my house to the grocery store 4 miles away, I have to drive by 6 flock camera deployments. Hardware store 6 miles away? That's at least 9-12 cameras I have to pass.
I literally cannot leave my neighborhood without Flock knowing about it because they've installed them at every single entrance.
And that's just the driving portion of a trip. I stopped going to Big box stores almost completely because I'm tired of looking up as I walk down the aisles and see a fucking screen showing me on camera with big red letters stating "Recording in progress". That's not enough though, you go to the self checkout and have cameras above you and in the checkout machines watching and recording and analyzing your every movement and facial expression.
It's blatantly obvious what's going on if people would look up from their phones for 10 minutes and pay attention.
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A camera in 2026 is not the camera of 1996. Cameras today are connected to active and passive monitoring systems which are much more invasive to privacy. What will a camera be able to do in 2036?
To the contrary, cameras have been able to automatically read license plates since the 70s, and the technology became cheaper and more widely deployed in the 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni... At the end of the day, a camera in public can only record images of people in public. That does not and never did require a warrant.
With Flock that can be reduced to a mere search query across many locales (maybe not even their locale!) with effectively no effort spent.
When the cost changes so dramatically it effectively changes the balance of power and that is something we should, at the very least, deeply consider.