Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

stateofsurveillance.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 373 posts

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

#241

Post by cj »

unglaublich wrote: post #201
taylodl wrote: post #175

25 cameras destroyed over the course of a year, and more than half were destroyed by a single person. This doesn't appear to be a widespread concern the headline makes it out to be.

I think the concern is widespread, but most people aren't ready to challenge the government which can have severe consequences to your life.

Does a significant percentage of the population even know what flock is or that it's happening?

In my non-tech circles, people don't think and don't care about this stuff.

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

#242

Post by Groxx »

timcobb wrote: post #232
Groxx wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless there's evidence that all of it was fact-checked, it's a waste of time to look harder. You can get any output you like, it doesn't mean it's correct.

How different is this from humans? In my experience people fill in the blanks quite the same, they just do it less convincingly and sometimes maliciously. Having the sort of prejudice you describe against AI content doesn't make sense if you consider humans make mistakes and lie all the time, coming from a position of less knowledge than LLMs. You need to approach both with similar caution.

At least part of it is that we do attribute malice or lack of care (or madness) to people who repeatedly do it, and treat their output differently in the future.

For some reason, some people repeatedly defend machines that constantly do the same thing, and claim we should give it the benefit of the doubt.

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

#244

Post by ergocoder »

tfourb wrote: post #95
DevKoala wrote: post #76

[flagged]

How about addressing the root causes of crime (i.e. poverty) instead of suppressing the symptoms by pushing crime out of politically powerful areas into politically marginalized areas? I'm not a fan of vandalism and luckily I'm living in a country where I have the law on my side when demanding that public space is not surveilled indiscriminately, but I totally understand the urge to simply take a stick to a camera th…

> How about addressing the root causes of crime (i.e. poverty)

Ok, let's get on it!

What do we do while we wait for the root causes to be addressed? It has been more than 20-30 years at least.

Can we use short-term solutions while waiting? no?

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

#245

Post by linksnapzz »

ai_critic wrote: post #199
zug_zug wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda like saying "Throwing the British's tea into Boston harbor will only make us subject to harsher terms." The reality is the vast majority of social progress in the last millenium was achieved with force and threat of force. I find this weird revisionist "violence is never the answer" trope recited as a fact that needs no justification to be incredibly weird and unreliable.

That's...exactly what happened with the Boston Tea Party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intolerable_Acts Had France not been willing to subsidize an insurgent campaign to distract the British, it's incredibly likely those Acts would've remained in place for some time. People who rush to using violence as an answer frequently do not consider the outcome if they've misjudged their opponents' capacity for it.

>People who rush to using violence as an answer frequently do not consider the outcome if they've misjudged their opponents' capacity for it.

It's part of the fun of being an internet revolutionary. Eventually, though, most end up thinking things through.

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

#246

Post by jfengel »

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…

What is a rollout in this context?

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

#247

Post by skiing_crawling »

tolerance wrote: post #48

I've warmed to LLM-generated/assisted writing in general but this kind of stuff is just lazy and is basically "I got Claude to say something I agree with and then made it pretty".

AI didn't start this, journalist have been using wordplay to "technically tell the truth" forever.

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

#248

Post by wartywhoa23 »

threecheese wrote: post #229
DevKoala wrote: post #76

[flagged]

Great, deploy cameras there, and have them monitored by the local police for violent crime. Don’t: - use the cameras to capture license plates, vehicle type/color/trim/stickers/personalization, and individual persons with clear biometric markers like faces, gait etc - use that data to populate a commercial database of citizen movements spanning the nation, which can be used to trivially match to an identity (if that…

Also

- make sure that cameras work in all cases regardless of the social status / net worth / closeness of ties to the Prince Of This World, etc, of those who committed a crime caught on camera, or those of the victim of said crime.

I don't know about US, but in Russia it's a common trope when a judge's son / kingpin's daughter, etc, run someone over on a crosswalk and all the cameras in vicinity suddenly glitch out and die, or vice versa - cameras thought to have never worked appear working alright when a high profile scumbag is assaulted.

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

#249

Post by cj »

timcobb wrote: post #232
Groxx wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless there's evidence that all of it was fact-checked, it's a waste of time to look harder. You can get any output you like, it doesn't mean it's correct.

How different is this from humans? In my experience people fill in the blanks quite the same, they just do it less convincingly and sometimes maliciously. Having the sort of prejudice you describe against AI content doesn't make sense if you consider humans make mistakes and lie all the time, coming from a position of less knowledge than LLMs. You need to approach both with similar caution.

> How different is this from humans?

Humans exercise judgement.

At least when humans lie they're usually doing it on purpose. When machines lie they don't know they're doing it.

Post reply on HN