Live data from Hacker News

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

stateofsurveillance.org

261–270 of 373 posts

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

#261
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why does this make it better for you the consumer? You still need to detect the lie and respond to it appropriately. Machines lie more elegantly, I think is the scary part

I wouldn't say machines lie more elegantly.

They lie more unpredictably.

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

#263
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.

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, but them justifying it by saying they're incompetent and nothing will happen?

And before someone screeches that wallyworld has cameras: so do many people now, too. The cops won't do anything even when a tracker like an airtag shows the bike is in a specific house. Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp and other forums are chock full of obvious stolen bike listings and people are easily tracing them to lost-bike posts.

There's a huge encampment under a bridge in my city that is known as the regional bike 'chop shop' where tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of bicycles are being cut up for their parts and the parts sold through fences and the frames et al going out for scrap metal.

The cops do not give a shit.

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

#265
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For throwing the tea into the harbor. By the way -- Where do you stand on throwing tea into the harbor? And where do you stand on the legitimacy of publicly discussing throwing tea into the harbor?

[flagged]

Based on the number of upvotes I'm getting I think it's you who's really struggling to make a point.

I don't think your arguing in good faith and you are getting called out on it by a few people. So you answer first, then I'll answer -- Was the boston tea party justified? Is civil disobedience ever justified? Is breaking the law a good thing sometimes if it's a bad law (e.g. Rosa Parks)?

If you can't answer those then I think you'll have convinced me and the rest of us that you aren't even trying to make a good-faith effort to make a point.

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

#266
post #174

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".

A browser plugin that scores webpage content based on how likely it is to have been AI-generated would be quite useful. Browser vendors can't build this.

AI is very hard to detect and changes on a weekly basis.

But you could build something that ranks the quality of the webpage content! This would also be more useful.

Of course, that tool would have to use AI...

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

#267

not sure why people are bothering with destruction, just drive around and shut them down wirelessly. some newer models require a button to be pressed for them to start the AP, but still leaves them vulnerable to attacks with a long stick and doesn't draw any attention while hundreds of cameras suddenly stop working, making the city government think they're unreliable.

Pending clarification, I suspect "just" is doing a lot of work!

models before 2024 are hardware vulnerable at modems, models after 2025 have a button on the back, 2026 I haven't looked into it.

put on a vest and it looks like you're just doing maintenance.

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

#270
post #174

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".

A browser plugin that scores webpage content based on how likely it is to have been AI-generated would be quite useful. Browser vendors can't build this.

Bot detectors are broken. Even human bot detectors are broken. When I'm in the right mood, I can be quite capable of writing with very good formatting, structure, and phrasing. When I actually take the time to do this, there seems to be about a 70% chance that some nimrod will crawl out of the woodwork just to accuse me of being a bot.

Even humans who deliberately use lazy formatting and leave obvious errors uncorrected to provide "proof" of being human aren't seeing the big picture, here.

---

That bigger picture is that it's easy to make instruct a bot to be lazy, or to avoid the usual quirks. I hate when I'm working on a project and see a constant outflow of negation ("Don't do x, y, or w" is a recent hit) and unfounded exclusive confidence ("The correct answer" as if this is Highlander and there can be only one). Repetitious jargon like overuse of "gate" for things other than fences and skiing is something I can't stand. Plus the usual things — like overuse of unusual punctuation — that are obvious tells.

That stuff all drives me nuts.

But the bot just follows instructions, and my bot has been instructed to avoid those things. It generally performs very well, though the instructions do need re-hashed every now and then as models ebb and flow.

It's super easy to get the bot to write some python or perl that takes a body of text and intentionally some words or lose a comma while mmaking other errors and converting — into --.

When it comes to human error in written language, we just aren't that hard to emulate.

Now, that all said: You'll just have to take my word for it, but I do not use the bot to help with writing English. But I do have every confidence that if I woke up tomorrow and actually started bulking up my comments using a bot, none of you would be able to tell.

Post reply on HN