My goal was to share complex things I've learned through IRL experience, and explain them in detail.
Unfortunately in my case, I can't justify the distilling/production time sink unless there is some kind of monetary incentive. I already donate time to other projects, and there's only so much time in a day.
My incentive was merely to catalogue some historical things that were not catalogued elsewhere. Google, Wikipedia etc. LLMs knew only what was on Wikipedia.
I don't mind that LLMs will find it....I used a bunch of agents to find sources for them and produce summaries of it, and even to build the site. It took a lot of human research too, but all my notes and snippets were sent to LLMs.
I hope this means no more of these objects are lost.
In recent years I've thought about making blogs, videos, etc to share knowledge, but the incentive is just no longer there. Even before AI, youtube/web search/etc had plenty of problems, and now they're compounded.
I launched a website that is niche a few weeks ago, but totally unique. After a couple of weeks search console wakes up to tell me that they have indexed one page in 80. And that the top search term that is finding my site says exactly the name of one of my pages, yet Google is showing my homepage in search!
The problem with missing drivers is not "typing code fast enough", it is knowing that you need to poke 5 into [base-address + $0562] within 5 milliseconds of receiving an IRQ or something stupid like that which good docs would tell you why and how, but most/many vendors will not hand out docs on how to program their chips at that level. They will have docs on how to paint rectangles on an existing surface using the gfx card, but not on how to actually start it at poweron or something along those lines. If you can't make it start painting a screen and waking up the monitor at boot, it is of very little use that you can paint rectangles in the dark.
So even if you can divine that a binary windows driver sometimes writes a 5 into that register at certain times, you will have a far harder time figuring out how and when it is needed to actually do that, and the source you get will be super hard for anyone else to understand if its all magic numbers getting written into "random" locations, compared to say, "wificard.driver.radio_enable = ACTIVATE_RADIO;" even if it compiles into writing 5 to offset $0562. Such reverse-engineered sources are super hard to keep working in the long run, when someone rewrites how and when IRQs are delivered to devices or whatever major is happening in the kernels so this leads to drivers no longer working even if they did have a short period of use.
EU and US are slowing down while China doesn't slow down. In fact, they are pushing harder after gathering so much info from workers, and facial recognitions set in place for half a decade.
> vendors who collect this sensitive data need to be held to a higher standard.
They already do that, in Europe. I assume that it works, as I don’t hear about this level of stuff, over there (though it could be because I am not plugged into European news).
One thing about the US, is that companies that have the means, can afford regulatory capture, or even strait-up bribery. This is often magnified, at the local level. I am constantly hearing anecdotal stories about the absurd levels of naked corruption, in my town. Much of this, comes from my friends, who own businesses.
The more plugged-in we are, the more access these small, corrupt municipalities have; so a bribed bureaucrat in a small town, could have access to a national database. We’re hearing a lot about small-town cops, accessing Flock camera data.
I don't think this should be described as a tax. It's paid access to a scarce resource, no different from a parking garage charging people to park. In this case it just happens to be a government-owned resource, but that doesn't make the price a tax.
If you're worried about poor people, the right move is to price things properly and then give assistance to those who need it, rather than giving away scarce resources to everyone for free.
That’s the weakness of most modern “democracies”: people vote once every few years for one or other party who then do largely whatever they want, outside of some immutable manifesto commitments (which are often flexible anyway).
So no, people don’t vote for such things - they vote for parties who turn out to do such things at some point.
I think people understand "rich tech CEO putting cameras everywhere offers no assurances of people's privacy and legal rights, instead opts to call them terrorists" perfectly well
The fundamental issue is that Flock doesn't care about people's privacy or rights. That washes out in a variety of ways including CEOs' statements, product-level security controls (thus creating the horror stories), and lack of legal commitments to protections.
I would personally be in favor of a fairly widespread camera network that had significant legal protections built in. Flock has demonstrated – in every possible way – they cannot possibly be the providers of such a system.
Police are bounded by evidentiary laws and warrant requirements, all of which legitimately do stand up in court. Flock is not.
So no, actually Flock itself is the problem. If Flock were willing to sign some consent decree that its data can only be accessed by police with a valid judicial warrant, for example, they probably could've headed off this entire mess.
But instead they called people "terroristic" for pushing back. Completely braindead move from the CEO.
A weird take. They seem oblivious to the fact that real problem is not distrust of flock, it’s distrust of the police. They are in a situation where the public just barely trusts the local police, and a new surveillance system pushes them over the edge into hostility. They need to be working to gain much more trust.
No you cannot, as of yesterday. The mobile app doesn't even allow your choice of camera app, to avoid even the tiny amount of fraud that doing so might enable.
>In 2026 it is virtually impossible to quickly move money from one account to another because every single bit of it has to pass through the US Federal Reserve's ancient systems
Which is why FedNow went live in 2024. In 2025 it already completed processing of $864 billion in transactions in real time.
