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Same. One of my UPS accounts would up with about $300 of shipping charges for things that were very clearly not to or from me. Impossible to get ahold of anyone at UPS to discuss/dispute this. Just wound up creating a new account.

Seems to require Chrome? In Firefox it's just a text box, nothing happens. Was confused at first about what it was supposed to do, the rest of the page made it clear it was supposed to mess about with whatever text you write.

Trying it in Chrome and seeing the results I'm not sure that it is really that helpful. Has undertones of elementary school grammar lessons highlighting words in sentences.

To be clear, I was defending YC's investment in them, not Flock at their early stages. If you have spoken to Garrett in the early days you would have heard a much different vision than today.

In their defense, Flock didn't start off quite this way. They were initially offering a product geared to HOAs and private entities to help with simple violations and things like that. At some point they stumbled on this loophole of allowing LEO's to sidestep restrictions on collecting and storing this kind of data, and then it took off. They were well past the YC investment at that point.

(and just to be clear, at this point I think that Flock has turned into an anti-Constitutional threat to US Citizens and should be wholesale banned and put out of business).

This can only mean that IBM Clippy is next.

Sure, if you want to trust a cheap knock-off with no Apple logo.

I learned my lessons from cube chargers, not going to risk getting ripped off again with some no-name product.

I wish Messenger had an auto-reply feature: "I probably won't see your message for a while because I don't install Meta apps on my phone"

Bug or feature?

At this point the barrier for me to install an app is pretty high. If you're going to needlessly gate certain functions behind an app that work on a desktop browser (or could work in-browser), then I just won't use those functions. If by extension that degrades the value I get from your site, then I just won't use the site, and I won't be contributing to ADU stats you promote to advertisers.

Every single company has turned this into a situation where I cannot trust your apps with privacy or security, and the risk and hassle isn't worth the install.

Given Flock's behavior to date, I really don't consider the assumption that they could move to selling collected data to be a conspiracy theory.

We have already seen that data is a highly valuable currency. And investor-backed companies with unicorn valuations are pressured to extract as much value as they can. All things considered, I would say that Flock continuing to monetize access to their collected data in new ways is a foregone conclusion unless it is specifically stopped or prohibited in some way. On top of that, I would wager that it may be already happening in some low-volume ways.

Yet?

You have to admit, the precedent for them being a company that understands the sensitivity of this data has not been set.

Technically, most people came at it with no strong perspective. The pushback developed when it became undeniably clear the the devices were being abused, and there was no accountability. In particular, Flocks CEO has handled this extremely poorly.

I’m all for the positive use cases, and have been involved with several similar products, but in this case Flock has completely mishandled the situation and created the situation they now find themselves in.

For a relatively small battery like that, it's not going to last for days. In the typical outage where that battery would carry you, you can typically just leave the fridge closed and it will stay cold enough to prevent 99% of your stuff from spoiling. For most people (at least the US), it's not super easy to get at the plug in the back of the fridge anyway.

Running HVAC is usually more of a concern, especially in winter or peak of summer, and those aren't device that you can hot-plug, and a small battery wouldn't help there anyway.

I like the idea of whole-house batteries, but to really make it practical you're talking about thousands of dollars to the battery, install, etc. And you still don't have extensive run time, which is why I think you see most people still leaning towards permanent or portable generators way more than batteries.

It had my boat name, which so far I haven't seen duplicated, and isn't particularly specific to anything that would preclude someone else from using it.

You're setting yourself up for a lonely life.

I think it is like CGI in movies, in the beginning it was often obvious and jarring. Over time as it gets better the obviousness of AI images will be much harder to spot and they will be common without being noteworthy.

Not quite sure how you got that out of my comment, but no. In the US at least, those classified as poor have a very low tax burden, in many cases they pay $0, or close to $0 in federal taxes after standard deductions.

FWIW, I was with you until the "Tax the rich" bit. Considering how many people the average "rich" person employs, they are generating plenty of tax revenue.

I'll have to try and dig out a couple of the ones I bought and re-verify this. Really though the 60fps doesn't matter for the majority of users. Even the 4K aspect is overkill for most common things.

ISTR GoPro moved away from Ambarella SoCs several years ago and rolled their own, but most of the other cameras are using Amba, Novatek, etc., and certainly offer great performance for a fraction of the cost of GoPro.

Not surprising, it's a commoditized sector.

On top of that, when GoPro first launched mobile phones generally did not have cameras capable of producing production-quality images, and especially video. 20 years later, the game is much different.

Remember the Flip video camera that was all the rage for like 2 years and then just disappeared when cellphones could shoot video? GoPro is like a rugged Flip, so it took a little longer for the world to catch up to them, but now there are lots of options, and a "cheap" sports camera that is 1/4 the price of a GoPro is good enough, even if it only lasts 1/2 as long.

Are you looking for Good or Great?

If you just need Good, there are dozens of no-brand options on Amazon and Ali that do 4K60fps with output that is more than sufficient for any non-professional use.

I don't have a brand recommendation off hand, because the ones I've bought have been random names, but they've all been more than enough. As a reference, I've used them for capturing footage for training machine vision systems, and some general purpose marketing videos. I'm not a "creator", so I paid no attention to editing features, clip hosting, or any of those things.

Amazon sometimes gets some hate here, but I usually just buy there because the returns process is so simple. In the random case I get a product that turned out to be deceptive advertising, I drop it at Whole Foods and have a credit before I leave the parking lot. And I have the product in hand in 48 hours at most.

There used to be a card you could plug into a PC ISA Bus that gave you a second workstation/interface. The main selling point was to allow 2 users to share a single PC for cost savings. IIRC, it only supported text displays, but for 99% of the use cases at the time that was plenty.

I use the 1st of my birth month. Slightly less suspicious? It's at least a little easier to remember. Generate fake profiles and identities usually is easier when you have bits that are rooted in your actual reality. Like, you have the same zodiac sign either way in this case, so you don't have to remember two of everything. Or if you're talking about a birthday trip, or related birthday thing from the past, details about the weather would be consistent, etc.

Never? Facebook is pretty overrun with what are basically fake profiles. Hell, I've been curating an alter ego on Facebook for over a decade. Built up a profile with several dozen "friends" that are all kind of interconnected and regional, but of course none of them have ever met "me" IRL, and the profile picture is a funny-ish celeb pic. Facebook has millions of legit users that are "friend collector" types, and won't think twice about engaging with an account that gently strokes their online ego with likes, "Happy Birthdays", etc.

That was my thought, but I also think we're at the point that the iconic companies that have come and gone 30+ years ago are unknown to the current crop of young-ish startup founders.

I would be really curious to know if the current Thinking Machines team had any awareness of the prior company, or if they landed on that name completely unaware.

IMO this shows how we have been pursuing many of these goals for half a century now.

I guess we are recycling company names now? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation

(I know, Corp vs. Lab).

It also appears to have a fairly narrow detection angle. This might work for spotting a drone when you already know roughly where it is, but that problem becomes infinitely harder when you have to scan the entire sky.

RF drone detection has been a challenging problem for quite a while. Lots of solid state radar/RF detection products have emerged in the space, but it is not a trivial problem. And that is for drones with active RF comms, anything flying autonomously is even harder to detect at a far enough range to actually do something about.

While that is certainly a topic worth pursuing, especially for anyone with a "corporations are people" argument, the challenge is the immediate vacuum afterwards, which is likely to attract copy-cats.

You might "execute" a corporation for proven anti-human actions, but that takes time. New corporations can crop up, maybe even involving some of the same prior executives, and the cycle starts again.

True, though it seems like at least 75% of the traffic on various social media and streaming sites is content that people want to avoid, yet there it is.

RFC 3514 is being repurposed as an "AI Bit", all AI-generated content will be required to set this bit during transfers.

This equates to about 20 cents per day per person, or about $73/year. It is a move in the right direction for sure, but I'm not sure I'd call this a significant statistic.