jkestner

I just got my kid a cheap flip phone that isn't as dumb as I wanted, because it's got KaiOS, a FireFox OS offshoot. An undiscovered country with just a few thousand apps in their store, and a web framework to make your own. If HN would get into it like it's an e-ink display, we could have all the little apps we need, and no ads or distractions.

Adrian Tchaikovsky has a good take on it as well, Human Resources.

I think they should’ve used the word ‘focused’. Everything else about the presentation says it’s a professional communication tool.

Bring back OS licensing, Apple!

“I kept trying to explain in between haymakers that we were better than this and on top of that it wasn’t likely to be ruled on favorably as far as the courts.” - Luke O’Neil https://flaminghydra.com/the-end-and-after-2/

Axon (among others) has operations hubs for data fusion centers and other platforms for police like Evidence.com, so it’s an easy sell to departments.

Communities are starting to pivot to the wider issue, but a reason that this issue found purpose is that Flock is a more evocative target than “ALPRs”. I think it wouldn’t be a bad thing if “Flock” becomes the generic name.

Reminds me why a friend picked RCN over Comcast for his Internet. “They’re the more incompetent evil company.”

One of my favorite books is Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262680936/turtles-termites-and-...), basically the thesis of one of his students (and current MIT Media Lab professor) Mitchel Resnick. It's about the educational value of modeling distributed systems with StarLogo.

Loved it. The earnest perspective of these monks can be very funny. Don’t know how to describe the rewarding prose except “chewy”, and this is a translation from Italian. Speaking of writing, the author’s extensive notes at the end are also excellent.

The wonderful thing about Flock is that you also get to be watched over by all the outside police you don't trust.

The body cameras that seem to make a difference are the ones we all carry in our pockets/purses. Axon cameras are nothing special, and the company is not neutral.

They said “mostly”. AI solves 90% and then you solve the other 90%.

The government is more directly accountable to me. The only way I have to influence what insurance companies do is through the government.

BigCorp gives money to politicians and gets to depress worker wages because they can't leave — sounds perfectly sane to tie your insurance to your employer under capitalism.

I read the letter as the CEO feeling pressure from his bosses to give opponents less ammunition lest he be replaced with "sober leadership". Flock truly has been their own worst enemy.

We should anticipate a future where a more competent malicious actor like Axon is leading this industry. As the Kleenex of surveillance cameras, Flock has poisoned the category, so I don't think switching brands will fool anyone, but we will have less of an attack surface.

Clearly, the stories in the press have hurt them, especially the police abuse. Requiring case codes is a good step, and proactively catching signs of abuse is a big change from "we're just an unopinionated tool; you should talk to your police department". They're still passing the buck on educating users on the limitations of their tool. I remain skeptical of any of their claims around data ownership.

Reading these actions, you can pick apart how to circumvent them, and the security audit is still pending — let's see how damning of a report they'll allow to be released.

A human must always be held responsible, but a tool must expose its limitations to enable human judgement. I put this in the same basket as Autopilot, which already fails with its name.

I’ve seen too many cases where people intuitively trust the magic technology instead of verifying it. The tool shouldn’t not present itself as magic or AI or whatever the current term is.

I don't see where it says who's paying whom. Maybe the deal is that Palantir gets more personal data to throw in a national profile database.

  You will never find anyone who is against these cameras saying that they don’t reduce crime. Of course they do.

Debatable. This is the first data I’ve seen that wasn’t paid for by Flock. https://atlpresscollective.com/2026/07/28/flock-cameras-atla...

It’s currently the case in many US states: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/04/1084452251/the-vast-majority-...

You mean, unpaid labor!

I did the books for my mom's business through high school, which prevented me from being a complete disaster as an adult.

Not super low. It starts to make sense around 1000 units. I’ve gotten runs of 2500 done domestically. But it is pretty hard to find domestic injection molders for consumer work - they will give you an FU quote at best because they cater to high volumes and industrial customers.

And they’ll make the molds in China anyway. Chinese molders are hungry — they will work with low volumes and offer a bunch of integrated services. But if you don’t know what you’re doing you will end up with bad parts over schedule.

Easiest way to get started is to use ProtoLabs. They charge lower prices on molds in exchange for higher part cost, are way faster than China, and have way better customer service.

Anything can be a monopoly or not, depending on how you define the market.

Yes. Someone's gotta create new grist for the LLMs so they don't Habsburg themselves.

Now, I thought that going to a subscription model would give them the resources/motivation they needed to improve things regularly, and let us customers pay for just what we need. You're telling me the benefits only went one way?

I started with PS2.5. I held onto CS5 until I found Affinity.

When you say "everything's working", have you updated since Canva took over? I haven't, after happily paying for the whole suite every time they gave me a chance. Just wary. At some point, not being a profit center for Canva, the app is going to get more exploitative.

If it bleeds, it leads. That is, our media has hyped up violence in society as it’s become more rare, and politicians use it to scare people into thinking we need to go back to the good old days.

Like Europe, the US has a pastiche of laws across states and municipalities, and varying levels of enforcement. My state has laws protecting free-range children.

You’re probably right that only in the US do people freak out over unaccompanied kids, but I wouldn’t say that’s true of most of the country.

I don’t think you can profile this as American. Are they conservative suburbanites? My kid walks to/from school longer than that. Many kids take public transit in big cities. Rural kids may ride a motorbike much further.

My new venture-backed social network is called Wormtongue, no reason.