jordanb

Dragnets have been constrained on both fourth and fifth amendment grounds. It's not merely the inconvenience of being stopped and questioned that makes a dragnet illegal, it is also an illegal search.

The other thing that's going on is that Flock is essentially an always-on "dragnet."

A "dragnet" is when you set up police checkpoints everywhere and essentially put entire cities under watch to find a fugitive. This happened in Boston after the bombings.

"Dragnets" are illegal except in extreme circumstances (like a bombing).

Flock is a "dragnet on demand." You have a digital dragnet in place not just in one city but potentially in every city, and with a single search can pull the results of the dragnet on anyone for any reason.

This kinda reminds me of the guys who decided to industrialize digging up dinosaur fossils, in order to feed the dinosaur fossil collector market. They were amazed that paleontologists were so "inefficient" at finding and digging up dinosaur fossils.

But from paleontologists' perspective, they go out looking for dinosaur fossils when they have questions that digging up a fossil may answer. The metric they're focusing on isn't tons of fossil mined out of the ground, it's a developing understanding of extinct life.

I feel like this is a submarine ad for the glasses by Meta.

But can I pay in dogecoin?

They invented a Forbes 30 under 30 bot.

Depending on the density of debris in LEO it might be very difficult to launch through to the higher orbits.

I think there would be a Kessler Syndrome within a few weeks of an anti-satellite campaign at which point trying to launch replacements wouldn't make any sense.

> Google (and its defenders) initially tried to pretend that they were just helplessly and clinically adhering to US Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) data. Something journalists later found out was a lie, because Google adopted the name change before the government could get its act together and implement it

This is interesting I must have missed it in the whole saga. GNIS was the HN consensus, now debunked.

That "Lake America" is doing a hell of a lot of work for Google

The thing is this was the pitch for buying clothes online: worried it won't fit? Just return it. No questions asked! We'll even pay return shipping!

It's interesting how companies are now redefining things they explicitly encouraged their customers to do as "abuse."

My mind was blown when I realized that the way tftp works is that as the machine is booting it asks the network if anyone has some software for it to run.

The data canters are using gas turbines and diesel generators.

I'm trying to build a torment nexus and these negative ninnies complained that it used up all the electricity, so I made a machine that turns breathable air into toxic smoke to power the nexus and they don't like that ether!

The first key feature of the Panopticon is that the guards can observe the inmate at all times and he can't hide.

The second key feature is that the inmate can't observe the guards. He can't know who they are and can't even know if they're paying attention to him or not.

The guy gives me unhinged stalker vibes whenever he does an interview.

The point of the video is that intermediary companies like Driscolls or Taylor Farms focus their efforts on building "accountability sinks."

They give farmers a 500 page document describing in detail how the produce must be grown, but then they provide little to no actual oversite, while producing enormous pricing pressure on the farmer. Any farmer who actually follows the 500 page document will not be able to make any money, so every farmer is compelled to violate the rules.

Then when product is contaminated Driscoll can say "that farmer wasn't following our policy we've cancelled our contract with them" while making no effort to actually clean up all the other farms, who are definitely violating the contract because it's impossible to follow it and make money selling to Driscolls.

Yep if a hiring manager wants to open a req for a junior, before AI he'd get praise for being tight with budget and hiring someone cheap and trainable.

Now he gets asked: if a junior can do the work why aren't you using AI? So instead of opening the req he says to the team "we need to figure out how to make AI do more."

I'm glad HN can be counted on to defend Blackstone's good name.

"Good enough for Australia" is a phrase I frequently heard from Aussies. There seems to be this attitude there that they're a frontier country where one improvises (half asses?) everything.

Anyone who designs such a system should know to use an exponential backoff to avoid the thundering herd. Maybe copilot missed that while it was reviewing its own PR

You'd have to ask the guys putting flock cameras in playgrounds.

Flock apparently know how to sell this stuff to cops because not only did they film children's gymnastics they used the footage as part of their sales pitch to police:

https://www.gadgetreview.com/flock-safety-employees-watched-...

Louis Rossmann likes to point out that the "CC" in "CCTV" means "closed circuit." Traditional security cameras are displayed maybe in a security booth in real time somewhere, and then recorded onto an on-prem hard drive. When the drive fills up the oldest video is overwritten. They're only ever looked at after recording if there's a reason to look at them.

The Flock cameras, on the other hand, upload all data to Flock which stores all video forever. They also do image recognition to identify license plates as well as other identifiable information (they've claimed to not do facial recognition but the implication is they can).

They then make this searchable so any cop with a flock login can put, say, your license plate into a flock search and it will give him a complete record of all your movements all across the country.

"De-identified" data is trivially easy to re-identify, especially by google.

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/a-face-is-expo...

As if the AI industry is only shredding "crappy" books.

I recently bought a rare book. It was a boat design book written by a famous yacht designer in the 1940s, but it's been out of print for decades and I had to pay $150 for a "fair" copy with missing dust jacket.

I have an interest in older technology and the old ways of doing things (for instance, how do you lubricate the mast of a gaff rigged boat so the gaff jaws don't jam?) I've often found myself reading very old books that have been out of print for a century.

Sometimes I read those books at libraries and I've been the only person to check them out in years (I started doing this back when they still stamped the return date on a card so you could see when it was checked out). Now most of those books have been disposed of by libraries due to yield management software and I've ended up with some of them in my personal collection, but people like me can only save a tiny sliver when most of them are being bought in mass by Sam Altman. When they're gone the knowledge in them is also gone.

We are burning the library of Alexandria and the HN consensus is "those books probably weren't saving anyway."

Easy: the CFTC is not credible.

The online gambling industry put their guy in charge of the CFTC (Michael Selig).

Their main goal is to preempt all state regulation of their gambling platforms. To that end Selig is promoting the novel theory that sports betting is trading of commodities and therefore should be "regulated" solely by his agency.

Was New Orleans "investing infinite resources" before? It seems like as always the pitch here is you fire a bunch of existing 911 operators and split the projected cost savings with an AI company.

It's also highly likely that the cost savings projections are optimistic and they will be back at the table a year from now saying that the only way to realize the projected savings is to divert more calls to the AI and further reduce staffing.

I don't think many of the BBB healthcare cuts have hit yet.

Maybe. But I think the government could just lie about both quarters and then restate after the election.

You never said the Treasury has to borrow this money. I'm saying the Treasury has to borrow this money.

The Treasury does not have the ability to "create money out of thin air." That is not how any of this works. The treasury, when it buys something, does so either by using tax receipts or by issuing bonds. The tax receipts are spent. The Treasury is issuing bonds.

The Fed could create money and use it to buy Treasury bonds on the open market, as part of its Open Market Activities to manage interest rates (which is exactly what it would do if the Japanese sold US treasuries)

Ironically, the law actually forbids the Fed from buying bonds directly from the treasury, so the treasury has to float the bonds and then have the Fed buy them off the open market if it chooses to do so. So again you can see how insane this move by the US Treasury is.