Nobody cared about the commentary on his feelings about Apple...

Republicans cannot be elected here. Just won't happen any time soon.

So Republicans join the Democrats. Local media calls these people "moderates" - no, it doesn't make much sense, just the accepted code word. Most of the current batch are funded by more or less reactionary tech billionaires. (The older set are less, the newer ones more.)

So yeah. You have to read past the label. Democrats here are such a big tent that we let Republicans run things a lot of the time if they wear a fake mustache and mumble something vaguely progressive-sounding now and then. But they do whatever's good for AirBNB and Salesforce when they're not servicing commercial real estate.

The SF Democratic machine is all in on Flock. That might have something to do with the Flock being in the SF Democratic Party.

Mar raised another concern: Two of the committee's current members -- Lily Ho and Trevor Chandler -- work for Flock. Last month, the San Francisco Standard reported that a prior version of Mar's resolution was removed from the party's agenda by a subcommittee chaired by Ho. Neither Ho nor Chandler offered to abstain from voting on Wednesday. The committee does not have rules related to conflicts of interest for issues like this one, Tung told Mar. They then proceeded to count both Ho and Chandler's votes.

I'd like to award you "dumbest possible mix of misunderstanding the text combined with missing the point, garnished with a sprig of self-satisfaction and a dash of ignorance".

Watch for it in the mail.

This looks like the final cell-phonification of the Mac. I'm bummed.

But they're right - if you assume that a significant fraction of Mac users are going to install some sort of third-party interface with an LLM, it is either significantly extend and harden the security perimeter deeper into the OS or your customers will routinely have everything exfiled as a matter of course, and it would just be cheaper to make iCloud into an anonymous FTP site.

And given Zuckerbook's demonstrated willingness to brazenly, actively subvert OSes, I'm willing to bet they're going to go Russian on their subjects, er, customers, anyway. ("You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push.")

It will probably be what finally pushes me to a Linux laptop, though. I'm old, I spend a lot of time at the shell. I like Macs because they're great unix workstations, still. But I don't see how you can accommodate both people like me and people who need to be protected not only from themselves, but from Zuckerbook and worse.

And they're a much bigger market than people like me. And "AI is the Footure."

Yep.

Oh, sorry. It really is hard to tell here.

You seem to be complaining that some unspecified music awards body didn't act, and instead one composed of "nerds" did.

Aside from a classic case of "Area Man Yells at TV", and apparently being disparaging of nerds on a site subtitled "News for Nerds", I simply don't understand the complaint.

Are you also angry at biologists for naming something after Gary Larson because someone you think is cooler didn't?

Your pretty fantasy dissolves in the face of police omerta.

All of your "good" cops are complicit in the acts of the thieves, racists, and psychopaths. They more than tolerate it - they actively impede attempts to bring these criminals to justice. It is literally a mockery of justice by the very enforcers who are supposed to fight for it.

Anyone remember all the performative outrage about "Stop Snitching" stuff? Just another attack on rival gangs.

The man at CHMR who would have been doing the target analysis of the girl's school (former Senior Advisor for CHMR & the Civil Environment Lead to QA/QC) has thoughts on this matter, for anyone who cares.

Good point. It's something that really should be addressed. But the Constitution was designed as a limit solely on the government's powers, and it's up to the government as described in the Constitution to write laws that restrict what private entities can do, within the bounds of their enforcement powers as provided by the Constitution.

This isn't a new problem. After Snowden, the US realized they could pretty much just outsource the NSA's spying. And they have.

And the other thing is: none of this is really relevant. There's nothing unconstitutional about sitting in a public space and recording the license plate of every car that passes. There's nothing unconstitutional about building a network of people doing that and storing it in a giant database. It was just infeasible to have a bunch of people doing that. Now it can be automated.

There's nothing unconstitutional about compiling data about people that people agree to hand over as part of the license agreement for using a thing. Once that information is owned by a private entity, there's nothing unconstitutional about the government buying it from that private entity. It's just the government receiving data that was either generated in a public setting or that was willing given in a private setting. (At least, legally. I doubt most people realize how much data on their lives companies collect, and I doubt most people realize they agreed to hand it over.)

Maybe handing over data collected in this fashion should be against the law. Maybe there should be privacy laws preventing it from being gathered in the first place. But there aren't, and neither party is interested in changing that. Which leaves us with the reality that nothing Flock was doing is illegal, and that the replacement systems localities are using aren't illegal either.

I really wish more people understood this. The Constitution only protects you from the government. It does nothing to protect you from private companies collecting your information, and do they ever. As electronics get more advanced, the amount of information private companies are collecting is ever increasing. TVs listen in on every conversation. VR headsets map out your house. And cameras installed on street lights record every vehicle they see.

Which brings me to the second very important point about Flock cameras people forget: pretty much every town that is canceling contracts with Flock isn't getting rid of license plate scanning cameras. They're just replacing them with cameras from other companies that do the same thing. Companies that people haven't heard of and that therefore haven't raised the same complaints.

Use-once and throw away.

Hell, if they get in your way, throw them off the boat, we'll go to Costco in the morning.

And some as far as ruining businesses, eh, you gotta break some eggs. (No, I don't talk about the price of eggs.) This is about habituating the populace to domestic military presence, not something trivial like people's livelihoods.

It is exactly the same mechanism as special interest group politics: concentrated interest, diffuse harm.

You think that because the fanbois flock to Blue Angel celebrations. What you don't see is all the people cursing at them everywhere else.

They are pushing to have antitrust regulations against the various labs dropped so they can "collude" on slowing down. This will of course require banning open models and disallowing access elsewhere.

Captive market, increasingly captive citizens, unconstrained capital openly colluding with government.

Where have I seen this story before...