One of the reasons I got on the OnePlus bandwagon years ago, was the ability to put CyanogenMod on it. Then the idiots there thought they could literally take on Google head on, and experienced on of the greatest blunders short of land wars in Asia and Sicilian with death on the line, without first immunizing against iocane.

My only hope right now, is Starlink/Spacex/Testa/xAI creates a whole new ecosphere for communications. Crossing my fingers Starship becomes fully operational sooner than later. Its the only real threat to Google and is likely big enough to take whatever Google tosses at them. Fingers Crossed.

FU to Micorslop, Google, Cell Phone INC (especially T-Maybe), Apple, etc, and their continued inshitification of everything.

They've been fighting between Android and ChromeOS for years. Each wanting to win. Toss in Fuchsia from the remnants of the PINK a project with Apple.

IMHO there are teams inside Google that are creating products(OSes etc) searching for a market.

Not sure why this was modded flamebait. I don't see anything grossly inaccurate and any editorializing isn't exactly couched in fantasy.

If you have three different compilers for a language, and you bootstrap a compiler using all three of them, the first generation (e.g. GCC compiled with QuestionableCC, ShadyCC, or SlopCC) should be functionally identical, and the second generation (GCC compiled with GCC, which was compiled with the other compiler) should be bit-identical. See "Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling" by David A. Wheeler. Some people have trouble trusting Rust because only the latest stable rustc can compile the latest stable rustc.

That largely depends on what the contract actually says, and how the data is 'federated' within Flock's own systems.

It sounds like Flock's business model was to build the massive data-collection system, but since that's expensive, it used contracts with government entities to pay for the build-out. The contracts with each of the entities might well be for the services delivered to them, but since many municipalities have separate contracts for how real estate (and installing something on a light pole counts) then Flock might be maintaining their own contracts separately for the physical placement of their cameras.

So Flock gets agencies/government to pay for the services of license plate data collection with one contract then uses another contract for Flock to pay for the rental for pole space. If the contract to provide data to the polity lapses or is terminated, that doesn't necessarily mean that Flock's permits to maintain equipment on poles is also terminated as they're separate contracts. Granted, operating the cameras is on Flock's dime now, but if they continue to harvest data then they might find takers for that data even if not the original municipality or other agency who paid for the cameras.

The thing that our current interpretation of the Constitution lacks is where the dividing line between one's self and a third-party sits when it comes to the sanctity of one's person, papers, and effects. At the time that the Constitution was written there was no photography, let alone videography, mass-processing of records automatically, etc. Someone had to physically observe someone in public in order to know what they did, and could only repeat with their words what they saw rather than demonstrating it. We don't have good law for 3rd party collection of volumes of data about people and the ability of said 3rd party to provide that data to the government. A ruling, law, or amendment that puts protections on requesting information and establishes some kind of checks and balances system that applies to the government in all its forms is needed. I don't know what the threshold should be either, but clearly right now when we have stories where the justification for a search is, "ASDFG" then something needs to change.

Laws are useless in general.

And by the time you get AT & T to fulfill the fiber delivery, Starlink will be providing Internet at Fiber Speeds to the whole planet. Starlink V3 is coming sooner (Within months) than the snails at the terrestrial providers could imagine.

It is possible to put laws into place that require how public-private partnerships work. It would be an imposition upon Flock and upon the police. And that is just fine, and as it should be.

Law enforcement contracting to the private sector should not be allowed to be a bypass of our rights.

The only place I see Al in the legal profession making sense is to do basic caselaw research, where it can cite the sources and the references upstream and downstream to those sources. The lawyer should be responsible to review the claimed caselaw citations to determine the merit of their support for the argument that the lawyer is making, and to pick the particular citations to use that are the strongest for the particular case.

Likewise the same sort of search but inverted, for one's opponent's most likely arguments or rebuttals might be performed, again with the lawyer doing the review based on the citations that the Al tool provided.

There was a television series in the 2010s called Person of Interest where the premise was that one of the main characters had managed to achieve Al, but in order to satisfy legal constraints, the Al was only allowed to spit-out a single phrase about a person, rather than any detail of any sort. It was up to the limited number of persons associated with the Al to figure out why this 'person of interest' had been referenced, whether they were the perpetrator, the victim, a witness, or someone who would suffer downstream effects. While soft science fiction, and pretty clearly taking inspiration from the older series Quantum Leap in having to figure out why they were there, the concept had some merit as to how Al should really be used. It should be treated as untrusted, it should be treated as requiring thorough review. It should be treated as another tool available, but no more trustable or authoritative than any other, and arguably a bit less trustable, a bit less authoritative.

I've seen firsthand in meetings people saying, "Well Claude says..." or "Well ChatGPT says..."

What's bothering me about this is that those running the meeting aren't shutting that crap down immediately.

Except that in basically all of the examples that you cite, the transition was from one proven technology slowly into another technology that was at least approaching some degree of maturity by the time it it mass-market adoption.

In most of those examples. early adopters were nearly all ultrawealthy who were using it for themselves. Those who weren't incredibly rich were technology-enthusiasts of some fashion or another. Those groups initially worked-out most of the showstopper-problems with the technology before widespread adoption, and in many of those industries either compatibility or outright law added extra constraint over time.

AI for the masses has taken a different development path. It's not ready and is misbehaving, to the detriment of many. "Hallucinations" should not be tolerated at this scale of deployment.

Not if you're the police.

Or as it was put nearly two millennia ago, "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

This is why systems like this require human oversight. Arguably if there's a judicial review process for allowing searches, then this system needs to be required to use that process. With a system containing precinct, local court district, municipal, county, state, and federal district jurisdictions, the nature of setting up proper permissions alone should be a mandatory herculean effort, probably the most difficult part of the entire system.

Without such a system requiring judicial oversight to confirm that searches are authorized, all we have is a further slide into a police-state.

This seems like a very obvious and straightforward requirement, force the officer to select an active case to tie the inquiry to.

And at the same time display a warning that selecting an unrelated case "will result in disciplinary action, up to and including termination".

Make them just as accountable as any other security system in the pirvate sector.

I'm gonna pirate your Pion, by changing it to Prion, (for the ARRRRR). ;-)

"prevent automation"

Buggy Whip Makers would like a word with you.

While your post has some interesting tidbits, some even worthy, the conclusions are incorrect. You're blaming government intervention while proposing government intervention as a solution.

The more government is involved in economic matters, the more screwed up things get, because that's the nature of regulations. We just need ONE MORE regulation, and that will solve all the problems (and somehow creates additional problems).

Supply Demand curves exist in all markets. Pushing them around artificially is a recipe to inefficiencies.