chaps

There's a lot of truth to this, but....... fuck they did a great job disincentivizing it.

In high school we had to read and annotate this 900p Greek mythology book during our summer break. Our grade reflected how well we annotated it. I didn't do any of it (thanks Ultima Online).

The very first in-class assignment we had that year took about an hour and had about a 25% bigger impact on our grade than annotating did.

Not saying that grades are the end goal but it felt like a slap in the face that the exploration of such a deep topic just.. didn't matter.

Are you okay?

Fucking yikes, bro.

You literally said, "It's also important to note that Flock is just a license plate reader."

You're spreading misinformation about what these things are and aren't. It's fucked up. But I'm hopeful that you can do better.

Also, please, for your sake -- submit a FOIA request for footage taken from a public camera. It'll get denied because public records laws consider this sorta information private. Your oversimplification is intellectually silly.

Friend, even after listening to that interview you still insisted on saying that flock ONLY does ALPR and only now that you've been given an example of where you were wrong, you suggest that I listen to the thing that clearly didn't inform you enough?

Your goalposts are quite mobile.

Flock is not just a license plate reader. They have many products. Here's an article today that includes a decent deep dive into the code of one of its new projects that's... definitely more than just license plate reading.

https://www.wired.com/story/flock-safety-os-investigate/

Everybody should submit FOIAs. If that makes me an advocate for public records, then sure, I'm an advocate.

And of course those things count, but it's arguably only focused on your immediate surroundings. I've done some pretty significant cleanup of parks in my area. It's very rewarding.

Are you interested in being less antagonistic about basic civics?

You're being needlessly antagonistic and it makes me think you haven't actually explored local options. Let's start elsewhere: what sort of civic engagement are you involved with? Have you ever submitted a FOIA request? Been to a community advocacy group?

It does matter and you're lying to yourself if you think it doesn't.

Mannnnn.... I've done similar and have NOT had the same experience. The problems I've had are usually because I'm loading stuff in a weird disk-memory-cpu trifecta and they all really want to push the remaining 30GB stuff into a database. Then it's off to ctrl-alt-f5 to wait for gnome to crash so I can auth in and kill the ravaging process.

Quick: give us 10 correlative reasons why this could be that don't include surveillance tech.

You'll do great.

Okay but can you give me an article that's relevant to the use of surveillance that speaks to your central claim?

That's creepy as fuck.

Also, show proof.

This reduction is happening across the board and isn't "because of flock".

People who like Flock: is this a surprise?

Yeah, a lot of these issues are felt in other fields too so it feels like there's a need for a larger, wider schism.

Like I would love to go to law school but I can't afford it. So many possible but inherently unattainable futures. We'll get there.

Have you ever dared to dream of something that sounds impossible but isn't?

Have you not met anyone who would disown you as a person for suggesting that?

Agreed. There's a lot of work to get us there.

Should private prisons have their own private prison guards that use paintball guns filled with pepper spray?

Should private prisons be FOIA'able just like public prisons?

"I mean they don't hide much anymore."

heh as a foia nerd, heh.

Right there's another gotcha with the data. They gave 15-60mph data in :30 minute increments.

"This would still identify officers blocks or get within a couple blocks of their home for those with take home cars. Would speeds of 15 miles per hour or more but only pings on the :30 minute mark, so one ping per hour from 2019 until the end of April work for you?"

Even gave them this SQL to run to get around that problem but they never got back to me, heh:

  WITH immobile_pings as (
  select count(*), vehicleid, round(xcoord::numeric, 3) as xcoord_rounded,
    round(ycoord::numeric,3) as ycoord_rounded,date_trunc('day', datetime) as day
  FROM gps_table
  WHERE speed = 0
  GROUP BY
    vehicleid,
    xcoord_rounded,
    ycoord_rounded,
    day
    having count(*) > 1440), --4 hours
  day_counts as (
    select count(*), vehicleid, xcoord_rounded, ycoord_rounded
    from immobile_pings
    group by vehicleid, xcoord_rounded, ycoord_rounded having count(*) > 15 -- 15 days
  )

select gps_table.* from gps_table s inner join day_counts i ON i.vehicleid = s.vehicleid AND array[round(s.xcoord::numeric, 3), round(s.ycoord::numeric, 3)] != array[i.xcoord_rounded,i.ycoord_rounded] AND speed > 15; -- 15mph

Fun fact: in some municipalities you can FOIA for the GPS records of police vehicles. Here's Chicago Police's. They removed 0-15mph for, erm, privacy reasons.... but it's not the worst.

Have a glance:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/hj4jtcag2i9qvl4sj6mg2/AF6c9r7...

Do yourself a favor and submit a FOIA request for some body camera of something you're trying to understand. If the footage is too long, they'll deny your request for being unduly burdensome because of the need to review/redact those records, even in public.

It took 8mo for Chicago Police to review and redact bodycamera footage from a protest in Chicago. It was 95% blurred. Almost hilariously, one of the only parts that wasn't blurred was a moment where one cop commented on another cop's mustache.

So from the FOIA perspective, the public isn't able to get gobs and gobs of footage just because it's public.

IMO it is and I've been saying it for more than ten years that it would catch up with the industry. And it is now. The LLM shit is just a mask over the larger problem.

The front fell off because the base was never built to support a shakeup of the industry. There's so little support, now and for as long as I can remember, for people to fail gracefully in the field. It's just up up up. And now that programmers are finding their jobs to be a little more precarious, maybe folk will start supporting mentorship as a practice.

This isn't just a "market" problem. It's a problem of people not teaching others skills that help them thrive inside AND outside of work.

Erm, no. I'm saying that the entire industry failure to cultivate a wide spirit of mentorship is biting everyone's ass.

Are you seriously suggesting that ten years of a systemic failure to mentor the new generation hasn't had an impact on the culture of mentorship?

I think you're misinterpreting my words. Of course there's malintent with copaganda.

I'm talking about the random schmos out there who don't know what "ALPR" even is. These folk are more and more learning about what these things are and pushing back on them.

More and more, yes. This was in June: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf

It's simply because the language hasn't caught up with the technology yet. A similar problem happens in courts where legal terminology hasn't caught up with technology.

There's no malintent with it, it just means that the public conversation hasn't gotten to a point where these distinctions can easily be made to a wider audience. We'll get there.