chaps

If you think "justice and freedom of expression seems to have prevailed", then please consider the people who aren't famous and can't get media attention when this sort of thing happens to them. Justice and freedom of expression fail to prevail on the regular and this is just one win amongst many, many, many losses.

This.... absolutely already happens. It's trivial and cheap to purchase the three meter, three second resolution data of millions of vehicles.

Yeah, I took that to mean to refresh the game and so I did.... and then lost my progress :(. I really want to play the rest but I don't want to go through the rest of the levels.

Free stuff has a way of short circuiting things.

....yes, half a million dollars per year is highly paid.

I'm one of those weirdos who opts out of the scanners because I'd rather avoid having people casually look inside of my body.

Last time I flew out of Laguardia I opted out and while I was being patted down another TSA agent about twenty feet away kept making kissy faces at me. Very much felt like intimidation.

What a time..

"Apps that already need location data are probably the most likely sources of collecting such data"

Yes, and many companies have access to both feeds.....

There definitely is and I've definitely pitched it to places. The Intercept had interest but told me that they wanted me to build the story out more to be less focused on Chicago. I understand where they were coming from (and the others who said the same thing) but it wasn't possible for me to continue doing freelance work, so no stories ended up being published about it at all.

Sure, hard. But, um, lots of things are hard.

For example, it was very hard for me to identify myself in an anonymized public dataset of vehicle trips, but I did. It was also hard to FOIA for the documents showing them writing SQL to spot my trip.. but I did.

Hard doesn't mean impossible.

I worked in ad-tech for a year before I left the tech industry as a whole. I've also done a fair bit of investigative journalism.

Let me share a thing:

Factual, a company that specializes in hyperlocal geofencing, uses geofencing much smaller than the self-regulation that their industry allows in their own rules. I learned this after a coworker quit because our company was allowing ad targeting to people using these smaller geofences. The whole company had an all-hands about it where the CEO of the company told everyone that we were not going to stop using Factual nor the smaller-than-allowed geofences because we, ourselves, were not the ones to produce those geofences. We were just a man in the middle helping to build a system to track people at high resolution.

Please try to reconcile with what your industry has and continues to destroy.

They're not removing cameras.

> For now, Everett’s Flock camera network remains offline, as the debate over transparency, privacy and public safety continues in the Legislature. The bill in Olympia that would put guidelines on Flock's data has passed in the Senate.

Yeah, it was about the ownership of the characters that was at-issue IIRC. From memory, they said they couldn't use the characters because I made the suggestion.

Amazing. Just texted my mom asking if she has the letter. I doubt it all these years later but I'll share it if she still has it!

Edit: no dice!

When I was 10 I pitched a game to Lucas Arts. Sent a letter and everything. Their lawyers responded telling me why they cannot make my game.

Feel like that opened something in me..

I tried using it, but I don't understand what it wants me to do! It says scroll, but when I do it just zooms in. Which is the same as clicking? I tried scrolling to the left but that just moved me to where I am now.

Love the idea, but strange UX.

Edit: tried it again and I think the problem is that there's no feedback during scrolling during transition screens. When I scroll, I expect it to scroll with me, not go on its own path. So by the time it's possible to scroll again, I already tried everything and gave up. Made more confusing by the instructional text disappearing between transitions. Give a little bit more feedback during those transitions and I think the problem goes away.

Anyone have any similar uBlock filter lists like this?

Sure -- it's something I figured out during the 2020 protests for some reporting work I was doing which led to this reporting: https://thetriibe.com/2020/12/hundreds-of-chicago-police-mad...

This reporting was made possible because it's surprisingly easy to export recording start/stop time, file size, duration, notes, cop badge and model name from the underlying system with a couple clicks (this is true for any agency that uses axon: https://my.axon.com/s/article/Justice-Exporting-search-resul...). I threw that info into postgres, made a materialized view with a column that gets the filesize:duration ratio and filtered for videos with a certain ratio. I never did anything with it besides that article I posted before.

Here's an observable about the BWC analysis that went into the reporting (disclaimer: the observable is mid-iteration that never received a followup. the analysis itself is separate from the reporting): https://observablehq.com/d/9f09764dbbdfc4b5

Glad you could stop by to contribute! :)

Friend. Friend....

Snobbery is a spectrum. You might not perceive your words as snobbery, but I do. We just have a different opinion of where you fall on that snobbery line.

You might not be a snob, but you sure as hell sound like one. It's okay when other people like simple things that you don't like.

I like to use textual anchors for things like, "line starts with" or "line ends with" or "file ends with" and combining that with levenshtein distance with some normalization stuff (combining adjacent strings in various patterns to account for OCR wonkiness). Turns into building lists of anchors that can be built off of. Of all the things I've tried, including things like image hashing and such, it's been the most effective generalized "tool".

But also, I hold the strong philosophy that it's important to actually read the documents that are being scanned. In that way, OCR tends to be more of a procedural step than anything.

Really, it ultimately depends on your goals.

It kinda does, friend.

Ooh, totally. Many years ago I was doing some analysis of parking ticket data using gnuplot and had it output a chart png per-street. Not great, but worked well to get to the next step of that project of sorting the directory by file size. The most dynamic streets were the largest files by far.

Another way I've used image compression to identify cops that cover their body cameras while recording -- the filesize to length ratio reflects not much activity going on.

Well, for background, my background is in investigative journalism with a focus on policing, technology, and transparency. I've been the plaintiff in a bit over 10 FOIA lawsuits and have three ongoing suits now. "Our guys" was more meant to be a hand waived ideal of what each in-person thinks their out-person is.

My point can be read as a recognition that ratcheting happens within the boring minutia and work is rarely done to recover from those ratchetings. Things like continuation of prosecution policies, legislation changes, staff changes, etc. There's a very strong tendency to consider those sorts of ratcheting effects as "just how things are" rather than recognizing that no, it hasn't always been that way.

Like, progressive politicians love to talk a big game about transparency, but when it comes down to it, they themselves contribute to systemic transparency failures. See Chicago's past two mayors' campaign transparency promises. Both have done a complete 180 on those promises and use never-losing lawyers to enforce that sort of thing. Chicago's mayor's office once asked me to do analysis of parking tickets' effects on poor folk... then a few months later accused my wanting a data dictionary of the parking tickets system so that I could modify the parking ticket system's data. That led to bad case law at the IL supreme court.

It's shit like that. The small-but-not-really-small things.

> I still think it is foolish to write off the current administration as if it's just another iteration of back and forth corruption

You are deeply, deeply misunderstanding my point if this is what you got from my post.

"Our guys" was tongue in cheek.

Documents that come from FOIA. So, some scanned, some not. Lots of forms and lots of hand writing to add info that the form format doesn't recognize. Lots of repeated documents, but lots of one-off documents that have high signal.

For my workflows, layout extraction has been so inconsistent that I've stopped attempting to use it. It's simpler to just throw everything into postgis and run intersection checks on size-normalized pages.

Tesseract v4 when it was released was exceptionally good and blew everything out of the water. Have used it to OCR millions of pages. Tbh, I miss the simplicity of tesseract.

The new models are similarly better compared to tesseract v4. But what I'll say is that don't expect new models to be a panacea for your OCR problems. The edge case problems that you might be trying to solve (like, identifying anchor points, or identifying shared field names across documents) are still pretty much all problematic still. So you should still expect things like random spaces or unexpected characters to jam up your jams.

Also some newer models tend to hallucinate incredibly aggressively. If you've ever seen an LLM get stuck in an infinite, think of that.

And I'm getting tired of these comments that normalize the awfulness of the past. We can be pragmatic in recognizing that "our guys" also did bad things. Less bad than awful is still bad. If we choose not to recognize our own foibles then we just fall down our old patterns of "it's someone else's problem".

Because otherwise, better than what we have now is an abysmal target and we should aim for better.

Like another poster said, this is very well known already. It's one of the reasons why municipalities purchase this data from data brokers.