jkestner

The wonderful thing about Flock is that you also get to be watched over by all the outside police you don't trust.

The body cameras that seem to make a difference are the ones we all carry in our pockets/purses. Axon cameras are nothing special, and the company is not neutral.

They said “mostly”. AI solves 90% and then you solve the other 90%.

The government is more directly accountable to me. The only way I have to influence what insurance companies do is through the government.

BigCorp gives money to politicians and gets to depress worker wages because they can't leave — sounds perfectly sane to tie your insurance to your employer under capitalism.

I read the letter as the CEO feeling pressure from his bosses to give opponents less ammunition lest he be replaced with "sober leadership". Flock truly has been their own worst enemy.

We should anticipate a future where a more competent malicious actor like Axon is leading this industry. As the Kleenex of surveillance cameras, Flock has poisoned the category, so I don't think switching brands will fool anyone, but we will have less of an attack surface.

Clearly, the stories in the press have hurt them, especially the police abuse. Requiring case codes is a good step, and proactively catching signs of abuse is a big change from "we're just an unopinionated tool; you should talk to your police department". They're still passing the buck on educating users on the limitations of their tool. I remain skeptical of any of their claims around data ownership.

Reading these actions, you can pick apart how to circumvent them, and the security audit is still pending — let's see how damning of a report they'll allow to be released.

A human must always be held responsible, but a tool must expose its limitations to enable human judgement. I put this in the same basket as Autopilot, which already fails with its name.

I’ve seen too many cases where people intuitively trust the magic technology instead of verifying it. The tool shouldn’t not present itself as magic or AI or whatever the current term is.

I don't see where it says who's paying whom. Maybe the deal is that Palantir gets more personal data to throw in a national profile database.

  You will never find anyone who is against these cameras saying that they don’t reduce crime. Of course they do.

Debatable. This is the first data I’ve seen that wasn’t paid for by Flock. https://atlpresscollective.com/2026/07/28/flock-cameras-atla...

It’s currently the case in many US states: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/04/1084452251/the-vast-majority-...

You mean, unpaid labor!

I did the books for my mom's business through high school, which prevented me from being a complete disaster as an adult.

Not super low. It starts to make sense around 1000 units. I’ve gotten runs of 2500 done domestically. But it is pretty hard to find domestic injection molders for consumer work - they will give you an FU quote at best because they cater to high volumes and industrial customers.

And they’ll make the molds in China anyway. Chinese molders are hungry — they will work with low volumes and offer a bunch of integrated services. But if you don’t know what you’re doing you will end up with bad parts over schedule.

Easiest way to get started is to use ProtoLabs. They charge lower prices on molds in exchange for higher part cost, are way faster than China, and have way better customer service.

Anything can be a monopoly or not, depending on how you define the market.

Yes. Someone's gotta create new grist for the LLMs so they don't Habsburg themselves.

Now, I thought that going to a subscription model would give them the resources/motivation they needed to improve things regularly, and let us customers pay for just what we need. You're telling me the benefits only went one way?

I started with PS2.5. I held onto CS5 until I found Affinity.

When you say "everything's working", have you updated since Canva took over? I haven't, after happily paying for the whole suite every time they gave me a chance. Just wary. At some point, not being a profit center for Canva, the app is going to get more exploitative.

If it bleeds, it leads. That is, our media has hyped up violence in society as it’s become more rare, and politicians use it to scare people into thinking we need to go back to the good old days.

Like Europe, the US has a pastiche of laws across states and municipalities, and varying levels of enforcement. My state has laws protecting free-range children.

You’re probably right that only in the US do people freak out over unaccompanied kids, but I wouldn’t say that’s true of most of the country.

I don’t think you can profile this as American. Are they conservative suburbanites? My kid walks to/from school longer than that. Many kids take public transit in big cities. Rural kids may ride a motorbike much further.

My new venture-backed social network is called Wormtongue, no reason.

Not too shocking. Many people’s jobs here require that they pretend that they’re not coding for fascism.

And of course, it's compounded by being pooled. Like RealPage, ALPR services like Flock, Axon Fleet Hub, and Motorola Vigilant VehicleManager offer data laundering so that organizations that shouldn't be talking can communicate.

Privacy laws now.

The Bezos investment gives me pause too. But the claim that there’s no telemetry is exciting: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/06/slate-says-its-electric...

New privacy legislation is about 20 years overdue. Between age verification, privately owned national camera networks, and above all else, data brokers, citizens need to reassert their right to anonymity.

In the face of government hostility, at least we here can make more tools like Signal or at least choose not to feed customer data to the beast.

I guess, but I’d just say it’s moved to other distribution models because who reads newspapers now? Mostly people who want to read Family Circus reruns (okay, that’s uncharitable).

I can’t speak to other countries, but we have a very healthy ecosystem in webcomics. I back several on Patron, buy the compilations of others on Kickstarter, and otherwise grab new issues at my local comic book store or library.

Don't forget that Tesla bought SolarCity to bail out Musk's cousins. I need a chart of all his mergers.

Dumb objects are not totally niche. No one actually likes smarts that impede the core function. The Slate truck strips a lot of this out.

The trick with phones, since the smarts are a core function, is not making them dumb, but more akin to a PC. Less convenience served on a platter, more freedom to develop and install just what you want without compromising on UX. The N95 and other Symbian phones did this for me.

I don’t want the rat race of modern smartphones. I want an appliance.

And you could do a lot in it with Python. I wrote scripts to talk with Bluetooth gadgets I built.