Keep in mind that the general public's sentiment on Flock is nowhere near that of the Twitterati. My HOA wants to pay for a camera. All the old folks that attend the meetings are excited and think the technology is cool. The only "crime" we get is a bunch of teenagers sneaking into the pool after hours.

At the same time though, if a car that's obviously "not from around here" were to do a drive-by looking for open garages to grab some tools or a bike - I'd want that to be recorded and flagged.

I'd get lynched for sharing a thought like this from a non-throwaway account, but: I don't get the ultra-liberal folks obsession with the skid row. For whatever reason they seem to think that low rank criminals should be allowed to continue living however they please. An attempt to clean up crime in Oakland - for example - is met with cries of gentrification! Think of the families! Somehow everyone focuses on the family of the drug dealer and not of the hard working single mom who doesn't want her kids to join a gang. Is seems that only those involved in petty crime are considered to be the valuable members of the local community, and only their values need protecting.

Do you really need flock cameras to catch low rank criminals in skid row or kids sneaking into the pool after hours? This seems like a massively imbalanced transaction. Moreover, who really cares about these kids doing that? Our justice system is completely overloaded, and the tools it has to deal with one of those kids in the wrong jurisdiction runs an extremely high risk of ruining their life rather than scaring them straight. One of those old people could probably accomplish the same thing by spending a couple of late evenings at the pool with a very bright flashlight if it’s that big of a deal.

Finally, I’m really worried about the parental surveillance we’re sticking everywhere. You are absolutely training your children to never take risks and wondering why they’re an anxious mess. There is a wide gulf between cutting through private property and vandalizing it, and I’m not convinced our current system is properly equipped to handle the nuances of that.

Flock won't help protect your shovel. No one is getting flagged for being in an area they don't live when you report missing lawn art. Its used for more serious crimes and to build a map that tracks where everyone goes, when and combined with your cell data who you are.

You personal benefit nothing and lose privacy of movement.

For most people it means nothing until it does.

I live in Oakland and this resonates true from what I’ve seen, where Flock is a deeply divided issue in Alameda county compared to the overall negative sentiment you find on HN.

Listening in on city council meetings or even just perusing Nextdoor posts you’ll find there are many proponents for more cameras generally from folks tired of crime.

> I'd get lynched for sharing a thought like this from a non-throwaway account, but: I don't get the ultra-liberal folks obsession with the skid row. For whatever reason they seem to think that low rank criminals should be allowed to continue living however they please. An attempt to clean up crime in Oakland - for example - is met with cries of gentrification! Think of the families!

You fail to demonstrate that you are capable of thinking in terms of policies that are pragmatic and enduring. Where is your rage when time and again corporations are give multi-million dollars of incentives when they promise jobs, economic boom to the cities which has been repeatedly shown to never materialize and taxpayers are left footing the bill. taxpayer money keeps flowing to other avoidable things like settlements for police brutality, cleaning up the mess left by many bad ideas, etc.

I am no liberal, but what seems to be the problem in spending some money to build low cost housing so removal does not seem forced? why would that thought not come to your mind? for every ultra-liberal, there are 4x the corporate boot-lickers, and that seems to be the source of the problem.

You seem like the kind of person that is perfectly ok with stolen goods as long as they are are kept in nice display cases in a museum and even an entry fee is even charged for it.

This entire post seems like a strawman? What do Oakland or Skid Row have to do with people not wanting Flock cameras installed in their communities tracking all of their movements?

I don't care about Flock tracking petty criminals, I care about Flock tracking _me_.

But why? For most people all they'll find out is "this guy commutes to work, goes to Costco, and has an affair". Big tech knows about the affair from text messages already.

There are already numerous examples of law enforcement abusing data from Flock to track and stalk citizens who have done nothing wrong.

There are already numerous examples of Flock misidentifying citizens as suspects of crimes and them being arrested or otherwise harassed by law enforcement.

You can say that these are individual problems rather than systemic problems, but with the US' gradual descent towards authoritarianism and being a militarized police-state I do not see how this technology will be used to make a positive impact on the lives of everyday citizens (which IMO has been happening since the 80s at least before you just imply I don't like the current administration).

I am personally willing to incur a higher risk of being the victim of a crime if it means government/police/private companies/etc. are not able to violate my privacy every waking moment of my life.

> I am personally willing to incur a higher risk of being the victim of a crime if it means government/police/private companies/etc. are not able to violate my privacy every waking moment of my life.

This is it precisely. Thank you for stating this so clearly.

And I am not. Practically speaking, invasion of privacy from the government or private companies affects me not at all. Petty crime does make daily life unpleasant. And before you say "but you don't know how that'll turn out" - we do. There is China, there is Russia, there is Dubai. These are places where a female can walk around safely in the middle of the night.

> all they'll find out

Who is "they"?

Flock collects data which is given/sold to police departments or other entities. Regardless of how you feel about law enforcement having this data, how do you feel about Flock being a middle-man who controls the flow of the data? How do you feel about knowing Flock is VC-driven and will be making decisions based on ROI, not societal benefit?

And a public officer would instead be driven by corruption, like that nice San Jose policewoman who signed off on customs forms for fentanyl shipments.

The "you shouldn't need privacy if you aren't doing anything wrong" is such a tired yarn.

There are many many many examples of abuse, both in the short term (flock gymnastics pedophiles, cop loveint, cross state abortion suspicion tracking) and long term (the "red scare", the administration performing loyalty tests). There are also plenty of discussions outlining how everyone should support privacy because some need it more than others and we're all on the same team.

Pretending people who are against flock or government illegal surveillance care more about criminals then their families is so bad faith it makes them an asshole (not you but a comment above).

And this administration has been talking about “the enemy within” for so long, when do we see the Executive Order declaring protesters as “treasonous enemy combatants” (or similar nonsense) followed by a beefed up ICE-style militia offshoot making arrests from a Flock list of 100,000+ Americans who were tracked within the vicinity of No Kings protests. If republicans maintain control of congress, I’d give it a greater than 1% chance which is way too high.

But think of it from another angle. It's easy to assume that everyone is on board with your cause when you are in a bubble and all of your friends are. But it could be that there's no grand conspiracy to suppress the public opinion. It's just that public opinion isn't quite what you think.

And yeah, there will be bad apples. On the balance, I think these bad apples are better than the ones they replace.

Because when the government decides you've done something wrong from said video (even if you haven't), it's up to you to prove your innocence. That's a direct contradiction of what the US was founded upon, and creates a very slippery slope.

It might help to realize that this is a uniquely American affliction. People almost anywhere else simply don't consider politics (or race or gender for that matter) to be nearly as important.

This would then let you see your neighbors as people. What you claim are core values are nothing of the sort. They are misconceptions invented by your in-group to dehumanize the out-group. In reality people's core values are: their kids, their health, love, belonging, a sense of purpose. The rest is just a puppet master hijacking these core values for organizing a crowd.

Counterpoint: what you want to claim are core values are actually window dressing to hide how people see the out-group. Who doesn't "love their kids" or fall in love, or want a sense of belonging (ok, a few), or a sense of purpose (ok, a few more). These are not statements about anyone's core values, they're statements about what it is to be human.

Core values are about how you treat people who are NOT close to you, how you believe limited resources should be allocated, how and by whom you think decisions should be made, what the relationship between individuals and society ought to be, and specifically between individuals and government.

That also sounds nice on the surface - but has the same problem. Political positions disguised as core human values. Allow me to explain.

You say "values like how you treat people who are NOT close to you". Which is really code for "people who like open immigration policies are virtuous and people who oppose them are bad and/or less intelligent". But once you drill down to details - the picture changes. This kind of sentiment is used to drum up support for very specific pieces of very questionable legislation. Why should a specific ethnic group with a large and powerful diaspora get a free pass to ignore immigration laws, but other ethnic groups get the book? How is this about being virtuous and treating people NOT close to you equally? Well, you aren't allowed to ask these questions - you don't want to be a part of the dumb racist outgroup, do you?

You're reading things into what I wrote that are not there. I have not suggested that any particular stance towards people who are not close to you is virtuous. What I wrote is not "code for" anything.

If your core values are the there should no border controls at all, those are your core values. If your core values are that we should very tightly controlled borders, those are your core values. If your core values are that we should let in more Norwegians and less Bangladeshis, or vice versa, then those are your core values.

My point wasn't that a particular set of core values are virtuous, it was that core values are not things like "loving my kids".

Well - what's a core value? I'd say that if you can remove a value and still stay "you" then that value wasn't really core.

By that definition maybe even "loving my kids" wouldn't pass the test, as Viktor Frankl explains better than anyone could.

As for immigration, it is no accident that anti-immigrant rhetoric is on the rise precisely when the economy is doing poorly. When there were enough resources to go around - there wasn't nearly as much reason to oppose immigration. Which means that "my family is financially secure" is a much more core value for most people than being open to the world (even if they'll never admit it).

That's a narrower framing than I had in mind for my original comment. My whole point is that "politics" has transcended any single issue and has become indicative of a much broader world view. Sure, if you zoom in on any policy question you'll find plenty of places where reasonable people can honestly disagree. But that's not the way our political system functions.

The timeline is very close, and this area was heavily contested, with Mexico, Russia, and the US vying for the area. After all, Fort Ross is right next to Sutter's Mill - exactly where gold was discovered.

So, in 1841 Sutter bought Fort Ross - and failed to pay until 1849, a year after the USA officially took California from Mexico. And by incredible coincidence - a year after gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill. The existence of gold was likely already known for some time. It's simply too perfect.

Also, the Americans used their favorite weapon against the colony - sanctions! Prior to Sutter's arrival, Fort Ross could trade with Mexicans and the local Indians. Sutter forbade this - America would not trade with anyone involved with Fort Ross. The more things change the more they stay the same :)

And for a shallow clone you would serve... what?

No need for a shallow clone, just let the Frontend fetch the relevant objects from a static file server

It's strange to frame this as classical vs scale. Us humans have a powerful inference engine in our heads. We also use a calendar to avoid re-deriving everything from first principles before we've had our morning coffee. Businesses couple many creative (human) agents together. They also have processes and rules.

It isn't, and it is not what was described: its about unbounded imagination (neural / LLM) that needs reality constraints (symbols / rules) to produce useful output.

Think of it like human imagination may do anything (flying cars), but the real world has constraints and we use language/writing (symbols) and rules bound to them to simulate and reconcile our imagination with reality to actually flow our energy into something that may work in the real world.

> they dont publicly admit it because that would counter their claims for years of "scale is all you need" (which has vanished with diminishing returns, see $MS / altman's GPT-5 bet).

Is my reading comprehension just completely broken or something? The above certainly sounds like "the powers that be want us to believe that attention is all you need".

As an American, what are ways in which you can not defer to an authority - in a way that actually matters? Sure, you can choose to go outside dressed in gaudy colors, or not dressed at all if you are in SF. Or choose to flip the Democrat/Republican bit once every 4 years (usually without any effect on domestic or foreign policy, though not lately). But in a regular person's life, what authority do you want to opt out of? The average person can't do a thing about their HOA board, let alone a government representative.

It's just as intellectually lazy to leave "consciousness" undefined and proceed to claim that "X cannot be consciousness" because of social reasons. That's the definition of a circular argument.

In the same vein, airplanes can't fly because they don't flap their wings.

As for ignorance: have you tried to make an LLM produce the same output for the same input (as you state above)? Give it a shot, you'll be surprised.

I’m not leaving consciousness undefined. I provided a definition and asserted LLMs were not conscious by that definition. I solicited an alternate definition and was given none. If you’d like to claim the LLM is conscious, you need to define what you mean, for both “the LLM” and “is conscious,” because it’s not passing any of our existing bars for consciousness, and the only thing you can point to are characteristics also present in other objects we don’t consider conscious, so again, the burden of proof is in fact on you and that other fellow to provide some definitions here, because as sits you and the other commenter are just saying shit and refusing to engage with any kind of rigor.

And, to your point: I have, and I did, and I was not. If you’d like to refine your argument further - What LLM? Provide input how, and in what fashion? Under what conditions? - we can have that conversation, but if your assertion is “I can’t get ChatGPT to consistently produce the same output twice and therefore it is conscious,” that’s an incredibly facile argument.

You two seem to be laboring under the impression that this is terra ignota philosophically; it’s not. There’s an enormous amount of literature, thinking, ideas, concepts, frameworks, and approaches that already exist here that you’re welcome to engage with, but you’re not doing that, nor are you actually engaging with any of my arguments except to deny their existence.

Philosophically - sure. But philosophy is a feedback loop. Humans trying to build a model of their brain within their own brain. There is by definition not enough oomph there, and that model will necessarily be approximate at best.

Think that's what an out of touch techie would say? May I remind you that just a few hundred years ago the best philosophers were debating whether the world would descend into anarchy if more people realized that the big monkey in the sky doesn't exist. Just because philosophers talk about something doesn't mean it exists in reality.

As for same output - there's a parameter called "temperature". It governs the random wandering in the output of an LLM. Reducing temp gives more deterministic output, but also reduces the capabilities. Is it possible that randomness is also precisely the mechanism behind human creativity?

I'm still waiting for a definition of "consciousness," as well as a definition of the entity which you're claiming might possess it.

You've now added two additional entities that require definition for your statements to be meaningful in any sense - "philosophy," the entire field of which you're dismissing as useless, which is going to be extremely fun if you ever actually decide to dig into the neuroscience of consciousness and how the brain works to make sense of the world, and creativity, which has come into the conversation for some reason I'm not entirely sure of but also warrants a definition that isn't trivially satisfiable by either an I Ching or a double pendulum, which, if you're arguing those are conscious, sure, I guess we could throw anything in that bucket then.

You're arguing with all the rigor of a stoned college student, and fine, that's a register you can stay in, no problem with someone having hobbies, but at least have the decency to recognize what you're doing and acknowledge that other people have actually put in the work to be able to discuss and evaluate some of the questions you're positing as unknowable conundrums.

@hgomersall: emerging from a lucky orifice is in fact the main thing in life if you think about it. After all, we are collectively a computer made of monkeys, and the function it is computing is natural selection. Kin selection is one aspect of it. Everything else - including money and innovation - is window dressing.

Sure, so should we, as society, reward it further by also providing more free money?

Well, society is welcome to try to stop them.

These appeals usually go like this: we should stop providing more free money to the people who are strong enough to go and take it. Individually we are weaker, so let's stop this collectively. But someone needs to lead the collective. And just like that - you have created another strongman who will just take what he can. In other words: Communism.