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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Here’s a good article this week on just one reason why Flock is terrible:

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

    Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code

    Flock’s surveillance cameras have already sparked outrage. WIRED reconstructed its next-generation AI system, already in use by some police, to confirm it goes much further than tracking license plates.

    VEHICLE SURVEILLANCE GIANT Flock Safety has told the public for years that its technology “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.” It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone, WIRED has learned.

    Drawing on a network of cameras that logs the movements of drivers in more than 6,000 communities, the tool can pick out potential witnesses by how often their cars pass through a neighborhood, or surface a driver’s “associates” from the cameras they pass together. Because the system also reaches police case files, 911 dispatch logs, and commercial identity records, those plates can be turned into names, home addresses, and relatives. It can search for people in an area drawn on a map based on nothing more than a physical description.




  • I’m very fortunate to have a job with a very small company (literally 4 people) where we get to set the rules.

    It is funny to see the ingrained notion we (collective “we”) once had that working from home could never work. I started this job in 2018, and I often suggested we do a work from home day each week since we all had laptops. My bosses (co-owners of this company) always shot it down. “Oh we’d never get any work done!”

    Then, of course, COVID. And while I certainly would rather COVID not have happened, it did convince them that working from actually works. And, of course, they loved it as well. So since 2020 I have not had to go back to the office. We still have office space for some minor things, and once in a blue moon we might gather there. But in six years I’ve probably spent six days in the office.

    Heck, I’m fortunate enough to finally have convinced them we should take Fridays off, too. We piloted that program two years ago over the summer, and it, of course, stuck because everyone likes that—though we actually just take every-other Friday off. But still. Hard to beat.