Go visit Harris County where Houston is, they are definitely active and more are getting deployed constantly. More commercial businesses are also installing them in their parking lots. It's not just Lowe's/Home Depot, I've seen new ones popping up at grocery stores and storage unit businesses.
To go from my house to the grocery store 4 miles away, I have to drive by 6 flock camera deployments. Hardware store 6 miles away? That's at least 9-12 cameras I have to pass.
I literally cannot leave my neighborhood without Flock knowing about it because they've installed them at every single entrance.
And that's just the driving portion of a trip. I stopped going to Big box stores almost completely because I'm tired of looking up as I walk down the aisles and see a fucking screen showing me on camera with big red letters stating "Recording in progress". That's not enough though, you go to the self checkout and have cameras above you and in the checkout machines watching and recording and analyzing your every movement and facial expression.
It's blatantly obvious what's going on if people would look up from their phones for 10 minutes and pay attention.
I think all the people who perished or the ones that lost loved ones would disagree with that assessment not to mention it's just shitty to talk about a tragedy that devastated so many lives.
I did a summer working with a traveling survey crew for pipeline work on the East Coast back in the 2010's. We started up north in Maryland and followed the pipeline south down to the North/South Carolina border.
Because we had to move to new sites further south every 3-4 weeks on average, we all had camper trailers and just hopped from campground to campground as we went. Towards the end we ended up staying at a campground near Mooresville NC and every day since we left that place I've wanted to go back.
It was so beautiful and quiet with so much history to explore and it left a huge impression on me. Might be time for me to actually pick up and go visit again.
Unrelated but there needs to be a guide given out to southerners visiting Maryland warning them to not call anyone under the age of 100 sir/ma'am... Might have just been bad luck with my encounters but I had a couple of people get very angry for calling them ma'am and it was so hard to undo a lifetime of defaulting to using those terms when talking to people I don't know lol.
Access to nature was something I sort of subconsciously selected for when I moved a few years back to be closer to the kids. It got me curious how close my situation was to the idealized standard in the post and I have to say, I think they nailed it.
I'm a little lucky to have found a house that borders a large therapeutic horse riding center so looking out my back windows (chain link fence on the back so minimal obstruction) I am looking straight into a small forest. That aside, my own property has 3 trees between 25' - 60` tall out front and out back there's an 80' tall sweet gum tree (it's lucky I value it's existence slightly more than I loathe the 6 billion stupid spike balls out drops for me every year) an 80' (I believe) maple, and a useless 95' Pine tree that the squirrels are slowly De-Branching).
It's a small property in the suburbs so those trees give me well over 30% coverage so I've got 2/3.
Quick check on Google maps and unfortunately I'm 483 meters away from my neighborhood park so I missed the mark there. But I think having 3-4 large parks all connected by 15+miles of hiking trails, a botanical garden, and an arboretum within a 5 mile radius more than makes up for that extra 183 meters.
Having spent the last 3+ years living with this level of access to nature spaces, it's become the bare minimum I expect from wherever I move in the future. And if I'm honest, I'll likely not be happy with anything less than being able to see more nature than society when I step out of the house..
> Or were you only asking about digital tools? I haven't really made any of those. Making physical tools feels much more satisfying these days.
I made that realization last year and since then it's just been random project after random project each one requiring me to discover a new tool or method to do some aspect of the project "properly". I'll never be a plumber or electrician professionally but it's so rewarding to start from zero and learn something new that is tangible in the real world. That's the one AI use case I've walked away from feeling like I actually learned something.
> Is it just that there's a direct personal benefit with those devices, and people view the trade-off as being worth it?
I think that's mostly it. Basically since Flocks only use is for the systematic tracking of people for use by police and government agencies, it's a lot easier to get people to turn against it. There's just no upside to them that any individual would ever benefit from.
It's sad because if/when Flock dies the death of deserves, the software/infrastructure will likely just get sold off and reapplied to some other deployment scheme like Ring quietly forgoing the big Superbowl Ad.
Sadly, judging by the info I read on the website now, it seems to be focused on using AI assistance.
Not going to lie, it deeply worries me how quickly society is just accepting offloading what used to be meaningful human interactions to AI. I hate to imagine what a society looks like once the people in it solely rely on AI for navigating life.
Sorry for the bleak reply. I was genuinely excited to read about the service as you described it and would love to hear that the human assistance side of it still works even if the website only showcases the AI.
While not "fully" Netflix original (having been picked up by Netflix from Fox I think after season 2 or 3), Lucifer was a great series and without Netflix we would have never gotten an ending for it. They did right by that show in my book and it saddens me that since those days, the quality and care put into what they produce just fell off a cliff. It's honestly gross how much money was wasted on all this new junk designed to be algorithmically enticing so much so that even after you watch it and tell yourself it was garbage, you still find yourself going back and hoping this time will be different.
Entertainment media used to at the very least masquerade as Art. Unfortunately it seems the desire for money eventually ruins all good things.
Throwing out my recommendation for History of the Universe as well as its sibling channels. Honestly, the people behind these channels produce higher quality documentaries, both in substance and style, than 99% of the "professionally" created stuff I've watched in at least three last 5 years.
> The youtube channels are nowhere near the style and depth of documentaries like the ones above...
My friend, if you enjoy long format, deep diving documentaries written, produced and narrated without AI about Space, Physics, Human evolution or planet Earths history, then I insist you head over to the History of the Universe YouTube channel and start watching!
This specific video is probably my favorite (I'm a sucker for contemplating "time"and what it actually is) and was the one that got me hooked on their channel. They go way deeper into the details without becoming a formal lecture and it's genuinely captivating. https://youtu.be/ZSmNii0uOmw?si=3Jaty3XcMGlryhh2
Did exactly this with the Sennheiser BTD-700 Bluetooth dongle. Found someone had done the work to create a little C library for controlling the dongle and with that Claude had created a nice widget for KDE to control my headphones.
> I think that reality is basically made of habit.
This statement is not self explanatory and reeks of performative profoundness, care to elaborate?
> Habit is a bigger deal than you think.
Feels like we're just adding the element of mystery to the profoundness to imply you have a deeper understanding than someone else in an attempt to get out of defending your position.
I hope not, I genuinely would rather find out you do actually have the answer to all my issues!
> I think this has nothing to do with commonality and more to do with the fact everyone I know who is autistic (I work in tech) has been obsessively getting themselves diagnosed with things since they were like 14 like its a religion.
I hope you decide to keep that opinion to yourself in the future and not tell people that what they are experiencing isn't real.
> Just has a new thing wrong with them weekly
So, you see multiple people experiencing a new medical ailment or symptom "every week" and think all these people are faking an issue so well it fools a doctor? What about my severe plaque psoriasis, T-1 Diabetes, and POTS?
Am I just imagining the giant red inflamed scaly patches of skin on each one of my joints?
Am I just psychosomatically making my body not produce insulin?
Im just making up that my blood pressure drops so low from standing too fast that I get tunnel vision?
Your opinion causes people like me to spend 20 years of their life to hide and ignore the problems they experience until they are so bad we can't function as human beings anymore. And the sad part of it is, if we (the patients) actually understood what we were dealing with early on in life, a lot of these problems can be avoided.
It's a shame so many people share your ignorant opinion and tendency to shame what you can't understand, you'll never comprehend how deeply that effects the people you are saying it about.
I was keeping a Windows install around solely to play Fortnite with my kids but they've finally found other games.
Rocket League performance on Linux used to be the other big reason but about 4 months ago I fired it up and found it ran smoother (the random stutters I have suffered through on Windows are not there on Linux).
Now that those two are no longer relevant I can finally reclaim that wasted SSD storage.
As someone in their mid 30's who followed Ron Paul back in the early 2000's, I have a hard time understanding this sentiment when, at least back then, "Your rights end where mine begin" was their foundation.
Idk, I don't have any loyalty towards any of these political parties so it shouldn't bother me but part of me gets defensive when I hear them described this way today. (Hell, I remember being the weirdo anti-interventionist in my circles and it was always the tea party ass hats that were uncomfortably enthusiastic about offing people they didn't like).
To go from my house to the grocery store 4 miles away, I have to drive by 6 flock camera deployments. Hardware store 6 miles away? That's at least 9-12 cameras I have to pass.
I literally cannot leave my neighborhood without Flock knowing about it because they've installed them at every single entrance.
And that's just the driving portion of a trip. I stopped going to Big box stores almost completely because I'm tired of looking up as I walk down the aisles and see a fucking screen showing me on camera with big red letters stating "Recording in progress". That's not enough though, you go to the self checkout and have cameras above you and in the checkout machines watching and recording and analyzing your every movement and facial expression.
It's blatantly obvious what's going on if people would look up from their phones for 10 minutes and pay attention.