They did a terrible job explaining it, but I think it's just that the case doesn't have magsafe

Here's my understanding (please someone correct me if I'm wrong). Flock sells license plate reading cameras. Lots of cities and states bought these and no one noticed.

Then there were some expose pieces about how the data is routinely used by police to do things like track people's everyday whereabouts (which should require a warrant). There were also a variety of other issues:

- They misidentified someone's license plate consistently, leading to him being harassed by the police.

- There were big security vulnerabilities which meant people could live stream the video from some the cameras and access some of the data.

- They have been used by police officers to stalk people for romantic/sexual reasons.

- They are being used to enforce a lot of laws that people think are unjust (abortion bans, immigration laws, etc.).

thanks a lot for taking the time to explain this man .. really appreciate it.

Magnus Carlson doesn't really need to practice chess (not in the same way most people do at least)

In general yes, but what about this sentence:

> Reitano's personal experience with a heart condition, and his desire to recreate his father, a doctor, out of software as a hologram, inspired him to co-found the company.

lmao this comment is going to be pulled up by the plaintiff's lawyers and used to show willful infringement. someone's going to be paying treble + plaintiff's legal fees

seriously though you should probably consult a lawyer about whether to change the name, especially given that you've posed this comment in public

Such a reductive title/framing. Yes, plastic recycling doesn't work very well. But that doesn't mean that getting rid of trash is simple/there aren't opportunities to reduce waste. Metal recycling, compost, glass bottle reuse, and proper management of landfills are all super important!

Also: > In total, Britain’s Environment Agency calculated that a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic.

They make it seem like this is a bad thing but surely the average cotton bag gets used more than 173 times. I've probably used some of my oldest reusable bags like ~1k times.

In New York City where disposable bag bans occurred I’m quite certain the average “reusable” bag gets used a single-digit number of times. Grocery stores charge 25c for a “reusable” bag in the case that you forgot to bring your own, and every household has a bag full of bags that never get used. Now they’ve re-allowed disposable paper bags, which seems sensible to me.

Surely the reusable bags that cost 25c also use a lot less resources to make than a cotton bag.

Also, I would argue that the paper bag is the worst of both worlds - more carbon emissions than a plastic bag but also unlikely to be reused.

That's only if it's buried. Properly managed compost is the best option.

Is that something I can do with plastic though?

Just because something doesn't impact geopolitics doesn't mean it isn't important

That's not what I'm saying, and I don't know where you inferred that from. I'm saying that tech has changed the world in the way we experience it, for sure, but it has been driven by political choices, more that drive political choices itself if we look at the bigger picture.

Isn't that exactly one of the interesting tensions here?

You original point is that at a macro level it's driven by the elite decision makers not technology. I think the point you are perhaps missing is how much of that is constrained by the distribution of power and how technology can change that distribution.

I think there is no doubt that access to the internet and information ( and propaganda ) , and self-organised mass communication has had an impact - that's why countries switch off the internet when trying to suppress an uprising for example.

A lot of previously stable countries are starting to feel 'ungovernable' in the sense that's it's increasingly difficult for the established order to create and maintain it's preferred narrative.

If you look back in history at the last big information revolution - the printing press - the consensus is that it played a significant role in things like the French or American revolution or the breaking the power of centralised religion.

And sure those in power are scrambling to put the genie back in the bottle, and they may succeed - but that just illustrates the potential transformative power.

Wasn't the whole Arab Spring in 2011 due, in a large part, to technology/twitter/mass-communication and organization enabled by the internet?

Maybe I am misremembering it.

That example alone feels enough.

The process of automating mathematics:

We understand the proof (most math from all of history) -> We understand how the proof was made (computer-assisted proofs like the four-color theorem) -> We have to trust the computer's explanation for how the proof was made (some LLM proofs)

Is that really a problem? The only risk in a Lean proof is the LLM finding a bug in multiple kernels (2 with the standard setup) that would let it add a new theorem without legitimately proving it. If you have reasoning traces or send a second model to look at the proof you can easily detect that and file a bug report.

For the rest you only need to check that the formal problem statement matches the actual problem and the proof is not using extra axioms. That's easy to check manually or with a simple script.

Many mathematicians care about understanding the method and the tools used more than the result. LLMs have a large advantage in memory and reading speed, you can feed them the entire internet and published literature at training time, and then make them check dozens of papers in a few minutes at runtime. They might not be very creative, but they've seen that obscure 1990's theorem in the training data that happened to use an idea that might just work again.

Reading the LLM's 12 MB lean output is a bit like trying to maintain a codebase that has been fully vibe-coded as a single giant file, by hand. Even if it's possible in principle, no one is going to enjoy that.

More generally, Musk admittedly works with a "move fast and break things" mentality. His companies have repeatedly broken environmental laws, labor laws, and securities laws. His companies often fail to deliver the features they promise and routinely miss deadlines they've committed to. They routinely violate contracts that they have agreed to.

Not doing business with them is a completely normal and unremarkable decision.