I'm actually surprised. The usual thing is that people don't care, or think "I have nothing to hide" and just go on with their lives. That's mostly been the case with online surveillance, tracking, etc. done by Google, Meta, and the ad industry.
For some reason, Flock became a rallying point on both the left and the right.
This ones easy, it's because the other ones provide a service people generally want, so the faustian bargain is always "Ill give you this thing I dont want to as long as you keep providing the thing I like."
Flock provides nothing direct to the consumer which means this is going to get worse and Id stake a wager they rebrand after raising their next huge round.
Plenty of people support Flock or at least its mission. They're just not vocal because the opposition is vociferous. Like most things the country is fairly divided. This poll has it 46% opposed and 38% support:
I think Google/Meta surveillance just feels like something painless, benign, and invisible. You couldn’t see a reason a huge corporation would really want to target you or put you in danger. With Flock, your local law enforcement has access, and that feels like a much more real threat (warrantless tracking of your real-world activity with the ability to ruin your day/life), not to mention how it’s already been abused to track exes of officers, had be easily hacked in the past, and that AI face recognition matched the wrong people.
Honestly I think the only significant difference is in branding: Flock isn't consumer-facing and is explicitly marketed for tracking people's movements. The major tech companies that make your phone, browser, maybe a few smart home devices with always-on microphones or cameras, all have more data about you and your habits than Flock could ever obtain, and with us paying for the privilege no less. I get that the average person doesn't care when the product works as advertised, but I don't think that's healthy. People should care as much about privacy when it's Google or Meta as when it's Flock.
The bipartisan nature isn't that surprising, given that surveillance is more of an authoritarianism vs libertarianism issue i.e. orthogonal to left vs right (in an oversimplified kinda way).
It's like nobody, left or right, wanted for or consented to the surveillance state. Nothing like shoving the biggest, dumbest camera you can find in everyone's face to rub it all in. Obviously, the surveillance state is part and parcel post-9/11, but it's too easy to ignore the tech nerds when they talk about abstract things like "privacy" and "abusing the system". Then we get visible things for them to rally against like Flock.
We are absolutely symbiotic from our cells upward. A large percentage of your body mass is bacteria, including the symbiotic bacteria you feed in your gut with the food you think you’re eating only for yourself.
Recent research has suggested that viruses supply us with a second immune system. These viruses keep down the numbers of bacteria and other microbes in our gut etc
We are so used to reading negative things about viruses that it makes a change to find out how they can benefit us too.
Claude sometimes (and Gemini always) will be lazy and fail to fetch new data from the web. Gemini will also repeatedly lie about it and say that it did when it actually didn’t.
My experience with Claude is that it doesn’t handle its own training cutoff properly. It responds as though its cutoff is today. Gemini is even worse about this.
I’m going to add this site to my agents files so that they’re explicitly aware of their own limitations.
I'd have to be pretty sure I could use the hardware forever without a login for me to let it near my systems. Anything with firmware or a security footprint would not qualify.
I might accept a Meta paperclip into my house, but then again, why risk it ;)
Meta's game is to do all sorts of dirty tricks to pull you into its data. No thanks.
Walking around wearing Meta’s hardware supports them by you advertising their product (unless you never show anyone that you own the hardware).
The existence of a used market also slightly increases the value of new things. By buying used, you’re supporting/signaling the used market and indirectly supporting the company.
If you don’t want to support a company, don’t go near their products.
“Advertising the product” is an extremely mild form of support in this case.
Your criticism of buying used is complete nonsense. Secondary markets have put companies out of business. You’re not “signaling” anything except that the price is too high.
You are right, it's double-edged. In some cases it can hurt companies (e.g. luxury good companies) while in other cases it can benefit them (e.g. car companies benefit from the second-hand market in many ways). It's a fascinating economics+psychology topic.
Absolutely not. A human driver has to watch the road and can’t scrutinize a gun.
And it’s also not easy to tell toys from real guns. Many cities illegalized toy guns on public transit because people were putting orange tips on real guns to make them look like toys. 3D-printed guns rarely look like they can actually fire, even though they can.
A human driver can't tell. I've had gun guys mistake my airsoft guns for real ones. Average person who isn't familiar with both real guns and airsoft has no chance.
You literally can't tell. You can tell by touching or by extreme close inspection if you have had held examples of both by subtle process/cultural differences, or by racking if you have done so in the past in either or both, due to major internal differences. But if you think toy guns are like nerf guns painted in black, then you just can't. It's not an easy tell like wrong corner rounding on Apple lookalike aluminium chassis.
Maybe I would change my mind if I were an actual Uber driver, but I'm thinking that I don't care if my passenger has a gun, as long as they're being safe and not pointing it at me. I've been around guns. They don't scare me. My job is to drive them from point A to point B. Why should I care if they are packing, or if they're underage drinking a beer, or if they're texting a mob boss about money laundering?
I’ve been a hacker since I was 10, so about 30 years now.
A couple of years ago, I felt the same way you did. And then I started properly/seriously using Claude Code. When Opus 4.5 came out, it was sincerely life-changing. I can prototype working projects in possibly 1/30th the time, and I can do them simultaneously.
This post has made me realize that the flood of AI news isn’t annoying or boring to me anymore because I think my profession is the only one that’s actually being replaced by it, for better or worse. For coders, there’s nothing even close to the level of importance as AI (which doesn’t mean it’s interesting).
Honestly I’d like to see more news about AI, but actually about the way it’s devastated the labor side of our industry and will kill the middle classes of countries like India.
Without question, nothing short of the web has been more impactful to our industry specifically than AI has been and will be.
I have the same "1/30th ... simultaneous" experience with coding agents, and I am having fun. Directing teams of agents to solve many problems (or create many useful things) for me has its own fun challenges/puzzles-to-solve.
Some of the fun is redirecting coding agents when they get stuck, by showing them code or design they could not work out on their own. Some of the fun is designing tools to rein-in AI coding agents, keep them on track, and verify their outputs. Some of the fun is exploring new areas for me: compilers, game dev, language design, emulators, embedded, etc.
So I am having fun at the CTO/PM/Engineering Manager level but also at the lowest coding level.
I've been coding since the early 70s. This brings back the joy I had discovering microprocessors and electronics.
Sure, if that is what you like. I for one did not get into this field because I wanted to hire people (artificial or natural) to write the programs for me. Programming as an activity / art is what I enjoyed the most. Managing people / agents is a total turn off.
serious question: do you program in machine code or assembler or use a higher level language? do you use design patterns and functional approaches? metaprogramming, code generation, templating, app frameworks?
Each tool, abstraction, language feature elevates coding to get more done with less (more concisely). Programming is a social activity, since source code is meant to be read by humans (at least historically) even if it is just yourself later.
I'm not trying to talk you into using AI coding agents, but explain why I find them fun, and I've written a lot of code by hand over decades, from spaghetti assembler code to structureed programming to object oriented to functional, etc. Each advance in the industry has been a new and diiferent kind of fun for me.
Are you saying that AI coding agents cannot produce working code? Or are you saying that it produces something that cannot be explained or understood?
If I used a macro to generate code that gets compiled and linked to code someone else provided, how is that different from asking a coding agent to generate similar code and linking to other coding agent code?
Is your concern that the output is probabilistic vs. a macro or code generator producing code deterministically? I apply engineering practices to ensure the results are suitable.
I do understand that AI is fundamentally different (and I've been studying ML in depth for more than a year). My comparison was in terms of tools increasing productivity, not how they do that.
I was a "10x programmer" on several projects and I am 10x more productive now than I was then (at least). I can create in a few days by myself (with agents) what used to take months (with a team of people).
Maybe I'm producing what some consider "AI slop" but the things I've built this year work to my satisfaction, are fun to make, and I am constantly learning new things. And I am doing this for fun but also to learn by teaching, so I build educational, visual things to share with others.
I absolutely do, in fact I do post on the subject as well. I just think the amount of AI news is overbearing and I do not feel like HN is a good enough source for IT news anymore. Sure, I can use another medium, but that's not the point, I hope we can discuss this and hopefully see YC come up with some good solution.
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