Speaking only for areas near where I live, it was in response to a persistent uptick in home invasions. Police can't be everywhere at once, and LPR cameras flag stolen cars and mismatched plates that thieves like to use.
Some are installed by private entities. Home Depot installs Flock cameras in their parking lots.
I assume their primary use case is combating organized retail theft rings, as companies like Target spend a great deal on this problem (to include famously having their own accredited crime lab).
looking at deflock.org, in our town there are a few in Home Depot and Lowe's parking lots; I guess it's reasonable for a business to have a camera in their parking lot to prevent theft, that's not particularly new; the problem is that Flock has been selling that data for other purposes (ICE).
Cameras on the street is another matter altogether. Should not be allowed unless the citizens of the town vote to allow it.
Harvest data and let the techno fascist state that is slowly emerging figure out a use case later. For potential scenarios: if you like sci fi you can watch minority report, if you like history you can look at central Europe around 1930
I've read that compute costs for LLMs go up O(n^2) with context window size. But I think it is also a combination of limited compute availability, users preference for Anthropic models and Anthropic planning to go IPO.
I there anything the outside world can do? Like are the people relying on https://snowflake.torproject.org/ and adding bandwidth there actually makes a difference?
I usually use snowflake as a last resort, and even that's not consistently working right now. However I've seen people recommend running Conduit[1] to friends overseas, which is an easy-to-use Psiphon proxy node. Psiphon is a popular circumvention tool here so that could be helpful.
Snowflake aims to make every IP address a Tor bridge. It hides Tor traffic inside something very similar to a video call, which works in a browser behind NAT.
If the censors could probe and detect Snowflake on IPs, those will get blocked. When a censor observes suspiciously high amount of traffic to a set of IPs, it might block them or shape bandwidth.
You and your friends at Islamic Republic would do exactly what Israel has done in Gaza, if necessary. Killing thousands in less than 2 days is just a sign of nature of Islamic Republic. If necessary they would use chemical weapons against people of Iran.
If you're an American, demand radio free gets all it's funding back to 2024 levels, for a start. I read that people in Iran have relied on that service for a long time.
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