I've found ChatGPT, especially "5.2 Thinking" to be very helpful in the relatively static world of fabrication. CNC cutting parameters for a new material? Gets me right in the neighborhood in minutes (not perfect, but good parameters to start). Identifying materials to compliment something I have to work with? Again, like a smart assistant. Same for generating lists of items I might be missing in prepping for a meeting or proposal.

But the high-level attorney in the family? Awful, and definitely in the ways identified (the biglaw firm is using MS derivative of OpenAI) - it thinks only statically.

BUT, it is also far worse than that for legal. And this is not a problem of dynamic vs. static or world model vs word model.

This problem is the ancient rule of Garbage In Garbage Out.

In any legal specialty there are a small set of top-level experts, and a horde of low-level pretenders who also hang out their shingle in the same field. Worse yet, the pretenders write a LOT of articles about the field to market themselves as experts. These self-published documents look good enough to non-lawyers to bring in business. But they are often deeply and even catastrophically wrong.

The problem is that LLMs ingest ALL of them with credulity, and LLM's cannot or do not tell the difference. So, when an LLM composes something, it is more likely to lie to you or fabricate some weird triangulation as it is to compose a good answer. And, unless you are an EXPERT lawyer, you will not be able to tell the difference until it is far too late and the flaw has already bitten you.

It is only one of the problems, and it's great to have an article that so clearly identifies it.

I'd love to have a Linux-based 3D CAD program, but the open source ones just aren't up to scratch.

I've tried using FreeCAD, but it still scrambles things topologically (for example: adjust an underlying object and your fillets may get totally hosed).

Fusion is especially frustrating as they have a macOS version. A Linux version really shouldn't be much different.

Yeah OnShape has been a godsend, and keeping it free for open designs is one of the better ethical stances to take. KiCad on the other hand is incredible (LibrePCB is shaping up really nicely too).

That's Linux's weakness right now - when a use-case misses it REALLY misses. Browser-native apps are a pretty reliable escape hatch for that.

I use RhinoCAD / MadCAM, and it is really the only thing keeping me on Windows. I've heard it works on some emulators like WINE, but haven't yet made the effort to test it, and can't really afford to have any latent issues pop up at random times after initial testing seems to work, so still enduring the Microslop insanity... ugh

False, he is forcing Flock on EVERYONE

No one has permitted themselves to be surveilled. And no, under the radar agreements with local cops and govts do NOT constitute my permission to be surveilled. If they want to go in with fully informed referendums in each community, then I'd accept it. But that is not Flock's business model.

I might accept it for this specific case. But, in general, just because the majority wants to do something doesn't mean it's legitimate to force everyone to accept it.

I mean, isn't that the literal definition of democracy? I tend to agree that "tyranny of the majority" can have some pretty bad outcomes, but that is what a democracy ultimately boils down to, is it not?

> I mean, isn't that the literal definition of democracy?

isn't relevant. A) we're not in a pure democracy, and B) no one argued that something is or would not be democracy.

That's why countries have constitutions, that usually can not be completely replaced.

Except, of course, by the action of a (super)majority, at least in the US.

But all these rich people want to go back to a time when they could impregnate their 14 year old housekeeper.

> No one has permitted themselves to be surveilled

As much as I dislike Flock, this is bad logic. There's no such thing as opting out of surveillance in public spaces. Public spaces are defined by being public, in that everyone (even governments/corporations!) is free to observe everyone else in that same setting.

So in reality, everyone has permitted themselves to be surveilled, purely through the act of being in public.

This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.

If this is what they thought was possible, why write the 4th Amendment?

Unreasonable search and overbearing government was one of the key issues of the American Revolution.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety - Ben Frank

Iirc he was a founder

Mission creep and abuse are major concerns. Examples are documented where systems introduced for limited purposes — like traffic enforcement or terrorism prevention — expand into broader, unchecked surveillance by multiple agencies, commercially and maybe gray or black markets, too. Imagine cameras initially deployed in work zones may later be used citywide, enabling mass tracking of individuals without probable cause.

Lack of oversight and due process further fuels opposition. Automated systems, such as those issuing speeding tickets without human review, deny individuals fair recourse. The absence of judicial warrants and transparency in deployment is seen as enabling government overreach and hidden revenue generation, disproportionately impacting low-income communities. Long-term record keeping may contain errors, omissions and misjudgements that remain uncorrected.

Financial and civil costs are real. Surveillance systems are expensive, yet studies show limited effectiveness in actually preventing crime or terrorism. Civil libertarians argue that resources should instead support community-based safety solutions that respect constitutional freedoms.

Ultimately, strict legal limits or outright bans on public video surveillance are in effect right now in many places, and those cases can be discussed among an informed voting public.

I was skeptical from the first sentence, but I stopped here.

This "chilling effect" is a favorite of privacy advocates, but it's purely a hypothetical. I have asked for and received no evidence of its practical effect in the real world, and can find plenty of evidence to the contrary.

New York City, for example, is one of the most highly-surveilled cities in the US, and yet turnout for things like protests is seemingly unaffected.

This is one of the centerpieces of your entire argument, yet is literally taken on faith.

aren't you declaring that you did not even read the whole post?

I agree that the hypothetical "chilling effect", as presented, is plausible and reasonable, but it lacks evidence. As such, I saved myself the effort of reading what might be a plausible argument until such time as it becomes supported by evidence.

I went back and read it, and you supported it with more hypotheticals, not evidence. So congratulations, you made me waste a couple minutes of my life! But this just tells me I once again made the right judgement call in not reading it the first time, and doesn't really help further your cause, or convince me I'm mistaken in this regard.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor

Being okay with people watching me in public does not imply being okay with someone aggregating the information about my whereabouts 24/7 even though it's "the same" information.

Btw it's a fallacy similar to the one debunked in "what colour are your bits". The context matters, not just the abstract information.

Courts made a pretty reasonable set of tradeoffs around the 4th amendment for search warrant vs. subpoena, police officers observing you, etc.

During the 19th century.

Unfortunately, modern data processing completely undermines a lot of the rationale about how reasonable and intrusive various things are. Before, cops couldn't follow and surveil everyone; blanket subpoenas to get millions of peoples' information weren't possible because the information wasn't concentrated in one entity's hands and compliance would have been impossible; etc.

The actual legal problem is that, the above does not apply to private companies. You have no fourth amendment rights from private companies. The constitution gives you no rights against companies.

So the company does exactly what the police aren't allowed to do, and then sell access to the police. For some reason, this literal circumvention of their restrictions has been explicitly allowed.

This is why Surveillance Capitalism is such a big deal. It is a direct circumvention of your explicit constitutional rights, and it just so happens to accomplish that because of the profit earned in the process. For a lot of assholes, this is the winingest of win-wins.

There isn’t a sweeping precedent that says “mass surveillance is illegal.

The Supreme Court has signaled concern (Knotts’ “dragnet-type” reservation; echoed in Jones/Carpenter), but mostly we rely upon older third-party/plain-view doctrines and very fact-specific scope/retention questions.

So we have things like law enforcement successfully subpoenaing gmail metadata at large scale.

The law is perhaps changing, slowly -- we have geofencing heading to the Supremes, and active litigation about ALPR.

Also, “private company” isn’t an automatic workaround—if a vendor is acting as an agent of law enforcement, Fourth Amendment limits apply.

Okay: Just how long would you permit someone to follow you around with a camera, recording everything you do?

The thing about a stranger watching you in public is that eventually you go somewhere else, and they can't watch you anymore. A surveillance organization like Flock, however, is waiting for you wherever you go. In this sense they're much more like a stalker following you around than a stranger who happens to see you.

This analogy bears out in practice: Cops have used Flock data to stalk their exes.¹

[1]: https://www.kwch.com/2022/10/31/kechi-police-lieutenant-arre...

Probably not long. I might also make it clear I'm not a fan, but at the end of the day, they're generally within their rights to record me in public. Sucks, but not much I can do.

> The thing about a stranger watching you in public is that eventually you go somewhere else, and they can't watch you anymore. A surveillance organization like Flock, however, is waiting for you wherever you go. In this sense they're much more like a stalker following you around than a stranger who happens to see you.

I mean, I don't buy this argument, because a stranger can legally follow me to all the same places where Flock is present. I mean, surely if I get into a car and drive away, they can get into a car and follow me. So long as we're both in public roads, they're within their rights to do so?

Granted, if they keep it up long enough, I can probably file charges for stalking. Perhaps the same can be done against Flock? Hell, this would even be a situation where Flock would be useful: proving that someone was following me around all day, thus supporting my bid for a restraining order or something.

> This analogy bears out in practice: Cops have used Flock data to stalk their exes.¹

Indeed, and this is where oversight, strict rules around usage and retention, and effective penalties for violations are needed.

Banning Flock is not the only solution! I mean, I would be in favor of banning Flock specifically (because they've demonstrated a willingness to act in bad faith), but I would not support a ban of ALPRs entirely. They do provide benefits, and coupled with the right rules, can be a net benefit to society.

You should not test this. If you record someone for hours or days in public, you may find yourself with a restraining order, a ticket for stalking (or assault), or a civil suit for invasion of privacy or IIED or something similar. This depends on the jurisdiction and the person you are recording, but what you are citing about not having an expectation of privacy is mostly meant with regards to point-in-time instances (one photo), not ongoing continuous surveillance.

Yes, the only distinction between any and all of these things and a legal recording is the length of time and the invasiveness of the collection of data. No, there is no bright line where you are definitely guilty or definitely safe (few things in law have one).

>> No one has permitted themselves to be surveilled

> As much as I dislike Flock, this is bad logic. There's no such thing as opting out of surveillance in public spaces.

You're agreeing that he is forcing flock on people. Legality doesn't make it not-forced. Not needing consent is different from receiving consent.

Do you have an answer? I certainly don't

I mean, you're welcome to buy an Apple Vision Pro, but you making poor decisions with your money doesn't make Apple responsible for that.

If you want to manually observe me in public, as in WITH A HUMAN PERSON'S LIVING EYEBALLS, go right ahead.

Even if you want to use a manually-operated still or video camera and microphone, one device per person, go ahead. Or even a radar gun operated by a human, one observer with one device.

But if you start littering the entire planet with cameras and create a panopticon, even if it is absolutely in public space, that is ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, and absolutely infringing on any reasonable concept of public/private space!

Consider simple speeding. An ordinary person who usually follows speed limits will rarely get stopped and fined, even if they occasionally exceed a limit in an emergency or when doing the safest thing in dense traffic that is over the speed limit, match the speed of traffic. But with universal surveillance, even watching 100% in public spaces, that person in an emergency could get dozens of tickets for minor infractions.

This is setting up Cardinal Richlieu's ideal tyranny: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."

With a panopticon of all public spaces, any petty tyrant can find enough evidence in six minutes to imprison anyone.

[0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cardinal_Richelieu

It's a good thing, then, that most criminal convictions require a jury of our peers, and not just the word of a tyrant. And that appeals exist, etc etc.

> With a panopticon of all public spaces, any petty tyrant can find enough evidence in six minutes to imprison anyone.

This is a blatant strawman. Said "panopticon" already exists in major areas, and this kind of abuse of power still rarely happens. It's possible to have increased surveillance come with stricter rules and increased oversight, you know.

For example, it's pretty telling that Mandani, largely seen as a promising progressive candidate, has opted to change so little about the NYPD, which conducts massive city-wide surveillance, on the level of your "panopticon". Perhaps it's because he understands the benefits it provides to public safety, and is implicitly voting in confidence of its current level of oversight?

It is not even close to "rarely happens"

It happens in EVERY authoritarian state that has the technology, to BILLIONS of people around the world.

It is also already happening a LOT in the US (presumably where your comment is limited to).

Flock is used specifically to create parallel construction, where they observe cars moving "in a pattern" that might indicate "smuggling immigrants" such as driving from a border county, or working with pro-immigrant groups (a 100% legal activity), and local/regional police are alerted to find a pretext to stop the car, and often results in charges for someone who would otherwise never have been noticed.

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

This has been known for thousands of years.

This type of systems are only a step away from absolute power

>> most criminal convictions require a jury of our peers

Tell that to the people kidnapped by ICE, with ZERO due process, based on just a sighting and tracking with a camera that matches a racial profile, then they wind up in detention and deported, or dead, with zero judicial intervention.

Stop acting like this doesn't happen or the current 'administration' actually follows the rules. This administration is on the well-traveled road to corrupting democracy and implementing fascism, and systems like Flock actively help it happen.

You are arguing sophistry on the wrong side of the facts, the wrong side of civil society, and the wrong side of history. Reconsider your life

You and I have very different definitions of "rarely", apparently.

It is rare, by most definitions of "rare" (at least in the US, where I'm implicitly limiting this discussion, in general). What's yours?

If your definition of "rarely" is "more than never", a) you're setting an unreasonable standard, and b) letting the lack of perfection be an easy way to discredit anyone who disagrees with you, which is intellectually lazy.

I certainly agree that abuse happens! Unfortunately, that's just a fact of life. The best we can do is minimize abuse, and we should be making every effort to do so.

But this does not mean reactionary banning of every new technology, regardless of the benefits it may bring. That's just reactionary conservatism, which I think (based on the rest your comment), you vehemently disagree with!

> Flock is used specifically to create parallel construction, where they observe cars moving "in a pattern" that might indicate "smuggling immigrants" such as driving from a border county, or working with pro-immigrant groups (a 100% legal activity), and local/regional police are alerted to find a pretext to stop the car, and often results in charges for someone who would otherwise never have been noticed.

[Citation needed]. This is certainly plausible, but is currently presented without evidence, and can likewise be dismissed without evidence.

> Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Cool truism. Except we're not talking about "absolute power" by any stretch of the definition.

> This type of systems are only a step away from absolute power

Okay this is just bullshit and hyperbole.

The rest of your comment is equally disingenuous and wildly emotional. I refuse to engage with this. Either calm down and have a real conversation, or go away. Your subsequent ad-hominems and strawmen are entirely unwarranted and uncalled-for.

You are awfully quick to dismiss what you do not know and are too lazy to even do a quick search. I literally read about these parallel construction scenarios here on HN and they are sufficiently common and severe to generate multiple legal actions and be repeatedly reported in mainstream press, e.g., [0],[1],[2],[3], and Flock even stopped cooperating due to these issues[4]. so, there's five citations, doing your homework for you.

>>we're not talking about "absolute power"; bullshit and hyperbole.

A corporate-government alliance that can track every movement of you and every other resident and arrest you on any pretext (e.g., "these two photos show you averaging 5mph over the speed limit, oh, you refuse a car search? GET OUT OF THE CAR...") is functionally indistinguishable from absolute power.

There is a reason such a panopticon is a core feature of many dystopian novels or movies - if they always know what you do, you have zero freedom to do anything they do not want you to do.

With that kind of power, there are endless examples of opportunities for abuse, and the burden of proof is on those trying to defend implementing such a system.

Repeatedly yelling "strawman!" or "citation needed" as if they were a magical argument winning incantations dismissing statements based on "tone" are not arguments. You really read like a high-school poster who got a hold of one of his older sister's college philosophy books over the holidays and now fancies himself a master logician. Of course it feels powerful to take an absolutist stand, and you can argue it forever, but such sophistry doesn't convince anyone and is extremely boring and pointless.

You had one good point upstream that one needs to draw a line somewhere between a single CATV camera and a panopticon. Yes, it is difficult to draw that line. Discussing THAT makes sense.

CBP is already creating surveillance networks to identify "suspicious" routes, and in real-time identify people coincidentally driving that direction, and having local police cook up a reason to stop them.

[0] https://apnews.com/article/border-patrol-surveillance-licens...

[1] https://apnews.com/article/immigration-border-patrol-surveil...

[2] https://www.404media.co/ice-taps-into-nationwide-ai-enabled-...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45030853

[4] https://apnews.com/article/immigration-abortion-license-plat...

There are even weirder stuff than companies being considered a "moral person". For example if a person speeds way too much in France (say more than 50 kilometers/hour above the speed limit on the highway, e.g. 180 km/h // 111 mph instead of the 130 km/h // 80 mph)... Well then that person gets arrested. And his driving license is confiscated on the spot. But here's the absolute crazy thing: even if the car belong to someone else, to a company, to a rental company... Doesn't matter: the French state consider that the car itself was complicit in the act. So the car is seized too (for 8 days if it doesn't belong to the person who was driving it and potentially much more if it does belong to the person driving it).

Companies are persons and cars (I'm not even talking about self-driving cars) have rights and obligations. That's the world we live in.

If you followed me around all day taking photographs of my every move for no other reason than you felt like it, I would very likely have recourse via stalking and harassment laws.

There is no difference to me that some company does it via technology.

If I'm interesting enough to get a warrant for surveillance of my activities - fair game. Private investigators operate under a set of reasonable limits and must be licensed in most (all?) states for this reason as well.

It's quite obvious laws have simply not caught up with the state of modern technology that allows for the type of data collection and thus mass-surveillance that is now possible today. If you went back 50 years ago and asked anyone on the street if it was okay that every time they left the house their travel history would be recorded indefinitely they would talk to you about communist dystopias that could never happen here due to the 2nd amendment.

There is a difference, the company is doing it to everyone, technology enables new things to happen and laws don't cover it. Before it was impractical for police to assign everyone a personal stalker but tech has made it practical.

By default if something is new enough it has a pretty good chance of being legal because the law hasn't caught up or considered it in advance.

> There is no difference to me that some company does it via technology.

I feel like it's telling that no one has yet taken this logic to court. I think that means that while there may be no difference to you there is a difference according to the law. This gets at your later point.

Speaking of:

> If you went back 50 years ago and asked anyone on the street if it was okay that every time they left the house their travel history would be recorded indefinitely they would talk to you about communist dystopias that could never happen here due to the 2nd amendment.

I think you're doing a subtle motte-and-bailey here. As far as I'm aware, Flock has strict retention policies, numbering in the low single-digit months (Google says 30 days "by default"). There is no "recorded indefinitely" here, which significantly changes the characteristics of the argument here. This is roughly on par with CCTV systems, to the best of my knowledge.

I don't disagree that laws haven't caught up yet, but I also think a lot of the arguments against Flock are rife with hyperbolic arguments like this that do meaningfully misrepresent their model. I think this leads to bad solutioning, as a consequence.

I'd much rather have good solutions here than bad ones, because ALPRs and other "surveillance technologies" do drive improvements in crime clearance rates/outcomes, so they shouldn't be banned--just better controlled/audited/overseen

Read some cases of who's suffering now. Cops (or ICE) can choose a passing vehicle to run a ALPR search on, finding out what states it just passed through. When they consider it "suspicious", said driver gets stopped, searched, and even detained.

Look at how ALPR is being used and whose rights are being violated as a result. Hint: it's not criminals.

I think the suffering/abuse is able to be reasonably controlled through increased/better oversight, more publicly available information, and more strict regulations around the use of the data produced by these devices.

I also think they're able to impart a whole lot of good on their communities. If they contribute to an increase in the number of arrests and convictions for crimes, that might end up being a net good.

I think starting from the assumption that they are net bad, and then telling me I should only look at the negatives is an uncompelling argument.

I need not look further than the testimony of people who used to commit crimes in areas with increased surveillance (i.e., San Francisco), and I see a compelling argument for their upsides. Now I have to weigh the positives and negatives against each other, and it stops being the clear-cut argument you're disingenuously presenting it as.

If you're only reading the stories of the homosexual people in Germany in the 1940s, you're making your judgements on only a fraction of the available information.

How about you give me your bank account details and permission to make free use of all your money, and then IF I contribute more value with your money than you do that MIGHT end up being a net good, so let's try it first and find out later?

"stop reading about the abuses of power, just ignore them" is a really poor position to take.

I'm not starting from this argument, though. I'm starting from the argument that we shouldn't be inherently opposed to putting up more of we think the benefit outweighs the negatives or risks of abuse

Your level of strawmanning here tells me you're not arguing in good faith

This is a really silly thing to say. It’s the “stop hitting yourself” of surveillance bullshit. Come on. Calling them “fixed cameras” so you can ignore the intent in the original comment is middle school shit.

The idea that there's not a scale difference is, quite frankly, bogus.

I don't disagree that quantity has a quality of it's own in some circumstances, but that's not an inherent property of "quantity".

Everyone doing it 24/7 via their cameras and running it through AI analysis and providing it to the cops for $$$ is not.

What if I recruit a few friends around my town to do the same, and we share data and findings? Is that also fine?

What if I pay a bunch of people I don't know to collect this data for me, but do all the analysis myself?

Where do you draw the line? Being able to concretely define a line here is something I've seen privacy proponents be utterly incapable of doing. Yet it's important to do so, because on one end of the spectrum is a set of protected liberties, and on the other is authoritarian dystopia. If you can't define some point at which freedom stops being freedom, you leave the door wide open to the kind of bullshit arguments we see any time "privacy in public" comes up: 100% feels, and 0% logic.

Because it seems clear to me that if an individual was to surveil and build up a dossier on any random stranger as much as an entity like Facebook or Google does that this would be considered stalking.

I've never been able to quite figure out why incorporating and doing it to basically everyone some how makes it legal. I think the secret ingredient is money but I'm not exactly sure how that works.

There are many things in life where the exact location of the line isn't clear, but quite a few cases are clearly over said line.

As examples: Fraud, threats, child abuse/neglect, obscenity.

How does this apply to the topic at hand, though? I think you're straying too far into hypotheticals, perhaps?

Stalking is targeted. Passively observing and making that information easy to search for a limited period of time is not quite the same thing, and the distinction has important implications

To paraphrase the quote, quantity has a quality of its own.

The central dogma of machine learning. Which Flock and its defenders know very well.

The idea that me an individual observing you, and a large, well funded company allied with the US government observing you has no difference, quite frankly, leads me to conclude* you are arguing in bad faith.

You can make an ideological argument that is the case, but not one based on fact and reality.

*edited for spelling

I mean, in both cases, I'm being observed in public, with unknown intent. Until that observation becomes action of some kind, there is no difference to me.

That tells me it's the concrete result of the surveillance that makes the difference, not whether or not it's an individual or a government doing the surveillance.

As far as I can tell, if no one searches for my vehicle in Flock's database within 30 days of being observed, whether or not Flock observed me becomes moot. For the vast majority of individuals observed by Flock, there will not exist any permanent record of their movements.

Now, all that is assuming they're above board with their retention policies, which they may well not be! I trust them about as far as I can throw them, but I haven't seen any evidence that they're lying about their retention practices, or that they're engaging in "dragnet-style" surveillance. I'm optimistic that any lawfare they engage in will out any bad behavior in that regard, thanks to discovery.

This does pose an interesting question: is an individual with perfect memory, who regularly sees you in public and who could recall every detail of every time they've ever seen you, better or worse than Flock, which "forgets" you after 30 days?

they could instead be limiting flock to private places.

> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.

if you followed me everywhere and took pictures of me everywhwre i went outside from my door in the morning to my door in the evening, id want to get a restraining order on you as a stalker. this is stalking

Scenario B: An array of cameras is installed (approximately) everywhere and takes a series of photos that include you, and the sequence of photos of your activities (approximately) wherever you go in public is assembled in real-time.

You claim these are different.

Other than details of the the technology, they are the same. The result is the stalker has a complete surveillance of your activities.

Scenario B is even worse, as the stalker now has a complete surveillance of EVERYONE, for the same cost, with zero regard for legitimate legal suspicion.

Stop being pedantic and ignoring reality

Ironic, coming from someone blatantly ignoring the reality of things like retention policies.

Scenario B reduces to "you were never seen or followed" if no one has a reason to search for you within the retention window.

Scenario A requires intent. Scenario B only reduces to Scenario A when that intent exists. When it does not, Scenario B is essentially a noop, and has 0 actual impact on you

Nonsense.

Sure, scenario A requires intent in advance

Scenario B requires intent ANY TIME. Someone in the system can decide they want to track me RETROACTIVELY and do it even more effectively than if they had planned in advance. With malicious intent, they can find or fabricate charges retroactively.

Yes, it is only potential, until it is actualized. Potential energy is still energy, and it is still different from not having potential energy in place.

Banning ALPRs outright is a strictly inferior solution, when compared to putting strict limits on their data retention.

This also inherently limits their potential for misuse, which seems to be your primary concern here?

I’d like to give the benefit of the doubt, but it feels very sea-liony and intentionally disingenuous.

> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.

Might I interest you in the concepts of stalking and restraining orders?

I mean, it might be a viable way to push back against them.

They have clearly lost their way. Seems like a fundamental loss of confidence in their ability to produce leading technology, and instead feeling like they must defensively focus on blocking and extracting maximum funds from customers, both with costly "authorized-only" repairs and subscriptions for heated seats.

Sad

(My E39 M5 was one of the last user-repairable BMWs, but it's getting very expensive. On the other hand, it's driving a significant market for regular people designing and building replacement parts, whether 3D-printed, CNC'd, or homemade)

So they do everything they can do get rid of facts.

The primary reason they spread disinformation is not to get people to believe the nonsense (which is merely an occasional bonus), it is to get people to give up on finding the truth. Once people have no substantial quantity or quality of truth, they can be entirely manipulated.

This regime is following the standard path to authoritarianism.

Give Trump some gold points for not being a hypocrite like all of his predecessors.

For every constraint I see them creating in the law, I can instantly create a simple workaround, and also see multiple ways it will impair or destroy the ability to create 100% legitimate parts/components/products.

This is an unfortunate example of a too-common political solution:

A new industry arises that unintentionally creates a new capability that some can use to create problems.

So, "let's just create a mandate on the industry that will destroy it or contort it beyond recognition, and provide no funding to support this new requirement!".

I fully understand and fundamentally support the need for government to regulate markets, pollution, product & food safety, and much more, but this simplistic approach is a net negative for society and the economy.

They need to focus on the actual act of "3D printing firearms" not on the precursors.

That due process only exists to the extent the branches of govt are independent, have co-equal power, and can hold and act upon different views of the situation.

When all branches of govt are corrupted or corrupted to serve the executive, as in autocracies, that due process exists only if the executive likes you, or accepts your bribes. That is why there is such a huge push by right-wing parties to take over the levers of power, so they can keep their power even after they would lose at the ballot box.

[0] https://smp.uq.edu.au/pitch-drop-experiment