Yup. We used to have a fridge built in the early 80s (possibly late 70s) that lasted until 2015. Ugly ass harvest gold color and everything. Ran it continuously. Had to have it repaired maybe twice in all that time. We moved out and left it behind; for all I know it’s still going (though probably not because it was truly an eyesore).

The point is that a well built refrigerator can last decades, same as other major appliances like washing machines and dryers. No computerization necessary at all. Our fridge was not the most energy efficient by the end, obviously, but apart from that . . . why not build them to last?

Greed. Just overwhelming, all-consuming corporate greed.

Lol wut? “My brain is not especially fucked enough right now so I’d like an extra special DOUBLE helping of corporate machine bullshit today, thank you!”

I think you should take that hit for the team, obviously. If you believe one is required.

That whole “a good prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich” was when you could pull your jurors out of a citizen pool that didn’t walk in already believing you were lying through your fucking teeth.

But then they pulled the mask off, and let us all see how they are using the courts for vindictive prosecution and political harassment.

Looks like the ham sammich days are ending, lol.

Funny thing about American voting: for all the ways that people insist voting doesn’t matter, the one place in America where one vote travels the absolute farthest is in a small town election, and right next to that are county elections, for positions like these.

County sheriffs are often elected, as are county commissioners; who gets elected and who gets appointed depends entirely on applicable state and local law. But even if both of these positions are appointed in Madison County, North Carolina, where this debacle took place, the appointer will almost always be an elected official, like a mayor.

In other words, there is in fact a place where the buck stops in local politics, whether it’s with the mayor or the commissioner or the sheriff or all of the above, and everyone who lives there already knows exactly where it does, especially in a back wood county in the hills like this one.

Add the fact that the meeting was already full of angry people, people who cared enough about the whole thing to make the drive into the county seat and attend, only to be shut up once they arrived.

So while they were silenced at this meeting, it’s not over. None of them want Flock cameras, and nobody wants to take the time and trouble to come to a goddamn podunk county commission meeting only to be told to shut up and sit down.

Come election season, any neighbors with short memories will absolutely be reminded of this, in the kind of local election where often every single vote counts.

The article quotes a Madison County privacy org directly:

“The Sheriff Office claims they are only using this technology for serious crimes, yet published audit logs tell a different story,” a website called Madison for Privacy says. “Madison County has searched the nationwide database over 1,200 times over just a 60 day period. In a county over only 20,000 residents, its hard to understand what could warrant this many searches.”

Holy shit, they’re not wrong. Follow that haveibeenflocked.com link to the Madison County sheriff’s office Flock searches, and the accompanying note:

These are some of the searches performed by Madison County NC SO. We have seen a total of 1,216 searches for this agency, performed by 1 person over 62 days between 3/11/2026 and 5/11/2026 (1 user was active in the most recent six months) The most recent import of records for this agency happened on 5/17/2026.

Madison County is southwest of Asheville on the state line between NC and TN, comprised mostly of unincorporated communities, which is a polite way of saying most residents live in the hills, not in the towns. The entire county has a population of roughly 21,000, and the largest town, Mars Hill, has only 2,000 residents. It doesn’t get much more rural than this on the East Coast.

So given the population and its distribution, and the fact that the sheriff’s office only serves the unincorporated communities because the three towns have their own municipal police, where the fuck does the sheriff’s office get cause or even time for what averages out to 600 Flock searches in a month?

But it gets even stranger. I clicked on a few searches, just to see what I could see, and every single one I clicked on with an unredacted reason* was associated with the same two or three other non-local police departments as the source of the information retrieved, two of which were the exact same ones every time: Forest Park Ohio PD, Tifton Georgia PD, and occasionally the Douglas County Nevada SO. There were a couple others, but always at least one of those three. (If you go to the little i next to the other PDs, it tells you, “This audit record appears in [n] different public record files.”)

This is true whether I clicked on a homicide, a non-DUI alcohol inquiry, a burglary, a car theft, or a sex offense. No matter what reason I chose, no matter how disparate the crime or the date, one if not all of those three law enforcement agencies came up as the source of the Flock information that inquiry pulled from. And this is the same of every search I clicked on, over and over and over again.

(*The sole exceptions to all this were where the crime itself was redacted, and then the associated source of information was Buncombe County, NC, which neighbors Madison County and could potentially be a valid law enforcement reason to search Flock data.)

And when I selected the Repeat Searches checkbox at the top, defined as “Display filter that hides likely duplicate searches (identical searches within 5 minutes). Does not affect server-side counts or downloads,” an even 800 of those 1,216 searches get loaded. So fully two thirds of those searches across two months qualify as duplicates executed within five minutes of each other, to Flock parameters at least. (Or maybe one third, if I’m understanding it wrong; I’m sure someone will be along to correct me shortly.) But that’s still a fuckton of duplicates executed within five minutes of each other.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t understand how it all works on the Flock side, but it almost seems like someone in the Madison County, NC sheriff’s office is just sitting on their ass keeping serious tabs on a short list of people living in other places.

I already assume that everything that goes into a cloud somewhere WILL be used for other purposes, at the very least as AI training material, and this will be no different. And the plan is for at least some (possibly all?) video to automatically be extracted to some kind of cloud storage, no matter how temporarily. From the article:

The AirPods will have a “small” LED light to indicate when “visual data is being fed into the cloud.”

That’s a hell of a non-answer to all the privacy concerns Apple already knows the public has. Since this entire article is itself just a manufacturer-friendly puff piece for pre-release promotion, the only conclusion I can draw is that Apple is willfully holding back the specifics on all of that.

And again with the fucking notification light, like that’s the solution to all privacy concerns. On AirPods a light can’t possibly be more than a pinhole itself, just because of the size of the device, so that’ll be even worse than Meta’s joke of a notification light.

I remember Bezos at the inauguration. He’s spent millions on the administration, including the inaugural party and financing not only the first lady’s documentary, but its positive reviews. All of them. And that’s just the highlights; Bezos has given so much to promote this administration at every turn.

Glad to see this kind of multiplicative return on his investment. He is very literally getting the presidential experience he paid for.

They’re here to stay

Eh, probably. At least for as long as there is corporate will to shove them down the rest of our throats. But right now, in terms of sheer numbers, humans still rule, and LLMs are pissing off more and more of us every day while their makers are finding it increasingly harder to forge ahead in spite of us, which they are having to do ever more frequently.

and they’re going to get much better.

They’re already getting so much worse, with what is essentially the digital equivalent of kuru, that I’d be willing to bet they’ve already jumped the shark.

If their makers and funders had been patient, and worked the present nightmares out privately, they’d have a far better chance than they do right now, IMO.

Simply put, LLMs/“AI” were released far too soon, and with far too much “I Have a Dream!” fairy-tale promotion that the reality never came close to living up to, and then shoved with brute corporate force down too many throats.

As a result, now you have more and more people across every walk of society pushed into cleaning up the excesses of a product they never wanted in the first place, being forced to share their communities AND energy bills with datacenters, depleted water reserves, privacy violations, EXCESSIVE copyright violations and theft of creative property, having to seek non-AI operating systems just to avoid it . . . right down to the subject of this thread, the corruption of even the most basic video search.

Can LLMs figure out how to override an angry mob, or resolve a situation wherein the vast majority of the masses are against the current iteration of AI even though the makers of it need us all to be avid, ignorant consumers of AI for it to succeed? Because that’s where we’re going, and we’re already farther down that road than the makers ever foresaw, apparently having no idea just how thin the appeal is getting on the ground for the rest of us.

So yeah, I could be wrong, and you might be right. But at this point, unless something very significant changes, I’d put money on you being mostly wrong.

With 68% of consumers reporting using AI to support their decision making, voice is making this easier. [1]

Does anybody actually believe that 68% of consumers use or even want Copilot? But they included a source for this very generous assertion at the bottom of the page:

[1] Based on Microsoft-commissioned online study of U.S. consumers ages 13 years of age or older conducted by Edelman DXI and Assembly, 1,000 participants, July 2025.

Oh yeah, that’s compelling: US consumers, 13 years old and older. An entire thousand of them!

So the only question I have left is which junior high principal Microsoft “compensated” for this survey, and what happened to the 320 summer school attendees who said fuck you, no anyway.

I’ve been off Reddit totally since 2023, so part of my understanding may be out of date, but before that I was on for many years and watched how powermods became powermods.

Thus this situation is very unusual. Reddit never did anything about the powermod situation before, but now, suddenly, it’s a big deal. For years (over a decade, at least) users have been screaming about the worst abuses on the site being from powermods, and time after time Reddit bent over backwards to not only avoid doing anything about it, but seemed to grasp every opportunity to enhance the problem any way they could, shutting down complaints rather than the power trippin’ bastards that were regularly creating the problems.

Note that powermods very frequently mod the largest subs, which is how they became powermods to start with: modding a sub that got big and then being invited to help mod new subs that then also grew in popularity.

For myself, I don’t think anyone would give two shits if “powermods” only had an aggregate total of 500 users each, but very frequently they have millions, even tens of millions. Looking at the largest subs on the site and the powermods on those subs, and how many of those powemods are crossovers on equally dominant subs, you see the same core group of powermods across all the top sites, give or take a few individually here and there.

Strangely, this is the group Reddit is now disbanding.

Another thing to consider is how many powermods went on to become admins over the years. At least a handful: I don’t know the exact number anymore but it’s non-zero. Powermods who are admins are especially useful to Reddit, because they ensure that the c-suite has direct control over some of the largest subs without ever appearing to do so.

All this is to say that the powermod situation has been mutually beneficial to Reddit admin for ages, which is why they never changed it or even really acknowledged it.

But now, for the first time since 2005, Reddit powermods are suddenly a problem. So what’s changed? Cui bono?

My guess is that Reddit admin is about to a) yank the entire site to the hard right by removing pretty much all effective human moderation and thus preventing powermods from being able to stand in their way across the largest subs (some of which we’ve already seen and the article addresses), and/or b) introduce some other vile change or policy that is certain to piss off EVERYONE, including every non-bot mod on the site, to the point that admin expects a general revolt even among the powermods and need to dilute the individual power of mods in advance.

One very hypothetical change that could do the trick is Reddit forcing mods, including powermods, to quietly engage in collecting evidence of and reporting users and content that admin would like to sell to the current US admin, for example: intel which Reddit is well situated to provide and for which the current administration has already been calling in the wake of a certain recent death. What if Reddit decides to go all in with the present political trajectory, looking for political power as well as the payout they’re usually in it for, and in so doing force mods to comply or lose their subs? It’s not like Reddit hasn’t already done it for less.

Again, these are just my own musings. But whatever the reason, Reddit admin calling it quits with the powermods suggests something much larger than just another light rehabbing of Reddit power structures.

After I didn’t see the mentioned content I looked around Zdnet, and I think you might have meant to link this article instead:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/rebooting-your-phone-daily-is-your-best-defense-against-zero-click-attacks-heres-why/

Bad click, it happens. Good article, though. Thanks!

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The only thing I really want to know about Google’s Protected Audience “alternative information dimension” container is how I can stuff it full of noisy bullshit, fuck around with it, poison it as thoroughly as I can, and then cheerfully send it away back to Google as a trojan horse as often as possible – all while maintaining the appearance of operating organically within the parameters of normal function as expected by the Google mothership, so they will gladly hoover up my toxic shit and not stop me from seeing what I want to see outside the interference of their New and Improved intrusive hellscape of data collection and ad serving.

And all this preferably as an automated function via uBlock Origin. Thanks!

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