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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Thw issue youll run into is effectiveness at that small scale, sonyoull be tempted to share data with other systems like that, and eventually you’ll end up creating a different flock.

    I wonder if a segregated system design could address this. Similar in-system segregation like a TPM for the actual detection/matching part of the system separated from the command and control part.

    As in, the camera and OCR operations would be in their own embedded system which could never receive code updates from the outside. Perhaps this is etched into the silicon SoC itself. Also on silicon would be a small NVRAM that could only hold requested license plate numbers (or a hash of them perhaps). This NVRAM would be WRITE ONLY. So it would never be able to be queried from outside the SOC. The raw camera feed would be wired to the SoC. The only input would be from an outside command and control system (still local to our SoC) that and administrator could send in new license plates numbers to search against. The output of the SoC would “Match found against License Plate X”. Even the time stamp would have to be applied by the outside command and control system.

    This would have some natural barriers against dragnet surveillance abuse.

    • It would never be possible to dump the license plates being searched for from the cameras themselves even by abusive admins. The only admin option would be to overwrite the list of what the camera is trying to match against.
    • The NVRAM that contains the match list could be intentionally sized small to perhaps a few hundreds plate numbers so that an abusive admin couldn’t simply generate every possible license plate combination effectively turning this back into a blanket surveillance tool. The NVRAM limit could be implemented as an on-die fuse link so that upon deployment the size could be made as small as needed for the use case.





  • I feel like the problem here is that you get people who are curious or like the other features the fridge has and just get what they can when theirs goes out. And while, sure, those people learn not to do that again,

    Part of what makes us intelligent is learning from others. I guess I would expect buyers to do even the most basic research on a large dollar figure purchase which would likely expose them to the headlines about Samsung putting ads on fridges after the sale.

    Do people actually just walk into an appliance store and just drop more than $1k on what they see on the floor without researching reliability, warranty, or other features from articles and news sources?




  • And it reminds me of his fling with the “Metaverse” of previous years — another tech buzzword buried in the graveyard of overhype alongside things like NFTs and LaserDisc.

    I was with you until you hated on LaserDisc. In the years before DVD existed it was the best quality home video available. Yes, it was expensive, but it did something people wanted with no other substitute apart from having your own cinema grade 35mm projector, sound system, and access to 35mm (or 70mm for that matter) print of a movie.





  • I think we’ll have to agree to disagree. Often times if I see an interesting question in the comments, I am glad for it, because that was the insight I needed to want to read the article and answer it.

    Just reading comments without the article? I have no issue with that at all, and do that myself.

    For me that isn’t annoying unless the commenter is getting something wrong that is talked about in the article, and doubles down on it.

    How do you, as the commenter yourself, know you aren’t getting something wrong without reading the article?

    I feel like each post is an invitation to discuss the general topic

    How do you know what the general topic is without reading the article?

    If you feel like that is disrespectful, I get where you’re coming from, but I don’t think it is that disrespectful.

    Maybe disrespectful is too strong a term. Let me amend that; I lose respect for the poster when they’re asking a question that is answered in the article. I sometimes write off engaging with them further in that thread because they’re clearly not even doing the most basic of tasks to be a part of the conversation.

    But plenty of interesting conversations can happen in the comments (like this one) that have almost nothing whatever to do with the article!

    I’ll do this too on occasionally, if I can clearly tell we’re not discussion the article topic, but its a gamble on my part and if someone smacks me down because it is article topical, I fully own that and apologize knowing its my fault.






  • The Fragmentation Trap If you try to do everything yourself (the “solopreneur” route), you theoretically need a “tech stack” of 4-5 different subscriptions.

    I’m not sure you appreciate how amazing it is today that a single “solopreneur” can actually perform all those roles all by themselves with software and skills of their own. Each one of those used to be an entire profession that required years of school and tens of thousands of dollars of tools and materials.

    That said, there are good free open source tools that do most of those big things you cited. Examples include

    • photo editor - GIMP
    • Kdenlive - video editor

    Would love to hear your thoughts on navigating this expensive landscape.

    Starting any business requires money and time. You can “buy” shortcuts in time by spending money on more expensive tools. Alternatively if you have more time, you can do things more manually.