Interesting. I just ran a similar search for « ANPR » which I think is the UK equivalent, in UK local government meetings and it’s mentioned about 80 times a month, which from a cursory glance looks like it’s more than are being shown here. I didn’t look through them yet to see how many were discussions about adding new installations vs referencing existing ones.
Is the argument that Flock cameras are used for mass surveillance defensible, or just paranoia, and if it is real, does anyone have a good idea of whether the same argument would apply in the UK?
There are quite a few new camera types rolling out in the UK, summary:
4D AI speed/behaviour cameras (Redspeed Centio): multi-lane radar + high-res imaging; flags speeding, phone use, no seatbelt, and can check plates against DVLA/insurance databases.
AI “Heads-Up” camera units (Acusensus): elevated/overhead infrared cameras (often on trailers/vans) to spot phone use and seatbelt/non-restrained occupants.
New digital fixed cameras (Vector SR): slimmer, more discreet spot-speed cameras (sometimes with potential add-on behaviour detection, depending on setup).
Smart motorway gantry cameras (HADECS): enforce variable speed limits on motorways from gantries.
AI-assisted litter cameras: council enforcement for objects/litter thrown from vehicles
Really interesting, thank you! They do seem very rare in comparison to ANPR, although maybe I'm not looking for the right thing. Durham, Plymouth and Wokingham are talking about Red Speed and Acusensus but given basically all 300 odd councils have discussed ANPR at some point in the last year, that's a tiny percentage.
No, I think you are right- they are not common in any way yet and hopefully will stay that way. Although with the fly-tipping issues here, if it could be done in an anonymous way, I would actually welcome the camera's that detect people dropping rubbish!
On the topic of tricking the automated phone usage detection cameras this youtuber had an entertaining video where he built a car phone holder by molding his hand and making a replica.
There's been increased attention on it here when (from memory), it was found that police departments on the other side of the country were handing over data from completely different jurisdictions' cameras, without any kind of warrant or official order, to third parties.
ANPR have been widely used in the UK for at least 25 years. It was first used 32 years ago in 1993 around the City of London.
They were initially deployed without discussion as it would have tipped their hand. The coverage back then was on the main roads around major cities, criminals with enough knowledge could have used minor roads, or used fake plates.
Discussions in the UK in meetings would be about the benefits of them, what arrests the use of ANPR have enabled. Councils have regular scheduled meetings about crime. There would be no real in depth discussion about new ones; that either never happened or happened before many of us (and many of the politicians discussing them!) were born.
Mass deployment of CCTV and traffic cameras have a much, much longer history in the UK than in the US. Tires burning around Gatsos were a meme 20+ years ago.
That's true if you define modern policing as a form of mass surveillance, but doing so stretches the dilutes the usefulness of the term. People see a difference between automatically flagging cars on a stolen car hotlist, and monitoring the comings and goings of every resident in their town. And they're right to see that difference, and to roll their eyes at people who don't.
That doesn't mean the cameras are good; I think they aren't, or rather, at least in my metro, I know they aren't.
These cameras may have been originally sold to municipalities as a way to find stolen cars, but from one year to the next, federal agencies have (1) decided that their main goal is finding arbitrary noncitizens to deport, and (2) that they're entitled to the ALPR data collected by municipalities in order to accomplish this goal. The technology isn't any different, but as a result of the way it was deployed (on Flock's centralized platform), it was trivial to flip a switch and turn it into a mass surveillance network.
> decided that their main goal is finding arbitrary noncitizens to deport
In the vast majority of cases this means: "enforcing immigration law." A presidential administration deeming it politically expedient to import illegal immigrants via turning a blind eye doesn't change the law of the land.
> that they're entitled to the ALPR data collected by municipalities in order to accomplish this goal
"Entitled" to purchase something that is being sold on the market for a fair price? Why wouldn't they be entitled to purchase this info if a vendor wishes to sell it to them?
Maybe, but I don't think there's much evidence that cameras with sharing disabled were getting pulled by DHS, and I think, because of how the cameras work, it would be a big deal if they had. Flock also has extreme incentives not to let that happen. We'll see, I guess: contra the takes on threads like this, I don't think the cameras are going anywhere any time soon. I think small progressive and libertarian enclaves will get rid of their cameras while remaining landlocked in a sea of municipalities expanding theirs.
> I think small progressive and libertarian enclaves will get rid of their cameras while remaining landlocked in a sea of municipalities expanding theirs.
Flock will just start putting cameras up on private property and selling the data to the Federal government. Municipalities can do very little to stop this, and local governments are pretty poor at keeping their true reasons out of public forum deliberation. Loophole methods of prohibition ("Can't put up camera masts") are easily thwarted in court.
> Is the argument that Flock cameras are used for mass surveillance defensible
Its always defensible - think of the children!/terrorists! - and always in the same dystopian direction. Just believing yourself to be being tracked, changes behaviour. Just as in large cities, people moderate their behaviour.
Publishing everything local councils do in the UK at https://opencouncil.network - trying to help people feel like they know who and what they’re voting for next May.
It’s been incredibly rewarding to see people’s changing opinions of their local government
We use openwhisper for transcription which accepts a list of "words to look out for" which we populate with a short list of the names of all the people and companies most likely to be mentioned in the text, and then we do a spell checking pass at the end using Gemini with a much longer list, telling it to look out for anything that might be a misspelling.
It's not perfect, but it's taken it from being an issue that made all our transcripts look terrible, to an issue I no longer think about.
I imagine just using the second spellchecking pass with Gemini would be almost as effective.
The terrain isn’t difficult - straightforward hiking with no special gear required - but you can make it as easy or hard as you like by varying the number of days you do it over. Famously the UTMB is a race that does roughly the same route in one push over two days, which is definitely difficult!
I will never forget watching a kookaburra swoop down as my grandmother went to take a bite out of a bacon sandwich, and stealing a piece of bacon out of it without touching her or the bread. It then sat on a branch whacking the bacon against it to "kill it" before eating it.
Same with me, but I was camping as a kid. One took the snag out of my mates bread just as he was about to bite it. It made sure it was dead by hitting it on the tree it landed in.
Worth noting that in the UK if you say « this is obviously predatory and isn’t going to hold up in small claims court » this requirement almost always disappears and they tell you that just this one time they’ll be nice and cancel from today.
Before chunking, run coreference resolution to get rid of all of your pronouns and replace them with explicit references. You need to be a bit of careful to ensure you chunk both processed and unprocessed versions in the same places but it’s very doable.
If you haven’t seen it, there’s a lovely overview of the idea in one of the SpaCy blog posts: https://explosion.ai/blog/coref
The BBC has a laudable goal of trying to be "balanced" which unfortunately is often poorly implemented as giving equal credence to both sides of an argument, even when doing so paints a wildly innaccurate picture.
If you look at the totality of the BBC's coverage, it's clear that the general consensus is that he did a good thing for humanity that hurt some powerful people, and he's been unjustly punished for it, but that there is a small cohort of people (including some very vocal, powerful ones who get headlines) who disagree with that opinion and think that he did something negative and was justly punished for it.
The trouble is that when you summarise that argument, you lose the "general consensus" and "small cohort" bits and you just get the two points, which together make a rather different story.
Yes, it seems like an insane amount of butter and heavy cream. Maybe butter in those days wasn't 80% fat and heavy cream wasn't 40%? Also, and it was covered by other commenters, but that amount of nutmeg, wow.
I believe 'sweet cream' just means not sour cream. Similarly I imagine 'sweet butter' simply means unsalted.
'Heavy cream' I think is a mistranslation in the reformulated recipe, that's a modern American higher fat (a bit less than double cream, but roughly substitutable) cream; I expect at that time it was a cruder process & product, more literally creamed off raw milk, resulting in something unhomogenised probably on the milky side of single cream. Which would make sense, since it's typically milk one makes pancakes with anyway, not any sort of standardised modern cream.
> Also, and it was covered by other commenters, but that amount of nutmeg, wow.
I don't follow you there though, I think that description ('exceptional, expensive amount') in OP meant for Locke at the time. These days it's (probably top-25 percentile of spices but) relatively cheap, half a nutmeg for 10 pancakes doesn't seem remarkably excessive to me? I mean, assuming it's 'nutmeg and orange blossom pancakes' that you're going for anyway.
I'm also noticing a lot of "heavy whipping creams" in my part of the US come with a thickening agent like xanthan gum in them to make them whip into whipped cream quicker. So there might be significant differences there.
Interesting. In the UK we have 'whipping cream' & 'double cream'; the former is actually closer to US 'heavy cream' (we don't have something named as such) at almost 40% fat (double would be about 50%) but even that doesn't contain such things, despite being named specifically for the purpose I mean. I think the purpose is probably stabilisation post-whipping though, rather than to whip faster?
I guess I'll have to try it. Apparently 1 nutmeg yields about 2-3 tsp ground nutmeg, and modern nutmeg pancake recipes seem to use about as much as Locke's recipe does.
The only thing I add nutmeg to on a regular basis is mashed potatoes, and then it's just a few swipes of the grater -- can't be more than 1/3 tsp -- for a family-sized portion, and the aroma is still very distinct. A single nut lasts me year or so.
I think based on some inexpert googling that what Locke calls "sweet cream" is what a British person today would call "single cream" (or just "cream"). Based on comparing fat content (about 18%) this is roughly between what Americans seem to call "half-and-half" and "light-cream".
On the other hand the butter content in this recipe is bonkers. The only way that makes sense to me is if you lose a lot of butter in the process of clarifying it, which is a step in the original recipe which isn't mentioned in the translated version in the article.
I don't know how wealthy Locke was, but people generally ate less back then cause food was less readily available. Meat was more of a special occasion rather than everyday staple like it is for a lot of Europeans today.
Illegal immigration numbers are about 50k for the period, whilst legal immigration netted out (minus emigration) at about 500k for the period, and "natural growth" (i.e. births minus deaths) are about 45k.
The story here is that we're letting in a lot more legal, non-EU immigrants than we have been previously, most of whom are coming here on work visas, or as dependents / carers.
Whether you think this is a good thing or not is worth debating, but the media narrative that we're being "overrun by illegal immigrants" simply isn't a fair representation of the facts. Immigration increases are primarily driven by policy.
Yes, a policy many in the Tory party like, because on net those immigrants are economically beneficial. But they can’t tell that to their base so they bang on about a small subset.
Is the argument that Flock cameras are used for mass surveillance defensible, or just paranoia, and if it is real, does anyone have a good idea of whether the same argument would apply in the UK?